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I’m so sorry if you’re hearing about this for the first time like this, but….
Tuesday, January 27, 2009
Manila
Sunday, January 18, 2009
It’s been a looooooong day. Yesterday, we woke up, puttered around the apartment, and got on a train to Shanghai. Shanghai - a sprawling mass of excitement, culture, and constant activity, featuring both extreme beauty and extreme ugliness, the best and worst of China packed into one throbbing metropolitan headrush.
We arrived in Shanghai, ate at Burger King, stopped by Starbucks, watched movies in the hotel room, ventured out for curry, bought beer at a convenience store, and watched more movies in the hotel room. Oops. It actually felt really liberating, and it was strategic - Shanghai, for all its allure, is damned expensive, and we’re trying to be financially responsible. This meant that while in Shanghai the best thing for us to do was park ourselves in the hotel room and be worthless.
So we woke up at seven fifteen, took line 2 from Nanjing Xi Lu to Longyang Lu, and jumped on the maglev. The maglev, incidentally, is still awesome. Every time I take it, it’s like taking a seven and a half vacation to the future. We made it to the airport and checked in. Then we changed over some money to pesos, confusing the poor girl at the currency exchange counter and encountering a dose of Chinese beaurocracy that put a wrench in our plans for having all the cash we’d need for the trip in hand. Maybe there’s something I’m just not getting going on, but every time I’ve gone to a bank in China, it’s required at least five employees to help me, and a lot of frantic gesturing, yelling, desperate shuffling of paper, and more red stamps than most of you have probably ever seen in your life. I’m in a good China period right now, but like any relationship, sometimes enough is enough and you need to get some space. At the currency exchange counter, I realized that I was quite happy to be getting away from China for a little bit.
I slept through most of the plane ride, and woke up in time to take off my sweater and shake off the grogginess before we landed in Manila. I was extremely nervous about this part of the trip - last time, we found ourselves stranded in a deserted airport at midnight, unable to find a taxi or a way to get money. It ended in The Worst Hotel in the World, after we’d been extremely thoroughly fleeced by every person we encountered. We were fine last time, and it wound up being about the best vacation ever, but I still wasn’t in a hurry to relive it. This time, we walked off the plane, breezed through immigration, grabbed our bag, finished changing our money without any fuss, and met the hotel’s driver, who was waiting for us outside. EASY.
So we checked in at Duck Inn, which Chris described as the Manila version of Blue Sky (which makes sense to other Nanjingers), and he was completely right. Beer, pool tables, white guys. Emphasis on GUYS. I’ve seen all kinds of foreigners around, but I swear it feels like I’m the only foreign female in Manila. I’m sure that’s not true, but I still feel like I REALLY stick out. Chris also commented that Manila didn’t seem to be the sort of place you bring your girlfriend while we were watching dumbstruck as a completely idiotic drunken lout enjoyed the attentions of not one, not two, but THREE GROs (Guest Relations Officer - on our last visit, a travel agent explained that these were the people who “do the sexy dance”) who were giggling, massaging, and dry humping the guy. We ate lunch at what was supposed to be a nice, quiet, outdoor area, but in which I was DEFINITELY the only female in the place who wasn’t being paid to show interest in her male companion.
I have no idea what to think about Manila. It left a really bad taste in my mouth last year, and now I’ve only got extremely cursory experience with it, so you really can’t use my opinion on it for anything.But here’s my opinion anyway. It’s a lot like what would happen if New Orleans, Miami, and Tortuga circa 1650 had a baby and fed it a lot of beer and mangos, then set it in the middle of an eternal summer afternoon block party. Which sounds great, right? It is CHILL here - everybody’s outside drinking beer or cokes, playing cards, blasting music from storefronts and car stereos, and smiling a lot. Everything’s incredibly friendly and relaxed. On the other hand, oh my god the prostitutes! Or GROs or whatever you want to call them. Our hotel actually has a sign hung outside it that says, “no unescorted young ladies allowed,” which under normal circumstances would really piss me off, but which here is a blessed relief. Our hotel’s house rules sheet also says that “firearms must be deposited with reception. They will be returned at checkout.” Hookers and guns oh my!
I don’t feel unsafe or anything, though, and I’m not freaked out - last time I was scared for my life. It’s just an extremely different city from anything I’ve ever been used to. It’s as different from China as China is from the US, at least, and that’s an intense thing to deal with in one night. However, I think this is probably an incredibly fun city if you can stick around long enough to figure out how to maneuver inside it. We went for a walk around the hotel neighborhood, and as soon as we walked outside we heard a really loud church bell ringing over and over again, and suddenly found ourselves in the middle of a parade (I think it had something to do with Sinulog or Ati-Atihan?). People were waving Virgin Mary/Assorted Saints icons and figurines around while they processed into a church, and there were troupes of kids dressed up in full-on island getup performing a dance. It just looked like so much more FUN than the Catholicism I know. Nobody looked bored or uncomfortable or guilty - the kids were just running and jumping and yelling and screaming to the drums, and it was AWESOME to watch.
Anyway, to wrap this up since I need to get to the airport by seven tomorrow morning, I’m fine to be leaving Manila tomorrow, but I’d like to be able to want to stay here. At least in my experience, it’s a mixed bag, much like the combo business we saw earlier today - “Dental Clinic / Pool Hall.”
Yet again, if you’d told me three years ago that I’d wake up in Shanghai and go to bed in Manila one day, I probably would have been really angry with you for mocking me and the travel lust I thought I’d sacrificed to inertia. So Bohol tomorrow! I won’t have internet for the next three or four days, but I should be back on Thursday or Friday.
