friendliest girl in town

NEW BLOG ALERT

2010-06-24T02:32:00.000+08:00

Hey guys! Just so you know, I'll be moving to Shanghai in a month, and you can track my journey on my NEW and IMPROVED travelog: The Gap Year.

Enjoy!

Darfur Radio Project

2009-02-04T14:21:00.002+08:00

If anyone still looks at this from time to time--

...please check out the Darfur Radio Project at http://www.darfurradioproject.org. DRP is one of the many reasons I don't have time to blog here during the school. I won't give too many hints about what it is- I want you to go see- but I will say that our new February show is up and I'm hosting, so definitely go see what it's all about.

this may be the last for a while...

2008-12-27T06:57:00.029+08:00

Well I am writing this from Minneapolis, where I make my permanent residence. After a nightmare travel day (ugh) I finally arrived at the Minneapolis/St. Paul International Airport on Saturday night, where I was surprised at how dingy and downtrodden the airport looked in comparison to the airport I had left behind in Shanghai. Usually the Minneapolis airport seems familiar and homey; I am not used to feeling that it is quaint and antiquated. At any rate, adjusting to the time change has been a lot harder than it was the first time around. I don't think I'm completely over my jet-lag seeing as I napped for about 5 hours yesterday and still managed to get about 10 hours of sleep in the night. That said, it's hard to say what's jet lag and what's just generally being tired and needing a lot of sleep to recover from the semester, not to mention the fact that being home is tiring just in the sense that it's a massive change. The landscape here seems very spread out and quaint. The snow is abominable and yesterday was the first day the temperature spent any significant amount of time above 0 degrees Fahrenheit. Today it was warmer but also poured freezing rain, so I have had my pick of unpleasant Minnesota winter weather since I've been home, I guess.

At the moment I am waiting for Han to arrive. His plane should be on the ground in about 20 minutes, at which point I will leave and go to the airport to fetch him. I am so happy and also a bit amazed that we managed to not break up and not even get in a fight through all this time. He is such a wonderful constant to have in my life, and besides being an incredible boyfriend, is also a really good friend. I am lucky to have him and I can't wait to see him.

I think this marks the end of the "friendliest girl in town" blog, at least for now. I'm going to miss keeping a blog, I guess, but the sad truth is that there's less variety in my day-to-day life at home/Swarthmore, so I have less to report on. I'm not one of those David Sedaris types who can make magical essays out of monotony and tedium, much as I wish I were. I wasn't even going to write again after that "what i learned" post but since my dad asked me to post these last pictures, I thought I'd give it one last go.

For those not in the know, my dad came to Shanghai for my last week of CET, and after the program ended we took a tour to Xi'an and Beijing. Of the 800+ photos we took, here is a selection of some of the best.

With some friends in Shanghai

Near People's Square

Hai Bao, the mascot for the 2010 World Expo in Shanghai

Art Deco

On the Bund, in front of Pudong Financial District

At the Yu Gardens

Yes they have FedEx in China...

View from above...

Xintiandi

Site of the first communist party congress

hot pot

jing an temple

Graduation

Top of the Shanghai World Financial Center

House/garden in Suzhou

Silk factory in Suzhou

Pulling the stuffing for a silk blanket

Zhou Zhuang water town

Xi'an ancient city wall

Market below the wall

A man trying to catch a bird

Father enjoying the old weapons

Feng Shui museum

A very lucky pixiu

Dumpling banquet

Tang Dynasty Show

With our guide in front of a Pixiu at the Shaanxi Provincial Museum, which had some of the oldest artifacts either of us had ever seen

Shaanxi Provincial Museum boasting Tang Dynasty style fishtail roof

At the Big Wild Goose Pagoda

Qin Dynasty (third century BC) terracotta warriors

Each has an individual face and uniform

Ideological training

Tiananmen Square, Beijing

it was very cold

First gate to Forbidden City

Inside Forbidden City

Temple of Heaven

Olympic Birdsnest

Cloisonne Factory - working with the copper

Adding enamel color at the cloisonne factory

Ancient section of the great wall

Great Wall (badaling section)

The 8th Watchtower (we're heroes)

At the Sacred way some of the statues don't smile...

...and some do! ;)

Rickshaw ride through the Hu Tong district

Part of the tour was eating a homecooked meal in this lady's house :)

Her 30+ year old turtle and talking bird

With a Qilin at the summer palace

Phoenix (sign of the empress)

Dragon (sign of the emperor)

Manmade lake at the summer palace

Bat, the symbol of happiness because its name is pronounced "bian fu" and "fu" is also the pronunciation of the word for happiness

Crane, symbol of longevity, atop a turtle, also a symbol of longevity, so basically a massive longevity symbol

The long corridor (a really long walkway)

Making some new friends :P

Empress Cixi's marble boat

and an infamous Chinese squat toilet.

It's been fun guys. Merry Christmas to those who celebrated it, and to all a happy new year. Here's hoping for more excitement in 2009. . .

2 posts in 1 day omg

2008-12-06T12:46:00.004+08:00

I realized I had never posted about Thanksgiving. On Thanksgiving we went to a famous restaurant, Quan Ju De, and ate Peking Duck. Peking duck, or Beijing kaoya is delicious, delicious duck, cooked specially so that the skin is fried and crispy and magical, and the meat is tender and full of flavor. You eat it wrapped in a small tortilla-type thing, with onion and special sauce. Basically it's a symphony of flavor in the mouth and should be eaten at all times by everyone who doesn't care about their figure because it's not very healthy. Before we ate, we rented costumes from a costume shop, and after dinner, we took photos, trying to get a group photo for the semester, and also a bunch of "for fun" ones. Here are some:

Reflections

2008-12-06T12:19:00.003+08:00

Yeah, yeah, I know, nobody wants to read the "What I Learned On My Trip Abroad" essay, but it has to be done. I mean, I'm finally nearing the end of my program: tomorrow my dad arrives, marking the end of the time i am here alone, and then in a week the program ends, and a week later I'll be on a plane headed home. A few months ago it seemed like I was going to be in China for so long...it would be ages before my dad even got her, much less before I got to see my other family members and friends and Han. But here we are, a mere two weeks away from America.

I feel really ambivalent, as I've hinted in my previous writings. At this point, I'm really homesick for Swarthmore and the rhythm of life there, with Sharples and my friends and McCabe. But it's still not like I fully want to say goodbye to China, because it might be a permanent goodbye. In a way, I wish that I could just go home for a few weeks, see everyone I love and miss, and then come back. Even better, come back bringing Han because a long distance relationship is neither fun nor easy, but that's another can of worms entirely... and not the point. The point is that I don't feel my "work" in China is done. I haven't seen enough. I haven't met enough people. My grasp of the language is better than it was but not good enough. I haven't visited enough sites, I haven't sampled enough foods, I haven't snuck into Tibet and I haven't figured out how I can permanently relocate to Sanya. I'm not trying to be Negative Nancy bringing all that up. The issue at hand isn't that I'm disappointed with what I have done. The issue at hand is that there is still so much more to do.

I came to China almost expecting that I would fall immediately in love with the country and probably want to move here eventually. Well, it didn't really happen exactly like that but I eventually shaped my love-hate relationship with this place (love: the food, friendly people, temples, the exchange rate, the language. hate: the slow service, the crowdedness, having a hard time learning the language) into something that resembles love with a few snaggles. I have a really hard time envisioning myself moving here for the long haul, doing the Shanghai expat thing for the rest of my life. I have an absurdly easy time envisioning myself moving here for a short period of time either teaching English, or with a job that somehow would put me in China only temporarily. I don't know if I would choose to live in Shanghai. Sometimes Shanghai is too overwhelming, too big, too crowded, almost too colorful and shiny. I liked Nanjing a lot. I loved Chengdu. It could happen.

I also came abroad, as many foreign students do, expecting to "learn a lot about the culture." I suppose that happened but as someone on Swat's Daily Gazette recently quipped, the plural of anecdote is not data- and although I've visited a lot of places and seen a lot of things, I don't feel equipped with enough information to make many generalizations about Chinese culture. I would say I learned about Chinese culture but, unexpectedly, the culture about which I truly deepened my understanding is my own. I took so many things, from a certain awareness of personal space/positioning when standing in a narrow hallway to giving pedestrians the right of way to asking personal questions to willingness to criticize our own country/culture to apologizing when I knock into someone to the requirements of friendship, for granted. I mean, obviously I knew these things are different in different places- the summers I spent in Costa Rica and Spain weren't entirely for nothing- but being here for so long and constantly observing such sharp contrasts between my American friends and the sea of Chinese people surrounding us put things into perspective for me every day. Yeah, I've learned some things about Chinese culture that I didn't know before, but honestly, being in a place for 3 months just can't help me... 了解 (understand? comprehend?) adequately at all. Instead, being here has made me seriously re-evaluate which parts of my own culture are highly important to me, and which ones I've found I may not like so much.

I am also sad about leaving our Chinese roommates and the people I have met and formed small relationships with. In all honesty the chance that I will see many of these people ever again is just so slim. I hope to keep in touch with Rose but the other roommates... unlikely... and everyone else who has become a part of my life here? It's just unrealistic. I know I'm being sentimental because I will fade from their lives just as they will eventually fade from mine. But it breaks my heart to have to say goodbye.

I don't know. I can't believe my "semester abroad" is almost over. It seems cliche but I feel old.

I FEEL GREAT

2008-12-02T20:57:00.002+08:00

...and why shouldn't I? It's not like every day I finish all of my final papers a week early.

And then when I was going to the gym I got squeezed into the elevator up to the gym with six of my favorite gym rat meatheads (the baldest and meatiest of whom, I might add, was wearing a knitted sweater) and they all shouted at me in heavily Shanghai-accented Chinese that I have lost a lot of weight and I am really very cool for coming to the gym so often.

Ya, i'd say it's been a pretty solid day.

I haven't really been updating a lot, I know... the good news is that those papers were the reason, and now they're done. The bad news is that I don't know if that means I'm going to be getting any better. I mean, my dad arrives this weekend and after that it's him and finals and traveling and then i'm home. So... we'll see.

Anyway, I asked Rose if it's normal for dudes who I would see at the gym but never talk to (except for one, who I talked to once) to comment on my weight- because I'm pretty sure that would NEVER happen in America. And she was really surprised I asked and explained that in Shanghai the girls are very conscious of their weight, so when people want to make conversation with a girl, if she has lost weight, they will tell her. I guess it is friendly and shows a certain level of affection? Well, glad to know all the meatheads over at the gym care about me ^_^

The Communist Party

2008-11-29T22:28:00.002+08:00

(We're walking through the Jing An Temple area and pass by a certain Hong Kong bank)

Chinese Person: Oh, it would be very good for me if I could get a job at that bank.

Me: Yeah? (thinking it's just about the money)

CP: Yeah...because you know, if I want to get a job at Bank of China, or something like that, I have to be a Communist and you know... I really don't want to be a Communist.

Me: *blink* Really? Why is that?

CP: Yeah, you know, the people who join the Party are the people like [name redacted], they just try to please the teachers all day and only think about making money. To get a job at the Bank of China or even any of the state run companies, you really have to be a Communist, but people who join the party don't care anything about Communism or know anything about it, they just want to be able to get a good job. The other thing is that foreign owned companies, we say that you have to work very hard and the work is very challenging. But at a state owned company, you just have to show up for work at 9, go home at 5:30 or 5, and in between, you don't have to do anything, you can just sit there. So a lot of people don't know anything about Communism or Communist theory, they just want to become a Communist so that they can lead a relatively easy life.

Me: Oh..interesting...

CP: Also, don't you think it seems a little bit weird? You have to be a Communist to work in a bank?

I had heard about this before, needing to be in the party to get certain jobs or move up in certain industries (banks, state owned companies etc) but I had certainly never had it spelled out so clearly by a regular Chinese person, and CERTAINLY not someone who wasn't a cynical academic. Hmmm.

street food

2008-11-28T20:46:00.002+08:00

As I write I am very full of food items purchased from the various vendors that sell near the school gate. First I bought some crabapples on a stick, cooked and dipped in fresh caramel made from boiling the sugar straight. Next I went to go buy a sweet potato. I pointed at a normal sized potato but he selected a freakishly large one, and I didn't have it in me to say no because this guy stands out in the cold every day selling potatoes. now the sweet potato sits before me half-eaten, GLARING at me with its potato-self, accusatory, because it was too much sweet potato to finish. While I was buying the sweet potato the potato guy's friend came up and said, "HELLO!" I said, hello, and he asked if I wanted some walnuts. He was so young looking and elfish and had puppy eyes and again I didn't have it in me to say no so I ended up buying a huge bag of walnuts. I wasn't able to finish those either so now I sit, full of sweet potato and walnut, and the worst part is that Jamie's roommate Maverick has been planning to take us out to dinner all week, and I'm already full. We can't go till he gets off work after 9 so I thought I would just buy a snack but then the food sellers sold me too many items!!! man!

Rose tasted licorice for the first time because the Dutch gave her some today. She thought the flavor was very weird. Her friend tried it too and also thought the flavor was strange. Apparently to her it tasted like stinky tofu. To me that's ridiculous because stinky tofu is in a league of nastiness all on its own. However, I guess if you haven't been raised eating it, licorice is pretty bizarre tasting huh? Not really sweet...

I forgot to mention this but on Tuesday I went out to lunch with my professor from SASS. He said he wanted to invite me to a lunch so I assumed it was with some Korea expert he wanted me to meet....actually it was his friend's daughter, who is a couple years older than me and hoping to go tothe US to get a master's. it was actually quite a fun meal and I liked her a lot. She gave me a ride home and offered to help me go pick up my dad from the airport when he comes. Actually, Dr. Liu offered for her, haha. But I wouldn't doubt for a second that I could turn to this girl if I ran into some issue in Shanghai in the next few weeks- she was so sweet and told me multiple times that if I needed anything I must call her. I am constantly amazed by the easiness and openness of the Chinese attitude towards friendship. Meet someone and they are your friend, is what it seems like. Take Jeremy- the farmer he knows who we went camping with, the guy who owns the bike factory we visited- those are people he just happened to meet, who he probably sees once a year at most, who still took the time to lead us around and be more than gracious hosts just for the sake of their friendship with Jeremy. Or my Chinese tutor's sister, who had never met me but has taken me out for dinner a couple times and wants to bring me and my dad out when he comes. I have to watch myself because I think we Americans are less loyal in that way, more forgetful, more casual, and maybe even more mindless. I don't want to thoughtlessly hurt one of my Chinese friends just by acting the way I normally do...

The lunchtime conversation was also full of gems. First there was Dr. Liu informing me that most of his female Ph.D. students are unable to find husbands, because in the prime of their youth they are too busy studying, and after they get their degree no man wants them because they are too educated and too old. Then the friend's daughter jumping in to say, "In China we say there are 3 kinds of people- men, women, and female Ph.D. students!" Or talking about Obama, when he asked me if I voted for Obama, and when I said yes, he said, "But you don't care about his race?!" And then telling me he doesn't like Hillary Clinton because she is too powerful for a woman. Hmmmm. When those kinds of comments are made I tend to just raise my eyebrows and probe for more information- there's no arguing to be done, because it would go nowhere, but I am interested in the motive behind that kind of perspective. Unfortunately in this case I got no further details. Anyway, it was interesting.

winter is coming

2008-11-25T22:00:00.006+08:00

Winter is coming to Shanghai...

...Cold has set in... The temperature has dipped to ~55 degrees by day, ~45 by night. Even to me this feels cold (after the ridiculously hot and humid summer and- it's still humid, just not hot) and the Chinese are beginning to break out overcoats, hats, scarves, mittens, boots and everything wintery. I, donning my GAP hoody which has served me well since freshman year, am often met with "美国人不怕冷!" (Americans are not afraid of the cold!), or if I choose to wear my new hat and red scarf, "Christmas!"

...People smoke their cigarettes indoors, instead of braving the outside- oh wait, they do that anyway, no matter the time of year. :P Today in a Kedi (local convenience store, like a 7-11) a whole hoard of smoking Chinese youth were in line behind me. And in restaurants? Forget it- they're pretty strict in Starbucks but I've even seen people light up in there. I am pretty spoiled from American, especially Minnesotan, rules... smoking ban states, you don't know what you got til it's gone.

...The number of street food sellers outside the university has exponentially increased with the cold, adding on various roasted nut sellers, sellers of fruit dipped in caramel, small fried dough items, and other yummies. Clad in huge overcoats and pushing carts, they are picturesque, especially appearing out of the nighttime mists, illuminated by streetlamps.

...The nighttime is accompanied by the sweet serenade of the wenzi-- wait, that's not right, you're saying, but oh, dear reader, you have underestimated the strength and virility and perseverance of the Shanghai mosquito. Even now, as Shanghai residents bemoan the onslaught of winter and huddle in frigid pairs as they limp down the sidewalk in heeled boots, the wenzi continue to terrorize my nights. They lie in wait during the day, hiding somewhere, perhaps in the vents, then arise in the nighttime like phoenixes of doom to sing songs of bloodsucking viciousness beside my ears and alight upon my cheeks legs and feet and sample the taste of me. So what I'm trying to say is that winter may be coming but it still hasn't resolved the wenzi problem, damn insects.

...And I realize how much I miss the holiday season at home. Only Starbucks is decked out in Christmas spirit, with red walls and tinsel and holly and specialty drinks. I go there to think about Christmas. Actually, I go there to study, but it is nice to feel cozy and festive while I am writing papers and learning vocabulary. But only when I play the songs myself do I hear the Christmas carols I'd be hearing left and right in the states, and only when some curious Chinese person asks about it do I realize how much a part of winter the secular side of Christmas becomes in America. It's something I really miss.

---------

Momentary pause for non-Shanghai related blather that is really only relevant to Swarthmore readers:

The onslaught of winter also means the approaching onslaught of Next Semester. I registered for classes yesterday and am set to take:

CHIN 012 Advanced Chinese - Huang (M 1:15-2:30)
CHIN 012A Advanced Chinese Conversation - Jiang Laoshi YAY!!! (TTh 2:40-3:55)
POLS 003 International Politics - Hererra (TTh 1:15-2:30)
POLS 107 Comparative Politics of Greater Europe - Murphy (W 1-5 double credit seminar)

Anyone going to be in class with me? :-D

mei guo

2008-11-24T21:47:00.003+08:00

As far as Shanghai blogs go I'm late in the game at getting this up but most of you still probably won't have heard this. Why the rest of the world hates us. Ugh, ugh. This latest example of American douchebaggery is so infuriating. We are so often already seen as stupid, rude, piggish and self-important but why, why must expats and tourists alike continue to live up to the name "ugly american"?! I just honestly cannot believe that anyone would talk to another person that way, and so utterly unprovoked! I am embarrassed that this man hails from my motherland.

Sometimes people act so ridiculous just because they think that since they are in China, it is okay. I can't tell you how many times I have heard some ass foreigner scream "FUWUYUAN!!!" to get a waitress to come over, or talk rudely to servers and retail workers, and just generally act crude and foolish. I have never seen this happen but apparently it is even commonplace for foreign men to approach strange women in clubs and bars and ask them if they want to go home and have sex. I would like to see them try that in an American establishment! It is so disgusting! Why do people think that being in China gives them permission to forget all levels of civility and manners and treat everyone else as if they are somehow inferior beings. Yes, Chinese people are loud. Sometimes they yell fuwuyuan! and often they hock up loogies on the street and the litter is terrible and you already know how I feel about the driving here but-- I am sorry, when a Chinese person does it it is culturally appropriate. When an expat, particularly an AMERICAN expat (which I can say because I know our culture and how most of us were taught to behave) acts that way it does not make them "fit in", it just makes him or her look ridiculous and is just plain rude and disrespectful. And frankly the foreigners do it to a much fouler degree than anyone else I've seen, and that horrid recording is CASE IN POINT. Sometimes I just get so angry at my countrymen! I know your mama taught you better than that!!!

