Before leaving Hoi An I met a girl from Boston. We hung out in bars, the cheap ones with the $0.25 draft beers, and chatted a lot. It was nice talking to someone from Boston, but she was very career focused. It got annoying talking about jobs and school and real world things like taxes and insurance. Sheesh. I also find I'm getting really sick of running the 'just met while traveling in SE Asia' script. How long have you been traveling? Where are you from? Where have you been? How much longer do you have? Where's next? What do you do back home? I've met some great people and had interesting conversations, but the introductions wear me down, and I'm sick of talking about why I dislike China and why I'm no longer working at the UN. Actually, I don't like bringing up the UN at all. It always gets a "Really? Wow!" response, and it always feels like I'm bragging. The only time I don't mind is when someone asks me whether I'm teaching English in China. It's the same thing with school. If someone asks me where I went to school I always answer Boston, and only MIT if they follow up. But saying I work in China always leads to the next question.
I collected all of my clothing before leaving Hoi An. Of the 10 shirts, jacket, and pair of shoes I bought, the only thing I was really unhappy with was the tux shirt. I may do another one in China. I had a hard time explaining stud eyelets to them, the collar isn't as stiff as I'd like, and the fabric I picked sort of makes it look like a curtain. Since that last part was my fault, I paid for the thing, but I'll probably never wear it. I don't know whether I mentioned before, but for one of the more casual button-up shirts I ordered I picked a blue and orange striped fabric, and for some bizarre reason they made the stripes horizontal instead of vertical. I tried it on, and it looked ok. I had half a mind to make them re-do it, but I thought that maybe it'd grow on me, and all of my shirts are vertically striped, so I kept it.
I took a bus to Hue. I paid $4 for the 3 hour trip, which turned out to be almost twice as much as I could have paid.
I could talk a lot about Hue, but I'll keep it short. My hotel on the first night was a too-expensive $9. Its redeeming feature was the fact that it was on the 5th floor, a one floor walkup from the elevator to the 4th. Next to my room, one of 2 on the floor, was a ladder bolted to the wall, leading up to a skylight that opened up. At night I took a little bottle of Vodka Hanoi up and sat perched on the edge of the window, looking down on the city.
Hue was the site of some of the fiercest fighting in the war, which I didn't know until I left the city and started reading a book called Dispatches. It's the old imperial capital, and the ancient part of the city is surrounded by a citadel with towering, meters-thick walls that go on for 10km. During the Tet Offensive, NVA regulars took the city and flew their flag over the citadel for weeks before the US could retake it. It was street to street combat with incredible losses, said to be one marine for every meter captured.
In the battle, and in a previous Viet Minh-French battle a decade or more earlier, the city took heavy damage from air strikes and shelling. The Thai Hoa Palace, Vietnam's equivalent of the Forbidden City, is mostly leveled to a foundation covered in grass, despite the hesitance of the US military to target it. What's left has been restored and reworked, and out front flies a huge Vietnamese flag. It's interesting for me to compare Vietnam's palace with the Forbidden City. The two-story gate here looks tiny in comparison to Tiananmen. The courtyards in China in which the emperor could review his mandarins and troops would hold armies, while the courtyard here would fit into a soccer stadium. Instead of 27 steps, split by a huge tablet carved with dragons, leading up to the Chinese throne, there are 3 unornamented steps here. It's fairly obvious where the power in the region was during the imperial days.
Showing posts with label nightlife. Show all posts
Showing posts with label nightlife. Show all posts
Wednesday, January 9, 2008
Friday, November 30, 2007
Living the dream
It's taken me a while, but I've increasingly come to a simple conclusion- I hate China. I'm willing to accept that I may just hate Beijing, since in reality I haven't spent much time in other parts of the country, but I definitely hate something.
Let me start with the Beijing-specific.
Who builds a megacity, a seat of power over an exploding (I'll not say booming) economy, here? It's perched on the edge of the world's biggest desert. It's not at the mouth of a navigable river, or on a strategic port. It's far enough North that the winters are brutal, made worse by the complete lack of moisture to retain heat at night. It's in a valley that traps pollution, so when the sky isn't sleet-grey it's tinged with the browns and yellows of poisons.
The accent in Beijing is jarring. Spoken Chinese can hardly be described as a beautiful language, at least to our Western sensibilities, but even in China the Beijing accent is considered the worst. Imagine, if you will, taxi drivers who are incapable of understanding "Park the car in Harvard Yard", and need the proper accent applied to the sentence for a glimmer of recognition to flutter in their alcohol-shot eyes. Beijing-hua is best spoken with a nasal whine, with a liberal application of Rs to the ends of words.
There is disturbing poverty within a literal stone's-throw of the Great Hall of the People. I'll post pictures of the slums South of Tiananmen soon, but they're truly decrepit. This a block from the black-tinted windows of the black Audis with black government plates.
I live in a rich neighborhood, surrounded by expats and the wealthiest Chinese. Not 30 minutes ago I was in Jenny Lou's, a grocery store that caters to foreigners with its imported goods. The faceless and absent Mrs. Lou is a despicable bitch, however, and would gladly gut your children for an extra dollar's profit. Nevertheless, the place has a monopoly on Triscuits and Macaroni, so we foreign devils pay our king's ransom and smile as she twists the knife. I did not, you'll note, restrictively refer to myself and my foreign colleagues as 'capitalist running dogs' or 'capitalist roaders'. I think it should be clear why. I can understand why foreigners, far from home, would fork over wads of cash for longed-for luxuries. I cannot, however, understand why Chinese locals will pay the same obscene markups for vegetables, fruit, and meats that are no different from those at the Chinese grocer down the street. Watching the Chinese couple in front of me pay $150 for a grocery bill (an astronomic sum nearly equal to a month's salary for your average white-collar Beijing worker), I saw no other option but to dump my loose change into the cups of the beggars outside the store.
The spitting. I have no way of describing it for those of you who haven't visited. There are 3 sounds I'm unable to escape: construction, horns, and HAAAGHH. It's not polite spitting, it's lung-clearing, projectile expulsions. Sometimes a gentleman in a suit will stop on the sidewalk, plug one nostril with a finger, close his mouth, and exhale sharply.
If you're not dodging phlegm, you're dodging cigarette butts (still lit), taxi bumpers, and bicyclists on cell phones.
Beer is expensive and disgusting. Daria and I had drinks at my coworker James's place last weekend, and I felt great the next morning. I'd gotten used to Chinese hangovers, caused by impure alcohol with all its formaldehyde and God knows what. Drinking imported Western liquor, even in quantities, is healthy by comparison. Tsingtao has almost no flavor, no bubbles, no color, and no alcohol. Besides a mild, soapy aftertaste, what's the point? I'm simply unable to drink Chinese liquor. Some pansy-ass Chinese gentleman informed me it was because Western men weren't 'used to' such strong alcohol (the Chinese is more like 'capable of being used to'). I responded by pulling out a hip flask of scotch and inviting him to try what Western men drank. That's another thing- the cultural elitism. China is great, grand, and flawless. I understand that they're restricted in their exposure to media, but the logical disconnect between wanting to be like us and thinking that they're already far superior to us is sort of mind-boggling.
Environmental bombardment. The air hurts, the people make me sick, the noise is penetrating. When I went to Thailand, what amazed me the most was the skies. I'd honestly forgotten that sky was so blue and that clouds were so fluffy. Isn't that depressing?
I go on about the little things that I hate about living here, and it really is little things that build up to make it intolerable, but the worst is that I don't know what's good about this place- I just can't find it. The food can be good. There are occasionally things that are cool, like the red stars on granite, but then I realize that they're cool because they're symbols for things that are blessedly-absent at home.
I've had fun on some of the days when I've been a tourist. There are breathtakingly beautiful buildings and parks here, you just have to seek them out. The problem is that they're not integrated into the city. It's not like Central Park, or the Common, where you just walk through as you get out of the subway on your way to work. To get into the Summer Palace, or even pedestrian Chaoyang Park, you have to pay an entry fee and fight through the throngs of tourists. There is great beauty here, but it's all labeled as such and priced accordingly.