O HAI!
Tuesday, January 13, 2009
Um, it’s been too long for me to try to catch up, so I’m just going to jump right back in and pretend like I’ve been online since October…
Right now, it’s 7:34 pm, and I haven’t bothered to get dressed today, meaning I’m sitting in my apple commercial living room in my sweatpants and a tee-shirt unable to find the energy to use the toilet, let alone leave the apartment. I’ve only been on break for three days, and I’ve gone all the way downhill in an incredibly short time. It’s been AWESOME.
First of all, I just got a new macbook pro, and after a few weeks with it, I’m unable to imagine how I ever lived without it. The transition from a PC lifestyle to a mac one was completely painless, and everything on this machine works better and more intuitively. Our apartment is such a staging ground for born-again mac people - you should see us with our matching macbooks, peaceably sitting on the couch listening to our separate ipods and occasionally glancing up to comment about some awesome thing that macs will do that pcs won’t. End of story, buy a mac.
Second, I just started using Picasa, and I like it. I really adore flickr, but it’s extremely tempermental in China, and I can’t use it very well due to its (lack of) loading speed. Picasa, though, is working great so far. So until someone posts something questionable and the net nanny comes down on it, I guess I’ll be using it. I really really really recommend it as a photo organizer, though, especially since it does all the little things that make most people think they need photoshop even though they don’t know how to use the really interesting features of it (me). Picasa, A+ in my book.
We had visitors over the holidays - Chris’s whole family made the trip, including seventeen-month-old Jackson, who outdid everyone in his enthusiasm for Chinese food and ability to engage with the locals. The little guy made more friends here than I’ve probably made in my entire life… Honestly, I spent a lot of the time being deeply embarrassed - I got off a plane and spent at least two or three months cringing behind Chris, Leif, and Lily, being largely unable to cross the street alone, let alone get a cab by myself. The Clanton/Clanton-Jones faction, however, hit the ground running, picking up necessary Mandarin, jumping in headfirst to the culinary environment, jetting around all over the city, arranging train tickets, cab rides, tour packages, etc., appearing almost entirely unphased. I also spent a lot of the time being incredibly grateful for what a nice bunch of people they were and for the fact that they were such completely good sports about everything.
As an example of extreme good-sportitude, I’d like to explain what happened when we went to Suzhou. We took a day trip to Suzhou, which seemed like a completely feasible endeavor. Suzhou (based on a few hours there) reminded me a lot of a Chinese version of Eureka Springs, Arkansas combined with overtones of Stratford, England. It’s got a really lovely canal system, traditional architecture, a ton of gardens, etc. It’s about an hour away by bullet train, and so we left around eleven planning to spend an afternoon taking in the sights and getting back to Nanjing in time for dinner.
As far as we know, though, buying train tickets in China is a troubled experience. The best way to do it is to show up at the train station no more than ten days before your departure to buy a one-way ticket with cash. Then you arrive at your destination, where you pray to be able to get a return ticket. We showed up at the Suzhou train station to be told by the ticket clerks that there were no seats available back to Nanjing. Chris and I committed an intense China-sin by leaving without our passports. Without a passport, you absolutely can’t check into a hotel. Not to mention the fact that we were traveling with a very small person with a limited supply of diapers. Chris and I both sort of freaked out in the face of this, while the other Clantons remained completely calm and willing to do whatever we needed to do.
Chris’s solution was to buy tickets for Shanghai, and hope that we’d be able to get Nanjing tickets from there. I was really, really terrified that this was going to end with makeshift beds of cast-off newspapers in a corner of the Shanghai Railway Station, but we had six or seven hours to kill in Suzhou, and so we made the best of it by heading up to Tiger Hill. Which was really, really, really pretty. There were vaguely threatening advertisements for the place all over the train station - “If you do not see Tiger Hill, it would be a pity,” etc. It WOULD have been a pity - we had a really nice afternoon wandering around. I LOVE Chinese parks. I like American parks, too, but it seems like every time I visit a Chinese one, there’s something bizarre and unexpected lurking around every corner.
We didn’t have time to make it to any other gardens, with names like “The Humble Administrator’s Garden,” or “The Lingering Garden.” We tried to make it to some place called West Garden, which turned out to be closed. We had to split up to do this, since there’s a four-person limit in a taxi. I was with Chris’s dad and sister, and spent the cab ride intently focused on the map and being sure I knew exactly where we were. Any of you who ever spent any time watching me try to navigate know exactly where this is going - we wound up lost. Actually, to give myself a little bit of credit, not badly lost, and within five or ten minutes a really nice lady pointed us in the right direction. But I definitely had about five or ten minutes to frantically fantasize about never seeing Chris, his mother, or Jackson again, and the three of us spending the rest of our lives learning to live off the land and heal from our emotional losses. I didn’t get much further than a touching scene in which we were finally fully integrated by the community, and sitting together at a restaurant raising cups of baijiu to toast our long-lost family members in a moving demonstration of remembrance, acceptance, and optimism before the nice lady helped us out, but oh my god it was nerve-wracking.Once again, Mr. Clanton and Carrie were veritable rocks of assurance and calm.