For those not in the know, Sherpas is the company whose representative that idiot is talking to/bellowing at/etc. You call them and place an order and they go get you takeout from any of some ~50 restaurants in Shanghai. I have never ordered a Sherpa myself because they are a little outside my price range for food items but I have heard nothing but good things about them from others.

Hooters China

2008-11-22T22:21:00.004+08:00

There is a Hooters a few blocks away, so we thought it would be funny on Friday to bring our teachers there for our Chinese lunch table rather than a Chinese restaurant. I don't think I have ever eaten in a Hooters in the US but Hooters here is just ridiculous. First of all those poor girls looked frozen in their tiny outfits, but I guess that's neither here nor there. Anyway the girls sang and danced and it was all very campy. In US Hooters establishments do the waitresses perform choreographed dances to pop songs and sing ridiculous children's ditties like "I'm a Little Teapot" and "Row Row Row Your Boat" to celebrate someone's birthday? I felt like I was caught in a freakish netherworld of song and dance, decked out as a man cave and featuring scantily-clad waifs. :P Also, people don't tip in China so there's really not any incentive for the waitresses to be friendly/coquettish with customers. All the things like saying "hello!" to all the customers when they entered, and the dancing, and the small outfits seemed very... "learned" in a way, rather than the kind of natural flirtation I'd expect in a Hooters at home.

My New Hat

2008-11-21T19:24:00.000+08:00

Do you like it?

Bought at Qi Pu Lu market, a wholesale market that's like mall of america on crack. Never going back to that place but it was an experience and I did get a hat.

Offending People

2008-11-21T10:35:00.006+08:00

I just got a comment on one of my posts informing me that it was offensive and somewhat arrogant. Needless to say that caught me slightly off guard but actually I did appreciate the comment. Although a lot of what I write is not entirely serious and shouldn't be taken as such, I would like to know if you find my opinions/commentary on the serious stuff offensive and I would like to have a dialogue about it. So please comment if that is the case, or contact me by skype drp.kate, msn heydudeitskate@hotmail.com, or QQ 798353695 (though granted I still kind of suck at using QQ). Thanks!

It's sort of interesting, keeping a blog like this. The Shanghai Expat blogs I read are less accounts of day-to-day life than short blurbs on China observations. But because I'm going home after such a short time, I want to have a good account of what I was doing and what I was thinking, both so that anyone who's interested can follow along, and also so that a few years down the road I can look back and remember clearly what I did and saw and felt and thought while I was in Shanghai for these few short months. One of my biggest regrets about the time I spent in Costa Rica and Madrid is that for neither of those summers did I keep a good diary, so now I've forgotten many details and many beautiful places I saw and people I met.

The thing is, I'm American, I have biases, and some things here strike me as totally weird, and others as totally hilarious. Sometimes I love living here and sometimes I find it endlessly frustrating and sometimes it's just so new to me that I can't do anything but laugh- not vindictively (usually), but in surprise and often in appreciation. Sometimes my reactions to experiences or ideas may seem hopelessly out of touch with the Chinese experience, which is an accurate reflection of the author (me). I can't and won't apologize for those gut feelings, and part of the abroad experience (in my opinion) is acknowledging them, and part of recording the abroad experience is writing them down as I felt them. On the one hand, I want to expand my horizons and I am doing so, but on the other, this is meant to be a semi-accurate log of my immediate reactions. To pretend that I don't sometimes have unsavory feelings is to lie to you and to myself.

The other thing about this sort of blog is that I sometimes take in large amounts of information that I want to process by writing, and that I will presumably want to remember later. This is a good venue for that, I think, but clearly not everything I learn or see is "right" and not all of my reactions to them are going to be "correct" or even the most open-minded-- much as I want them to be.

And ultimately the reality of writing so much and keeping this so open is that I am bound to offend someone at some point. But part of reconciling all of those issues is talking about them, so hopefully that will be possible. :)

On another note-- I had a terrible moment this morning thinking about how exactly a month from now I'll be back in the United States and I won't be going to MOB every day and seeing all my lovely trainers, or eating shengjianbao in the canting every morning, or kickin it exclusively with Wu Laoshi and all the other laoshis, or jesting with Rose, and I felt very sad. I have really carved out a little existence for myself here. Even though it isn't perfect and I do miss my family and Han and my friends, I am going to be really sad to leave this place. Sadder than I think I know now.

"this is china" moment: a meeting with the secret police

2008-11-20T21:36:00.007+08:00

1 - So, because this afternoon I am participating in a conference on democracy in China, tomorrow I have to have a meeting with the secret police.

Us - ..... uhh...

1 - Yes, just for a conversation, they just want information, what I am discussing, that sort of thing.

Us - well.. um... **feeling awkward** How do you know they are the secret police?

1 - they told me.

Us - .... They aren't very secret are they?

1 - Maybe "secret police" isn't the right word... it is more like the state security? people who are in the secret police, they will usually tell you they work for the provincial government. But it is more like state security.

Us - **still feeling awkward** oh.

1 - It is not a big deal, it is just a conversation... 20 or 30 years ago, yes, if you had to meet with the secret police it would have meant you had some problems but today, they just want information. In fact, I can say, no, I don't want to have a conversation.

Us - O_O really?

1 - Yes yes, because you see, I am not breaking the law, I am just going to a conference to discuss, so I am not doing anything wrong so I can tell them I don't want to meet. But if I tell them that, maybe they will find something else that I did wrong..

Drew - **Kidding** Well... I have friends in high places, I have guanxi, so if anything goes wrong just come find me.

1 - I am not worried about it... I have a lot of friends too. ... I have a lot of friends in the secret police.

And then he went on talking about his friend in the secret police, who was already his friend before he entered that...field, but how people in the secret police want to make friends with people "like him."

I mean, I think the entire episode really speaks for itself. On the one hand, huge changes have taken place in China that other countries (ahem) shouldn't pooh-pooh at. A conference on democracy in China? I think it goes without saying that that would have been unheard of a couple generations ago. Given what was going on in zhongguo when my parents' generation was growing up, it seems like things today are pretty damn open. But on the other hand, to us Americans, it still seems really scary to have to have a meeting with the authorities about participating in a conference like that-- even if it is just to gather information.

EDIT: Toooootally unrelated but watch this amazing music video!! it's the song my Chinese class is learning... Peng You it has rugby and Chinese, plus it even has karaoke (if u can read the characters) so basically it is most things I enjoy thrown into one music video.

I have missed my rugby team unbearably this semester and I can't wait to go back and play again! eyes on the scrum, there's a good shot of the second-row's face at 3:06--- that's meeeeeeeee! (except..a dude version. a chinese dude version.)

kpop, the gym, etc...

2008-11-19T19:33:00.003+08:00

Alright so Kpop doesn't technically count as having to do with China, but I've downloaded a lot of it lately and I have to admit...cheesy as it is I looove it!!! Kpop for those not "in the know" is Korean pop music... yeah everyone in my group already makes fun of me for being obsessed with Koreans, so just go on and do it too, I know you already are :P seriously though... It's so good! Dance beat, and romantic, and if you watch the music videos, sexy dudes haha. The more upbeat songs are great to work out to and the slower romantic ballads are good for moping around and missing your boyfriend-- especially if said boyfriend is, in fact, Korean... ha ha ha. Sadly that's an activity in which I've been indulging rather frequently of late, so I guess all the whiny kpop is a fairly apt soundtrack to my life. But really Epik High is a very talented guy who can rap in English (wow!), and if you want to try some I recommend him, Big Bang, Psy, Fly to the Sky, and then I've just started listening to Se7en, TVXQ. Super Junior is really popular toooo.

I wanted to write a little more about my gym too. First of all, I can't remember if I mentioned this before but gym etiquette is rather different here from in the US. In the US it's generally considered polite to let other people use a machine in between sets. In China, people hog the machine until they are completely finished with it. I don't really understand this because on the few times I've tried this method, I find myself tiring out the muscle group I'm trying to work on far more quickly than if I migrate from the chest presses, to the lat pull downs, to the tricep pull downs, to the free weights, and so on. Anyway it's really frustrating when I'm trying to migrate through and make it to each machine 2 or 3 times without doing the same muscles right in a row, when some meaty Chinese dude is hogging the lat pulldown machine and won't even let me get in to do 10 reps between his fifth or sixth set. But I guess I should just adapt since I am the one who is not Chinese...blah. Also different: the times when people go to the gym. In the US, if I go around the dinner hour or when people are just getting off work, the place is packed and I am lucky to get on a treadmill for 30 minutes. Here, if I head to the gym around that time, I am swarmed on the sidewalks by people beelining it for home, and the gym is EMPTY!! But then around 8 or so it starts filling up and by 8:30 it's pretty rough trying to get on any of the cardio machines. The best is going at around 3 or so, I have the place to myself... except for the trainers who all watch me. haha.

Actually, I really like the trainers even though I never talk to them. I think there are more trainers than people who need training at my particular gym because they all tend to stand around watching people a lot of the time. The one trainer who insinuated that I am a fatass is always friendly. I still haven't gotten up the courage to ask him if he thinks I am skinnier. Although according to the pattern I've experienced, if he notices it, he will probably just tell me himself utterly unasked :P. and there's this other one who always gives me a big ol' grin. He's actually such a dude- all the trainers except him tend to wear typical track pants and MOB Fitness shirts or shirts and track jackets, and generally look like how you would imagine young male personal trainers, all muscly and stuff. This guy looks older, middle age, and is ALWAYS WEARING PAJAMA PANTS. I also tend to always see him training women who look like they have no idea what's going on, which leads me to believe he must have a very kind personality. Anyway, he's always nice to me and rocks awesome/highly unprofessional garments so I like him. The sales rep who sold me my membership is always friendly too. Baaasically they love me over there?? Haha hardly, but it's nice to be known and not just stared at blankly as another laowai. One thing that's interesting and very different from American gyms is that there are no female personal trainers. With the exception of one, all the female employees I have seen working there over the past 2.5 months are receptionists who are thin like all Chinese girls but not really "sculpted" as if they've been working out or anything like that. The one exception looks like a total gym rat but I've never seen her work out. I also can't tell what her job is as she doesn't wear the same outfit as the (male) sales reps or the receptionists, but I've never seen her training anyone either. I mean, she might not even work there, she might just be friends with all of them or something.

My Weekend In Paradise

2008-11-18T17:16:00.008+08:00

Soo this weekend I spent a lovely 3 days in Sanya, a major tourist destination for Chinese, Russians, and a smattering of Japanese and Koreans too. The place was breathtaking- that kind of mountain-to-water beauty that can be found on certain Caribbean islands but not in, say, Florida, no matter how attractive flatter beaches can be. The water, although it tasted like gas, was green and blue and refreshing. Our hotel gave us a free upgrade to the "VIP Building" which meant we were in a secluded building on the side of a hill, with a gorgeous pool and a to-die-for view of the beach and the ocean. It also meant our room was giant, with a shower that poured water onto us straight from the ceiling, and that they provided Hawaiian-print bathrobes (as you can imagine I took just about every opportunity to don that beautiful bathrobe and flaunt it all around the hotel).

All three days were spent lounging by the pool or the beach so it won't really do to give a play-by-play as I usually do. I have to say first though that I think I have really changed as a person. "Lounging" meant I did all my homework for the weekend and Monday (which I missed) and read Into the Wild and Freakonomics as well as 5 articles for my papers. Damn Swarthmore, it has transformed me into a monotonous drone who cannot even bear to take a weekend at the shore without swamping herself in books and work. Side note: Into the Wild, while well written, in my opinion was nothing more than the romanticization of an arrogant, self-absorbed brat plagued by hubris who met a tragic end of his own making. Freakonomics was an interesting read and if you haven't read it you should.

We also spoke a lot of Chinese both out and about (see below) and in the hotel, which I hadn't expected but was pleased by. We had some problems with our room- the first night we came back and found that the lock had COME OFF THE DOOR (what?)...all our stuff was there so I guess it had just worn out but we had to call the non-English-speaking service center and explain, and then deal with the non-English-speaking guy they sent up to fix it. The next day, the in-room safe broke, so we had to go through the same process. All in all I was really pleased with my ability to express myself in Chinese. Sometimes when I am in class and going through the motions of daily life in Shanghai, I get frustrated and feel like my Chinese studies are going nowhere, or at least progressing far too slowly to be normal. But when I get out 'in the field' and have to actually use Chinese on something real, I realize that I actually have improved quite a lot. thank god. this entire trip hasn't been a waste! :P

Anyway, the night that is worth describing in detail is Saturday night. We ate dinner at Rainbow, a waterside bar and grill with a live band that served highly delicious and highly affordable (a specials menu of roughly 50 dishes, all for RMB 39/$5.70!!) Western food. Oh man. Delicious, delicious burger...come to me... Ahem. After that we wanted to go out, but all the clubs and bars we had passed seemed fairly sketchy. Also, since the island was OVERRUN with RUSSIANS (more on this in a sec) we figured the music would probably be strange, and if Eric is to be believed probably not very good. But what Sanya did have a lot of were small, locally owned seafood restaurants, where one could pick a fish from the tank and have it prepared. We had already eaten so we did not have any of the fish (although we gaped as several other customers did pick a fish, which would promptly be beaten against the floor until it died or flopped only limply). Instead, we decided to go from small fish restaurant to small fish restaurant, having one beverage at each place. This turned out to be a fantastic idea, because we met some really funny people. At the first, a lady appeared trying to sell us fake pearls. Obviously we didn't want to buy, but when she learned we were not Russian but American, and could speak some Chinese, she wanted to stop and chat anyway. First she asked, "You Americans just picked a new president...what is his name? his skin is very black (*rubbing at her skin*) and his hair is very short, and curly?" Which we confirmed. Then we discussed Obama for a bit, after which the conversation shifted to how Americans "didn't want a woman to be president," and neither did she, because "men and women have different personalities" so it wouldn't be suitable for a woman to be president. So, that was interesting. At the next small restaurant, the laoban (manager) also wanted to talk to us about Obama, so he got to hear about how Amanda doesn't like him, and how I am hoping he will be able to fix what Xiao Bush did. Interestingly, he wouldn't offer any of his own opinions on Obama, although he did make the observation that Xiao Bu-she "really likes to go to war." After that, we went around to a few more small restaurants, and finally ended up at a random hotel on the beach, where we commandeered some lounge chairs and watched the sea. We also watched the Chinese couple in front of us on the sand, which was a right soap opera as the boyfriend tried repeatedly to kiss and snuggle his girlfriend, who was having none of it and would bat him away with indignant squeals. There were also some people about 20 yards away setting off fireworks and firecrackers, which was great :)

Other than that, interesting observations:

The number of Russian tourists on the island. Everything was, for the most part, printed in Chinese, English and Russian. For the first time in China, people didn't approach us saying "Hello! Hello!" but blathering in incomprehensible Russian. (The first time this happened we were all terribly embarrassed for a minute because the fuwuyuan at the hotel suddenly switched from basically-understandable speech to utterly-opaque speech, and for one horrible moment none of us knew why we all of a sudden couldn't understand any of his Chinese. aaand then we realized he was trying to talk to us in Russian. This happened MULTIPLE TIMES throughout the weekend.) I was also totally surprised to find myself in a situation where I didn't know at least enough of the language to say "I don't speak X" or "I don't understand" in the language! In Spanish, Chinese, French, and probably I could get by in Italian and Portuguese too, and even in Korean I could say "I am American" or something like that, I wouldn't have that problem, but we had to resort to saying "I am American" in either English or Chinese depending on who was talking to us (yes even Russians thought we were Russian too).

Also, I am sorry in advance to offend any Russians or lovers of Russian tourists who may be reading this, but the Russian tourists were hilarious to see because the vast majority of them looked just like the quintessential ugly American tourist. To put it in Jamie's words, they were "straight out of Disneyworld": obese, and trapped in ugly nineties outfits including but not limited to: bleached jean shorts, pleated khaki shorts with polos tucked in, hawaiian shirts, capris (NOT cute capris) and baby t-shirts. I also saw several Russians rocking fanny packs. As for the ones who were not obese and trapped in the nineties, sadly by and large they were no more fashionable than their comrades, for they often wore overly-low-cut, unflatteringly-tight garments made of shiny metallic material. I felt very happy that for once (as opposed to my daily life in Shanghai) I was not the one walking around looking like a fashion train-wreck when compared to the people around me.

Chinese tourists are hilarious. I saw more matching Hawaiian outfits on Chinese tourists than I have ever seen before in my life. It was AWESOME. I also really liked seeing that there were a lot of Chinese tourists because usually at those kind of tropical resort destinations, it's loads of foreign tourists being waited on by locals. And while there were loads of foreign tourists there were also lots and lots of Chinese tourists too. Many of them came in ridiculous tour groups, but a lot seemed to just be there with families and friends.

Anyone who thinks (wrongly, as I could have told you before) that Chinese people don't like to have fun should go to Sanya for a visit. But here is an interesting observation that I and my classmates have noticed over the course of our stay. Americans tend to be of the mind that we young people need to 'get our yayas out' as my mom's family would say, and should have fun in the prime of our youth, etc etc, and then settle down and work as we get older. In China, it seems to be the complete opposite! I did not see one group of young Chinese people, like college students, and granted they are all in school now, but STILL. American college students living in Florida and Cali still go to the beach and party. What I did see were huge groups of Chinese adults past middle age, who were frolicking in the pool and on the beach like small kids!! This pattern has been largely true throughout my travels in zhongguo, and was also corroborated by Jamie and Drew's trip to the Tsingtao Beer Festival, at which they saw virtually no college-age Chinese students, but did hang out with a lot of wasted middle-aged Chinese businessmen. I guess that the idea is that in youth, one must put his or her nose to the grindstone, and once they have earned the time and money to have fun, they can? Nothing wrong with that but it is just very different from what I'm used to seeing elsewhere!

Rockin' the robe

Hotel pool

Lots of these guys throughout Sanya

Sweet Hawaiian outfits

The small building is the post office

More sweet gear...yes I did document a lot of this stuff

best person ever

I LOVE THE OCEAN

The three adventurers

Rainbow 2 had a Minnesota license plate!!!

Walking around Sanya we saw some dancers...

...and a store called "Do Me."

Pick a tasty!!!!

Some dudes showed up to play music.

Daddy why did we never have father-daughter hawaiian wear?!?!

Please read

2008-11-14T10:40:00.002+08:00

Please check out this article from the NYT: New Pollution Threat in Asia. This is really scary and sad. Pollution clouds that block out the sun? Please, everyone give just a moment of thought about how you can take one small step to help out the environment-- if we don't act now, the end of human civilization may really be just around the corner...

In other news, I'm going to the beach this weekend, so pics and other fun items will appear on Tuesday. Cheers~

neighborhood government

2008-11-13T21:12:00.002+08:00

Today instead of our usual political science class, we went to go meet some people who work for a neighborhood council near the university. The neighborhood council is the lowest level of government here, after the street level, district level and city level. It actually turned out to be sort of interesting, if only because it was such a different system from what I've seen in the US.

Basically, there's a compound of apartment buildings that make up the neighborhood. I can't remember how many people they said lived in the neighborhood but I think it was a couple thousand. The council helps solve disputes for the people, from landlord-tenant disputes, to neighborly disputes, to domestic disputes. They also help people get in touch with the right gov't agencies to solve issues that go outside the bounds of the council, and hold activities so that old people who live alone in the compound don't feel lonely.