All of this, plus a lack of job satisfaction, an absence of good friends, and steadily declining weight (and health?) combine to make me strongly consider moving back home in the spring. I'm still weighing options, and I think I've found a good English teaching gig here, but I don't know whether the investment of time and mental health will pay off in terms of Chinese learned and resulting career benefits. As much as I was eager to get out of Boston, I think about it rather fondly from here. So besides looking at teaching jobs here I'm looking at lab positions in NYC, Boston, and San Francisco. I don't know how I'll make the eventual decision.
Let me start with the Beijing-specific.
Who builds a megacity, a seat of power over an exploding (I'll not say booming) economy, here? It's perched on the edge of the world's biggest desert. It's not at the mouth of a navigable river, or on a strategic port. It's far enough North that the winters are brutal, made worse by the complete lack of moisture to retain heat at night. It's in a valley that traps pollution, so when the sky isn't sleet-grey it's tinged with the browns and yellows of poisons.
The accent in Beijing is jarring. Spoken Chinese can hardly be described as a beautiful language, at least to our Western sensibilities, but even in China the Beijing accent is considered the worst. Imagine, if you will, taxi drivers who are incapable of understanding "Park the car in Harvard Yard", and need the proper accent applied to the sentence for a glimmer of recognition to flutter in their alcohol-shot eyes. Beijing-hua is best spoken with a nasal whine, with a liberal application of Rs to the ends of words.
There is disturbing poverty within a literal stone's-throw of the Great Hall of the People. I'll post pictures of the slums South of Tiananmen soon, but they're truly decrepit. This a block from the black-tinted windows of the black Audis with black government plates.
I live in a rich neighborhood, surrounded by expats and the wealthiest Chinese. Not 30 minutes ago I was in Jenny Lou's, a grocery store that caters to foreigners with its imported goods. The faceless and absent Mrs. Lou is a despicable bitch, however, and would gladly gut your children for an extra dollar's profit. Nevertheless, the place has a monopoly on Triscuits and Macaroni, so we foreign devils pay our king's ransom and smile as she twists the knife. I did not, you'll note, restrictively refer to myself and my foreign colleagues as 'capitalist running dogs' or 'capitalist roaders'. I think it should be clear why. I can understand why foreigners, far from home, would fork over wads of cash for longed-for luxuries. I cannot, however, understand why Chinese locals will pay the same obscene markups for vegetables, fruit, and meats that are no different from those at the Chinese grocer down the street. Watching the Chinese couple in front of me pay $150 for a grocery bill (an astronomic sum nearly equal to a month's salary for your average white-collar Beijing worker), I saw no other option but to dump my loose change into the cups of the beggars outside the store.
The spitting. I have no way of describing it for those of you who haven't visited. There are 3 sounds I'm unable to escape: construction, horns, and HAAAGHH. It's not polite spitting, it's lung-clearing, projectile expulsions. Sometimes a gentleman in a suit will stop on the sidewalk, plug one nostril with a finger, close his mouth, and exhale sharply.
If you're not dodging phlegm, you're dodging cigarette butts (still lit), taxi bumpers, and bicyclists on cell phones.
Beer is expensive and disgusting. Daria and I had drinks at my coworker James's place last weekend, and I felt great the next morning. I'd gotten used to Chinese hangovers, caused by impure alcohol with all its formaldehyde and God knows what. Drinking imported Western liquor, even in quantities, is healthy by comparison. Tsingtao has almost no flavor, no bubbles, no color, and no alcohol. Besides a mild, soapy aftertaste, what's the point? I'm simply unable to drink Chinese liquor. Some pansy-ass Chinese gentleman informed me it was because Western men weren't 'used to' such strong alcohol (the Chinese is more like 'capable of being used to'). I responded by pulling out a hip flask of scotch and inviting him to try what Western men drank. That's another thing- the cultural elitism. China is great, grand, and flawless. I understand that they're restricted in their exposure to media, but the logical disconnect between wanting to be like us and thinking that they're already far superior to us is sort of mind-boggling.
Environmental bombardment. The air hurts, the people make me sick, the noise is penetrating. When I went to Thailand, what amazed me the most was the skies. I'd honestly forgotten that sky was so blue and that clouds were so fluffy. Isn't that depressing?
I go on about the little things that I hate about living here, and it really is little things that build up to make it intolerable, but the worst is that I don't know what's good about this place- I just can't find it. The food can be good. There are occasionally things that are cool, like the red stars on granite, but then I realize that they're cool because they're symbols for things that are blessedly-absent at home.
I've had fun on some of the days when I've been a tourist. There are breathtakingly beautiful buildings and parks here, you just have to seek them out. The problem is that they're not integrated into the city. It's not like Central Park, or the Common, where you just walk through as you get out of the subway on your way to work. To get into the Summer Palace, or even pedestrian Chaoyang Park, you have to pay an entry fee and fight through the throngs of tourists. There is great beauty here, but it's all labeled as such and priced accordingly.
All of this, plus a lack of job satisfaction, an absence of good friends, and steadily declining weight (and health?) combine to make me strongly consider moving back home in the spring. I'm still weighing options, and I think I've found a good English teaching gig here, but I don't know whether the investment of time and mental health will pay off in terms of Chinese learned and resulting career benefits. As much as I was eager to get out of Boston, I think about it rather fondly from here. So besides looking at teaching jobs here I'm looking at lab positions in NYC, Boston, and San Francisco. I don't know how I'll make the eventual decision.
Wednesday, October 24, 2007
In fact, the road to hell.
There are jackhammers going outside my apartment.
It's midnight.
Seriously, people, this is not the road to the future.
edit: I had originally written, "road to civilization", but I think that's inaccurate.
It's midnight.
Seriously, people, this is not the road to the future.
edit: I had originally written, "road to civilization", but I think that's inaccurate.
Tuesday, September 11, 2007
Saturday In the Park
09/07
I was absolutely determined to go out on Friday rather than watch more DVDs, but didn't really have firm plans with anyone, so I ended up sitting alone at the Rickshaw for a while. I chatted briefly with strangers, but I wasn't nearly as successful at insinuating myself into a group as I had been the previous week. I think I probably have to be more forward; relying on situations to present themselves is silly and boring. Later in the evening, Randy, formerly of Harvard, and his friends joined me. We all ran into another group we knew and decided to bar hop together. So I met some new people, some of whom I'm meeting tonight to play poker, and successfully avoided another movie night. I went home late and slept in.
09/08
When I woke up it was still way too early to just sit around in the apartment. Because it was unusually clear and sunny I decided to finally go check out some of the nearby parks. Chaoyang Park, the huge one across from my apartment, was sort of unimpressive, at least the parts I saw. I pretended I didn't hear the gate guard yelling after me as I biked past. I thought she wanted money, but it turns out bikes are banned. She didn't run after me, though, and it wasn't until I was on my way out that I figured out what she'd wanted. The Beijing Pop Festival was going on, so I stood on the opposite side of the lake and listened a bit, but I was eager to find something more scenic.
The next stop was Hong Lingjin (Red Scarf) Park, by way of an interesting street. One side of the road was crumbling and filthy. The stores all sold construction supplies: racks of steel piping, bags of concrete, wire, simple metal tricycles for transportation. This is your destination if you need to run a labor-intensive, low-tech, somewhat shoddy building project. The other side of the road has the Park Avenue apartments, gleaming new towers on manicured, gated grounds. I imagine the side of the building with views towards the park is substantially more expensive than the side overlooking the slums. I tried to take a picture to capture the contrast, but it didn't work very well. I ended up stitching 2 together using photoshop. Had I known how easy the stitching process was I would have taken the pictures with that in mind and gotten a much better shot. Next time. In fact, I think I'm going to try to get some skyline shots in Beijing using stitching, and maybe play around with making the seams invisible.