After that, we hung out in a coffee shop, and made our way to the train station. The train station was PACKED. More so than I’m more or less accustomed to Chinese train stations being packed. We made it to our train with no problems, though, and arrived at Shanghai a few minutes before eight. Chris and I were pretty well steeled for the worst (makeshift beds of newspaper in a forgotten corner of the Shanghai Railway Station, for those of you who can’t keep up), and Chris was thoroughly girded for battle. His plan was simple - he would charge out of the train station and make a frantic dash for the soft seat CRH ticket office before it closed at eight, while the rest of us would exit the train station and plant. So the train arrived, and Chris ran like an Olympian, while the rest of us pushed and shoved our way out, stroller and all.
And bless his soul, Chris came back with tickets. They were closing down the ticket counters when he arrived, and I’ve got a very vivid picture of how this went down, involving a lot of frothing at the mouth and for some reason togas (we’ve been rewatching Rome). Chris convinced them to let him inside, and pleaded with them for tickets. They tried to tell him that there were no seats left, but Chris managed to convey that we had a baby and talked them into giving us the emergency reserve tickets. This is the story that Chris told me, although my version also involves gladiators and snake pits. Anyway, Chris returned and met us at the exit of the train station (where I’d been pacing back and forth worried that I’d taken the wrong exit and was fashioning a scenario of my adventures in Shanghai with Chris’s entire family as a group of homeless beggars who stumbled upon some sort of dastardly mob plot and inadvertantly changed the course of Chinese history when…), looking for all the world like the all-but-conquered hero returning victorious but with a heaviness in his heart. The best he’d been able to do was book a slow train for us.
There are two types of trains between Nanjing and Shanghai. One is the bullet train, which is the only train Myself the Princess had ever ridden. It’s clean and comfy, with western toilets and lots of leg room. It’s about a two hour trip. Then there are the other trains, which are older, coal-powered, crowded, and have toilets that pretty much involve squatting over the tracks. It’s about four and half hours on them. Our train got into Nanjing at about 3 am. It seemed like Chris felt somehow responsible for the whole thing, since he seemed pretty upset about it, but he’d actually arranged for one of the coolest things I’ve done in China so far. Because we had soft sleeper tickets!
The soft sleeper cars are arranged into compartments with four beds in each. Since there were five of us, we were worried that one hapless soul would get stuck with a carload of the baijiu-swigging businessmen we’d seen in the waiting lounge who were clearly looking forward to their journey as an opportunity to par-TAY. However, the gods were with us, and we wound up with a couple of empty compartments. It worked out fantastically, with Jackson (who deserves a freaking medal for so many things, one of which being his behavior during the entire ordeal) and Carrie getting some badly needed sleep in one room, and Chris, his parents, and me hanging out in the party car next next door. I regret to announce that this was the night I finally acquired a taste for baijiu. And it was also the night that I got baijiu-drunk and ridiculous in front of SOMEONE’S PARENTS. Good grief, Anne! Have you no shame?
Have I mentioned how grateful I am to the Clanton family for being so much fun and so welcoming? A big unabashedly public thank you is in order for all of the Clantons and the Clanton-Joneses.
So now we’re hanging out and enjoying a week off before we pack up and head back to the Philippines! YES! We’ve been getting grief for visiting the same place twice, but I don’t even care. I had such an absurd amount of fun last time, and this time we’re going to a very different island, inhabited by the world’s smallest primate and home of the Chocolate Hills. Plus at least three or four days spent lazing about the beach doing nothing but getting sunburned and imbibing fruity cocktails with umbrellas in them. But the other four days are going to be spent staying at an organic Filipino bee farm, and I honestly believe that being able to utter that phrase will provide me with enough environmentally conscious, well-travelled hipster cred to last me the rest of my life. SCORE!
shanghai! part 2
Saturday, October 4, 2008
We left for Shanghai on Monday morning, and at first glance the Nanjing train station did not look promising for easy travel. The place was PACKED. It’s a holiday week for a lot of people due to National Day, and the boards showed all the trains as sold out. This isn’t the end of the world - you can always get a standing room only ticket - but it’s not a whole lot of fun. We had to do that on our way back from the U.S. this summer, and being stuck next to the bathrooms on a crowded train will really make you wonder exactly what these people are eating that produces such a frothy, richly complex aroma. However, this went smoothly enough - Chris pulled out a miracle by wrangling a couple of seats for us on the next train (we think we got special foreigner reserve tickets or something), and we had plenty of time to grab McDonald’s next door and catch our train without running or getting stressed. The CRH train really might be the difference between my experiences traveling in China and those of people who’ve been here longer and traveled more. It’s a slick, fast, clean, two hour train ride in comfy seats with lots of leg room.
Anyway, we got to Shanghai, and followed our usual Shanghai train station routine - I parked with the luggage on a bench while Chris went to get our return tickets, which he did with no hassle while I absentmindedly went through my standard list of worried fantasies about what I would do if Chris disappeared and left me stranded by a trashcan and some homeless guys (. Then it was off to our hotel. We stayed at the Nanjing A*Live Design Hotel. The hotel was Chris’s find, and it was a perfectly nice place to stay - great location, a nice room with a pretty view, and a Starbucks on the ground floor. Our bathroom came stocked with the usuals (soap, shampoo, paper slippers, toothbrush and toothpaste, a razor, and sanitary wipes labelled Her and Him). There was also an array of sex toys, which surprised me a little. I mean, I think it’s fantastic that a hotel would think to provide free condoms - China’s great when it comes to birth control, and I think that the U.S. could take a lot of lessons from that. But in addition to the condoms, there was a cock ring and several packets of a “traditional Chinese medicinal preparation” designed to “keep your passion hot.” Now, as I said, China’s all over making birth control easily and freely available, but when it comes to STDS…. “the contents will prevent the spread of infectious diseases, with no side effects!” Aiiieee…
We didn’t have much of a plan, so we decided to take a walk from the hotel to the Bund. The street near our hotel was a really nice, leafy area with sculpture parks, coffee shops and cafes, and strollable sidewalks. Along the way, Chris got attacked by a woman trying to shine his shoes. It started with Chris’s polite Chinese equivalent of “no thanks,” but the woman kept following and trying to grab his shoes. It ended with her actually smearing white shoe polish all over him and us fleeing. We also saw people crouched on the ground with blankets spread out selling jewelry. I was mildly interested in the first one we passed, but then I noticed that everyone’s spread was almost identical. Beads, dangly earrings, Bhudda heads, antique-looking mortar and pestle sets, etc. I don’t quite understand how that works as business.