Each building can nominate someone to the council, after which there is a vote. If there are 10 people running, 8 people can be elected; if 8 people are running, 6 can be elected, and so on. The candidates don't run campaigns per say- it's more like running for middle school class president. Each person can make a speech at a group meeting, and then they put up a poster with a headshot of each candidate and his or her resume. You may be surprised to be reading about elections in China, but it's true. This is the real government, which answers to the next up level of government, and it has elections. Such is the face of political change in the PRC- very low levels of democracy are in fact allowed. And, residents don't even need a hukou to vote. Migrants who are 'unofficially' in Shanghai can vote in the elections if they have lived in the neighborhood for over a year.

As in every level of government, every company and every government agency, there is a parallel party committee. Basically the Party branch is separate from but parallel to the government branch, and makes sure that what happens is in line with party policy. The party committee has a Party Secretary, who is sort of awkwardly at the same level of power/just below the head of the council/agency/company/whatever. According to Prof Peng, the Party Secretary is chosen such that his or her personality meshes with the head of the council or whatever. If the head person is fiery and assertive, the Party assigns a more laid back Secretary. If the head person is quieter, a more energetic Party Secretary is assigned. In this case, it was clear that the Party Secretary was more in charge than the head of the council. The former was first to answer all of our questions, and did far more of the talking, while the latter acquiesced to most of what the secretary had to say. But I suppose this is different depending on where you go. The Party -wants- to get along with the government organ, so as to minimize friction and maximize oversight. Interesting tidbit here, too, is that the Party Committee is also elected, by the Party members who live in the neighborhood and are retired (if you are employed, your party registration is with your workplace).

One thing they mentioned that was a little bit unexpected was that the council does get involved with enforcing the one child policy. The lady told us that about once a year, someone will get pregnant when they already have a child. At this point they will go to "have a conversation with her", after which she will decide whether or not to keep the child. Most decide not to.

But other than that unsavory duty, it sounded like they did a pretty good job of responding to the needs of the neighborhood. In a way it sounded like the sort of 'neighborhood associations' we have in the US, except it's a branch of the actual government of the PRC. As for the people we met, they were very friendly and answered all of our questions, and gave us tasty oranges and bananas and seemed super happy to have foreign exchange students come for a visit.

food update and sweet/sour

2008-11-12T21:53:00.007+08:00

First I just have to do this.....

JEFFREY WASSERSTROM

...juuuuust kidding, this post isn't about you, Prof. Wasserstrom!! :)

...the reason for that particularly feeble attempt at humor is that yesterday when I posted, I used the above named professor's full name, causing the entry to pop up in his google updates...which made for a slightly awkward moment when this was revealed to me, but shoot, this blog is meant for people to read so maybe I should use full names more often in an attempt to lure people with self-google-updates to come and view more often... har har.

Anyway, food update- ate delicious lunch at a vegetarian restaurant today, highly recommend. I always forget how many awesome things can be done to vegetables and tofu. Combine the endless possibilities with some Chinese cooks and WHO KNOWS what could happen!?! Bell peppers filled with mashed pumpkin, and after the pumpkin was gone we ate the bell peppers... Mushrooms with the texture of sushi, dipped in soy sauce and wasabi... spicy veggie stirfry tucked into warm "pita pocket" type pieces of steamed bread... rice and tofu and spinach wrapped in tofu skin things oooo...... more different stir fries and combinations of vegetables cooked together in savory spices than I even know how to describe, boy oh boy. Could definitely have stayed there eating all day. Little did I know that Chinese vegetarian restaurant would be so full of flavorful and festive feasts. Plus, I have to say I felt pret-ty trendy eating in a vegetarian restaurant. Next stop is a restaurant where they only serve food that's white!

And now I am eating MA LA TANG woooohoo

Today I talked to the malatang guy. I kind of like to play "sweet and sour" with random Chinese people either that I meet or on the street, you know, smile at them and see what the reaction is. It's pretty entertaining here because I get reactions ranging from nothing, to shock, to surprise and then a happy grin, to a regular smile, to hostility, to "what, why is that weird laowai smiling at me?" and so on. Anyway the malatang guy never really responded very well when I'd smile happily at the prospect of eating his malatang...just kind of looked at me like I had lost my marbles and went back to monotonously and unsmilingly lording over his soups. so I never really tried to engage before even though I go there all the freaking time. But today I was waiting by the door/entrance where he cooks the stuff, and since I was the only one waiting to "da bao zou" (get takeout) and he was just standing there cooking like he does, I felt bad not being friendly. Our conversation was pretty basic - "Do you like cooking malatang" "no, im tired of it" "are you shanghainese" "no" "where are you from" "anhui, where are you from" "america" "oh, america" etc, why I'm here and for how long, blah blah. But when I left we had actually had a full conversation, and- AND- he actually smiled!

so I guess the moral of the story is...be friendly, cause sweet and sour doesn't always predict the truth :)

I felt so sad for him too, when he said he hated cooking ma la tang and how he's tired of it :( It's just unfair. Some of us get dealt such good cards in life, while other people get dealt the "move to Shanghai in search of your fortune and spend the rest of your life cooking ma la tang or performing other such mind numbingly menial tasks in hopes of eking out a living better than the one you would have had otherwise" cards.

shanghai history

2008-11-11T22:13:00.003+08:00

Today we had Jeff Wasserstrom come to talk about the history of Shanghai. It was really enjoyable, actually- he really knows his stuff and I felt like I learned a lot. We talked about the 3 sort of "myths" of Shanghai and why they are not true or only partially true:

1. that Shanghai was a "small fishing village" before the Opium Wars, after which it became a treaty port and then opened up to the world and became the Pearl of the Orient. Actually, before the Opium Wars, Shanghai was a walled city of 200,000+ people, with academies, temples, stores, and a port that served both China and much of Southeast Asia. Even though it wasn't open to the West, it was already somewhat international and definitely a city, not a village. And people did other things besides fish. But apparently it makes for a better story to have Shanghai go from "nothing" to "something" thanks to the intervention/presence of the Westerners...

2. that Shanghai was a "colonial city." Wasserstrom argues that this is only 1/2 true or 2/3 true- the other 1/3 is the part that is problematic. In fact, there is only one point in history during which Shanghai was completely colonized and controlled by an outside empire, and that occurred during the Japanese invasion. Rather, the French Concession and the International Settlement were pockets of Shanghai under foreign control, but it is factually incorrect to say that Shanghai was a "colonial city", in the sense that Hong Kong was a colony and Calcutta or Bombay were colonial cities, in its heyday.

3. that the Bund Park once had a sign that said "No dogs or Chinese people allowed." This is actually a really interesting topic and a point of contention for Chinese historians the world over. The way the story goes, the International Settlement opened a public park in the Bund that was only open to foreigners (not just white foreigners, but Japanese, Korean, Indian, etc) and not Chinese. According to the story, a sign posted at the entrance read, "No dogs or Chinese allowed."

This story was used as a major tool by the Communist revolutionaries in Shanghai, as evidence of Shanghai's shameful history as a colonial city, and evidence of the unfair and oppressive nature of the imperialist western countries. Many scholars today point to it as evidence of Shanghai's colonial nature.

In fact, photos of the actual sign reveal a list of rules for the park, one of which was No Dogs, and one of which read something like "Open only to foreigners and their Chinese servants." Wasserstrom basically argued what I thought from the moment our regular history prof, Professor Li, told us the story: that even though the sign probably never read "No dogs or Chinese allowed" in so many words, it might as well have because of the prejudice behind keeping the Chinese out. Indeed, the attitude of most (not all, but many) foreigners in Shanghai at the time was at least that because of their different customs, they would not feel comfortable around Chinese, and Chinese would not feel comfortable around foreigners (read Carl Crow for more on this). And clearly, the colonial mentality of the time was that the local population was poorer, more uncouth, and undesirable. So, while Chinese amahs looking after foreign babies could enter, no regular Chinese people could, and not even Chinese people that lived in the International Settlement and paid the taxes that supported the park, just like the foreigners.

What's bizarre to me is that a large body of Shanghai scholars argues that not only did the offending sign not exist, but that the reasoning behind the sign that did exist was not in the least bit racist. In fact, when Professor Li introduced the topic to us, he specifically said that the foreigners who set up the park and the park regulations were not racist- they just didn't want poor coolies and homeless Chinese to come into the park and make them feel uncomfortable. And he was very vehement on this point. He was highly displeased by Wasserstrom's paper, and it wasn't just him- a whole symposium came together to talk about why Wasserstrom's argument was so offensive and untrue. So we talked about why that might be...Wasserstrom explained that for one, many of those scholars grew up being taught that the foreigners had colonized Shanghai and only abused Chinese people, but when they learned the history and saw that actually Chinese and Foreigners had lived and worked together in relative harmony, they grew to really love this image of Shanghai and didn't want to go back. Also, it relates to the sort of 'spirit of modern Shanghai', in which Shanghai reclaims its old international identity, much of which was suppressed during the Communist years. So to argue that the foreigners had been racist would somehow mar that.

(On a side note, the end of the story is sort of interesting- the local people began to become more and more angry about the park, because after all, Koreans and Japanese and even *heaven forbid* Indians (who "everyone knew were slaves") could enter, and plus, they were paying taxes, and the park was called a "public park." So first, a rule was made that if a Chinese person was accompanied by a foreigner or had a foreigner vouch for them, he or she could get a pass into the park. Predictably, this didn't last long. After that, a second park was built for Chinese people, but clearly this didn't work either, because the second park wasn't as nice and besides, it was the principle of the matter. So eventually, the rule was changed to something along the lines of well dressed Chinese people could enter. But even so, Carl Crow, one of the "old China hands", notes in one of his writings (seriously, check him out- very cool) that ever afterward many foreigners would glare at the perfectly well dressed and well behaved Chinese that came into the park)

Woooo that turned out to be a lot! Yay Shanghai?

Anyway, i had sort of a funny conversation with Rose about it.

Rose: How was your day?
me: yeah it was okay, we had this professor come from the US to teach us about Shanghai history
Rose: *double take* you had a professor from the US come to teach you about Shanghai history?
me: yeah, he's like a China expert I guess
Rose: ... is he Chinese, but lives in the US?
me: no, he's American
Rose: white guy?!
me: yeah
Rose: ..... has he ever... lived in China?
me: I guess.... I think so, probably
Rose: you think so... hmm... wow

I guess it has never surprised me having American profs who are 'experts' on other countries, but I guess it would seem weird if a group of Chinese students visited the US and brought in a Chinese professor to teach them about the history of New York!

Cultural Differences

2008-11-10T21:28:00.002+08:00

The cool thing to do in China is to use one's telephone as an mp3 player. I have noticed this several times: in the car on the way to Le Shan, Tang Jing was using her phone to play popular Chinese music for me...and yesterday at Zhongshanling Amanda and I saw a fellow and his girlfriend ambling arm in arm along the path, listening to American pop blasting out of his very slick mobile...but today at Starbucks really takes the cake. I was sitting in the downstairs area, by myself because it was the dinner hour, when suddenly this Chinese dude in skinny jeans and a snazzy jacket came in. I didn't really pay attention at first because dudes in skinny jeans and snazzy jackets are a dime a dozen here, and plus I was trying to learn new words like "animal excrement" for my vocab quiz tomorrow. Suddenly though, Michael Jackson's "Billie Jean" came blasting through the air. At first I couldn't figure out where it was coming from, and then I realized it was coming from his phone. First he sat down on a chair next to me, and I sort of glanced at him and smiled politely, thinking it was a ringtone and that he would soon pick up his phone. No such luck. He got up to get his drink from the barista and I hoped that then he would leave, but again, no such luck. He sat back down in the chair and restarted the song from the beginning, looking at me, SMIRKING, as if to say "Yes I am blaring Michael Jackson into Starbucks, and you can't stop me, whatcha gonna do about it laowai?!" So I leapt forth and snagged his phone from him and tossed it out the window, scolding him in rapidfire Chinese about Starbucks etiquete!!!! .....actually that is only what I wanted to do, in reality I just smiled politely again and tried to focus on my work. Soon the song ended and I was happy but not for long because then he played another song, which I didn't recognize. After that song was over I thought he might leave but instead he played ANOTHER song, and this time it was A COVER OF MICHAEL JACKSON'S BILLIE JEAN sung by someone else! What a bizarre person... thankfully after that he left :P I guess the soft jazz floating out of the tastefully hidden Starbucks speakers wasn't good enough for him??

In other news I finally finished editing Professor Liu's paper AND got a good start on my new outline for the slightly shifted DPRK paper...nice... AND I picked topics for my final papers, just have to get them okayed by the professors, but for political science I'm planning to write on political modernization and prospects for democracy in China, and for history I'm planning to write on prostitution throughout the history of Shanghai (about which there's a surprising amount of literature o_o) AND pulled a bunch of sources for both. HURRAY FOR PRODUCTIVITY

Also I think I'm getting sick :( I have that tickle in my throat...curses... but I won't let it get me down cause this weekend I'm going to Hainan!!!

Nanjing

2008-11-09T20:44:00.008+08:00

So, yesterday and today Amanda and I were in Nanjing, a city about 2 hours northwest of Shanghai. We took a train there on Saturday morning, most of which I slept for because we had stayed out pretty late on Friday night. Taking the train was easy- last week we bought our tickets at the ticket station down the way, then Saturday morning just showed up about 45 minutes ahead of time, boarded the train, and were off. The train was a lot more comfortable than I thought, too- lots of leg room and really wide seats.

When we got to Nanjing we took the subway to Xinjiekou, which is sort of the city center and where there is a lot of shopping and that sort of thing. It was pretty cute- lots of overpriced designer stores (Gucci, Louis Vuitton, Burberry -- I don't know how so many of those stores do so well here, I see them in every city! I guess that ostentatious displays of wealth are really in vogue though..), wide streets and trees. I have to give it to the Chinese local governments- they do a great job keeping the cities full of trees. Neither of us had had breakfast so our first order of business was to find food. It took us a surprisingly long time to find a Chinese restaurant though! Instead, we saw 2 KFC's, 3 McDonalds and 2 Pizza Huts. We finally found a place that was overpriced and pretty nasty but at least it was food. The buns I got were soooo gross- the bread was delicious as all steamed bread is, but the filling was like, sticky, watered down steamed potato stuff with sugar. BARF.

People lined up for Pizza Hut??? we saw this strange occurrence MORE THAN ONCE in Nanjing!!

After we ate, we decided to start sightseeing. Most tourists would start their day with something lighthearted and cheerful. We started our day by going to see the Nanjing Massacre Museum. The Nanjing Massacre, also known as the Rape of Nanking, took place for six weeks starting in December of 1939, during the Japanese invasion of China. According to Chinese estimates, 300,000 Chinese, including women, children and the old, were brutally slaughtered by Japanese soldiers, and there were over 20,000 cases of rape. The museum was exceptionally well done- outside the architecture was sort of bare and minimalist. I didn't take pictures inside because it felt disrespectful, but directly inside was a beautiful, respectful and tasteful memorial. In a huge dark room, photos of the victims were projected 1 at a time on a dark wall. Every few seconds a gong sounded and the photo changed. There were also small lights on the ground, like stars, and on the ceiling it said "300,000 victims." I'm doing a very poor job of describing it but it was really moving. After the memorial was a MASSIVELY HUGE museum that described how the massacre took place, starting with the Japanese invasion. The museum combined testimonials from survivors with thousands of photos and historical artifacts and profiles of important figures (Chinese military/political figures, Japanese military figures, important Chinese civilians, and important foreign onlookers/activists), and told the story from the very beginning through to the war crimes trials afterward. I really learned a lot both about the time period and the actual violence. It was also very, very sad and heavy- if you've been to the Holocaust museum in DC, this museum was extremely reminiscent of that, although even better done I think. After that section of the museum there was another huge section of the museum, done in the same way with loads of pictures and artifacts and well-written English explanations, that told the whole story of the Japanese invasion of China. I was VERY impressed, and very saddened... war is Hell. And again, I felt so lucky that America hasn't experienced violence like that on our own shores. It just sickens me what humans will do to each other...

Outside the museum

At the end of the museum and the outdoor gardens and such, they had a huge reflecting pool (not in this pic) and a statue of peace.

After the museum, we were both physically tired (from having gotten so little sleep) and emotionally tired, so we decided to go to the hotel, check in, and have a quick napski before seeing anything else. WELL worth it, sleep was so necessary at that point. But when we woke up, it was already night! Still, I had written down in my places-to-go-list that Fu Zi Miao, the Confucian Temple, is open until 10, so we decided to go. Unfortunately it was around 6:15, the dinner hour, so we had to wait like an HOUR to catch a cab (ugh) and 3 cabs got stolen from us by ninja-like, wicked Chinese people before we finally got one. The cabby was actually really nice about it- he had this other dude in the cab, and I think they slowed down in front of us by mistake, but he asked where we were going and when we told him they were both like HOP IN! so we did, and everything worked out. He dropped us off in front of the Fu Zi Miao area, which it turns out is like a touristy section with stores and restaurants and live music and loads of people. It took us a while to find the actual temple but it was pretty fun, and super cute, even if the whole thing was touristy to the point of being ridiculous.

This morning, we woke up late and decided to go to Zhong Shan Ling, or Sun Yat Sen's Mausoleum. This time, we were able to figure out the buses so we took a city bus all the way out there. The mausoleum is on a mountain and is actually part of a huge historical/tourist complex that includes the mausoleum, a Ming dynasty tomb, the Linggu temple and pagoda, an amusement park, and several other sights. For 80 kuai we got entrance to the Mausoleum, the Linggu Scenic Area (which included the pagoda and temple), the open-air music hall, and the Sun Yat Sen Memorial Hall (which we never found), not to mention all the free paths and other free sights along the way. All in all it was a great deal and a great way to spend our day. It was nice to be out of the city but still around people and sights, and everything was well signed and well marked and well organized and well taken care of. If you ever go to Nanjing definitely do this!

Main gate...

Funny thing about the mausoleum was that there would be a long path and a structure and you'd think it was the mausoleum but it wasn't :p

Stairs up to the mausoleum

Pic of the outside; they didn't allow pictures inside.

The view from the mausoleum

The absurdly beautiful Open Air Music Hall

Waterside pavilion

You can kinda see the amusement park...

HORDES of schoolchildren in matching tracksuits were swarming the entire place...I guess these ones only have matching track jackets but still

Linggu Pagoda

Inside the pagoda

View from Pagoda

Little dudes on the pavilion

And then we came back! :)

wenzi problems

2008-11-06T22:45:00.004+08:00

First of all the word for mosquito in Chinese is 蚊子 (wen-zi) which is a great word, because the left-side of "wen" is the bug radical (appears in words for insects as well as words for insect-like creatures like shrimps) and the right side of it, 文 is pronounced wen. 子, spelt zi in pinyin and pronounced "zih" or "zuh" is just added on to a one-syllable noun to make it 2 syllables (this also happens in MANY other characters including 桌子 (zhuo-zi, table)，柜子 (gui-zi, cabinet)，车子 (che-zi, car)，本子 (ben-zi, notebook)，孩子 (hai-zi, child kid or young person)，瓶子 (ping-zi, bottle)，杯子 (bei-zi, cup)，被子 (bei-zi, beadspread) etc when they are not used with another character, i.e. 茶杯 (cha-bei, teacup) or 女孩 (nü-hai, female child) although I THINK that can also be 女孩子 too. Anyway IMO "wen-zih" is a great word for mosquito because in speaking it one can imbue it with all the meanness one feels towards those wicked creatures.