The park itself was surprisingly nice considering the 4th Ring Road, one of the 5 concentric highways in Beijing, cuts right through the park and over its lake. But the gardens were pleasant and the trees and the bridges were elegant and very much fit my China archetype. The park was also filled with art. There were steel sculptures illustrating Chinese legends, painted mobiles hanging from trees, huge rocks split in half revealing foot-long 'fossils' of insects, and even garbage cans shaped like- well, something anthropomorphic.
I've noticed is that there's no graffiti around town, at least not the spray painted kind. I don't know if they clean it up quickly, if a severe punishment deters artists and vandals, or whether it's just that I live around a snooty expat neighborhood and a neighborhood probably too poor to afford paint. There is, however, extensive use of spray stencils. The otherwise beautiful bridges in the park had at least 4 'No fishing' signs each, and the walls around the park repeated that message and others. I guess the extensive use of sprayed behavioral dictums are a vestige of the Cultural Revolution. If the spray-painted signs aren't enough there are plenty of more western sign boards. I particularly like the warning not to swim in the water translated into English; I can't imagine anyone from a western country even considering a dip in the green, soupy lake. The locals seem not to be bothered by the idea of eating the fish that they catch in brazen violation of the many signs. My view is that if the water's so green you can't see a millimeter below the surface there's probably too much nitrogen in it, and one has to wonder, especially in a city of 17 million, what exactly happens to the nitrogen from human waste?
Here are the pictures from the park. You have to scroll down, I'm afraid, because iWeb messes up my old links if I put the new pictures on top and it doesn't let me use HTML anchors to send you to the bottom. It's lame, and I'll try to figure out a workaround soon. (Edit: I sort of fixed it. Still gimpy, but it'll work for now.)
I was absolutely determined to go out on Friday rather than watch more DVDs, but didn't really have firm plans with anyone, so I ended up sitting alone at the Rickshaw for a while. I chatted briefly with strangers, but I wasn't nearly as successful at insinuating myself into a group as I had been the previous week. I think I probably have to be more forward; relying on situations to present themselves is silly and boring. Later in the evening, Randy, formerly of Harvard, and his friends joined me. We all ran into another group we knew and decided to bar hop together. So I met some new people, some of whom I'm meeting tonight to play poker, and successfully avoided another movie night. I went home late and slept in.
09/08
When I woke up it was still way too early to just sit around in the apartment. Because it was unusually clear and sunny I decided to finally go check out some of the nearby parks. Chaoyang Park, the huge one across from my apartment, was sort of unimpressive, at least the parts I saw. I pretended I didn't hear the gate guard yelling after me as I biked past. I thought she wanted money, but it turns out bikes are banned. She didn't run after me, though, and it wasn't until I was on my way out that I figured out what she'd wanted. The Beijing Pop Festival was going on, so I stood on the opposite side of the lake and listened a bit, but I was eager to find something more scenic.
The next stop was Hong Lingjin (Red Scarf) Park, by way of an interesting street. One side of the road was crumbling and filthy. The stores all sold construction supplies: racks of steel piping, bags of concrete, wire, simple metal tricycles for transportation. This is your destination if you need to run a labor-intensive, low-tech, somewhat shoddy building project. The other side of the road has the Park Avenue apartments, gleaming new towers on manicured, gated grounds. I imagine the side of the building with views towards the park is substantially more expensive than the side overlooking the slums. I tried to take a picture to capture the contrast, but it didn't work very well. I ended up stitching 2 together using photoshop. Had I known how easy the stitching process was I would have taken the pictures with that in mind and gotten a much better shot. Next time. In fact, I think I'm going to try to get some skyline shots in Beijing using stitching, and maybe play around with making the seams invisible.
The park itself was surprisingly nice considering the 4th Ring Road, one of the 5 concentric highways in Beijing, cuts right through the park and over its lake. But the gardens were pleasant and the trees and the bridges were elegant and very much fit my China archetype. The park was also filled with art. There were steel sculptures illustrating Chinese legends, painted mobiles hanging from trees, huge rocks split in half revealing foot-long 'fossils' of insects, and even garbage cans shaped like- well, something anthropomorphic.
I've noticed is that there's no graffiti around town, at least not the spray painted kind. I don't know if they clean it up quickly, if a severe punishment deters artists and vandals, or whether it's just that I live around a snooty expat neighborhood and a neighborhood probably too poor to afford paint. There is, however, extensive use of spray stencils. The otherwise beautiful bridges in the park had at least 4 'No fishing' signs each, and the walls around the park repeated that message and others. I guess the extensive use of sprayed behavioral dictums are a vestige of the Cultural Revolution. If the spray-painted signs aren't enough there are plenty of more western sign boards. I particularly like the warning not to swim in the water translated into English; I can't imagine anyone from a western country even considering a dip in the green, soupy lake. The locals seem not to be bothered by the idea of eating the fish that they catch in brazen violation of the many signs. My view is that if the water's so green you can't see a millimeter below the surface there's probably too much nitrogen in it, and one has to wonder, especially in a city of 17 million, what exactly happens to the nitrogen from human waste?
Here are the pictures from the park. You have to scroll down, I'm afraid, because iWeb messes up my old links if I put the new pictures on top and it doesn't let me use HTML anchors to send you to the bottom. It's lame, and I'll try to figure out a workaround soon. (Edit: I sort of fixed it. Still gimpy, but it'll work for now.)
Friday, September 7, 2007
I've never wanted a briefcase before.
I just had my second meeting in as many days. I spent 2 unproductive weeks trying to to line up meetings and make things happen. Now things have finally started falling into place, but maybe a bit faster than I'd like.
09/06
I had a meeting at the Beijing Pharma and Biotech Center, a biotech promotion group funded by Beijing. The meeting was at 2PM, and their office is about 25km from work, so I knew I had to leave at 1 at the latest. I had some preparation work to do, but I also had a morning meeting with a UN coworker to deal with.
The coworker was trying to get me to help rewrite our Country Service Framework, the description of our activities in China. I had helped on an earlier draft, and it turns out I inadvertently changed UN policy by combining our listed 'priority' and 'goal' in our development and aid framework language. It turns out that the priority was China's and the goal was our own, so for about a week our goals matched China's phrasing. They're similar; it's not like I was devoting the UN to a new socialist countryside or anything. Anyway, besides finding out I accidentally set policy, this conversation took forever. We realized after an hour of discussion that the only tasks I'd actually been given so far were 2 copy/paste operations. I wanted to leave, to get ready for my afternoon meeting, but our talk dragged on and on. She realized it, too, but we've got scheduling problems coming up and had to finish outlining the work. She left for a quick talk with our boss, I scrambled to organize my notes for my meeting, then we got back together to talk some more. I ended up with a real assignment, one involving a working brain and plenty of writing, but I spent my whole morning getting it.
I raced downstairs to a cab and across town, writing notes on the ride. I got out somewhere near the address I'd been given and walked across a medical school campus, complete with beautiful bridges and Chinese eaves, stopping to ask a security guard directions. I was a bit confused about where to turn, but I stumbled on the place, a much bigger office than I'd imagined. That part of town is much less vertical than others, and the office had a big parking lot of its own and an open field on the other side. It wasn't what I'd imagined.
So I sat down with 'Alice' from public affairs, who was translating, and Hong from research, and ended up talking to them for 3 hours. I knew the meeting was running long, but I didn't realize to what degree until I'd left. They gave me some decent information, but since it was mostly translated I didn't get much in the way of quotes. The most exciting part for me was 2 books they had, both reports in Chinese on the local industry and full of statistics. I photocopied the cover and title pages of the books so that I could find them later; they may be the only way to get some damn numbers around here. Hong was very interested in biotech elsewhere in the world, a topic on which I'm now fairly knowledgeable, so I gave them some stats I'd gathered and promised to email them a few reports, in addition to my own when it was done, then we took a picture and I left.