The scenery changed drastically once we hit People’s Square and started down the pedestrian shopping street Nanjing Dong Lu. Honestly, Times Square or Picadilly Circus have NOTHING on this place. It was a holiday week, so the crowds were in full force. Every three feet or so, someone would offer us a watch, DVDs, or handbags, and there were a few people just standing in one place screaming “HASHISH!” (so much for China’s infamous zero tolerance drug policy?). There were people EVERYWHERE. You could barely turn around without nearly knocking someone over. Other than the expensive brand named stores (I realize Shanghai’s an enormous city, but is it really big enough to justify an Omega watch store on every block?) and the counterfit watches and handbags on the street, vendors were out in force selling HUGE balloons, light up devil horns, glow sticks, and just about every toy you might expect to see in the discount bins in Wal-Mart. I kept seeing people walking around with huge inflated mallets, and wondered if they were supposed to be some kind of harmless stress relief. I found myself desperately hoping to see someone go absolutely beserk with his/her Minnie Mouse encrusted balloon cudgel.
We made it all the way to the river, by which point the crushing crowd had taken a toll on us. We weren’t forming coherent sentences, we were exhausted, and there was nothing to do but throw ourselves back into the throngs of slowly ambling people and ride the current back to the hotel.
We recharged and planned our next move. The Lonely Planet Shanghai 2004 Edition had this to say about the French Concession: “The French Concession was once home to the bulk of Shanghai’s adventurers, revolutionaries, gangsters, prostitutes, and writers”, so that was pretty much a no-brainer. The plan was to get to the area, choose a splendid restaurant, and drink ourselves silly on Maoming Road, which Lonely Planet told us was a “nightlife magnet.” Problem #1: the “find a restaurant by walking around” never works. That’s exactly how you wind up with about twenty options, and you finally get so hungry and overwhelmed that you slink into Papa John’s instead. Problem #2: In China, 2004 might as well be last century. The Maoming Road described in the guidebook doesn’t exist anymore.
[Nanjing has a Papa John's, and a Starbucks, and a Subway, which were three things we got super excited about in Shanghai, but none of them are in our neighborhood, and so the only classic example of American laziness, convenience, and corporate packaging we regularly get into is McDonald's. I guess if we visited Nanjing and stayed in Xinjiekou, we'd have a similarly exciting experience of familiar and easily accessible chains.]
We had a shamefully good time glutting ourselves on pizza and garlic butter (although it grieves me to report that the garlic butter sauce suffered in translation), and then charged off down Maoming Lu looking for the insanity. We went up and down the street, looking for the tell tale signs of staggering youths, vomit in the streets, weaving taxi cabs whose patrons’ drunken hollering was audible as far as the sidewalk, etc. Instead, we found a Disney English Training Center, the Teddy Bears Collectors Shop, and a row of tailors with names like The Executive and Candor. I’m about as interested in men’s fashion as I am in women’s fashion (the idea of shopping as a recreational activity normally makes me feel a little nauseous), but these were good-looking suits. If you need some swanky men’s business apparel, I’m telling you: Maoming Lu’s got you covered.
Anyway, we were about to give up when we finally found a tiny little section of a block that included a couple of bars and two or three restaurants, and decided we were tired of walking anyway. So we got a table at Blue Frog, right next to the huge open door/windows, and watched the empty sidewalk and drank bloody marys and tom collinses. It was actually a really pleasant, quiet, friendly place to drink. It wasn’t crowded, the music was decent and not too loud, and it made a really nice counterpoint to the craziness of the Bund.
We also saw a guy pulling an enormous wagon full of the biggest teddy bears I’ve ever seen in my life down the mostly deserted street, peering forlornly into Blue Frog seeking customers. It was just such a pitiful sight - I probably would have bought one if I wouldn’t have had to lug it around train stations.
After we paid our alarmingly high bar tab, we walked back to the hotel. That’s where we noticed a sign for a pub in the basement of our building called Windows Underground. We were on the verge of calling it a night, but figured we should at least stop in and have a beer. We headed down the stairs into a laser lit cave furiously thrumming with industrial trance, a sardonically smiling bar tender, and cheap beer. I don’t really know how to describe the atmosphere - Chris said that he felt like he “should either be snorting blow or sucking blood.” Between the blackness and the strobe lights and the lasers flying around with the truly satanic tunes blaring, the place simply had to be a front for some kind of unimaginable crime. However, the clientele looked innocent enough - a group of young, trashed girls, an American shooting pool, little clusters of friends playing dice games and laughing in corners. One beer turned into several, because we kept getting cracked up at how freaking hardcore the ambiance was. Then we crashed out.