ANYWAY the point of my writing is this: There's sort of a big mosquito problem in our hotel. As in, wenzis (actually no s is necessary but adding it is fun) hide sneakily during the day and then come out as soon as the lights are out to terrorize me in my bed. Beauty sleep has become "get eaten alive" sleep because I wake up each day with new bites on any part of me that isn't covered by the bei-zi (bedspread, remember?). And since I like to sleep with parts of me out... Well I hadn't really looked in the mirror much today until now, when I just discovered that I have matching wenzi bites on each cheek. COOL

wenzi: 1 jialing: 0

Jewish people

2008-11-06T14:59:00.004+08:00

"The Han Chinese are like Jewish people..... very rich and good at making money."
--Peng Laoshi, our political science professor

haaahaahahahahahahaha. Every Chinese person I've talked to loves the stereotype of the rich, cunning Jew, and even more than that, they love to imagine themselves as similar to that moneymaking ideal. I never cease to be fascinated by the obsession with money here. Almost everyone I have met and talked to in China hopes to make more money, which is obvious (who doesn't like more money better than less money?) but the fixation on money is much stronger than it is in the United States, I think. Maybe this is some sort of reaction against the enforced poverty of a few generations ago. Also, an interesting factoid: according to my history professor, a lot of Europeans who came to Shanghai and made their fortune after the Opium Wars were Jews.

So, the election. I'm ecstatic about Obama's win. I'm disgusted that Coleman and Bachmann hung on to their seats in Minnesota, and disappointed in California and Florida for adopting anti-gay measures. So, there's still work to be done...But yesterday was a great day in American history. So yesterday I happily tied a "I <3 THE USA" bandanna to my backpack for my afternoon classes and for once I felt not the least bit embarrassed for my country.

I don't think people in China are as engaged in American politics as people in Europe, but the Chinese I had talked to about the election all hoped Obama would win and disliked George Bush (or 小布什, Xiao Bu-shi, little Bush). I think in general people feel that the USA-China relationship was stronger during the Clinton years than during the Bush years, so they are hoping that now that there is another Democrat in office, the relationship will improve. However, people are worried that Obama will be protectionist and hurt manufacturing/exports. That said, according to...something I read, even the Chinese youth, especially ones studying English and other political systems, like Obama and feel inspired by him. Which is interesting to me in a way, because according to our professors, a pretty solid segment of the intellectual youth actually wants China to return to the pre-opening and reform ways, with the danwei or work unit that would provide services like health care, child and elder care, and education as well as employment, feeling that the consequences stemming from the loss of those programs have outweighed the benefits of economic development. In my opinion giving up market reform just because it hasn't included health care and free education is throwing the baby out with the bathwater, given the impoverished and politically charged conditions the danwei system characterized. Can't the Chinese find a way to provide health care and free education without returning to a planned economy? Europe and Canada did. Here's some food for thought, though-- apparently, the Chinese government is sitting on huge surpluses of money but is just "saving" it for something in the future. Meanwhile although millions of Chinese have seen their standards of living increase dramatically since the late 70s, there are also millions living in abject poverty, and there is not free education and hospitals require that patients to pay in cash (meaning that those who can't afford it are screwed, much as in the American system except with even fewer opportunities for insurance). In the US, the standard of living in general is higher than in China but our government is broke. Yesterday I said to my roommate that I was glad Obama won but since our country is pretty much out of money right now, there's going to be no way to afford the changes to education or health care that everyone is hoping he will bring. All she said was that she found it sort of ridiculous for me to say that America doesn't have money. I explained that while many private citizens have money (and I didn't even breach the discussion on poverty in America, which I've found is just largely unproductive to get into here) the government is practically bankrupt. I still don't think she really believed me.

Anyway I don't have much else to report, so I'll leave you with this ridiculous photo from Shanghaiist.

We interrupt our regularly scheduled broadcast...

2008-11-05T17:16:00.002+08:00

WOOOOOOOOOOOOHOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

1 step forward, 2 steps back

2008-11-04T13:23:00.001+08:00

Some Dutch people moved in across the hall. They are here for a month doing some kind of research or something. Since Rose works for Dong Hua's International Cultural Exchange School, she's working with them. I had already met a couple of them this morning, and when Rose came back she said that she had spent part of the day with them.

Me: Yeah I know they are here, I met some of them this morning.
Rose: They met you too! They said they met some American girls, and I told them the fat one is my roommate.

...
WHAT IS IT WITH THESE PEOPLE????

In which a milestone is reached

2008-11-03T20:04:00.006+08:00

Rose: *eyeing the remains of my takeout malatang that I ate for dinner (btw it was incredible)* oooo, did you eat ma la tang?
me: yesssss *happy sigh*
Rose: ooh...!
me: mmmmmmmm... *dreaming of malatang, I pat my stomach several times to indicate how distended and full it is from all the tasty vegetables and tofu bits with spicy spicy soups. i pat it loudly, and it makes a satisfying sound, like a hollow drum, except it is not hollow in the least, for it is filled with foods. flump flump flump*
Rose: you are thinner!
me: huh?
Rose: you are thinner than before!
me: *blink blink* .. *bird noise* gluhh!

because what else shall I say? "Thanks!" "Great, do you still call me fat fat behind my back?" "Oh good, now maybe I am only six times the size of your average chinese person instead of ten times larger!"

Still. if a Chinese person said it, it must be true! right?!??! >_>

Today was...largely boring. I just edited a paper on east Asian free trade agreements for like 4 hours. My adviser for the Korea paper is having me revise a paper of his own that he wants to submit to an English language journal in Taiwan. I have to say, it's pretty slow going. Part of the problem is that his English is really good, but just not quite there. Thus, he has a pretty extensive vocabulary, but it's not always used correctly. He writes with complex sentence structures, but a lot of run-ons that must be snipped into pieces. And I constantly have to be on the lookout for extra "the's", missing "the's," and verbs conjugated just a little bit incorrectly, which is NOT fun to be on the lookout for because in my brain I am so used to reading Chinglish at this point that I just sort of slide over it. The other part of the problem is that I'm woefully uninformed on the topic, so half the time I'm not sure if I don't understand what he's talking about because I'm just ignorant, or if his writing actually doesn't make sense. Still, I'm pleased he wanted me to look over it (although it doesn't necessarily mean he thinks highly of me- just that I am the only available native speaker of English), and the last line of the note he sent me back today after I'd emailed him with a question was quite cute: "Anyway, Do it bravely,I give you a free hand." :P

In other news, holy cannoli, the election is very soon. Tomorrow is Tuesday here but Tuesday night in the US isn't until Wednesday morning here so I have to be in suspense longer than I feel is fair. Also, I have always disliked daylight saving time, but now I truly despise it. I am no longer an easy 12 hours ahead of Eastern Standard Time, but because silly USA had to "fall back" I'm now 13 hours ahead of Swarthmore and the east coast, and a whopping 14 hours ahead of home. Dear jesús. I don't think i will ever get to call home and get ahold of someone ever again!

ALSO-- THIS IS IMPORTANT --- I have noticed thanks to my handy counter that I am getting a lot of hits on this blog! This is GREAT, fantastic, couldn't be better actually. I love knowing that people are at least *viewing* the page if not necessarily *reading* the content. What makes me sad is not knowing who all my "fans" are! so if you are reading this I would love it if you would comment or shoot me an email-- if you know me and have my personal email you can go ahead and use that, otherwise send it to aijialing@chinamail.com :D don't be shy I would love to hear from you, even if you feel like a creeper!

Factory Fun

2008-11-02T19:36:00.007+08:00

Right so this weekend was sort of bizarre, but it was certainly tolerable, even if looking at factories wasn't how I would have chosen to spend it. Basically, since the idea of this program is to encourage us to consider working in China in the future, CET thought it would be a good idea to actually have us go look at some real factories in the area around Shanghai (the Yangtze river delta, Zhejiang province-ish, with lots of factories and such being developed). So Jeremy pulled up the Forbes 200 list for China (maybe that means something to you, it means nothing to me >.<) and picked some random cool-sounding places and asked if we could go tour. We visited the ones that said yes.

The first place we went was Thursday after class. It was a solar panel making factory. They didn't let us take pictures but believe me, you aren't missing anything... it was pretty horrendously boring. Everything was really sterile and mechanized, with oompa-loompa looking people in onesies running around operating the machines and moving bits from here to there. I guess it was semi-neat to see how solar panels begin as individual wafers and then get made into an actual large panel, but to be honest it was pretty anticlimactic.

That night we stayed in a really nice 5 star hotel in Jiaxing. Jiaxing is a depressing and industrial city but I will say this for it: it has at least one good bar. We asked the people at the hotel to recommend a bar for us to go to, and they bundled us into a couple of cabs and sent us on our merry way. The bar was called "Boiling 100 Degrees" so we were initially skeptical, but it ended up being REALLY fun- really big, and actually more of a club than a bar. We were also the only foreigners and somehow I doubt that place sees a lot of foreigners at all. So we hung out around the bar for a while because the bartender, who had bright yellow dyed hair, was really fun. There's this really silly Chinese drinking game where you and another person have 5 dice under a cup, and you shake it, and then have to both guess how many combinations of dice there are in total (i.e. three 2's or four 6's) while faking the other person out, getting them to guess higher than they should, and then calling them on it and forcing them to drink. So we were playing that with the bartender taking sides and helping. He also kept doing ridiculous magic tricks. At one point I wrote him a note that said "你好" (hello) which he thought was so cool, he was laughing and showing it off to all the other bartenders...I think it blew his mind when he found out I could write other things, and my other American friends could too. :P Then we went and danced for a while which was silly because the dancing stage was just this dinky platform that was bouncing up and down with the movements of the 'dancing' Chinese people. In general, Chinese people don't really dance the way Americans do, it's more of a bouncing up and down motion, and this is enhanced with the addition of techno music. We asked them a couple of times to play American hip hop or dance music but they said no. However, at one point, they did play a techno remix of "Take Me Home, Country Road" directly followed by "Hit the Road Jack, and Don't You Come Back," accompanied by dancers in short skirts and belly shirts, one of whom was a man.

The next day, we got up bright and early to go visit a coal power plant. I mean, the day before we had gone to see solar panels being made, so the next day it made perfect sense to go see "clean coal," right? The people who showed us around were really friendly, just recent college graduates I think and pretty pumped to practice English. They also let us take loads of pictures.

I'm sort of an expert on coal...

I forgot to mention that all of our teachers came with us on this tour! that made it more tolerable, I think- traveling with the teachers is absolutely hilarious. Wu Laoshi (teacher Wu) is extremely aged, but with the heart of a young'un. She cracks us all up at every turn. She started doing dance moves at the solar panel factory because she was bored and felt stiff. ahaha. She loves to order her students to eat more, even after we all say we are full. She is an energetic and wonderful old lady. I hope I can be such a baller when I am her age.

After we left the coal power plant, we went to visit a linen yarn factory. This place was cool because it was a factory in the sense of how I imagine a factory... assembly lines, and long endless rows of machinery, and gadgets and gears and things that could snap your fingers off if you inserted your hand the wrong way. The guy who gave us our tour was a hoot. Usually Chinese people don't make jokes the way Westerners do... I don't know, the sense of humor is just different. But it was clear that this guy has spent a lot of time around Western businessmen. When asked how they planned to keep ahead of the competition, he responded, "Kill them. *cackle*" He also apparently laughed when Jeff asked how they keep their workers happy, then pointed out that they have a place for them to play ping pong. Lovely... He was also really straightforward. He straight up said, "Unions in China are useless and have no power." Which is like the worst kept secret in China, but no one was expecting him to come right out and say it either.

I am also an expert in flax....*ahem* Actually the joke of the "foreign expert" is sort of widespread in the business community here, I guess. Apparently it is the custom to introduce foreigners with really overexaggerated biographies. Like you could introduce me as, "Oh, this is Kate, she is an expert in Korean foreign policy, and is actually helping to formulate US priorities in the 6 party talks." Just absolutely ridiculous! And if they don't enhance your biography, it is still highly probable that you will be referred to as "an expert."

Bleached and unbleached linen yarn

And that night was Halloween, and Boiling 100 Degrees was having a halloween party, so we decided to go. Problem was, we didn't have costumes. Problem solved: we all dressed in the hotel bathrobes, Hugh Hefner style. When we got to the club, of course, no one else was in costume...but whatever, we're American and it's OUR holiday and we know how to celebrate it properly (I really hope next year at Boiling 100 Degrees some of the Jiaxing residents also show up in bathrobes XP). But I'm getting ahead of myself! We decided to hang out in the hotel and pregame for a while, and get the laoshis (teachers) to hang out with us. So we bought some beer and put on music and it wasn't long before all of us, the kids in the group AND Jeremy AND the teachers AND 70-something year old Wu Laoshi were gathered around a small table playing flip cup. Some of the teachers don't drink so they drank water but it was still mind blowing. After a bit we decided to go to the club. All in all it was just a hilarious night because 2 of the teachers came with us, we danced on the stage behind the DJs, Amanda and I got groped by some female bartenders when they were taking a picture with us (what?), and we were wearing bathrobes. :P

The next morning we got up horrifically early and headed off to a place that is the largest wholesale outlet place in the world. It was sooooo big. Most things there you couldn't just buy one-it's a place where business people go to pick out the things they want to sell in their stores. Some of the things we saw were worthwhile for purchasing but let me just say that if anyone has an insatiable drive to eye and purchase knick knacks, I definitely recommend Yiwu. It was out of control. SOOOO big and so many knick knacks. I didn't buy anything or take pictures but Drew bought some pretty priceless stuff. We found a store that sold bandanas and scarves, and he bought like 10 different themed American flag bandannas. Some of them were pretty ridiculous, like the one that was a Harley Davidson rip-off and said "Eagle Fly: The American Way" where it should have said Harley Davidson, and the one that had Osama Bin Laden and American flags all over it. He also bought a set of... I don't know what to call them... hats? More like, do-rags with bills, designed like American flags, and gave one to everyone on the bus. :P He got some bandannas for the 2 laoshis that were with us too, whichever ones they wanted. Lu Laoshi picked a Harley Davidson knockoff. Ni Laoshi picked a cannabis one. We all died laughing and she wanted to know why and we explained that it was marijuana patterned. She ohhed but still bought it?? I think she thought the leafs were pretty or something ahahahaha but it was so funny to see tiny, proper ni laoshi sporting a marijuana bandanna.

That afternoon we went to a bike making factory where, again, they wouldn't let us take pictures. It was a pretty depressing place though. One of those places that made me thank the lord several times over for not making me a poor Chinese girl forced to work in a bike making factory. Think huge warehouse with people performing mindless individual very small very repetitive probably unsafe at different levels...tasks. The people there made hand-spun motors for the bikes, for crying out loud. It was true assembly-line, mind-numbing work. In another area of the factory they had a painting room, where the carbon bodies of the bikes were painted. It was pretty terrible- no ventilation, just the worker and the airbrush and the nasty paint. The kid we were watching didn't look any older than 16 either. :( I think it made all of us really value our education (which probably costs more than those people will earn ever) and the opportunities it affords us.

and that night we had another lovely dinner with everyone together- I can't even describe how funny those dinners are, with the teachers and everyone carrying on. And then I fell asleep at like 8. We were supposed to go hiking today, but it was raining AGAIN (for like the 4th day in a row) so we did not. I have never been so happy to have the fourth day of rain. Coming back to Shanghai we drove across the Hangzhou Bay Bridge, which is the longest trans-oceanic bridge in the world. Apparently it's going to completely change the region because originally people had to drive all around the bay, and now they can cross it, knocking off 2-3 hours. Personally, I just found it another bridge. again..anticlimactic. :P

All in all, like I said, I would have rather spent the weekend in Shanghai catching up on some work, going to the gym, maybe hitting up a few areas of the city I haven't had time to see. But it wasn't a terrible trip by any means. And for me, it was a particularly interesting contrast to the places I had just seen the weekend before. Last weekend I was watching people plow a field with an ox. This weekend I was in one of the most rapidly developing areas of China, touring factories and power plants. The disparities of wealth and development in this country are pretty incredible. Nothing I've seen in the US compares... And it was just sort of depressing, that the people who go in to the bike factory every day to handspin bike motors probably have a quality of life many times higher than the people working out in the country, but altogether their quality of life is so much lower than mine or probably yours, whoever is reading this. I don't like the argument that someone has to be there to make the bikes we ride, even though it's true in a way...I don't know. I guess my biggest problem is being unable to come up with an alternative, given the massive failures of communism worldwide. Even 'socialist democracies' don't really solve the problem because how many European countries just import from China and other places? Do they even have these kinds of dismal factories in those places? And it's not like they're even all bad, these factories- they do provide jobs, and a higher wage... higher, not high enough I think, and they certainly aren't good enough. I don't know, it was just interesting, and definitely did not make me want to go into business in China/be responsible for running one.

THE END!!!

still tired from fall break, but there shall be no rest for the weary

2008-10-29T18:23:00.002+08:00

This is again the last you'll hear from me for a few days. I had forgotten that this week is our "study trip to the Yangtze Delta Region" so I guess tomorrow afternoon we're setting off on a four day trip to look at factories. Here is hoping this turns out to be one of those things that sounds mind numbingly boring and awful but turns out to be both exciting and hilarious. I have 2 main tasks for this trip: study lots of vocab flashcards, and remain positive in the face of being forced to hike and observe the manufacturing of motorbikes.

The last days of break

2008-10-28T23:23:00.011+08:00

I am going to compile these into 1 post. Here's what happened on my last day in Lijiang. Basically, I was just walking around the touristy part of the old town wondering what I was going to do with myself all day (my flight wasn't until 10:45 that night), when I was approached by a large woman who started pointing at a mountain and telling me in damn good English that she was of Naxi heritage and would like to take me on a tour up the mountain to see a real Naxi village, free of tourists, for the whole day, until 6:30pm. I was sort of sketched out, but then she got out this little book where her clients had written recommendations in several different languages. She showed me many convincing English ones, which said things like, "If these people approach you, GO WITH THEM!!!!!" What finally made me agree was seeing that her husband had cornered a pair of Belgian tourists (presumably this would mean that I was not about to get kidnapped and have my organs taken, although there could have been the possibility that the Belgians were actually secretly in cahoots with the tour guides/kidnappers and were going to get a chunk of the organ money for helping to snag mine. Remember, my body is very great [at least according to my previous tour group] so I probably would have earned them a bundle. luckily this was not the case, they were normal Belgians, and very pleasant travel companions at that). Together we bargained them down to a fair price and agreed to all go. The places they took us were incredible... I really got to see some of the real life that peasants in China live, and the contrasts between the places I went that day and the city I am in now are heartbreaking. The people we met, who were the guides' friends, were almost absurdly gracious hosts, letting us sit by their fires and giving us food. It was a truly life changing day.

View of Lijiang, too bad it was so cloudy

Edelweiss

Black pepper

The house to the right is the owner's old house. The house to the left is the new house, made of concrete, in which they've lived for about 5 years now.

She made corn for us

And put on her traditional clothing for us

This is in her sister-in-law's house. Our guide said they seemed to have a little money because they were able to have a wood floor (instead of dirt) and a separate section of the house for sleeping.

They still farm the traditional way.

Over lunch, we learned how to play mahjong.

Then we went to another temple. Several of the monks we saw were just little boys, no older than this kid, who was btw extremely cute and sweet. I asked the guides how such young kids ended up in the monastery, and they said that some of them decided to go on their own, and others...their parents decided for them. I didn't ask how or why they would come to that decision, but the boys seemed happy enough living all together and just joking around like boys will, although it was clear they also lived a life of hard work and austerity... although, compared with the backbreaking farmwork in the surrounding region...eeh? I asked this kid if he liked living there, and he replied that he was used to it.