I took a bus to meet Scot nearby at Zhongguancun, the computer and electronics district, where he'd been shopping. I wandered around a bit to check out the huge cell phone and MP3 player selection, but only ended up buying some blank DVDs and an iPod wall charger ($3!). At this point I'm seriously considering these external hard drives with card readers that they have around here. I'd just buy the case and put my own laptop drive in it, I think, rather than trust whatever discount drive they're pushing. The kind of cases I like are light, have batteries built in so you can use them on the road without a wall plug, and have a slot to load a CF card. A setup like this, maybe $100 for a hard drive and $25 for the enclosure, would give me almost unrestricted space for digital pictures while I'm traveling. I just ordered a second 2GB compact flash card for Thailand, so the drive isn't urgent, but I'm seriously thinking about it for the future.
Afterward our getting our geek fix we met Matt and Ben, 2 MIT grads from my year who just moved to Beijing to start work. We had a hot pot dinner in Wudaokou, yet another Beijing district I hadn't seen before. Haidian and Wudaokou are where most of the universities are, so they have a young feeling. Microsoft, Google, and a lot of other tech companies are there, too. After dinner we had some beer on the street and chatted for a bit, then I said goodbye to Scot before his visa run back to the States and rushed off to catch the train home. I only made it part way before the system shut down for the night (I couldn't make a connecting train), so I had to take a cab part of the way.
I got home right before midnight, thankfully, or the elevator would have been off and I would have had to climb up to my apartment. I'm getting sick of the damn Cinderella routine.
09/07
I met Alessandro at the office at 8, and his driver took us to our meeting at the National Center for Biotech Development. Alessandro normally pays this Chinese guy to drive his wife around during the day and leave the car back at the office afterwards. It's cheaper than buying another car, a local guy gets a pretty sweet job, and his wife doesn't have to learn to drive, so I guess it's good all around.
\We had about 5 minutes with the center's director, then he left us with a staffer to answer the rest of our questions. The staffer was polite and nice, he just didn't really know what I want to find out or he doesn't want to tell me. Honestly, I think they don't know. One thing I want is a list of biotech companies in China. He thought they had such a thing in each individual department of their center, and it could maybe be compiled. These guys work in a building together, have a focus on biotech, and rely on their contacts to get anything done, but they don't have a master address book. It's not incompetence, I don't think, just this Chinese attitude wherein you don't coordinate between departments.
Then, as I'm writing this, I get an email from the staffer thanking us for the meeting and 'reminding' me that I have to submit my report to him for approval of any reference to their center before publication. I haven't responded yet, but if a guy in the US asked me for editorial approval after the fact I'd probably laugh at him. I doubt it'll be an issue; I don't think I got anything interesting enough to make it into the report.
09/06
I had a meeting at the Beijing Pharma and Biotech Center, a biotech promotion group funded by Beijing. The meeting was at 2PM, and their office is about 25km from work, so I knew I had to leave at 1 at the latest. I had some preparation work to do, but I also had a morning meeting with a UN coworker to deal with.
The coworker was trying to get me to help rewrite our Country Service Framework, the description of our activities in China. I had helped on an earlier draft, and it turns out I inadvertently changed UN policy by combining our listed 'priority' and 'goal' in our development and aid framework language. It turns out that the priority was China's and the goal was our own, so for about a week our goals matched China's phrasing. They're similar; it's not like I was devoting the UN to a new socialist countryside or anything. Anyway, besides finding out I accidentally set policy, this conversation took forever. We realized after an hour of discussion that the only tasks I'd actually been given so far were 2 copy/paste operations. I wanted to leave, to get ready for my afternoon meeting, but our talk dragged on and on. She realized it, too, but we've got scheduling problems coming up and had to finish outlining the work. She left for a quick talk with our boss, I scrambled to organize my notes for my meeting, then we got back together to talk some more. I ended up with a real assignment, one involving a working brain and plenty of writing, but I spent my whole morning getting it.
I raced downstairs to a cab and across town, writing notes on the ride. I got out somewhere near the address I'd been given and walked across a medical school campus, complete with beautiful bridges and Chinese eaves, stopping to ask a security guard directions. I was a bit confused about where to turn, but I stumbled on the place, a much bigger office than I'd imagined. That part of town is much less vertical than others, and the office had a big parking lot of its own and an open field on the other side. It wasn't what I'd imagined.
So I sat down with 'Alice' from public affairs, who was translating, and Hong from research, and ended up talking to them for 3 hours. I knew the meeting was running long, but I didn't realize to what degree until I'd left. They gave me some decent information, but since it was mostly translated I didn't get much in the way of quotes. The most exciting part for me was 2 books they had, both reports in Chinese on the local industry and full of statistics. I photocopied the cover and title pages of the books so that I could find them later; they may be the only way to get some damn numbers around here. Hong was very interested in biotech elsewhere in the world, a topic on which I'm now fairly knowledgeable, so I gave them some stats I'd gathered and promised to email them a few reports, in addition to my own when it was done, then we took a picture and I left.
I took a bus to meet Scot nearby at Zhongguancun, the computer and electronics district, where he'd been shopping. I wandered around a bit to check out the huge cell phone and MP3 player selection, but only ended up buying some blank DVDs and an iPod wall charger ($3!). At this point I'm seriously considering these external hard drives with card readers that they have around here. I'd just buy the case and put my own laptop drive in it, I think, rather than trust whatever discount drive they're pushing. The kind of cases I like are light, have batteries built in so you can use them on the road without a wall plug, and have a slot to load a CF card. A setup like this, maybe $100 for a hard drive and $25 for the enclosure, would give me almost unrestricted space for digital pictures while I'm traveling. I just ordered a second 2GB compact flash card for Thailand, so the drive isn't urgent, but I'm seriously thinking about it for the future.
Afterward our getting our geek fix we met Matt and Ben, 2 MIT grads from my year who just moved to Beijing to start work. We had a hot pot dinner in Wudaokou, yet another Beijing district I hadn't seen before. Haidian and Wudaokou are where most of the universities are, so they have a young feeling. Microsoft, Google, and a lot of other tech companies are there, too. After dinner we had some beer on the street and chatted for a bit, then I said goodbye to Scot before his visa run back to the States and rushed off to catch the train home. I only made it part way before the system shut down for the night (I couldn't make a connecting train), so I had to take a cab part of the way.
I got home right before midnight, thankfully, or the elevator would have been off and I would have had to climb up to my apartment. I'm getting sick of the damn Cinderella routine.
09/07
I met Alessandro at the office at 8, and his driver took us to our meeting at the National Center for Biotech Development. Alessandro normally pays this Chinese guy to drive his wife around during the day and leave the car back at the office afterwards. It's cheaper than buying another car, a local guy gets a pretty sweet job, and his wife doesn't have to learn to drive, so I guess it's good all around.
\We had about 5 minutes with the center's director, then he left us with a staffer to answer the rest of our questions. The staffer was polite and nice, he just didn't really know what I want to find out or he doesn't want to tell me. Honestly, I think they don't know. One thing I want is a list of biotech companies in China. He thought they had such a thing in each individual department of their center, and it could maybe be compiled. These guys work in a building together, have a focus on biotech, and rely on their contacts to get anything done, but they don't have a master address book. It's not incompetence, I don't think, just this Chinese attitude wherein you don't coordinate between departments.
Then, as I'm writing this, I get an email from the staffer thanking us for the meeting and 'reminding' me that I have to submit my report to him for approval of any reference to their center before publication. I haven't responded yet, but if a guy in the US asked me for editorial approval after the fact I'd probably laugh at him. I doubt it'll be an issue; I don't think I got anything interesting enough to make it into the report.
Monday, September 3, 2007
Shared experiences.