Shanghai! Part 1
Friday, October 3, 2008
When I visited China, almost exactly one year ago, I flew into the Shanghai airport. Chris met me there, and we had three hours to kill before our train to Nanjing left. So we walked down Nanjing Road, which blew my small town Arkansan mind - between the jet lag and the total sensory overload involved in a Shanghai crowd, I spent my first few hours as a tourist in China completely shell shocked.
Previously, my ideas about Shanghai were largely informed by the opening scene of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. The Shanghai in my head remains thoroughly saturated with gangsters, loose women, thieves, and smart-mouthed underage native sidekicks. We spent three days roaming around the city, and I still don’t know what to think about it.
I mean, if you’re in China, OF COURSE you should see Shanghai. We didn’t wander too far away from the Bund/French Concession/Nanjing Xi Lu area, but these places were clean, modern, and startlingly easy compared to Nanjing. The streets were stocked with public trash cans and ashtrays, for starters, and we got the impression that everyone spoke English - the hotel, the restaurants, the train station, the organic smoothie bar, the Converse shoe store, the beggars, the hawkers, etc. The sidewalks were large and clear (except for the human river), the shops were spacious and well-organized, and everything was shockingly clean and well cared for. Also, in three days during which a lot of public bathrooms got used, I only saw one squatter, and it was in the train station.
Overall, Shanghai struck me as a really sleek, sexy, enormous international city, and I’m glad we spent some time in it. I was surprised at how self-conscious and backwoodsy it made me feel - we were plastered against spotless glass windows oohing and ahhhing over pistachio cheese cake, freshly squeezed mango and strawberry juice smoothies with protein boosts, clothing stores that regularly stocked our sizes and weren’t doused in glitter and sequins like everything is here, and the sophistication of the residents. But something about it bothered me - because Nanjing is NOT backwoodsy, at all. It’s a really progressive city with a ton of culture, populated largely by friendly, curious people who’ll help you out if you’re in trouble, language barrier be damned, and while we were bathed in western luxury and exciting glass and steel citiscapes in Shanghai, I still felt more comfortable with dirty, messy, friendly, and genuine Nanjing, and I was really relieved to come home.
That said, though, Shanghai is an exciting cosmopolitan place, and if you can stand the crowds, it’s worth the trip. We weren’t really in the market for a “Get to Know Shanghai” trip - it was more of a “Let’s Get Out of Nanjing and Far Away From Work So We Can Actually Relax” sort of deal. So there was a lot of gratuitous Starbucks drinking, sleeping in, and avoidance of an inflexible schedule of events. We did walk around the Bund, though, and we saw the aquarium and the natural history museum. We had a really good time, but the entire trip was really bipolar. Around our hotel and in the French Concession, everything was so calm and fun and relaxed, but anywhere further up Nanjing Road was maddeningly crowded and stressful. I’ll get around to the specifics later.
It was exciting for me.
Sunday, September 28, 2008
Also, today Chris and I went to Suguo to buy water, and I glanced at a Chinese newspaper, and for the first time ever I could actually read all of the headline. It said “太空 你好 !” [tai4 kong1 ni3 hao3], and it means, “Hello, Space!” I realize that this may not be need-to-know information for the internet, but it made me really happy.
photo tour of my neighborhood
Sunday, September 28, 2008
This probably isn’t going to be very interesting for anyone but family, but Chris and I went for a walk and took some pictures of our neighborhood. I was waving my camera around and indiscriminantly clicking, so some of them are a little blurry, but here are the highlights.
Here’s our building. I guess it doesn’t look like much on the outside (ok, ok, it looks like a slum), but unfortunately, China seems to place a higher priority on function rather than form, except for the parks, which are freaking gorgeous:
Also, most buildings in China have cages on the windows on the lower floors to protect against theft, which I’m not sure is as big of an issue as the bars and occasional rigged lines covered in jagged broken glass might indicate. Inside is really modern and clean, swear.
Next door, a new complex has just come up, and people have only recently started moving in. It’s fancy, with walls and guards and a security gate. We have a really nice view of our rich neighbors out of our balcony windows, and we’ve been watching the construction and cleanup going on as a substitute for tv.
If you walk a little further into the residential neighborhood, you’ll come to this palacial-looking public toilet:
And this completely incomprehensible business sign for a ritzy-looking establishment that does snacks, massage, and aroma therapy:
When the weather’s nice, people come outside. The roundabout near our street has been packed with senior citizens visiting and enjoying the gorgeous fall weather we’ve been having. People sit around, play cards or chess, talk, play with their dogs, or munch on street food. When I was in the US this summer, I kept feeling vaguely uneasy at how deserted all the sidewalks seemed to be. I kept wondering where everybody was.
I really wish that picture had turned out, because it would have been a really good one. Near our house, there’s a row of playground equipment that I assumed was for kids, but gets more use from the elderly. Older Chinese people take care of themselves - you’ll see them out in open areas doing tai chi, playing on see saws and swing sets, or walking around backwards to target one muscle or another (it looks FREAKY, incidentally).
Here are some other housing pictures:
And here’s some stuff from Ninghai Lu/Hankou Xi Lu, which are very near to our school, and where most of our needs get met.
Here’s one of the DVD shops, which mysteriously disappeared for a couple of weeks. We found out from a Chinese friend this weekend that there’s been some kind of “politeness contest” going on in China (or maybe just Jiangsu?), which involved cleaning up DVD shops and street food vendors. I couldn’t find any references to this online, but thankfully the DVD shops are open again.