And that was the end of the day. After that I just went back and kicked it at the hotel for a while before heading to the airport. I texted the bingguan owners to see if they had a room, and they did, and came and got me. The next day, which I had free in Chengdu, had two excitements. The first was that I hung out with the girl I had met my first day in Shuangliu. It was actually supremely awkward, partly just because she's 15 and had her 13 year old sister (actually her cousin of course but everyone is sister and brother here..) with her and I felt like I was babysitting...but also she told me some pretty personal stuff about her and her family, and I didn't really know how to respond, being a foreigner and not knowing her and such (not to mention my innate personal awkwardness). But it was nice I guess. When we got back to Shuangliu that afternoon she and her sister invited me to their house, which was cool (had never seen a real Chinese house before, and her room had posters of movie stars that I recognized from watching Taiwanese soap operas all summer!), and to her grandfather's to watch tv and stuff. The second big excitement of the next day was going to Le Shan to see the giant Buddha carved into the side of the mountain. It was absurdly expensive to get into the 'park' where the Buddha was, but we took a boat to a little island in the river it faced and got to see it for almost free. Unfortunately it was really hazy out so my pictures turned out very poorly, but hopefully you can make it out.

And then the bingguan people ripped me off in the sense that I had to pay an American price for them having driven me 1.5 hrs each way instead of the Chinese price, but it was worth it to see that giant Buddha. The things people can build, especially in the name of religion!

And that was the end of my fall break!!!!!!!! so sad!!!!!!!!!

and I'm finally caught up, damn. Really nothing happened yesterday or today. My excitement for today was getting a seat on the bus home from work. At work, I met with Dr Liu, my adviser. He seemed very pleased and impressed with how many articles I had read before and my uhhm very lengthy outline, but wants me to talk more about the 6 party talks and stuff, so I have a bunch more research to do...which is really only a good thing. He also seems pretty enthusiastic about keeping in touch after I go back to the US and continuing to polish and write on this paper. He even said that he would completely understand if I can only get an outline finished by the time I leave. I am fairly confident that I will get more than that done (I mean, I AM a swattie) but it's good not to feel pressure. He also sent me a paper he's submitting to an English-language journal in Taiwan so that I can polish it for him, hurray for being a native speaker of English. And that's about all I have today.

four day tour - day 4 photos

2008-10-28T22:16:00.007+08:00

On the fourth day we left Shangri-la.

Not before we went to another temple though!

Aaaand then we went to a place that had these. Cow boats. I know, what? They were great fun, with 2 Naxi guides who steered with poles. We all sang songs as we floated down the river, and I sang "The Circle Game" (obviously) and many Chinese songs were sung and we made the younger guide (see below) sing by himself every other song :D

He was a muffin, he sang me a song in English :)

These pretty red plants were everywhere

One of the guides really wanted me, as the foreign friend, to wear their traditional costume :) it was really an honor

We then went to La Shi Hai, which is a place where you can ride horses and I guess it is a giant lake that only happens at certain wet times of the year and there's incredible bird watching.

Unfortunately my horse was something of a tired old nag.

And then we went back to Lijiang and that was the end of the tour. Sniffle.

four day tour - day 3 photos

2008-10-27T23:49:00.010+08:00

Stayed overnight in Fei Lai Si and got up early to watch the sun rise on Mt. Meili (Mei li xue shan or Mei li snow mountain).

I don't want to sound hokey but watching the sun rise and shine down over that mountain was a profoundly spiritual experience for me. I have never seen anything like it. I wish the tourists hadn't all been there but the incense and light wind helped... It was beautiful.

Then we were back on the road again.

If you are wondering about the lovely parka I am wearing in these photos, I rented it for 20 kuai. Yes you can rent coats for 20 kuai for 4 days in this place we stopped at. I had really bad altitude sickness that morning for whatever reason (the altitude, perhaps) but I did manage to get out and take pictures at most of the place we stopped for picture taking, and besides I was really getting to be a pro at taking pictures from the window of the moving van.

All those are from the road to Shangri-la

This guy sucked. He was dressed up in traditional clothing with a yak but charging 10 kuai per picture, yah right. we all took pictures out of the van instead, for free. But then he noticed and started throwing rocks at us. and none of my pictures even turned out, that one is blurry and the other one is clear but you can't really see him that well. that's what I get for being CHEAP I guess.

Then we went to a temple in Shangri-la. Here is what I feel about the temples and I wish I could be more eloquent. I also wish I had more pictures- it's strictly forbidden to take photos of the inside religious places, and even though I was bad and did it anyway a couple of times in Chengdu and elsewhere (does buddhism have a hell? maybe it's a good thing I gave some extra cash to that angry monk on the first day), there was no way I was getting photo replicas of any of the good stuff. But suffice it to say that much gold and elaborate paintings are used, and wall-sized murals tell religious stories, and wood is intricately carved and the ceilings are high and incense is burned and--- if I weren't in China looking at a Buddha, I could have been in Europe looking at a Christ. The similarities were shocking. To have so many of the same themes and structures and ideas, in a completely different cultural context...This particular monastery had the same sort of things many European cathedrals have, with patrons of the church/monastery entombed within, with gifts still left and a likeness of them and tour guides who explain how much they contributed to the place... And some people, like me, went to see the art, and others went for religious purposes, and some for both. But it really made me wonder, more than anything else, how much we are just...programmed to want to believe in some higher being, and worship it. Is it always and forever the duty, the passion, of man to try to build a house for God?

And then it was off to dinner. yes the dinner where they made me and xiao li the guests of honor. No I will not post the pictures of me ten cups of bai jiu later, they are UNFLATTERING. it is a damn good thing they drink it out of that little wimpy cup because otherwise this would be a country of consistently drunken people. Also, bai jiu is probably one of the grossest things I've ever tasted... only drink it if you're the guest of honor of a lot of highly cool Chinese people, otherwise just don't...

And that was the end of the third day (and please make note of xiao li's face in that last picture, it is priceless). I am going to sleep now so I will finish tomorrow... SORRRYRYYYYYY it's taking so long to get these up, I've been busy ugh... but nothing is really happening other than study/work so whatever... although I got a lovely package from Han today, with a letter from him, a poem he wrote for me :), a letter from LIZ DICKEY my russian slore, photos of me and han, a gorgeous locket, and a pen. so basically I'm really happy and so lucky to have such a great guy. Han sorry if you're reading this and feel embarrassed but I really mean it. :)

GOOD NIGHT

four day tour - day 2 photos

2008-10-27T22:57:00.008+08:00

Got up bright and early. We had stayed overnight in a small town called Ben Zi Lan. Didn't have a lot of time to explore there.

A terrible Chinese outdoor toilet! The people on the tour insisted that I go see, then insisted that they'd never seen one quite as awful either.

Off again!

Everyone likes taking pictures with me :D

I love mountains

Seriously though being here is like being a celebrity

"Let's take a picture with Xiao Li. XIAO LIIIII!"
"How should we pose?"
"Everyone hit him!"
"Yeah, hit Xiao Li!"

:-D

Countryside

Lunched at Fei Lai Si

Inside this tent were people traveling on foot to Lhasa, pilgrims. They invited me into the tent and told me all about their six-month religious pilgrimage. I didn't get to chat for very long, but what a group.

A lost laowai :(

The above are where we hiked that day. THE END! of day two.

four day tour - day 1 photos

2008-10-27T21:45:00.011+08:00

Pictures... Just going to post with comments. :)

Tour started out in Lijiang Old Town, a UNESCO heritage site. Beautiful old buildings but lots of tourists.

When I saw this I thought OH NO A HIKING TOUR I AM SCREWED but it wasn't like that at all :D

I was also intimidated. not for long!

Wasn't long before we were heading through the countryside.

Our first stop

I knew everything would be okay when multiple people helped me take my picture :D

Inside this temple, the monks showed me how to properly pray and what to do, then an old monk chanted over me and blew incense. I was like alright this is cool...then he whipped out this book and pointed, and i looked, and it was a bunch of people writing like "bless you" and the donation they gave. "Mon-ley! mon-ley!" he urged loudly, pointing at the book. So I gave him some, and he got mad because I hadn't donated 'enough' (urg) and so I gave more. and then he gave me a bracelet. yay buddha?

Working on a wall

We stopped at a small market.

The view from the market.

Some of the wares... hmmm.

And then we were off again and I was taking more pictures out the window.

Heading for Tiger Leaping Gorge

Tiger Leaping Gorge

This guy really wanted a picture with me.... awkward.... he had his wife take it.... possibly even more awkward

Back on the road

And we ate dinner in a 'restaurant' that was actually someone's house, I think...

And that was the end of day 1!

the trip

2008-10-26T23:23:00.003+08:00

I have sort of been procrastinating on writing this because I don't know how to begin. I mean, I'm not exaggerating when I say this week ranks up there in one of the best of my life, and not just because I had fun alone in Chengdu or saw pretty places in Yunnan. The cornerstone of this week's all-around fabulousness was the people I was on the tour with for four days in Northwest Yunnan, or Southwest China. So... I don't know, I guess what made the people so lovely were two things: 1. They were incredibly nice to me and took care of me, making sure I knew where to go and when, making sure I was included in every conversation, making sure I understood what was going on and what I was looking at. This is what I want to emphasize first because the other part, the funniness of it all, added flavor to the soup but the really important part was being made to feel like a real member of the group and someone that was cared about. Like when one of the women came and made sure I was awake and brought me with her and her husband to see the sunrise on mei li xue shan so that I wouldn't miss it at all. Or when the half of the group I sat down to have lunch with on the first day made sure I got my money in the food-pool with them and that i always sat with them and tried everything when we had a group meal together thereafter. I don't know how else to put the feelings I got from those kind of interactions into words so I have to stop there but the overwhelming gratefulness I have to those people for their kindness is something that will never leave me. 2. Some of the conversations we had were just wonderful and I am going to try to retype excerpts... Basically they are all in Chinese unless otherwise stated, but I can't really do the Chinese well enough to reproduce it exactly and besides most readers wouldn't understand. But these were the kinds of things I was working with:

[on politics]
Zhang ge: So what do you think of Bush?
Me: I hate him, he's stupid and awful.
Zhang ge: Yeah! He really likes to make wars on other countries.
Me: Yeah I don't get it.
Zhang ge: When is Obama going to become president?
Me: Well um... IF he wins... and he might not win... well if he wins, then in January.
Zhang ge: oh in January... So if he doesn't win, McCain will become president?
Me: Yeah, I hope he wins though
Zhang ge: Did you vote for him?
Me: Obviously
Guangdong guy (sadly I did not manage to learn everyone's names by the end of the trip, bad me): I hear that in America a lot of people hate Obama because he's black
Me: Yes
Him: Are you a racist?
Me: What?
Zhang ge: You're white!
Guangdong guy: Yeah, do you hate Obama because he's black?
Me: No!

[on romance]
Zhang ge: So have you found a Chinese boyfriend yet?
me: No...
Shanshan: Why not?
Me: Ehh I already have a boyfriend
Someone: Oh, you have a boyfriend?
Me: Yes
Someone else: Is he American?
Me: No, he's Korean but he is studying in America and that's now I know him.
(dead silence for a moment, then heated discussion about how I am dating a Korean, filling in everyone who did not happen to hear this tidbit)
Everyone: No! No! Korea is bad! You shouldn't have a Korean boyfriend! You need to find a Chinese boyfriend! Why would you get a Korean boyfriend and not a Chinese boyfriend!
Me: Well I like my Korean boyfriend a lot
Someone: Is he handsome?
Me: yes
Xiao Ye: Do you have a picture?
Me: Yes *gets out camera to show*
Everyone who sees: Ohhhh he looks very Korean
Me: oh really?
Zhang ge: He is very strong!
Me: He likes to work out a lot
Guangdong guy: Is he taller than you?
Me: Yes
Someone: Are you moving to Korea?
Me: What? I don't know, maybe
Someone: When are you getting married?
Me: what? Ahh I haven't thought about it really.

[on provocative dancing]
Shanshan: Jialing, do you know what we are talking about?
Me: *have been staring out the window taking pictures and not listening* What? No
Shanshan: Do you know what gangguanwu is?
Me: What? No
Shanshan: Oh *pointing at the guangdong guy* He really likes to do it!
Me: What?
Everyone explaining and talking over eachother: It is when you have a large thing, a gangguan *in english* pipe, and you dance like this *sexy dancing* around the (english)pipe, pipe-dancing!
Me: Ohhh, *realizing it is pole dancing* yes I get it
Shanshan: Yes, gangguanwu
Me: Sooo what you are saying is that he really likes..
Shanshan: YES!!! *Points at guangdong guy triumphantly* Did you hear that? She just asked me if what we are saying is that you like pole dancing!
Guangdong fellow: EH?! *in english* I... Don't... Like It!!!

[on the difference between america and china]
Zhang ge and his friend the guy from guangdong in this specific conversation but everyone at various times: What does your father do?
Me: uhh he is a doctor
Them: Oh, you must be very rich!
Me: uhhh
Them: How much does he make?
Me: what
Zhang ge: Just on average, his salary, in a month
Me: uhh I don't know
Guangdong guy: How many cars do you have?
Me: umm well my dad has 2, one that he drives and one that i share with my brothers
him: What car do you drive?
me: a volvo
him: oh, how much did it cost?
me: what! I don't know
Zhang ge: well how much horsepower does it have? (interlude of explaining the chinese word for horsepower)
me: eh? i don't know!
Zhang ge: It's just that we want to know the difference between China and America
Xiao Ni: Yes, everyone here thinks that everyone in America is very rich
guangdong guy: People in China think that the moon is bigger in America!
Zhang ge: no that's not true but everyone does think that everyone in America is very rich
me: well there are people in America that are very rich but also people that are not that rich
them: well we think everyone there is very rich

[on the future]
(Xiao Ni and Zhang ge have been talking about their son)
Xiao Ni: We are hoping that when we have enough money we can send him to America.
Me: well send him to find me, I'll take care of him
Zhang ge: Well it won't be for a while, he's only one now
me: That's fine, I'll be old then but I'll still take care of him!
Xiao Ni: Aw... WAIT... You're moving to KOREA!!!! how are you going to take care of him?!?!?!
Me: ! uhhh err *deciding it's too much effort to talk about not having discussed the very far future* well I'll make my boyfriend stay in the US
Xiao Ni: Oh, you'll make him stay in the US
me: yeah
Xiao Ni: So when do you want a baby?
Me: O_O uhhhhhhhhhh
Xiao Ni: *thinking I don't understand* when do you and your boyfriend want to give birth to a child?
Zhang ge: She hasn't thought about that yet!
Me: uhh...right, haven't thought about it yet

[on kissing]
(the last night we all had dinner together, Xiao Li the tour guide and I were the guests of honor and had to drink quite a lot of nasty bai jiu, or white liquor. this is Chinese tradition and there's not really a way of getting out of it without simultaneously offending people and looking like a huge pussy. at this point they have made Xiao Li drink a LOT and not made me drink as much but still a bit)
Shanshan's husband: Xiao Li is very tired
Shanshan: Yes he is very tired
Xiao Li: yes I am *clearly hoping they won't toast him anymore*
Shanshan: you must give him a (english)kiss!
Me: uhhhhhh
Shanshan's husband: Yes, give him a (english)kiss!!!
Me: *turning red* errrrr I don't really...think my boyfriend-
Xiao Li: *looking terrified* I don't know what that is!!
Me: uhhhhh
Shanshan: *kisses her husband's cheek* A kiss!
Xiao Li: *eyes pop out of his head* Ahh! *offers me the ceremonial dagger he always wears at his side* You may stab both of them!
Me: *brandishes it*
Everyone: *claps, cheers, toasts*

Actually that night was just hilarious overall...they kept coming up with different ways we had to drink the bai jiu, arm in arm, cheek to cheek, hugging, etc. Ridiculous. But vengeance was mine when it was discovered that that day was Shanshan and her husband's anniversary, so then everyone toasted them one at a time.

[on the death of communism in China]
Shanshan: Jialing is going home very soon. We must toast her!
Me: *thinking everyone is going to toast me one at a time and force me to drink 10+ more cups of bai jiu* errrr
Shanshan: Don't worry... we will toast to... *english* MAKING A LOT OF MONEY!!!
*Everyone likes this idea*
Everyone all together: To making a lot of money!!! *toasts*

They also liked to tell me that my 身体（body）is very 棒 (great, awesome). First of all I like the word 棒 because it is pronounced "bahng!" (fourth tone) and just embodies the qualities of awesome/cool/great. This was more a comment on my fitness than anything else because unlike most of them I did not get extremely tired when we did our hikes. This is partly because I'm in pretty good shape from working out 5-6x/week and hiking before, and also partly a reflection on the comparison between someone who doesn't smoke and exercises regularly (me) and someone who chain smokes (while hiking as well as before and after) and does not exercise (most of the people commenting). Still it was flattering and I enjoyed feeling like I was a contestant for the iron man competition rather than a sweating beast which is what I usually feel like in hiking settings.

They also repeatedly said I was 很厉害 (pronounced hen lihai!) (more fourth tones and often said with a hint of admiration). This word is tight, lihai, and basically means intense, awesome, very good, and badass. I was lihai for drinking bai jiu (although like I said there wasn't really a good way out of it), lihai for going on the tour alone, lihai for hiking and not getting tired, lihai for playing rugby, lihai for not getting carsick, lihai for not being cold, lihai for like everything I did. Another thing that made me feel grrrr-eat!

[On not being lihai]
me: *hiking along at my usual pace, minding my own business. come up on Lao Cai, who is older (mid-late thirties probably), short, and quite pudgy. He always sets off hiking first and doesn't stop to whine and feel tired like many of the younger and thinner members of the group* ni hao
Lao Cai: Jialing, do you know the meaning of, Ben Niao Xian Fei?
Me: Err no
Lao Cai: *in english* Ehhm.. the ehm, stupid, bird, flies, first. *Chinese* Not being as smart as everyone else, so you get up earlier and work harder
Me: Ohh, I get it
Zhang ge: *coming up on us smoking a cigarette and panting* Not being as lihai as some people, but setting out to hike first so you don't get left behind!

Also there was a running joke about eating dog, and I felt quite happy to be included in a joke.

And now I am sorry to leave anyone reading this in suspense because I had meant to post pictures tonight but it's already past midnight adn I have class tomorrow and it's just not really going to happen so sorry.

HOWEVER...I have decided to set up PicasaWeb Albums with ALL my photos from China. My facebook albums are edited, the pics that go up here are even more selectively chosen, but I'm dumping everything into the picasa albums. They aren't totally updated from this trip yet but they have everything old and some new.

The first 500 photos (stuff from break towards the bottom): http://picasaweb.google.com/kaizpuru/China#

The second batch not quite at 500 (all new): http://picasaweb.google.com/kaizpuru/China2#

DAY 2 -- Chengdu

2008-10-23T20:52:00.008+08:00

So the next morning I arose early and once again the owner of the bingguan chauffered me. It was sort of pricey (200 kuai...which is actually 30 dollars and NOT pricey by American standards, considering) but he agreed to come back and pick me up again at 5 and take me to the airport to catch my flight to Lijiang so even though I felt semi-ripped-off at the time, I also felt it was worth it. The bingguan guy was so nice and friendly again. He wouldn't stop complimenting my Chinese even though I didn't understand half of what he was saying, and said that if I ever come back to Sichuan I must stay at the Hang Kong Bing Guan, and to bring my brothers to meet him, and told me about all the places we passed, and how he felt about gai ge kai fang (China's opening up and reform), and was just a good chatty companion. And if you are reading this and think he was a sketcher I assure you my sketchometer was on and I wasn't getting any weird vibes. I think he was just happy to be chatting with a foreigner. Interesting what he said about gai ge kai fang: First, he took pains to remind me that this is something that started 30 years ago, when he was just a very small child. Second, he said it was good because before, no one had anything at all and now, everyone can have anything they want.