8/31
On Friday the UNIDO director general came through the office. Our Chinese office manager decided that this was an important event, and came by my office to make sure I'd stay until 6:30 to join the staff meeting and photo op. I agreed with them that that was a good idea, and wondered why they'd waited until a few hours beforehand to give me a heads up. Whatever, the only thing I would have done differently is wear a tie. The director seemed to be a nice guy, definitely a politician, but I hope my colleagues will excuse me if I wasn't too impressed by his rank. I looked up his CV out of curiosity, and what immediately struck me is how he went from assistant professor at U. Michigan Dearborn to Minister of Finance in Sierra Leone. That's some kind of a promotion.
I went home around 8 and relaxed for a bit, but I didn't have long before I was supposed to meet Linda and her boyfriend at a bar. They're leaving China soon, and I just wanted an excuse to go out. I didn't get around to eating dinner, usually a bad idea before hitting bars, but drinking coffee all day had messed with my appetite. I changed clothes, decided against the bike lights because I didn't want to carry them all evening, and set off, showing up at the Rickshaw a while before they did. While I was sitting alone in a lawn chair in the courtyard, drinking my expensive Tsingtao, I was invited to join a couple of girls and a guy at a table nearby.
Have I mentioned how much I love this phenomenon? In my experience, friends either have shared interests or shared experiences. These are the bonds that hold people together, and the best friends have plenty of both. In a place like China, expats all have a common shared experience before they even meet. If nothing else, you're guaranteed to be able to talk about China, and that makes starting conversations relatively easy. Of course talking about China with everyone gets old after a while, but the potential is there. Think about it- people in a NYC subway would never talk with strangers, but the instant there's a power outage, boom, there's a shared experience and people emerge from their bubbles. In line at the airport? I bet you're silent unless the line's brutally long or your flight's delayed, when the shared suffering gives you something in common. There are exceptions, but the rule works fairly well. It's one of the reasons I was such a fan of drinking shots of liquor in college (Hi, mom!) If you drink a beer nearby someone you don't know then it's a just couple of people having a beer, but inviting them to gather in a circle, coming up with a toast, grimacing about the burn of the liquor all produces a weird camaraderie that lingers beyond the act of drinking. And no, it's not just the additional intoxication brought on by the booze.
Anyway, so I join these 3 at their table. One's a heavily-tattooed, 30-something American guy living for years in Indonesia on his savings, claiming to spend $8 a month on rent. Another's a Canadian girl working for a security publication in Beijing with aspirations of holding public office back home in Toronto. The third's a Greek/Italian girl whose line of work I missed. Linda and her boyfriend come, other people join the original 3, and after a hanging out for a while we go our separate ways. I got the Greek girl's cellphone number, and I'll likely see her again, by coincidence if not on purpose. Such is the small world of the Beijing expat ghetto. This happened all evening- meeting and chatting with new people, being asked directions by strangers (and me accidently telling them the wrong street), being offered pot disguised as Marlboros by the Libyans who don't speak English, Chinese, or Spanish but welcome me at the open seat at their table. No thanks, I don't like the idea of Chinese jail, but it was nice of them to ask.
09/01-02
It was a quiet weekend. I didn't get in until 5AM after seeing Linda and her boyfriend off on Friday, and I didn't get up until 2:30 on Saturday. I watched a lot of movies, read some books, and did some research on freelance writing for science publications. The article below is one of my reject ideas, something I wanted to write about that didn't really fit into the science category. It feels strange not citing sources, but I guess I should try to get used to that. I'm also not very good at this style of writing, I don't think, so I'll try to get some more practice in before I start sending things off for real.
On Friday the UNIDO director general came through the office. Our Chinese office manager decided that this was an important event, and came by my office to make sure I'd stay until 6:30 to join the staff meeting and photo op. I agreed with them that that was a good idea, and wondered why they'd waited until a few hours beforehand to give me a heads up. Whatever, the only thing I would have done differently is wear a tie. The director seemed to be a nice guy, definitely a politician, but I hope my colleagues will excuse me if I wasn't too impressed by his rank. I looked up his CV out of curiosity, and what immediately struck me is how he went from assistant professor at U. Michigan Dearborn to Minister of Finance in Sierra Leone. That's some kind of a promotion.
I went home around 8 and relaxed for a bit, but I didn't have long before I was supposed to meet Linda and her boyfriend at a bar. They're leaving China soon, and I just wanted an excuse to go out. I didn't get around to eating dinner, usually a bad idea before hitting bars, but drinking coffee all day had messed with my appetite. I changed clothes, decided against the bike lights because I didn't want to carry them all evening, and set off, showing up at the Rickshaw a while before they did. While I was sitting alone in a lawn chair in the courtyard, drinking my expensive Tsingtao, I was invited to join a couple of girls and a guy at a table nearby.
Have I mentioned how much I love this phenomenon? In my experience, friends either have shared interests or shared experiences. These are the bonds that hold people together, and the best friends have plenty of both. In a place like China, expats all have a common shared experience before they even meet. If nothing else, you're guaranteed to be able to talk about China, and that makes starting conversations relatively easy. Of course talking about China with everyone gets old after a while, but the potential is there. Think about it- people in a NYC subway would never talk with strangers, but the instant there's a power outage, boom, there's a shared experience and people emerge from their bubbles. In line at the airport? I bet you're silent unless the line's brutally long or your flight's delayed, when the shared suffering gives you something in common. There are exceptions, but the rule works fairly well. It's one of the reasons I was such a fan of drinking shots of liquor in college (Hi, mom!) If you drink a beer nearby someone you don't know then it's a just couple of people having a beer, but inviting them to gather in a circle, coming up with a toast, grimacing about the burn of the liquor all produces a weird camaraderie that lingers beyond the act of drinking. And no, it's not just the additional intoxication brought on by the booze.
Anyway, so I join these 3 at their table. One's a heavily-tattooed, 30-something American guy living for years in Indonesia on his savings, claiming to spend $8 a month on rent. Another's a Canadian girl working for a security publication in Beijing with aspirations of holding public office back home in Toronto. The third's a Greek/Italian girl whose line of work I missed. Linda and her boyfriend come, other people join the original 3, and after a hanging out for a while we go our separate ways. I got the Greek girl's cellphone number, and I'll likely see her again, by coincidence if not on purpose. Such is the small world of the Beijing expat ghetto. This happened all evening- meeting and chatting with new people, being asked directions by strangers (and me accidently telling them the wrong street), being offered pot disguised as Marlboros by the Libyans who don't speak English, Chinese, or Spanish but welcome me at the open seat at their table. No thanks, I don't like the idea of Chinese jail, but it was nice of them to ask.
09/01-02
It was a quiet weekend. I didn't get in until 5AM after seeing Linda and her boyfriend off on Friday, and I didn't get up until 2:30 on Saturday. I watched a lot of movies, read some books, and did some research on freelance writing for science publications. The article below is one of my reject ideas, something I wanted to write about that didn't really fit into the science category. It feels strange not citing sources, but I guess I should try to get used to that. I'm also not very good at this style of writing, I don't think, so I'll try to get some more practice in before I start sending things off for real.
Wednesday, August 29, 2007
If my posts had fewer subjects it'd be easier to come up with clever titles.
8/24
Night out at 5:19
I decided that I should go out to a bar. I was sick of sitting around watching TV and eager to try to meet people, and I'd seen on the thatsbeijing forum that a member was performing at a place nearby called 5:19, so I decided to check it out.
5:19 was quiet. There was the forum member playing guitar and singing rather competently, plus maybe 10 other people on the first floor. There were others upstairs on the roof, but I didn't know that yet. So I ordered a drink, much to my regret turning down the Bombay Sapphire in favor of the dramatically cheaper Gordon's Dry in my gin and tonic. I chatted with a few of the guys sitting around on some couches. They turned out to be Americans working in construction on the new US embassy, and were all pretty drunk. The conversation was much as you'd expect a chat with drunk construction workers to be, revolving around booze, women, and sports. I politely declined their invitation to go next door to dance with the Filipina girls, explaining with a straight face that I was waiting for a friend.
I chatted with the bartender and owner, Dave from Canada, who was running the business in his retirement. I asked him why he'd stayed in China after his decade-long contract with the mining company was up and after his wife divorced him, and he answered that he couldn't imagine readjusting to civilization.