Very near here, there’s the Exotic Foods store, which in the bizarro world I live in, means things like pasta, whiskey, canned beans, chocolate, olive oil, and cereal.
We’ve bought a lot of whiskey from this store, and for just a little extra, you can get these ridiculous gift sets that come with fancy bags that people dig out of the trash to take home, souvenir glasses which are overrunning our kitchen cupboard, and upscale packaging:
This is just down the street from the market, where we get veggies and meat:
There are also soooo many little food stalls, clothing shops, and tiny little hodgepodge places that sell stuff like shoelaces and power strips scattered around:
Anyway, that’s pretty much what my daily life looks like. We’re enjoying a week off for National Day, planning to go to Shanghai tomorrow to finally do something in Shanghai that doesn’t involve rushing to the airport. Most of our friends are out of town, so we’re getting into some highly anticipated time in.
The full flickr set is here, if you’re interested.
bei tian min ren
Friday, September 12, 2008
Our apartment building just got a shiny new silver gate. Gates were the bane of our existence while we lived on campus - if memory serves me correctly, there were at least eighteen that had to be hopped, several eyeless, soulless ferrymen who had to be paid off with special silver coins emblazoned with the insignia of hell, a bloodthirsty hound that could only be avoided by throwing a cloth sack filled with the intestines of a virgin pig before its feet, and all of this usually had to be accomplished while being riproaringly drunk. So we were more than wary when the gate first appeared, but after a few days of seeing it always unlocked, we stopped worrying about it.
Today is Friday, and we’ve got a three-day weekend due to Mid-Autumn Festival. Chris and I finished classes at about three-thirty, and BOLTED from the school, determined to escape work for a glorious seventy-two hours as quickly as possible. We’d been at home for about thirty minutes, during which time we’d mostly jumped around screaming about how great it was to have such a slight taste of freedom, when the doorbell rang. I think we were irrationally afraid that it was going to be something involving school, and so we didn’t answer it (stupid).
Later, Chris went out to buy water (we haven’t set up a water delivery service yet, and so we have to run around the corner every day or two to buy some), and found out that the gate was locked. Chris can jump it - a combination of being tall to begin with and having spent the last several months working out like some kind of sustained but none-the-less-intense-for-the-duration Rocky montage - so it’s not so much a problem for him. I, however, am now for all practical purposes under house arrest. The doorbell had been the building manager trying to give us a key. Chris found some friendly people who told him where to get a key - the trouble was that it was too late in the evening, and the building manager had already gone home for the day. Chris’s conversational Chinese is pretty damn good, and he understood that the friendly neighbor was telling him to try again “ming tian”, which means “tomorrow” or “bei tian.” Chris didn’t know “bei tian”, so we looked it up on the internet, figuring it was some other word for one day of the week or other.
All the internet knew about the phrase “bei tian” was the Chinese idiom “bei tian min ren,” which translates to “bemoan the state of the universe and pity the fate of mankind,” which I hope is exactly what our friendly neighbor was advising Chris to do.
From My Gmail Drafts Folder
Saturday, September 6, 2008
1. These were the blurbs on the backs of books I was processing at the library. I really apologize for not being able to cite authors, but I didn’t include it in the draft I wrote for myself to treasure them forever (and I’m too lazy to hunt them up online, although it should be easy to do if you’re curious).
a. What werewolf Elizabeth Young craves is a normal life, with a husband, kids, and less shaving. Unfortunately the vaccine she’s researched isn’t working yet. Worse, she’s in heat - and soon every dangerous wolf pack for miles around will be at her door. To buy time, she needs to have sex, and often, with the first human male she can find…b. …Jayd just wants to chill, still hoping Junior year can carry on, drama free. And with Misty and her ex KJ reportedly “hanging,” Jayd is ready to move on. But the brother won’t stop blowing up Jayd’s cellie, and the text-messages keep coming; and the message is clear: KJ wants Jayd back bad. Buy Jayd couldn’t care less. She’s got a new man to kick-it with now - a half-Jewish white boy from Palos Verdes whose parents are loaded with a capital “L.” And Jeremy Weiner’s no ordinary white boy - he listens to East Coast rap, he’s got a sweet ride, and he’s got it bad for Jayd Jackson. But no one at South Bay High will just let a sistah be happy. Misty’s back to her usual foolishness, KJ’s all over her jock, and the notoriously anti-black teacher Mrs. Bennett is tripping. Jeremy’s got her totally sprung, but she’s going to have to rely on her brains–and some of Mama’s magic, of course–if she’s going to survive another week at Drama High.c. Strong-willed Ashley Baxter is trying to forget. She has locked up her heart, convinced that no one - including God - could love her. Four unlikely people - Alzheimer’s patients - find the cracks in Ashley’s heart and slowly help her remember. Then comes the nightmare of September 11, which forever changes the lives of the Baxter family, causing them to remember what is important and leading them to make decisions that are both heart-breaking and hopefilled. Landon Blake, who has loved Ashley since she was a teenager, tries to dull the pain of her rejection by immersing himself in the rescue efforts at Ground Zero.