He dropped me off at Wenshu Monastery. Wenshu Monastery was originally built during the Tang Dynasty (618-907 AD), destroyed during the Ming Dynasty and rebuilt in 1691. Today it is a fairly famous hub of Buddhist activity. To call this place a temple doesn't do it justice at all, although many guidebooks do so. It is more like a compound. There are MULTIPLE temples and gardens and other buildings and a huge teahouse and a vegetarian restaurant and those are just the places that visitors can go, not to mention the places the monks actually live. I spent a good hour and a half walking around there and taking pictures. You aren't allowed to take pictures of the insides of the temples, though, for religious reasons. Inside each temple was, usually, a huge buddha made of gold, seated inside a really fancy throne/enclave, with other lesser deities beside him. In front of the main altar would be a place for incense, and bountiful offerings of fruit and money and grains and such, and cushions for prayer. I saw many people lighting incense and praying; clearly this place is a religious destination as much as a tourist one. Think...European cathedral, people like me go for the art, other people go to pray. Anyway, inside each temple room thing aside from the great golden Buddha there would also be full color statues of other deities, often in very interesting 'leaping' or 'dancing' or even active-sitting poses, with unique expressions and facial pictures. It was truly an awesome sight to see. Outside, there were lots of other places to light incense and offer prayers, but I felt sort of awkward documenting this with my camera...some private religious activities even zealous tourists shouldn't intrude upon, I think.

This lady wanted to take a picture with me. Funny: After I left I saw a sign with rules in Chinese and English. one of the rules was "Do not force foreign tourists to take pictures." hehe!

After I left the temple I walked around what I later discovered to be a tourist zone. I had wondered how such a big city had so many traditional Chinese-style buildings and shops. I guess Chengdu has areas of the city sectioned off as tourist sections, entertainment sections, etc. Hmm.

My next destination was the Wang Anting Xiao Xiao Zhanlanguan, or Wang Anting Small Exhibition Hall, or the Mao Museum. Ok...it was a huge pain in the butt to find, but I had some fun on my way. First, this little girl who was like 6 came up and said hello and introduced herself in English. I did the same and then she said bye and ran happily to her mother, who was waiting nearby looking sooo proud. Then I was walking around and these two wizened old ladies wearing Mao-style coats hobbled over to me and pressed a tiny gold pin in a red pouch into my hands, babbling in Chinese about how it would bring me "ping an" (safety and wellbeing basically). Of course they then wanted 10 kuai for the pin and their blessing but it was interesting.

ping an ladies

giant mao

After all that, the Mao museum was well worth it, especially since I had walked around without finding it for long enough that I had given up, and THEN I saw the street where it was on. Maybe it is like one of those magical places you can only find when you aren't looking, except, Communist. I wouldn't be surprised because this place was absurd. I mean, ABSURD!!! First of all it is like half of the owner's dirt floor house. A small room. Smaller than the room I am sitting in now. FULL. TO. THE. BRIM. with Mao Zedong paraphrenalia. I mean, there was barely room to walk in the place. He had mao statues, hundreds of pins, plates, bowls, newspaper clippings, photographs, tapestries, figurines, anything Mao you might ever want to see, this dude had. Apparently Mao came to this guy Wang Anting in a dream and told him to open a Mao Museum, so he did. He was a tiny little wrinkly old fellow who made me look at all the Maos and ferociously complimented my Chinese, demanded my name card (I knew those damn things would come in handy) and had me sign a guestbook. I gave a small donation and scampered away. The whole experience was surreal, especially since I saw it all in less than 30 minutes.

Another tourist section

The fanciest public bathroom on earth

My third destination was another temple, the Qing Yang Gong or Green Ram Temple. Zhis place is a Daoist monastery and just as beautiful and religious as the Wenshu Monastery. I was hungry because I had been too adventurous and forgotten to eat all day, so my first plan of action was to visit the vegearian restaurant on the Temple grounds. Goooood choice. I asked the fuwuyuan to suggest a dish, and the one I ended up getting was amazing. Ahhhhh. I want some now... hot peppers, eggplant, fried crispies, spicy, veggies, yum yum, oh, I cannot describe but it was fantastic. I walked around the place a while longer, took pics, and left.

The kind of food I wake up in the night salivating over

My future yard

I had some time to kill before 5 still so I just walked for a bit, trying to get back to this park I had passed. I bought some caramelized crabapples on a stick which were mouthwateringly delicious in the sense that I may wake up in the night desiring them. I found the park and soon discovered it was not just a park but kiddy fun fair with a small fare for each ride, as well as a large open plaza, and several tea houses, and a pretty lake that rented swanboats and paddleboats. I was definitely pleased to have stumbled upon that place!

At 5 the bingguan guy came and fetched me and took me to the airport. This had the makings of a small crisis because I couldn't read his handwriting on the sheet he'd written his phone number on, but I stopped some lady with a baby who looked harmless and got her to help me, and I think I freaked her out because she couldn't figure why this idiotic laowai couldn't read numbers like a normal person because as soon as the call went through she like sprinted away. Anyway I made it there pretty early and in a short amount of time I made it to LIJIANG where my 4 day Yunnan tour would begin.

And I am feeling sad that the tour is over and tired and sort of cold and very filthy and in need of a shower so I am going to stop here and continue writing about all the excitement -- AND post PICTURES!!!!!!!!!! -- when I get back to Shanghai.

EDIT: pictures have been posted, and more excitement is on the way

Fall Break is nearly over, boo hoo

2008-10-23T20:09:00.003+08:00

Well who knew that my hotel in Lijiang would have free internet? I have sooo much to report from my break that I figured I'd start writing now, and post pictures when I get back to Shanghai. Be prepared to be bombarded with pictures...I saw some really beautiful and special places over the past few days. I also had the time of my life, haven't spoken English (except for 2 phone calls with Han <3) since Saturday, and am super depressed to return to schoolwork/reality in a couple days.

So. DAY ONE.... SHUANGLIU

Day one was Saturday, when I took my flight to Chengdu Shuangliu International Airport. As planned, I rode the Maglev train, which was actually kind of anticlimactic, although it did get up to 250 mph in speed. Which was sort of cool I guess.

SPEED!!!!

Anyway when I got to the airport I got a lot of stares because I was like the only foreigner in the "domestic flights" area. You know, being foreign in China is so different from being foreign in Europe or even in Latin America. At least in those places (less so in Latin America but in certain parts) there is SOME CHANCE that I could be a local, just with really poor taste in fashion or light hair and blue eyes. Here you just look at me and it's obvious that I am not Chinese, duh. And I could live here the rest of my life and I would still be a laowai. I could BEAR CHILDREN in this country and raise them to speak Mandarin like a local Chinese person and those children would still be laowais. Is that how it is in other places? Foreigner always? In China it just feels painfully obvious. THERE WILL BE NO BLENDING IN.

Not that I want to because it is sort of fun to be a laowai and get stares and have people scream "HELLO" at me...but I digress.

Anyway when I got to Chengdu I sort of wandered around aimlessly looking for the person who was supposed to meet me who didn't show up. Since that was a fail I figured i had to get to the airport hotel on my own, but there was no service desk in sight (the only one had been before the end of the secure area) so finally I asked a semi-official looking woman with a luggage cart. Long story short I finally made it to this tiny little hotel. Actually it was called the "Hang Kong Bing Guan," or Airline Hotel, and it was not really a hotel in the huge building full of rooms sense of the word, but more of a bed&breakfast type place minus the breakfast. It was like a converted house with real nextdoor neighbors and somebody's garden out back. I think that the person that helped me get there must have been related to the owners because I later passed by a more legitimate looking "airport hotel", but whatever. The family that owned it was really helpful and the place was supremely cute- balcony with free tea (overlooking the airport but hey I can't be picky when they offer free tea), tv, comfy bed. It's amazing how these terrible and hard chinese beds have become so wonderful and comfy to lie down in when i am tired.

Simple but cozy

Out the back window

Anyway they said they would call a cab for me to get to Chengdu if I wanted to go into the city, but when I came downstairs 15 minutes later they were like "well today it is too late, everything you want to see is closing" (I had brought a list of places to go in Chengdu since I had a full day there). Instead, they offered to bring me to Shuangliu, the town next to the airport and for which the airport was named. I figured what the hey, it's a new place, and agreed. So the owner of the bingguan (I just looked up the character for "bing" and it means army, so bingguan si like army hostel, which is sort of bizarre and you can make of it what you will, but what I have seen indicates that a bingguan is like a small hotel, they are everywhere) drove me to Shuangliu. He was sooo nice and told me about everything we passed by and all about Shuangliu and gave me the number for the bingguan in case I couldn't find a cab or the cabbie couldn't find it.

Shuangliu was a town of the sort that I am seeing are quite common in China- not quite a "city"...not developed with as many buildings and roads as Shanghai or even Chengdu, or Minneapolis or Philly or wherever...but not a small town, either, because the roads are wide and smooth and the buildings are large and there are lots of cars. It's just that they are dirty and usually have poor air quality (although it's not really fair to make this assumption about Shuangliu since it was cloudy that day) and the quality of life seems mediocre and despite the abundance of open front stores, everywhere is devoid of character or identity. If you know MN you can think of it was a dirty and industrial Maplewood. Same idea. Which isn't to say I didn't LIKE Shuangliu because I did.... it's just that, I think it's an ugly place and it makes me sad that authentic places are disappearing in favor of these "developed" industrial monstrosities.

Yuck

Anyway, when we got to Shuangliu the bingguan guy dropped me off at the city's open air market so I started my adventuring there. I felt pretty famous because I guess Shaungliu doesn't see a lot of foreigners...not as attractive as Chengdu I guess. Anyway everywhere i went people STARED and WHISPERED. Lots of teenage girls stared and giggled but kind of looked like they wanted to say hello but were afraid, and now I feel like an ass for not saying hi first but I was afraid too. Schoolchildren passing by gasped and said "a foreigner!" and ran away. Bolder folk said "Hello!" Parents bouncing little babies pointed and cooed, "Ni kan, yi ge laowai! Hello, ayi!" (look, a foreigner! say hello auntie!).

Market excitement

I usually don't like taking pictures of kids because it's creepy, but these ones were so darn cute

After walking through stands selling fruit, DVDs, jewelry, yarn, shoes, clothes, and more, I finally came to an AWESOME place: an open air street food eating place. Basically vendors selling street foods stood around selling ma la tang and other tasties, and there was a common no-mans-land full of child-size tables and mini-chairs for squatting where people could eat. As you might expect I caused quite a stir when I got some malatang for myself and sat down at one of the tables to eat. At one table next to me the boyfriend literally choked on his food gasping and laughing and trying to get his girlfriend to look. After a while as I ate a girl came and sat down with me. She seemed really excited and happy and introduced herself as Tang Jing, a fifteen year old high school student, then announced she wanted to be friends. We exchanged phone numbers and day after tomorrow when I am back in Shuangliu we have plans to hang out :D

Food courtyard

Armies of these throughout Shuangliu

After a while more of exploring I got a cab and told him where to go. He looked very put upon to be told that I wanted to go all the way to the airport (whatever it was like 10 minutes away) and announced that I would be paying 30 kuai ($4.40) as if it were some hefty sum. This was yet another indication that things were different here than in Shanghai, because in Shanghai a 30 kuai cab is pretty unheard of but I mean, the meter starts at 11 kuai and to pay 30 kuai for anything is expensive but not THAT expensive... I don't know, it just felt different than it would to pay 30 kuai for a 10-15 minute cab ride to someplace outside Shanghai proper. Anyway when we got to the airport I had no idea how to get to the bingguan and he pulled up at some other Hang Kong Bing Guan adn tried to make me get out. I insisted it was NOT the same bingguan and made him use my phone to call the right one. While he idled the car and called the bingguan, some people approached to try to get in the cab. Suddenly someone noticed what the passenger inside was. "Ni kan! Yi ge laowai!" (look! a foreigner!) aaannd it wasn't long before like 8 people (and I am NOT exaggerating here it was a crowd!) were clustered around the cab staring in at me and pointing like they were at the laowai zoo. Actually it was really hilarious and if it hadn't been almost night I would have taken a picture.

But finally I made it back to the bingguan where the people where very pleased that I had made it back with little trouble and in one piece, and I went to sleep to gather my strength for the next day in Chengdu city.

fool me twice, you-- can't get fooled again?

2008-10-18T08:08:00.005+08:00

FOOLED YOU.... I just can't stop writing incessantly about... myself.

Last night was funny, and I have a bit before I have to leave.

First though, something that happened that I keep forgetting to write about. So, it's very important in China to have business cards to give out to people. On several occasions at my internship, especially, I have had people hand me their business cards, then look sort of put off when I did not give them mine in return (to me it was obvious that I wouldn't have one...). One of the Korean men didn't even say hello, just handed me the card. There's a special etiquette to giving the business card here, and if you are reading this and interested in doing business here, take note. You must turn the side of the card up to show the language of whoever you are giving it to (English or Chinese). You must turn it so that the writing is upside down to you and right side up to him or her. Then you must use two hands NOT ONE to give it to them. When you get it you have to look at it, and then set it aside, not immediately stuff it into your wallet. Anyway it was starting to feel awkward not having one, so in my internship class I asked how to deal with that. Jeremy responded that he would print us business cards. So now I have business cards. To be honest they are totally whack because they say my name, "Intern, Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences" and are covered with CET stuff. LOL. Because obviously as an intern, I am such a big deal that I need to have a business card. Aaahahahah. I feel like a pompous beast. But at least I have something to hand out and thus I do not have to feel like a lowly one.

As for last night.

Andrew was like, at the hotel where I lift, I saw a poster for a pretty classy looking bar, we should get dressed up and go out. So he, Lucas and I decided to get dressed up and go have a few cocktails, and then come back to the hotel and and watch movies. Too tired to go dancing! We also invited two friends of my roommate, Jungle and Li. So we got pretty and set off for the bar. Luckily it wasn't far away, I was wearing my shoes of doom, which are pointy like spears and also very tall and inflexible and sexy and of course highly uncomfortable. But Beauty is also PAIN so I endured. Anyway so we got to the hotel and took the elevator up 30 floors to the bar. When we walked in we were greeted by a bevy of attractive young female Chinese employees in absurdly short skirts, high heels and little shirts, who asked if we wanted KTV or the bar. Once inside the bar, we met with the sketchiest and most socially depressing scene I have yet encountered in China. First of all we were the only people there except the employees, and on a big stage, two Chinese people singing covers of pop songs. They were singing their little hearts out...to us. oh man. The room was like too dark, almost too dark for a bar, dark enough to be weird, except for the disco ball, which was spinning a galaxies-like series of little gold lights all across the room. There was lots of hardwood and nice carpet but because it was so dark and had a weird disco ball and no patrons and scandalous looking waitresses the effect was just sleazy. Luckily there was a pool table, a foozball table and a dartboard, so after we got our OVERPRICED (80 kuai!) beverages we started playing pool. Well by our third round it wasn't long before the bar was full of other people. The problem? the only patrons were OLD, WHITE, BUSINESSMEN who were buying drinks for, talking to, groping, putting their arms around, checking out and clearly trying to take home all the short-skirted female employees and other similarly clad young things! Oh my gosh. We had come to a bar that was actually a hangout for old businessmen and prostitutes. Great. Classy. After that round we left rapidly. and I definitely learned my lesson, don't hang out in the bars of upscale hotels unless you like to kick it with nasty old men and call girls!

SEE YOU IN A WEEK!

秋假快乐！

2008-10-17T10:15:00.003+08:00

Today, now that my midterm is finished, I am finally officially on fall break. Hurrah! and I leave tomorrow for Chengdu. Hurrah! I just have to get some things in order and I'll be set to go.

The other day I was standing around outside on the phone and I saw this woman come out of a shop bearing a small square of what looked like cardboard. On closer inspection I saw that it was actually a sticky sheet of sticky stuff and stuck to it were all sorts of bugs and dust and dirt, it was really nasty. but then I looked even closer and saw a wriggling MOUSE attached to it!!! She took the sheet over to a trashcan and used a stick to scrape the mouse off into the trash, it was awful, poor mouse, they are nasty creatures but it would be terrible to be stuck to a sheet of sticky like that.

I have decided that tomorrow I am going to take the Maglev Train to the airport. I am very excited. Rose was surprised we didn't have a Maglev in the US.

You know, the thing that makes me sort of sad is that the infrastructure in China is getting progressively better and more exciting, while the infrastructure in the US is getting progressively shoddier. I wish the American public would scrape their eyeballs away from their televisions and make our leaders do something about our cruddy roads, our 70,000 structurally deficient bridges, and many cities' complete lack of adequate public transportation (PHILLY). One thing I've realized being in China is that we Americans have a very special privilege in that our government is, at least at some level, accountable to us. In China, it doesn't matter if the people want good infrastructure or not. They don't elect their leaders or have any say in what the leaders' priorities ought to be. In America, we can refuse to reelect a specific leader or a broader party if we don't like how they are operating. Unfortunately, I think many of us take that for granted. I mean, I even had to go to another country and see non-democracy in action before I realized how lucky we really are to have a say...and how sad it is that so many of us are really disengaged, despite our privileged position.

Anyway, unless something spectacularly exciting happens today and I absolutely need to comment on it before I go adventuring in Sichuan and Yunnan, this is probably the last you'll be hearing from me for a week or so. I'm only bringing my backpack and I definitely don't want to have to worry about my laptop while I'm away. If I track down an internet cafe in Chengdu maybe I'll come online but don't count on it. Pictures and updates when I return...

In which a tour is finally figured out

2008-10-16T19:12:00.004+08:00

Well as I mentioned before, on Monday my tour group that I had booked for next week informed me that there will be no tour. Aghhh so I have spent this whole week trying to get that figured out. Actually, Rose was getting it figured out for me because she is Chinese and knows how to deal with the horrible Chinese service industry. Anyway we finally got a replacement tour booked and things are looking pretty good. I leave Saturday for Chengdu, have Saturday afternoon and Sunday in Chengdu, then Sunday fly to Lijiang, have one night in Lijiang and then meet up with my tour group there. We're going to Lijiang, Shangri-la, Tiger Leaping Gorge and Meili Snow Mountain. Then I return to Lijiang, have one more night there, fly back to Chengdu, have one more night and day there, and then fly back to Shanghai. It's not QUITE as exciting as I wanted (no Dali and no Kunming >_<) but at least it's not nothing, which is what I was looking forward to this time on Monday.

I hate to write on negative topics but I have to stop a minute and give the Chinese service industry its due. I have never experienced such poor and unenthusiastic service anywhere else in my life. This tour group thing, Rose had to pester the travel agent multiple times a day all week to get anything done. After they failed to properly arrange the original tour OR to tell me soon enough that I could easily arrange a new tour if so wished, they wanted to keep my money and send me on a completely new tour that focused on hiking, or send me traveling alone throughout Yunnan. Even to book the new tour, we had to badger them into getting me a plane ticket from Chengdu to Lijiang to start the tour (the original tour started in Chengdu so I had already purchased a plane ticket there), they didn't help me get hotels in Chengdu (don't worry mom and dad- I've already booked the proper nights at the Airport Hotel in Chengdu, so I'll be close to the airport and won't miss my other flights), and they didn't offer to help with the hotels in Lijiang either. The travel agent returns our emails or calls in a fashion that could only be described as "really f--king slow." I was getting madder and madder, but Rose was like, this is China, get used to it.