I met the musician, who I'd previously chatted with in the online forum, and we went upstairs to the roof to hang out with some others. There he introduced me to an older guy from Montana working on the communications infrastructure for the Olympics.
I took the opportunity to ask how he felt about potential protests, which was apparently a red-button issue. It ended up a 3-hour, heated debate about freedoms, respect, and the 'greatest stage ever set on earth'. I thought for a while he was drunk, but it later turned out he was a recovering alcoholic and he'd been drinking tonic water. Anyway, we had radically different points of view. In the young and naive corner, I supported protest and free speech and the ability and obligation of individuals to change the world. He had a much more jaded attitude about the potential for change, and he also believed that the Olympics shouldn't be interrupted by dissent. His arguments weren't very good, but one that held up for me was that public protest would inevitably disrupt some poor athlete's proudest moment. He also had this weird belief that Olympics were about hope for the Chinese people, and that protesting would somehow betray that hope. I personally think that most Chinese see the Olympics more as an opportunity to make a quick buck by whatever means they can than they do a source of hope or pride. Anyway, he argued on the grounds that protesting against injustices in China during thr Olympics was somehow taking away hope from the Chinese people, which was just weird. By this point the bar had closed, which I didn't think they did in Beijing, and we were standing outside the front door debating. He finally misquoted Ben Franklin at me, saying, "He who sacrifices hope for security gets neither." (What?) When of course it's, "He who sacrifices LIBERTY for security deserves neither." So when I pointed his error out to him, trying hard not to jump up and down in glee that he made my point for me, we agreed to disagree and I went home for the night. I didn't meet anyone my age and I didn't meet any girls, but at least I got out of the house.
8/25
On Saturday I met my language exchange partner for the second time, this time at a Starbucks in Guomao halfway between our places. We haven't been very diligent about studying, to say the least. As much as I loathe Starbucks, it was nice to overpay for a giant coffee; I had no idea how much I'd miss the drink. So we chatted for a few hours, asking questions and taking notes. I managed to drop my pocket PC with my electronic dictionary off of the table and down 2 flights of stairs, but it survived intact, probably thanks to the heavy metal case that I've hated lugging around.
Bike repairs (Or, "No, no. Night time is when I fill the hole with water")
It was getting dark when I got back to the subway station where I'd left my bike. I had already put on my helmet and flashing lights and started riding down the street when I realized that my rear tire was flat. Fortunately, China has bicycle repair 'shops' on just about every corner They're really just 3-wheeled carts with supplies and a grease-covered older guy sitting on a stool, but they work. I remembered that only a moment ago I'd seen one across the street from where my bike was parked. Then, as I got off my bike and turned around, something clicked- those bastards flattened my tire. Furious, but trying to act cool, I walked my bike over to the cart and asked to use his pump, hoping they'd just let the air out. So I pumped up my tube and stood around for a minute poking at the tire. It was leaking, so I asked the guy how much it'd be to change the tube. He wanted 40RMB, but I talked him down to 25RMB ($3.50 for parts and labor), plus I get to keep the dead tube, which I'll throw away to prevent him from pawning it off on someone who doesn't know a new one from a patch job. When he took the tire off I checked it for anything along the inside which could re-puncture the tube. Assuming he's competent, he should have done that himself if he didn't know how the tube was damaged. He had a water bowl, so I pumped the tube up and slowly ran the length of it through the water until I found the leak, an invisible line of holes along the seam. It could have been a slightly split seam or it could have been someone with a needle poking my tire a few times. Who knows, but after he put my wheel back on I waited for a few minutes to make sure all was kosher before I paid him and left. I don't know if he actually did kill my tube, but everyone here I've mentioned the incident to thinks he did.
8/27-28
On Monday and Tuesday I got little done at work, or so it always seems to feel. I'm calling and emailing a bunch of people in the government and research institutions, trying to get information and set up meetings. I finally managed to schedule one with the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Science on Wednesday, but other than that I mostly got passed around from person to person and played phone and email tag.
Alessandro, one of UNIDO's permanent staff, has been really helpful about suggesting names and sending emails out through his account with his name on them, so that's been encouraging. We also have fun chats during the day on everything from his part-time job at the opera during college, where he chatted with Pavarotti and had to carry around large, 'dead' sopranos on stage; to articles in the Economist; to hiking and climbing. He's much older than I am, has a wife and a kid, but it's cool to have someone at work to interact with on a social level.
This week I was also tasked with writing the copy for the new UNIDO China brochure. I don't mind doing some of this kind of work for the people here; it makes me feel like I'm pulling my weight and it keeps them happy.
Exercise, plus what do do with my time
The evenings have been slow and long since my 1 month membership for yoga expired. I would have re-upped it, but I'll leave for Thailand before the full month and it seemed expensive to waste that time. As a result I'm going home earlier and still not doing much when I get there. I've been thinking about getting back into martial arts, so I've been shopping around. I found a well-regarded jiu jitsu school down in SOHO, about 15 minutes from work by bike, which I'll probably check out, but I realized that since I'm in China I should probably take advantage of it by learning something local. I've been asking around about taiji and kung fu teachers, but they're elusive. Most of the best teachers seem to be old guys who teach in parks, just not in the parks near me. They also charge lesson by lesson, payable in cash, and aren't cheap. So I'm looking, but I don't know if it's a practical idea.
The other fitness thing I've recently stumbled on is this yoga retreat outside of the city. It's not cheap, but neither is it too expensive- on the order of $100 for a weekend with food, transportation, accommodation, and classes included. It sounds fun, but the most amazing part is the setting; one location is an old Buddhist temple, another has property around a crumbling stretch of the Great Wall. It seems great, assuming I can handle that big a dose of hippie-ness in a weekend.
8/29
My first work meeting with a 'local expert'
After much debate I ended up wearing my suit to my meeting at the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Science. I seriously wonder what people think when they see me walking around wearing a jacket, tie, and eyebrow piercing. I sort of like the contradiction, and I guess I'll settle for it if I can't dye my hair fun colors. No one in China dresses up; it's like casual Friday meets the Caribbean, with short-sleeve button up shirts all around for the elite businessmen and officials and track pants and polo shirts for the rest. It's sort of a shame that a country with such a cool sartorial tradition has settled on the lowest common denominator of Western dress. Even during the Cultural Revolution, although the clothing was uniform, it was unique and interesting.
I got up at 6:30 to make it to my meeting by 9, biking to work to collect my notes and drop off my computer, then catching a cab to Haidian, some 15km away, during rush hour. I got to read papers and jot notes during the ride through the morning traffic, so I understand the appeal of chauffeurs for people with money and stressful jobs. The taxi driver didn't know exactly where to go, but we managed to navigate there successfully, marking the occasion as the first time the Chinese GPS software on my pocket PC has been useful, and even then it wasn't while hooked up to the GPS. The campus of the institute, along with the rest of China, was gutted by construction, so I hiked in dress shoes over piles of dirt and under tin roofs until I found the right building.
The man I was meeting with, a Prof. Huang, had come downstairs to meet me when I called him to tell him I was nearby. We shook hands and headed up to his office. After the business card swap ritual we got down to business, but as an aside, how are you supposed to take the card you're accepting with 2 hands while simultaneously offer your own the same way? I assume you take turns, but who offers first? The actual trade ended up a weird tangle, but I don't think he cared. He spent a couple of years at Cornell, studying abroad as everyone here seems to do, so was probably lower key about some things than he could have been.
Prof. Huang is the head of biotech research at the institute, a scientist, not a suit. He was wearing a tie, however, so I just took my jacket off and the clothing thing worked out after all. I started by telling him about my research and my goals, and then we dove right into my list of questions. Unfortunately this whole exchange was in English. His wasn't great, but he knew the relevant vocabulary, so it went better than it would have if I'd tried to come up with Chinese for 'cultivars' or 'herbicide'. I ended up with some good notes, a powerpoint presentation with stats, and an introduction to a guy at the Chinese Center for Agricultural Policy whose papers I've read, so all in all it was productive.