2. A short passage written shortly after the death of Steve Irwin and apparently during a particularly emo period of my life:
I think Steve would want us to look at his death and learn what we could from it, and there really is a nice little parable in there. The guy wrestled some of the most dangerous animals in the planet, and did some of the most outrageously dumb things ever filmed, and in the end, a fuzzy, relatively innocuous beastie that tourists swim with regularly was the one that took him down. So the lesson here is: watch out for the things you think you can trust.And that’s exactly why people read these horribly trashy books. Because life sucks, and the hero never means half the tripe he spouts, and people get old and ugly and die. Unless you happen to be in a romance novel.[I wish I knew who in the world I was planning to send that little angsty gem to]
3. I think this was the start of a blog post I probably wisely abandoned, due to its graphic and personal nature:UGH. Ok, I realize that whining about my period is about as cliched and uncool as it gets, but I haven’t had one of these in FIVE YEARS. I mean, what’s going on with me right now is pretty close to what would happen if a boy started menstruating, right down to me absolutely flipping out and convincing myself and everyone around me that my kidneys were failing after a drunk trip to the bathroom that resulted in a gory surprise.
Oh, you’re still here. Excellent. Anyway, I’m getting off my Psycho Freak Out Barn Burning Birth Control (Depo Provera) after spending a good three years longer on it than you’re really supposed to, and I’m admittedly a little freaked out about having to be a regular girl again. See, I liked Depo. Yes, it made me grouchy for a while, and sure, there may have been thirty pounds or so that kind of showed up without an invitation, but so what? I DIDN’T BLEED. I realize that ladies reading this have no idea why I’m so disgruntled by this completely normal thing, and so I appeal to my male audience for sympathy: every month for the next thirty or forty years?! Come on!!
I hate to start talking about this, because it always makes me feel like a traitor to my gender and like the kind of girl that all intelligent feminists hate, but I WISH I WAS A BOY. I find the female reproductive system to be at least as good an example of poor design as a twenty-one year old pothead neo-Taoist survey-crazed drop out with a band’s myspace page. [note: this is not to say that twenty-one year olds, potheads, neo-Taoists, drop outs, and rocknrollers aren't capable of producing tasteful, user friendly myspace pages. It's just that when you put it all together you wind up with something that crashes your machine every time you accidentally click on it, and leaves permanent scars on your retinas from all the flashing and glitter. You know, just like a vagina.]. There’s this weird bloody mess every month, plus the frequent UTIs, and don’t even get me started on what happened to me right before I moved to China, pelvic exams, statistically smaller body mass and lesser strength, not to mention various societal pressures and prejudices. Where exactly is the silver lining? And if you tell me anything about the miracle of childbirth, I will answer in the words of my no-nonsense ninth grade health teacher: “it feels exactly like trying to poop a basketball.”
4. Did I post this?
Overheard recently:
“Damn, if my wife was as beautiful as you, I wouldn’t go out to work on the project tonight. I’d just stay home… just kissin’.”
“Just kissing?”
“Yeah, baby, just kissin’. I wouldn’t try to make love or nothin’.”
5. I know I posted this on my old blog, but it made me kind of laugh to remember that this is an actual, honest-to-god, true story that I solemnly swear I am not exaggerating, so here it is again.
Um, I had the weirdest haircut ever yesterday. I’m not going to mention the name of the place, because I’ve always had good experiences there. The people who work there are always really nice and friendly, and in spite of the fact that i hate salon banter, they do a nice job and are extremely pleasant.But yesterday was something else. I arrived about ten minutes early, and the woman glared at me from behind the counter. “It’s 12:20,” she snapped. “You’re not supposed to be here until 12:30.”“Oh,” I said, flustered. “I can… come back?”“No, it’s fine. Can you wait outside while I run grab a coffee?”“Um, ok-”“I’m going to leave door unlocked, so don’t let anyone come in.”I followed her outside and set up shop to play some tetris until she returned, and then she said, “Ok, look, do you have any adderol or know where I could get some?”“No, man, I’m sorry,” I said, when what I meant to say was, “stay the hell away from my hair!” I did offer to reschedule so that she could have a full lunch - my plan being to leave and go somewhere else. But she told me to just sit down, she’d be right back. So I sat on Dickson Street, protecting the salon, and harboring fantasies of defending it against a Mafia-esque hair product crime ring, with the trusty though unfortunately narcoleptic dog that’s always sprawled out in front of the nearby shoe store by my side.She came back, and barked an order for me to go inside and directed me to the shampooing station. I noticed a half empty bottle of wine, not tucked away beneath a desk, but just sitting there on a styling table. I got a really rough shampoo with scalding hot water, but I was far too frightened to complain. I got situated in the chair, biting my lip against the pain of my now-damaged neck, and she asked me what I wanted her to do. I muttered something vague - my usual tactic being to allow them to ask the right questions until we figure out what I’m actually asking for, since I have no idea how to describe a haircut- and she practically yelled, “what do you want me to do?” I yelped that I wanted to keep as much length as possible, I just needed a trim. She then grabbed a seemingly random section of my hair, and abruptly snipped it. “Is that ok?” she asked.“Um, yeah,” I whimpered, fairly sure that it was not ok, but completely blind since I didn’t have my glasses on. She then proceeded to attack, with no recognizable system, and I just sat there impotently, watching huge chunks of my hair fall to the floor. She then launched into the salon chit chat routine, but spoke each question in such a way that it felt like an interrogation: “Where are you from.” “How old are you.” “Are you married,” etc, all the while grabbing pieces of my hair (about which I’m a little more vain than I usually care to admit) and viciously mutilating them. I wanted to blurt out, “I JUST WANT TO GO HOME!” but fear kept me rooted in the seat.A few other people cycled through, all of whom were greeted with, “got any adderol?” and she kept getting distracted, walking away to answer her cell phone, eat a bite of her sandwich, or, at one point, after trying to adjust herself in a display that I can only describe as pornographic, vanishing into the bathroom to change clothes. FINALLY, after about an hour and a half, the ordeal was over, and I put on my glasses and tried not to scream. She’d mentioned that she was going to undercharge me, since she’d been late and I’d watched her freaking store for her. Of course she didn’t. Forty-five dollars of my life, gone, forever, just like half of my hair.