And it's not only the tour group. At restaurants here, and I don't mean the little tiny restaurants where the food actually comes out really quickly, but the hotel restaurants and Applebee's and other supposed 'western' and 'upscale' places, sometimes the meal you order won't come, or they get the order wrong, or they take a long time to bring anything, and forget about them coming back to check on you. It's really unbelievable. Even in the stores, half the time the salespeople are slow, mean and unhelpful. Today at the school store, I went to buy a soda. The lady glared at me, and then it turned out that the machine wouldn't take my student card because it was broken. There was another perfectly good register with a working machine, and plenty of employees standing around, but no one offered to let me buy it there. Instead she just turned to the next customer and when I asked if someone could help me at the other register she just snapped "Bu keyi" (no) and dismissed me with her eyes. They are so unfriendly and mean :(

Obviously those are things that one can encounter in the US. And sometimes service is great here, like the lady who helped me with my phone card. The tour I booked for me and my dad also seems okay. But as a service-minded, customer-is-always-right, Caribou-trained American, what I've experienced on my own and seen my friends and classmates experience just blows my mind. This is definitely one area where China can and needs to improve.

Spotted at the MOB Gym

2008-10-15T22:17:00.003+08:00

Today at the gym I saw what was probably the tackiest workout clothing ever. First she was wearing the tightest sweatpants I've ever seen... sweatpants are meant to be comfy but, and I mean this girl not only had the fine bone structure of most Chinese women but also did not have an inch of fat on her body, but the pants were so tight they gave the illusion of voluminous pockets of fat in all the most unflattering places, and also they were pale blue which is just an unforgiving color. But on top it was even worse. First of all she had a nasty tattoo, then she was also wearing a vibrant salmon-orange-pink brassiere and a white fishnet tank top. The poor girl seriously looked like she had stepped out of some horrible Vegas meets Stripper Aerobics netherworld, it was just sad. Annnd then when I thought I had seen everything I saw someone working out in a J.Crew style dress. Oh China, you are too much for me sometimes.

It has been a while

2008-10-15T11:32:00.003+08:00

Gosh, sorry I haven't updated at all in the past two days. They have been really frustrating... Basically a lot of annoyance with some small academic and Swat and internship-related things, and then the big kahuna was a problem with the tour I had arranged for fall break. Long story short, it fell through, and they didn't tell me until a week before my break...great. But in the end my roommate was able to help me out by prodding the travel agent in Chinese, and if everything goes as planned (unlikely) they seem to have found me a new tour, my flight ticket to Chengdu won't go to waste, and everything has worked out.

So what else has happened in the past couple days? I have to say, they have somewhat been colored by my stress about this trip. I've also been really busy with work.

Let's see...I went on an adventure down the block to add money to my phone. The way it works here is you buy the initial phone card and add money. I think i put on about 50 kuai originally, which is around $7, so it's pretty cool that it's lasted me this long. Then you can go to basically any convenience store and they sell "refill cards." First i went to the Kedi, the 7-11 type place, but the lady said they were sold out. The way she pronounced "mai," sell, was bizarre, so I think she was speaking Shanghainese at me, which would be cool because I definitely understood...around the second or third time she yelled it. Then I soldiered on to a small store that said 手机 (mobile) on the outside, but when I went in, the owner (who was lounging on a small folding chair outside the store, and seemed distraught that I had just entered) said they only sold new phones, not refills. Hmm. Then I finally continued on to a really crappy looking joint. It was a store..sort of..not really, more of a booth built into the strip of stores, with a display case of cigarettes in front, clutter everywhere, a dirty plastic curtain leading into a back room that I assume was employees only, and little candies and gum and other small items packed in around the middle aged owner. She was outside of the booth/store having a chat with some friends when I approached. I knew how to say the name of the refill card but not how to use it or what to do with it or what she was saying when she asked if she would (do something) or I would (do something). But finally her friend and she and I all figured out what was going on and made it work and I was able to add 100 kuai.

Her friend was clutching this tiny, squirming dog. Shanghairen love their xiao gou, their small dogs. I see them everywhere, scampering about, long haired, short haired, all tiny little yippers. Except they don't yip or yap. Maybe living in such a big, active city does that to them. Also, no one puts them on a leash, or they almost never do.

Other than that, I got nothin'. Ate at a new Ma La Tang place with an even better flavor. Woooo.... Oh, one thing happened at the Ma La Tang place. At first, I couldn't understand what the guy was saying to me, although later on I understood better what he'd say if he spoke. But he was kind of like saying to Rose repeatedly, "Tell her, she doesn't understand Chinese." When we sat down with Rose's friend, with whom we were eating lunch, Rose told her that the guy kept saying I couldn't understand Chinese. The friend smirked, shook her head, and said, "他说的不是中文." (What he's speaking isn't Chinese). Rose nodded in agreement and added that he wasn't speaking Mandarin, but some dialect. This seemed strange to me because I don't think either of them understands Shanghainese, or any dialect except Mandarin and the one from their home, but maybe hecause they are Chinese they can understand a dialect anyway? But I think maybe he just had an accent, and that made his speech hard to understand, and made them say it isn't Mandarin (or isn't even "zhongwen" in Rose's friend's words) At any rate on several occasions I've heard people say that accented Mandarin isn't really Mandarin, and it's always said with a little bit of derision and usually by Beijingren or people from that general region.

ranting aside

2008-10-12T22:08:00.002+08:00

Not a lot happened today other than that I was in a terrible mood for most of it (observe my ranting earlier about that wicked paper, which I'm still not inspired about at all) and cried a lot to Han and generally felt homesick and awful until I went to the gym and worked our and stuff. But, I did get to have dinner with David from Swarthmore and that was fun, to see a friend from school and feast on Tex Mex...and we truly did feast. And I guess the good thing is that the days I do feel sad and homesick are few and far between, while the days I go out and do fun things or don't go out and do fun things but still feel happy are most days.

I want to describe the scenery a little bit. Walking out of the gate onto Yan'an Xi Lu (West Yan'an Road) puts you into a fairly typical Shanghai scene...for the more "chinese" areas of Shanghai. The more touristy/Western areas I think are a bit more modern, upscale looking, with more fancy designer fashion stores and nice restaurants and also more foreigners who seem like full time expats or tourists. The majority of foreigners I see around here are students like me. Anyway, walk out onto Yan'an Xi Lu. In front of you is a road with 3 or 4 lanes in both directions...yes, the roads here are ridiculously wide. Across the street is a public park, of which this city has many, many more than I expected. Turn left, and there's a line of tiny restaurants serving dumplings, noodles, and wontons, a Korean restaurant, a copying place (think third-world Kinko's), and some other little stores. All of these places are narrow, low ceilinged places crammed full of wares or tables depending on the type of shop, usually with a step or two to get inside. The sidewalk is grimy from pollution and general wear and tear but the city does a fairly good job of getting rid of litter.

Take a right out of the gate and you walk past the plaza I described before, where there is a DVD seller, a fruit stand, and other assorted food and item sellers with their carts or, just as likely, a blanket laid out with jewelry and trinkets arranged on top. The sidewalk here is usually packed because there is a bus stop. Keep walking and there is a line of stores, which are, for whatever reason, a bit nicer than the shops to the left side of the gate. There's a Kedi, the local convenience store (there are also some called Guangming and also ones called Kwik. I haven't figured out the difference between the three, but they all sell the same assortment of snacks, drinks, magazines, batteries, condoms, ice cream, toiletries, alcohol, etc, think Chinese 7-11), and a Hello Pizza, which is a Western-style pizza place. There's a little restaurant with, IMO, mediocre food whose sign just says 面 (noodles). Keep walking and you pass lots more little shops- several shoe stores, one or two stores selling accessories (kinda like Claire's), the Ma La Tang store, a few small and unappealing looking restaurants, a bakery, and down at the corner another non-chain convenience store with a huge chestnut roasting device right in front. One thing I really love about Shanghai is the number of small, privately owned shops and boutiques. Don't get me wrong, I have no idea how any of them turn a profit because there are SO MANY and I never see any customers...but it's really refreshing to not see the exact same stores everywhere I turn. The spirit of entrepreneurship is thriving in Shanghai, and it makes America look like a corporate wasteland in comparison.

The corner of Yan'an Xi Lu and Kai Xuan Lu (Kai Xuan Rd) is what I like to call "the intersection from hell" because it is an 8 lane road and a 6 lane road and in order to walk to the gym the "safe" way I have to cross the 6 laner while on my left cars try to knock me down/turn into the six laner and to my right cars try to knock me down/turn onto the 8 laner (I can also go the "unsafe" way which is also the "fast" way but involves walking about 15 minutes through a tunnel which has a sidewalk but no escape route in the event of a traffic accident and also the cars whiz by honking at me and make me feel uncomfortable). However, if I need to cross the 8 laner, or actually I could probably do this to go to the gym too if I weren't so lazy, or if I want to hop on the lightrail at the Yan'an Xi Lu stop, I can walk up a flight of stairs to the 过街天桥/overhead bridge and cross the street that way. Shanghai is full of these overhead bridges because the roads are so wide and the drivers care so little for pedestrian safety.

Continuing right down Kai Xuan Lu you will eventually come to a common scene in Shanghai: a makeshift parking lot for motorcycles on the sidewalk. Just as the roads are wide here, so are the sidewalks, and I have to believe one reason for this is that bikers, motorcyclists and pedestrians must share it in peace. So often you will be walking along and see 25 or so motorcycles lined up, just like bikes at a bike rack or cars in a parking lot. This particular one often has a small circle of older men sitting in folding chairs or leaning against a bike or just squatting on the sidewalk, chatting. In the evening more elderly people will come out and sit or squat together, enjoying the cool night air and talking.

I expected to see a lot of beggars here but so far I haven't seen many. I know this isn't because of a lack of poor and unemployed people. China still hasn't completely figured out how to deal with the consequence of dissolving the 单位 (danwei), or work unit: unemployment. The dan-wei used to provide for employment, food, childcare, eldercare, everything, but as China switched to a market economy it disappeared, leaving little behind as a social safety net. So maybe this means that the police here are particularly strict on beggars, moreso than in the US. Side note on the police: my post-coldwar education apparently has not failed to instill a terror of Communist police in me. When I see the police in the US, I immediately begin fretting that I've done something wrong. When I see the police in China, I fret the same thing but it's on a different level, more of a cold feeling in my heart and gut than a nervous tick. There's absolutely no rational explanation based on my experience here- the only interaction I had with any police, he was perfectly helpful and gave me the only decent directions I've gotten in this city. The rest of them just stare at me like everyone else. But I fear them none the less and I really think it is because we in America are inundated day in and day out with descriptions of arbitrary policemen in Communist police states.

an appeal

2008-10-12T11:55:00.002+08:00

Alright so I have to write a paper for my internship class and I have no idea what to write it on.... the topic is "Anything we want that has to do with our experience interning in China, but not a blog, because it has to include some analysis."
...
If you feel like that is the worst topic you've ever heard of, you're not alone.

if you have any ideas as to what I should write my paper on, please let me know stat, because I'm at a loss... Not working in a real office setting means I have absolutely zero perspective on "office culture," having only one research topic means I can only use that topic on one of four papers so I think I am going to make it the last (and fifteen pages...!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!) one

side note: fifteen pages wtf??? Maybe I can write fifteen pages about a Swarthmore class that I really like that I've done a substantial amount of research on... Like my research paper for SASS will probably be 15 pages or longer... but "my experiences interning + analysis"? Wow, definitely not going to happen. I really miss Swarthmore's academic standards. even the worst topics I've ever gotten at Swat don't usually require me to spew fifteen pages of B.S.

I really hate writing papers I'm not invested in because it ultimately means they are a lot of bull, and a waste of my time and the professor's time because in the end the point of the paper isn't how good my writing can be, it's whether I've gotten anything out of it... ah...

help...

Aida and Everything Else

2008-10-11T15:34:00.002+08:00

So as I said yesterday, Amanda and I went to go see Aida, the Elton John musical. It felt good to get some Broadway. Funny thing- the part of town where the theater was was so urban and Westernized that I actually felt like I was in New York. It was a really cute area though, and I'll definitely be going back- for those who are familiar w/ SH it's near West Nanjing Rd and the new Marks and Spencer. Anyway, the audience contained a good portion of the expat community and their offspring. I should think it would be slightly bizarre to grow up an expat's child. There was also some really good people watching i.e. the man in the blue shirt, blue pants and white jacket or the man wearing a very long and very womanly peach scarf. The show itself was like...Elton on crack, it was so Elton. It was an orgy of light, color, singing and modern dance. I enjoyed the dancing very much and the singing was incredible. I didn't REALIZE that at the end, Aida and her lover are buried alive together, but I guess not every story has a happy ending? So I cried at that part. Our seats were the cheapest tickets (rmb280, like 40 bucks) but we had okay seats I thought- the first floor, in the back row, which meant we weren't terribly far from all the action but also weren't staring at the actors' feet. I was really glad I went :)

then after we FINALLY caught a cab (such a hassle, made me wish I really was in NYC!) and came home the second part of my night began. The guys (jamie, jeff, drew, and drew's roommate "bing ren" [ice man!] and jamie's roommate maverick) and I went out to go clubbing. We originally wanted to go to this new club opening near our school but the line was so long...we happened to run into a friend of theirs from their gym though, who told us we should go to this other club called The Caribbean. We decided what the hey so we went to this other club...good choice. It was a pretty small spot, but ample room for sitting at tables and a dance floor, and the best part was the LIVE BAND.... it was sooo fun to have live music, and they were really good! they did covers of all kinds of pop and reggae songs and it was just a great time, I danced my little heart out and today I'm really sore but it was worth it.

One funny thing was that Bingren had brought some of his female friends over to hang out before, but they left before we went to the club and since I had been at Aida I didn't really meet them. But I guess they all really wanted to meet me, and I think part of the reason they left was because they wanted me and Amanda to be there too... it's different from the US, I feel like usually at home when girls are brought in at the request of some dude, and they come over to party, there's like an unspoken girl power struggle over the guy territory...and if you're the friend of the guys, it usually sucks because they're trying to mack and the new girls ignore you. But here the girls are sort of intimidated by the guys and want to be friends with us haha.

Aaaand then I got my nails done today and ate ma la tang and I think we're going to Applebees tonight and I plan to eat SALAD hurray for salad i miss it so

Not a good time to be sick

2008-10-10T15:12:00.002+08:00

I'm definitely a sniffly miffly today. I feel a bit better than I did yesterday, though-- yesterday my head was in a fog all day and I had a tickle in my throat and felt tired... but I had to study for a test, and then I felt stressed out so I worked out pretty intensely, and then had a nice shower and sleep so my feeling better today is a tribute to all of those things I think. Except for the snot pouring forth from my nostrils.

But today is a bad day to be sick. This evening I am going to go see Aida, the Elton John play. I love Elton John. Oh man. He's my guy. And then after that there is this new club opening pretty close to us and I am not missing out on the opening festivities...sniffles be damned, I suffered through this week in order to get to the weekend and I won't let a little bit of a cloggy noggy (noggin, that is) get the way of my fun. Will report on both probably tomorrow.

Had a good thing happen to me this morning. We all met with Wu Laoshi, the elderly academic director, one on one to discuss our progress. When I met with her she pretty much directly asked me if my class was too slow. So I was like... yeah. So she explained that my teacher had come to her saying that it seemed like I was bored in the class, had already studied a lot of the material, and was catching on at a faster speed than the other two in the class, and it seemed unfair. I pretty much agreed, saying that I had already studied a lot of the material, and although there was some use in going over it again (in that I can now use more frequently a lot of grammar structures I had known before but rarely incorporated into my speech), but she cut me off, saying that it was too much. She explained that my placement test was pretty bad (really? surprising) but based on my performance in my class now, attributes that to jet lag (not surprising since i took the test the morning after I arrived). So basically in the end she said she thought I should move to the higher level class, and gave me the books both classes will use after fall break so I can think about it and decide.

I think I am going to do it... I can't stand being this bored in class. It will be hard because they've had a half a semester of grammar that I probably don't know, not to mention lots of vocab, but a little extra studying never hurt me anyway. I'll also really miss my teacher, because she's AWESOME-- it's not her fault the subject matter is too easy. She does a fantastic job of explaining it and is always so fun and merry during class. So I guess I'll probably bring both books with me over fall break and look at them before I decide but that is what i am leaning towards now. I'm surprised becuase I had assumed it was too late to switch, which is why I had endured without saying anything for so long (since last time I said anything I was told it would get harder...). Guess I should be a little more pushy next time.

In other news, submitted an outline of my north korea paper to my adviser today so hopefully he likes where I am going with it. I am pretty surprised by how much I've learned already! It's so interesting.

I also applied to be the CET Student Correspondent for Shanghai, which (if I get it) will mean that if you can't get enough of my blog here you'll be able to get it on the CET website too, to the tune of $50 a month for me for posting bimonthly entries. Woooooooooot. Will be nice to have some earned income after I spent all my savings buying plane tickets to Puerto Rico for me and Han (obviously worth it but I'm such a hoarding beast it really breaks my heart every time I look at my bank account online and see such a small number).

:)

2008-10-08T21:46:00.002+08:00

Well the president of the science fiction club I accidentally joined said that the club wouldn't really get started til after fall break so, since fall break was the golden week last week, I've been waiting impatiently! Well last night I got a text message from them saying that the first meeting was today, and new members should come to pay club dues and meet each other. Hurrah! I got Rose to show me the building and set on my merry way. When I first showed up, only a couple of other girls were there and they seemed sort of shy and also like they thought it was totally bizarre that I was there. But then a third girl showed up and was super friendly so we chatted, and the other girls warmed up a bit after that and said I actually spoke quite well :) The meeting was a bit different from what I expected-- Usually when we have first meetings at Swat, we make sure everyone at least hears everyone's name, and maybe their class year and major or something like that. there were no introductions here- everyone just pointed out their name on the original sign up list and handed their 10 kuai to the club president. But, the girl I met, Tan Shichen, was soo friendly and left with me and we exchanged phone numbers so maybe I have another new friend, yay.

The rest of the day was whatever, uneventful. Was really tired because Rose and I stayed up late last night talking and giggling, and then my afternoon classes seemed sooo long.

I think that people here are either like overly friendly to foreigners (which, obviously, I don't mind because I'm like starved for friends other than the like 8 people I actually know here) or just don't engage at all because they assume we can't speak any Chinese and feel that their English isn't good enough to be able to communicate with us. So often, I get a sense of relief from people in the 'second category' when I speak Chinese. Then they usually become regular and normal and whatnot. But I really like when it seems like people stop just thinking of me as a foreigner, and start thinking of me as a person and a potential friend. Like the people at the gym, and the Starbucks girls (who i miss lately because I haven't been in as often :( ), and maybe this girl I met today, and my roommate... Anyway. It's an interesting experience.

a spanish artist and the difference between chinese and european toilets

2008-10-07T22:06:00.004+08:00

I really hate Chinese squat toilets, I have decided. I simply cannot get used to them! They are holes in the ground masquerading as real toilets! When you walk in to the bathroom, everything seems fairly nondescript and normal, and then you walk across the tile floor, open the stall door that is made out of the same stall door material they use in the US, but instead of a toilet, there is a sort of bidet-shaped device installed in the ground and MAYBE, if it is a high end toilet, a handle so you can steady yourself as you take a piss or do whatever it is you need to do. It may be made of porcelain or fake porcelain just like a real toilet and it may even flush like a real toilet but you best believe you will have the best thighs of your life by the time you are done in this country because it is not a real toilet at all. Oh and they never provide toilet paper so if you have forgotten to bring your role it's drip dry for you! The fundamental difference between the two styles of toilet is that you find yourself either sitting on a throne like royalty or squatting on the ground like a peasant. Now I know this is a country is based on socialism with Chinese characteristics (i.e. revere the peasant!) but I like my few minutes every day where I can be empress of the water closet and by god I do not enjoy having that experience taken from me! We are not amused! ...and yes that is the royal we.