When I got back to work I took my taxi receipts to the administrative assistant to figure out how to get reimbursed. She asked me to write my name and the purpose of the taxi trip on the receipt. "Just write, 'meeting'," she said. So I did, she added up the total for the 2 receipts on her calculator, asked if I could break a hundred, and handed me cash on the spot. How cool is that? In a country filled with red tape, in an organization known for bureaucracy, I got my taxi receipts refunded from petty cash out of a drawer in the assistant's desk.
Night out at 5:19
I decided that I should go out to a bar. I was sick of sitting around watching TV and eager to try to meet people, and I'd seen on the thatsbeijing forum that a member was performing at a place nearby called 5:19, so I decided to check it out.
5:19 was quiet. There was the forum member playing guitar and singing rather competently, plus maybe 10 other people on the first floor. There were others upstairs on the roof, but I didn't know that yet. So I ordered a drink, much to my regret turning down the Bombay Sapphire in favor of the dramatically cheaper Gordon's Dry in my gin and tonic. I chatted with a few of the guys sitting around on some couches. They turned out to be Americans working in construction on the new US embassy, and were all pretty drunk. The conversation was much as you'd expect a chat with drunk construction workers to be, revolving around booze, women, and sports. I politely declined their invitation to go next door to dance with the Filipina girls, explaining with a straight face that I was waiting for a friend.
I chatted with the bartender and owner, Dave from Canada, who was running the business in his retirement. I asked him why he'd stayed in China after his decade-long contract with the mining company was up and after his wife divorced him, and he answered that he couldn't imagine readjusting to civilization.
I met the musician, who I'd previously chatted with in the online forum, and we went upstairs to the roof to hang out with some others. There he introduced me to an older guy from Montana working on the communications infrastructure for the Olympics.
I took the opportunity to ask how he felt about potential protests, which was apparently a red-button issue. It ended up a 3-hour, heated debate about freedoms, respect, and the 'greatest stage ever set on earth'. I thought for a while he was drunk, but it later turned out he was a recovering alcoholic and he'd been drinking tonic water. Anyway, we had radically different points of view. In the young and naive corner, I supported protest and free speech and the ability and obligation of individuals to change the world. He had a much more jaded attitude about the potential for change, and he also believed that the Olympics shouldn't be interrupted by dissent. His arguments weren't very good, but one that held up for me was that public protest would inevitably disrupt some poor athlete's proudest moment. He also had this weird belief that Olympics were about hope for the Chinese people, and that protesting would somehow betray that hope. I personally think that most Chinese see the Olympics more as an opportunity to make a quick buck by whatever means they can than they do a source of hope or pride. Anyway, he argued on the grounds that protesting against injustices in China during thr Olympics was somehow taking away hope from the Chinese people, which was just weird. By this point the bar had closed, which I didn't think they did in Beijing, and we were standing outside the front door debating. He finally misquoted Ben Franklin at me, saying, "He who sacrifices hope for security gets neither." (What?) When of course it's, "He who sacrifices LIBERTY for security deserves neither." So when I pointed his error out to him, trying hard not to jump up and down in glee that he made my point for me, we agreed to disagree and I went home for the night. I didn't meet anyone my age and I didn't meet any girls, but at least I got out of the house.
8/25
On Saturday I met my language exchange partner for the second time, this time at a Starbucks in Guomao halfway between our places. We haven't been very diligent about studying, to say the least. As much as I loathe Starbucks, it was nice to overpay for a giant coffee; I had no idea how much I'd miss the drink. So we chatted for a few hours, asking questions and taking notes. I managed to drop my pocket PC with my electronic dictionary off of the table and down 2 flights of stairs, but it survived intact, probably thanks to the heavy metal case that I've hated lugging around.
Bike repairs (Or, "No, no. Night time is when I fill the hole with water")
It was getting dark when I got back to the subway station where I'd left my bike. I had already put on my helmet and flashing lights and started riding down the street when I realized that my rear tire was flat. Fortunately, China has bicycle repair 'shops' on just about every corner They're really just 3-wheeled carts with supplies and a grease-covered older guy sitting on a stool, but they work. I remembered that only a moment ago I'd seen one across the street from where my bike was parked. Then, as I got off my bike and turned around, something clicked- those bastards flattened my tire. Furious, but trying to act cool, I walked my bike over to the cart and asked to use his pump, hoping they'd just let the air out. So I pumped up my tube and stood around for a minute poking at the tire. It was leaking, so I asked the guy how much it'd be to change the tube. He wanted 40RMB, but I talked him down to 25RMB ($3.50 for parts and labor), plus I get to keep the dead tube, which I'll throw away to prevent him from pawning it off on someone who doesn't know a new one from a patch job. When he took the tire off I checked it for anything along the inside which could re-puncture the tube. Assuming he's competent, he should have done that himself if he didn't know how the tube was damaged. He had a water bowl, so I pumped the tube up and slowly ran the length of it through the water until I found the leak, an invisible line of holes along the seam. It could have been a slightly split seam or it could have been someone with a needle poking my tire a few times. Who knows, but after he put my wheel back on I waited for a few minutes to make sure all was kosher before I paid him and left. I don't know if he actually did kill my tube, but everyone here I've mentioned the incident to thinks he did.
8/27-28
On Monday and Tuesday I got little done at work, or so it always seems to feel. I'm calling and emailing a bunch of people in the government and research institutions, trying to get information and set up meetings. I finally managed to schedule one with the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Science on Wednesday, but other than that I mostly got passed around from person to person and played phone and email tag.
Alessandro, one of UNIDO's permanent staff, has been really helpful about suggesting names and sending emails out through his account with his name on them, so that's been encouraging. We also have fun chats during the day on everything from his part-time job at the opera during college, where he chatted with Pavarotti and had to carry around large, 'dead' sopranos on stage; to articles in the Economist; to hiking and climbing. He's much older than I am, has a wife and a kid, but it's cool to have someone at work to interact with on a social level.
This week I was also tasked with writing the copy for the new UNIDO China brochure. I don't mind doing some of this kind of work for the people here; it makes me feel like I'm pulling my weight and it keeps them happy.
Exercise, plus what do do with my time
The evenings have been slow and long since my 1 month membership for yoga expired. I would have re-upped it, but I'll leave for Thailand before the full month and it seemed expensive to waste that time. As a result I'm going home earlier and still not doing much when I get there. I've been thinking about getting back into martial arts, so I've been shopping around. I found a well-regarded jiu jitsu school down in SOHO, about 15 minutes from work by bike, which I'll probably check out, but I realized that since I'm in China I should probably take advantage of it by learning something local. I've been asking around about taiji and kung fu teachers, but they're elusive. Most of the best teachers seem to be old guys who teach in parks, just not in the parks near me. They also charge lesson by lesson, payable in cash, and aren't cheap. So I'm looking, but I don't know if it's a practical idea.
The other fitness thing I've recently stumbled on is this yoga retreat outside of the city. It's not cheap, but neither is it too expensive- on the order of $100 for a weekend with food, transportation, accommodation, and classes included. It sounds fun, but the most amazing part is the setting; one location is an old Buddhist temple, another has property around a crumbling stretch of the Great Wall. It seems great, assuming I can handle that big a dose of hippie-ness in a weekend.
8/29
My first work meeting with a 'local expert'
After much debate I ended up wearing my suit to my meeting at the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Science. I seriously wonder what people think when they see me walking around wearing a jacket, tie, and eyebrow piercing. I sort of like the contradiction, and I guess I'll settle for it if I can't dye my hair fun colors. No one in China dresses up; it's like casual Friday meets the Caribbean, with short-sleeve button up shirts all around for the elite businessmen and officials and track pants and polo shirts for the rest. It's sort of a shame that a country with such a cool sartorial tradition has settled on the lowest common denominator of Western dress. Even during the Cultural Revolution, although the clothing was uniform, it was unique and interesting.