6. I guess this was intended for family, and I never finished it, but it was the start of a description of a day in my life, back when I lived on campus (shudders).
At 7:15, my alarm clock goes off. It’s my cell phone alarm, and it’s a British lady yelling “IT’S TIME TO GET UP. THE TIME IS [beat] 7:15″ over and over again. The night before, I’d had a talk with myself about how much easier my mornings would go if I’d just wake up when my alarm goes off, maybe drink some coffee, check my email, and get my head fully functional before class starts. However, my resolve goes straight out the window, and I set my alarm for 7:30. Then 7:45.
Then there’s a frantic scrambling for clothes, toothbrush, deodorant, and my elevator card (using the ‘vator is a 150 yuan privilege), and within ten minutes I’m swaying exhaustedly behind the podium of my first class of the day, yelling at myself for not giving myself enough time to look over my lesson plans before the start of class.
The bell rings, and the last few stragglers come trailing in, giving me wary looks to see whether or not today’s the day I’ll start cracking down on tardiness. I take roll and ask the class, “how are you?” and get the sleepy, dishonest response, “fine.” I make sure everyone’s awake, give them a page number, and we’re off.
Most of my classes are two hours long with ten minute breaks. Which, incidentally, is a very long time to be up in front of fifteen Chinese teenagers if you don’t know what you’re doing (and let’s face it, sometimes it’s hell even with the most carefully planned lesson). Sometimes it’s all smiles and jokes and they get really into it, but sometimes you spend hours the night before trying to come up with a fun, informative class and it immediately goes down in flames.
Anyway, I teach my first class, and then my second from ten to noon, and then it’s lunch time. Lunch options include fried noodles from the guys in the alley just outside the school (cheap), Wu’s Fried Meat Buns, which are these juicy little bombs of greasy goodness, located a little further down Ninghai Lu, Skyways, the tasty German bakery, on Hankou Xi Lu, across the street from the market and the DVD shops, or the nearby McDonald’s.
7. Some environmental notes:
Over lunch, I watched a couple of national geographic specials that left me with an OH MY GOD WE ARE WRECKING THE PLANET sort of feeling… Don’t worry, this isn’t about to become a buzz-word laden lecture on environmentalism - I know I’m the last person who can throw that particular stone (I don’t recycle, and one of my favorite pasttimes in the states was driving around for no real reason - I know I’m no friend of the earth). But holy god. First of all, I saw a program on elephant rage. There are all kinds of problems surrounding elephants. In jungles, elephants are needed as gardeners - their tendency to trample out patches provides a vital ecosystem . Of course, force elephants into too small of a jungle habitat and EVERYTHING gets trampled, which wrecks the ecosystem. Thin out the elephant population too much, though, and those stomp patches start to disappear, which damages the entire jungle. So there’s issue number one.
Issue number two: human/elephant conflict. Apparently, grieving elephants occasionally do not take their losses lightly - they strike back, trampling villages and killing people. Of course, villages also get smashed by elephants looking for food, forced into contact with human beings by their shrinking habitat. Then there’s the fact that elephants could very well suffer from post-traumatic stress syndrome, which causes violent lash-outs. And how about the roving gangs of orphaned bull elephants with out-of-control hormones and no older elephants to provide limits and education? These bands of thugs run around killing *anything* that gets in their way - people, rhinos, whatever. And uncontrolled aggression in the largest land animal is a considerable problem.
Where are these problems coming from? Well, when elephant population becomes too dense, it becomes a huge burden on natural resources. Naturally, elephant population becomes too dense when people take over its existing range. In an effort to correct the situation, people cull the elephant herds. Elephants, however, are deeply emotional and social creatures, and a baby calf watching its mother gunned down out of no where could very well grow up to be the kind of elephant that gores people for fun. The show I watched showed a lot of different methods people were trying out - chili powder, for example (elephants’ noses are too sensitive to tolerate it), but all anyone was doing was treating the symptoms, not the problem - there just aren’t enough resources left to support an elephant population without interspecies conflict. Now, I don’t know how to solve that one.
Then I saw a show about the crazy spike in jellyfish numbers in the ocean. Predictably, this one’s a global warming issue. And that’s a huge problem because if jellyfish take over the ocean, well…. I mean, come on, they’re creatures out of a sci-fi nightmare. I wasn’t paying a whole lot of attention to the television, but I did catch this: there’s one species of jellyfish that at the moment of death releases all of its eggs/sperm into the ocean, resulting in a TON more jellyfish. This was discovered after someone attempted to cull the species. Woops.
So, um, apparently culling isn’t the way to go, if it leads to sociopathic, violent pachyderms running amok and horrible, unstoppable, brainless jelly monsters eating the entire ocean.
8. And here’s a sentence I’d really like a context for - no subject, no address, or anything. It sounds juicy, and I HAVE NO IDEA who or what I was talking about in November 2006:
We’re doing all of this too late; there was a time for it, but we let it pass, and there’s something ridiculous, reprehensible even, about the way we’re thinking and planning.
It’s late and I’m bored…