..Toilet troubles aside, today was a lot better than yesterday. I went out and did something, for one! You know how I am about Spanish artists so I managed to track one down and go see a little exhibit at the Spanish consulate. It was actually a great little exhibit and I am really glad I went.

The Spanish consulate..which has a giant passage from Don Quixote on the wall outside of it. Who knew?

The work he did was very interesting. First, he took an image, presumably off the internet- the ones in this picture are an image of a victim of the 3/11 bombing in Madrid, and two policeman standing on the beach by bodies of people who died trying to get in to Spain.

Then he recreated the image using thousands of images off of google searches of words and names relevant to the content of the image. For example, the images used in this picture of the policemen and the deceased immigrants were images that appeared on Google when he searched for the themes proposed a survey from the Opinion Institute in September 2004 as the most important problems of the Spanish: 'social well being', 'health and sanitary assistance', 'pensions', 'employment', 'inflation', 'terrorism', 'delincuency', 'drugs', 'taxes', 'moral values', 'environment', 'pollution', 'education', 'public services' and 'domestic violence.'

The hand photo was made up of photos garnered by searching for the word "other" in Spanish, French and English. There was also a picture of Daniela Ganishya Runyinya, the Hutu delegate to the Intra-Rwandan Dialogue of 2004 (shows up in the third photo above) that was made up of images that appeared in a search for the word "peace" in 86 languages, and Auschwitz (in the first picture) from pictures for the words history, destiny, memory, past, commemorate, conflict, violence, horror, barbarianism, pain, blame, justice, truth, testimony, conscience, and progress. The skull was made from images that appeared under searches for origin, evolution, form, function, innovation, design, art, architecture and creativity. One picture showed two birds flying over an open plane, and was composed of images that appeared in searches for the names of places where there have been apparitions of the Virgin Mary. A particularly poignant but graphic image showed a man whose head was blown off from a bomb in Iraq. It was made of images of every president whose country has troops there.

I really liked his work because it not only explored important current events (note the inclusion of the infamous Lyndie England, whose image was comprised of photos from searching for the names of participants in the Schleshinger Panel) and ironies (i.e. the dead immigrants juxtaposed with issues that are important to Spaniards), but also created some really beautiful works (the hand, and the portrait of Ms. Runyinya especially). By using images taken from Google, his work also tested the boundaries of what is public and private in the age of the internet. Anyway, I was really glad I went and his name is Joan Fontcuberta if you are interested.

Also, before I went to that I went to eat malatang for lunch and I made friends with this girl sitting next to me. We chatted for a while and she gave me her MSN. I was pretty happy about that! I got a lot of Chinese convo in today actually because I had a happy chat with the security guard at the Spanish Consulate, who asked doubtfully if I was Spanish. Then, at work (I finally went back in to SASS...long story) I spoke Chinese with some visiting scholars from Korea. I hope I see them again obviously because of my research and they might be good resources...one of them works in South Korea's Reunification Ministry. Bet you didn't know they had that!

nothing much o_o

2008-10-06T22:01:00.002+08:00

I guess I don't really have much to report today. Everyone should go listen to the first Darfur Radio Project show of the semester, at the DRP website. It sounds really good and I can't wait to get back into it in the spring.

I don't know, today was just another fairly routine Monday. I took a nap which was my exciting deviation from every other weekday. Other than that I followed my routine- did some DPRK research, grabbed some food, worked out, did homework, came home around 8:30. Sometimes I feel frustrated because I feel like in having a routine, I'm not fully experiencing life in Shanghai. On the other hand, I'm not here for a week long vacation, I'm meant to be living here for a few months and establishing a routine is one way I cope from being apart from all my friends, my family, and my... REGULAR routine. I don't know. I really WANT to go out and do things, but I don't know what things I should be doing (what do people who live in big cities do for fun anyway, I certainly don't know), and I want to do my homework and work out and get my research done, and things close at a certain time (read: early, unless you are a street vendor), and it's not like I can spend my day out and about and then stay up late doing homework because I have to get to sleep 2-4 hours earlier than I do at Swarthmore because I have such early class. Plus, I know it's stupid and a waste of time given that I only have a few months here, but I really need my down time and rest... which is just even harder to fit in because I have to go to bed so damn early, but I just can't be on the go all the time here like I can at home sometimes. I just want to find a balance and I am having a hard time doing so...And when I combine tracking down a destination (harder than u think...) and figuring out how to get there and what I should bring and travel time it takes so long and is such a pain in the butt and half the day is wasted and I usually don't even find the destination so it is just easier to not even bother... but I feel like that is SUCH a cop-out! This may not be a week long stay but I'm in CHINA, somehow interacting with the fuwuyuan at the convenience store seems like sort of a lame way to experience this country... Gah, I don't know what to do, I wish I had more people to go exploring with--maybe that would help??? I just, gah, I really don't want to look back on this time and say, i wish I had spent less time in my room and more time doing stuff. and at this rate I think I will!!

Ok... I need to get a grip and actually go do something cool tomorrow...that is my goal... maybe I can find something tonight so that I don't have to waste time looking for something tomorrow.

Also I bought a grapefruit today from this fruit vendor...there is this little plaza about a half a block from the school with a hole-in-the wall convenience store, a milk tea bar, a socks store (???) and then an abundance of street vendors: huge fruit stand that actually seems to have recently rented a giant store thing and is more permanent and large now, a smaller fruit stand, an illicit DVD seller, and occasionally some roasted chestnut sellers and some people who sell these little fried dough...things. Anyway I like to walk through there and buy DVDs and fruits, and the fruit vendor lady is really nice and always looks happy to see me. They sell and eat underripe grapefruits here?? but I bet you didn't know that green, hard grapefruits are as good to eat as the ripe ones...and the juice doesn't get everywhere...

girl weekend

2008-10-05T15:21:00.002+08:00

This has been a great and wonderfully girly weekend. Amanda and I have been on a gossip girl watching spree- I'm still deeply sad that the internet is too slow and I am too impatient to watch the new season, but we bought the first season so now we can watch that. We also got our nails done for 10 kuai... $1.50. Then last night we went out dancing.

Dancing was a lot of fun, it was me, Amanda, Jeff, and Jamie's roommate Maverick. We went to two clubs, Babyface and Zapata's. Babyface was really cool. The first room was really big, and had huge wall-sized screens with colors and lights and patterns, and smoke machines, and was playing some sort of weird techno. There were lots of tables and booths around too, and waiters filing through the dancers. If you wanted a drink you had to snag a waiter and he would go to the bar and get it for you. In the second room they were playing more hip hop tunes. It was sort of a weird selection of 2-4 year old hip hop but hey, I'll dance to anything. Heh, they also played music videos, but the music videos didn't go with the songs...i.e. Rihanna singing, with a video of snoop dogg playing. :P It was definitely a very local club- almost everyone there was Chinese, which I thought was interesting because I had heard clubbing hasn't really caught on with local people in China very much. Maybe Shanghai is leading the way! Anyway, there definitely weren't a lot of foreigners there besides us and a couple really creepy old men who were clearly just there to prey on young, hot Chinese girls. gross. Still, even though it was a mostly Chinese spot, the bouncers gave Maverick a little bit of a hard time when he walked in with us, verifying with Amanda that Maverick was actually one of our party. :( I guess there is a) a big divide between foreigners and Chinese, maybe seeing us all hang out is odd and b) preferential treatment of foreigners. Sad. Anyway, there were too many people and too many tables (not enough dance room!) there so after a couple hours we left and went to Zapatas, where we had gone on Tuesday. The feel there was instantly different because it was almost all foreigners, mostly European I think. Also the music was a lot more like what I'd expect to hear in an American club, except they threw in some random stuff like from the 80s hahaha. Anyway Zapatas is definitely my favorite place but I had a great time at both clubs and I can't wait to go back out next weekend. Woohoo!

Todayyy I finally worked out (my gym has been closed since Wednesday for the national week) and as I was going in I almost got taken out by the personal trainer who called me fat zooming by on a bike and waving at me. After I kicked my own ass I went and ate malatang for lunch. Well the first time I ate malatang I got the lowest la, or spicy. It was still...really spicy. This time though I thought I would up the spice factor a notch so I asked for zhong la, or medium spicy. Well so much for medium, the soup was highly delicious but it was so spicy that my face turned red, I sweated several small rivers and it loosened up my mucous so much that I was hacking and coughing like I was ill with the plague and not just eating some soup. I think I won't be trying the highest level of spicy! Also, here is one thing I have to be careful about with ordering spicy there. The first level of spicy is called "wei la". The medium level is called "zhong la." But the highest level is also called "zhong la"!!! The difference is that medium, 中, is first tone- you almost sing it, as if you were singing "zhong" in a steady A tone. The highest level zhong is 重, fourth tone. It's pronounced as if you were adding a !: "zhong!" So if you screw it up you might get the highest spicy instead of just the medium ("just" the medium...right... cough hack wheeze sweat).

KTV (again)

2008-10-04T19:07:00.006+08:00

I still can't get over how different Chinese Karaoke, or KTV, is from American Karaoke. Last night, I went out with five of the roommates, Yanjie, Hu, Bodin, Yuelou and Doreen (whose Chinese name I dont know :() to go to Karaoke. This was fun for me because all of them are so friendly and nice and fun, adn I got to hear a lot of Chinese and speak a little bit. It's sort of hard to keep up though- even though I can understand most of their conversation, at this point, I can't arrange my thoughts quickly enough to offer many timely responses in Chinese. Oh well. Anyway, it was a pretty good set up. So we went to the same KTV place that I had gone to the last time with Drew and Jamie. The first difference was that this time none of us had drank anything before. Chinese college students are not NEARLY as focused on drinking alcohol for fun as American college students are.

Then, I found out that, after leaving for the Karaoke at 11 or so (which is a fairly standard "going out" time, I think) the plan was to stay at Karaoke until 7 am. I was sure they had to be kidding. 7 am? That meant around seven hours in the tiny Karaoke room singing Karaoke songs. In case you missed my earlier post on Karaoke in China, at a KTV place there is definitely no bar scene where everyone is together and one at a time, heavily intoxicated individuals lacking any sense of shame stumble up on stage to caterwaul "take me home country road" and "like a virgin." In China, you adn your friends get a private room with couches, disco lights, and a wide, flat-screen karaoke tv for your personal room. The KTV place we go to is huge, too- they must have some 50 separate Karaoke rooms! You can buy snacks and drinks at the little attached supermarket, or order pizzas and stuff to be delivered, but it's not like you're meeting people or hearing a bunch of different people sing, or dancing. It's maybe the kind of thing that I would have thought would be fun for around 3 hours, tops... Plus, I don't think I even know enough English songs to sing Karaoke for seven hours straight!

But, they were definitely serious. So until 7 in the morning we sang Karaoke songs. At around 2, my poor roommate was bored and wanted to go, but Bodin wouldn't let us, haha. I would have expected that I would have gotten bored, because most of them don't know many English songs, and I don't know any Chinese songs. Plus, the English selection there is weird- they have a lot of well known artists, but from each artist, the one or two songs they have available are often the kind of song you only know if you buy the whole album and listen to it on repeat...not the hits. So given that and considering my abject failure at keeping up with pop culture, my choices were limited. But, a lot of the Chinese songs ended up being nauseatingly romantic love ballads, which also meant that they were slow. Plus, I already knew a lot of the characters! Maybe the purpose of all my Chinese textbooks has secretly been to imbue me with the ability to participate in KTV??? So if the song was slow and the melody simple enough, i was also sometimes able to join in on the Chinese songs. Plus, Doreen and Yuelou were kind enough to choose several English songs themselves. I found this touching because I doubt they would have chosen them on their own, but they picked ones they knew so that I didn't have to feel awkward about picking lots of English songs on my own, and then singing them by my self. :) So it was just fun to hear the songs and the singing, and hang out. One of the songs was SOO funny it had Chinese cowboys and cowgirls doing line dances and lyrics were really fast and rhymed but basically were like "I'm a cowboy so obviously I drink cow milk, I don't drink beer because it's bad for me." At around 3, Bodin went and got some snacks for everyone to refuel. By 5 am everyone was asleep except for me and Boston and we were just kickin it. And then finally we left and went to McDonalds, where I was so tired I couldn't eat and put my face down on the table and passed out. Then wecame back, and I slept til 2:30 haha. All in all it was a great night! But the Chinese college student definition of a good time is definitely different from what I'm used to!

Also, yesterday before the KTV, Rose took me and Amanda to go to Pudong (the eastern part of Shanghai) to see fireworks to celebrate the end of Shanghai Travel Week (which IDK what this is but I guess it coincides with the golden week and causes everyone to come to Shanghai on vacay??)

unclear if that video will work? comment pls.

Absentee Ballot blah blah dont get me started

2008-10-02T21:38:00.002+08:00

I finally got my absentee ballot in the mail. So that's one more vote for Obama/Biden in PA- hurrah! Han made the mistake of asking me what I think of Sarah Palin the other day and you know, I can really go on for a very long time about how insulted I am that she of all Americans and all women was selected and how disgusted I am from the great transformation of John McCain. I used to have quite a lot of respect for him for his stand on torture, if nothing else, but I bet if you asked him now he'd be all for it as long as it was one of the islamics. Sigh.

Anyway, American politics aside, this should be a fun weekend. It's my first weekend fully in Shanghai after a few weekends of travel and I am pretty pumped. Originally I was hoping to go to Qingdao for the annual Tsingtao Beer Festival (because how many times do you get to go to a world-famous, international beer festival in China?) but I finally decided that transportation would be too expensive. :( So, I'm staying in Shanghai but I already have plans to go to Karaoke one of the nights and go out dancing in a club with the girls on the other night. I also am hoping to finally have time to get out to another gallery, and you know what I need more than anything else: a massage. I also watched another episode of gossip girl today which was... necessary.

And I got to skype with my mom and dad and Danny today and that was just great. I also talked to Vero in spanish a little bit which sent my brain over the edge of crazy AND i got to see Nixxers who I miss lots. Hehe I was chatting with Han the other day and he said he misses Nixxers too and feels bad for always refusing to hang out with her and kicking her out of the room. She is a very naughty cat because she sits on the table and tries to eat food items off of our plates but she is also a very lovable creature and I miss her running around and meowing and sleeping at the foot of my bed. Also I sing to her a lot.

This was a totally pointless entry, but whatever.

Also, at the restaurant I went to last night, they served brains. ...Did not try, I'm not trying to get some neurological disease 20 years down the road where holes appear in my grey tissue and little spasms and loss of sensation show up in my hands and I can't figure out why. x_x

And today for dinner I ate this sort of thing and it was SO GOOD omg yum

Fun with my Roommate

2008-10-01T22:15:00.002+08:00

Last night at the bar, a few choice songs came on: YMCA and the Macarena. Of course all the Americans knew them but our Chinese friends did not. So today Rose asked me, "You know, last night at the bar, a song came on, and you all knew the dance, it was something like this" and waved her arms around. Oh! I said, the Macarena. So of course I immediately taught her the dance to The Macarena. After that I thought it might be useful to learn some other popular American line dances/dancing that is done at weddings and bar mitzvahs so we learned the Cha Cha Slide, The Electric Slide, The YMCA, and The Chicken Dance. As you know I am a giant dork and love all those sorts of dances so we had a grand time XP Hurray for American culture!

Then we watched some funny youtube videos from years past that I highly recommend: YATTA! and Numa Numa. After that, Rose said that during the 2004 elections, she LOVED the jibjab parody of "This Land"! Which was so surprising to me, both that people abroad watched it and thought it was funny. So we watched both This Land and JibJab's latest parody, It's Time For Some Campaignin'.

:)

vindication, china, and pics

2008-10-01T10:31:00.003+08:00

Every Monday and Tuesday I have an "一对一" or one on one with one of the Chinese teachers. I usually hate it because my Chinese yi-dui-yi teacher has decided that my Chinese is at a level where I can talk at her for 20 minutes on some topic. They gave us a sheet of topics to pick from, which range from lame ("Have you become accustomed to Chinese toilets?") to slightly less lame ("How are Chinese youth and American youth different?"...which might be easier to answer if I had more than one Chinese friend). I tend to make my teacher pick my Tuesday topics because I hate picking them, so this week she made me talk about "How do Americans view China?" I am going to talk about what I said but, I wanted to first GLOAT because after the session my teacher looked quite pleased and told me that my thoughts are very deep and I express myself very well and that I should be in the 300 level class (the class above mine, which I agree, I should be in) or the 400 level class. So it's not just me being sour grapes when I say, I can do it XP

This question actually turned out to be quite interesting. I had to really think about what image of China we tend to have, in America. I also really did not want to offend my teacher so I tried to be as unoffensive as possible with what I said, but, even having to do so made me realize that the American view of China is not very favorable. So, I said that
1. Most Americans just don't know very much about China, because our education system favors Western history and culture, particularly European. My teacher looked surprised. So I said that we know China is a very special place, with a culture that is very different from ours. It is very large, with a huge population. I briefly mentioned the phenomena of "Yellow Fever" which made my teacher look like she wanted to be ill.
2. Then I talked about how we see movies like "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" and "Hero," which glorify the ancient culture but don't tell us much about China today. I also mentioned Jackie Chan movies, which may make people think that China is all about kung fu and martial arts.
3. Then...I had to breach the second prong. I explained that although we are no longer in the 80s, a lot of Americans have a cold-war mentality about Communism, and thus, fear China because it is a communist country. We may think that Chinese people don't have any private property, or political freedom, or freedom of speech. After the 1989 Tiananmen square incident, (at which point she looked both embarrassed and resigned and asked if all of us knew about that) many Americans' only impression of China is that image. So a lot of people are frightened of or dislike that aspect of China. I also discussed how our news media likes to cover the negative aspects of China. They love talking about Tibet, and how the Chinese are so abusive of Tibetans. I said that I think sometimes that we get a biased picture of what is going on, which made her look happy and explain that actually Tibet is a part of China and there are just some people that violently struggle for independence. I also said that the news media loves talking about China's pollution problem, without mentioning the West's role. I also surprised her by saying that some people even criticized the Olympics, saying, for example, that there was even less freedom during the Olympics. ("Really? People said that?")
4. And I closed by saying that Chinese people have a much better grasp on what American culture is and what America is like, with which she vehemently agreed.

And you know, here's the thing. As far as political freedoms go, China doesn't have many. But it isn't like people don't have any idea what's going on, or blindly trust in their government, either. There is a lot of cynicism about the government here, and people make good use of the internet to find out about things like Tiananmen Square and other historical tidbits that the gov't would rather they didn't know.

"Fun" fact: The crackdown at Tiananmen Square is obviously really famous and also an important day in Chinese history because it demonstrated that the Chinese government would not tolerate Eastern-Europe-style transitions out of socialism. But, it was hardly the first protests there. I guess Tiananmen Square is a place that has always been used for protests and that kind of thing.

And I think it is true that our media is almost gleeful about covering the more negative aspects of modern China: the milk scandal, the pollution, the corruption, the human rights issues. But there is more to this place than that. There is more to Chinese people than that.

I wish that we got a more comprehensive education that included China's historical role in the region and the world. I wish that our news media was more favorable of China...or at least less negative. I wish that our popular media didn't focus on Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (one of my favorite movies actually..) and Kung Fu and White-Man-saves-and-wins-Asian-girl stories. I wish that we in America had an understanding of China that was anywhere near the level at which they understand us.

And to close on a happier note: because we had no class today, all of us went out to a bar last night, all the Americans and some of the roommates and their friends. It was a bunch of fun but the funniest thing happened when we were pregaming here. We were pumping some tunes and being festive and this family staying across the hall (I live in a hotel, remember?) burst onto the scene and wanted to take pictures with the foreigners:

Hahah!