I got up at 6:30 to make it to my meeting by 9, biking to work to collect my notes and drop off my computer, then catching a cab to Haidian, some 15km away, during rush hour. I got to read papers and jot notes during the ride through the morning traffic, so I understand the appeal of chauffeurs for people with money and stressful jobs. The taxi driver didn't know exactly where to go, but we managed to navigate there successfully, marking the occasion as the first time the Chinese GPS software on my pocket PC has been useful, and even then it wasn't while hooked up to the GPS. The campus of the institute, along with the rest of China, was gutted by construction, so I hiked in dress shoes over piles of dirt and under tin roofs until I found the right building.
The man I was meeting with, a Prof. Huang, had come downstairs to meet me when I called him to tell him I was nearby. We shook hands and headed up to his office. After the business card swap ritual we got down to business, but as an aside, how are you supposed to take the card you're accepting with 2 hands while simultaneously offer your own the same way? I assume you take turns, but who offers first? The actual trade ended up a weird tangle, but I don't think he cared. He spent a couple of years at Cornell, studying abroad as everyone here seems to do, so was probably lower key about some things than he could have been.
Prof. Huang is the head of biotech research at the institute, a scientist, not a suit. He was wearing a tie, however, so I just took my jacket off and the clothing thing worked out after all. I started by telling him about my research and my goals, and then we dove right into my list of questions. Unfortunately this whole exchange was in English. His wasn't great, but he knew the relevant vocabulary, so it went better than it would have if I'd tried to come up with Chinese for 'cultivars' or 'herbicide'. I ended up with some good notes, a powerpoint presentation with stats, and an introduction to a guy at the Chinese Center for Agricultural Policy whose papers I've read, so all in all it was productive.
When I got back to work I took my taxi receipts to the administrative assistant to figure out how to get reimbursed. She asked me to write my name and the purpose of the taxi trip on the receipt. "Just write, 'meeting'," she said. So I did, she added up the total for the 2 receipts on her calculator, asked if I could break a hundred, and handed me cash on the spot. How cool is that? In a country filled with red tape, in an organization known for bureaucracy, I got my taxi receipts refunded from petty cash out of a drawer in the assistant's desk.
Wednesday, August 22, 2007
What do duck, military history, and bars have in common?
08/16
Thursday I went to yoga, went home and showered, then biked downtown to meet up with Scot and Catlin for dinner. An girl from MIT came along, and a guy from Harvard met us halfway through our meal, which was my first Peking duck in Peking. It was good, but not as spectacular as I'd hoped. I'll have to try a couple more places. The rest of the meal was pretty standard, but since it was more expensive than the places I tend to eat there was less (maybe no?) MSG and less oil. So it was fun, but sort of sad, as it was my goodbye to Catlin before she went back home. So stay in touch, Catlin.
08/17
Friday night I stayed in. I thought about going to see BT perform at a club literally across the street from my apartment, but I decided against going alone and paying more than I could afford, and I don't listen to his stuff much these days, anyway. So I watched DVDs. I should have studied Chinese, but I'm weak-willed. My (rather pathetic) excuse has been that I don't have a desk lamp and that it's too hard on my eyes to do it in the poor overhead lighting at night. Well, I'm buying a desk lamp today.
08/18
Jack, my flatmate's boyfriend who's sharing the apartment with me right now while Xie Fan is in Hong Kong dealing with a death in his family, invited me to go to the Temple of Heaven. I was tempted to tag along and get some Chinese practice in, but I'm trying to save these big, dramatic touristy things for when Adri or Daria (or anyone else that buys a ticket, hint to you all) come. That, plus the fact that it's the PLA's 80th anniversary and I was told I could see China's new J-10 fighter at the Military History Museum (they spoke lies) led me to turn him down and go to the museum on my own.
On my way to the subway I finally found the military surplus store I was looking for. They have some stuff there, but not the hat I'm looking for or exactly the right jacket. I really want to find navy or gray Cultural-Revolution gear.
I also took some street pictures as I biked. One illustrates the superfluous crossing guards (8 at an intersection, albeit a very large intersection, 3 visible in the photo.) Another is a sea of umbrellas on a sunny day like I discussed when I talked about combat walking. Some are construction photos, particularly of the cool new CCTV towers that are being built at an angle, eventually to be connected on top with an 'L' shape.
In the subway I noticed that there was a battery of monitors over the platform. I thought that it was a weird place for security monitors, but on closer inspection I realized that they showed every subway train door and were meant to be visible to the train conductor so he could control door closing. I thought it was neat.
I posted pictures from the museum, but other than that there's not much to say. It was absolutely crazy packed with people. I didn't understand enough of what was written on most of the signs to learn much Chinese military history, but the exhibits went back to the very beginning of the nationalist movement to the 2007 PLA anniversary with a tank simulator, updated uniforms (which look much like the US's, to much scandal), and lots of video displays that can only be described as recruiting material. Another observation is that the gift shop is on the 4th floor, way out of the way. Not only do you not have to go through it on the way out, but to get there you have to climb an awful lot of stairs to get from the 3rd to 4th floor. It was jammed with people anyway, so I guess it's not a problem.
On my way home I got a message from Scot, so we met up at the subway stop for dinner and beer. After that we started walking north up to Sanlitun, near where I work and live, to meet an MIT guy and to go to some bars. The hike is a few miles, but we broke it up with a short side-trip to Wal-Mart. I've been meaning to make the pilgrimage since I'd arrived, and I finally got my chance. It's a lot like what you'd expect from a Wal-Mart, only in Chinese. The one glaring difference I noticed was that checkout lines were short and really densely packed. We bought a durian (big spiky fruit with the strongest smell you can imagine) and cheated by having the employees cut it up for us, then continued on our hike north. I had the durian in my backpack sealed in 3 plastic bags, but it was still pretty strong.
We met Ben, the MIT guy who was in China teaching this summer, in Sanlitun, but the bars weren't really very full at 10pm. We went to Butterfly, one of the few bars I've found in Beijing that I like, mostly for its prices, and had a couple of drinks. We asked if we could eat our durian, and were surprised when they said yes. So we cracked it out. The flavor wasn't as strong as you'd expect from the smell, and was actually pleasant, but the texture was strange and soft. The waiters came by almost immediately and asked us to put it away.
We checked out Alfa, which was a fairly quiet lounge with high prices, and Nanjie, which wasn't really hopping either, but had outdoor seating next to a field and looked like it might be fun some other time. Bar Blue, winner of best in Beijing last year, seemed classy, but also wasn't packed and was way more than I wanted to pay.
So we sat at outdoor tables at Pure Girl Bar and played a drinking game with chopsticks while we people-watched. Besides lots of couples making out there were a few drunk drivers coming down the alley. One guy crashed his motorcycle about 10 feet from us. I jumped up and ran over with a couple of other people while I watched others jump up and run away- that made me feel good. The driver was a black guy with bleached hair, a sleeveless shirt, lots of bling, sunglasses on after midnight, and of course no helmet. He was ok, but he took the entire side panel off of his Honda rice rocket and destroyed one of the bar's signs. After making sure he was unhurt and wasn't about to ride off I sat back down and watched him pick at his bike and try to gather some dignity. I'd say he's an ambassador's son. I guess that because Chinese companies are loathe to hire blacks and as a result there aren't many around. The racism means that most of the blacks here, based on my observations, are with embassies or are students. Students can't buy motorcycles in China and don't tend to look that wealthy, and I guess that African embassy workers might not be that rich, either.
I went home at 3 or so, enjoyed climbing the 14 flights to the apartment, and went to sleep.
Thursday I went to yoga, went home and showered, then biked downtown to meet up with Scot and Catlin for dinner. An girl from MIT came along, and a guy from Harvard met us halfway through our meal, which was my first Peking duck in Peking. It was good, but not as spectacular as I'd hoped. I'll have to try a couple more places. The rest of the meal was pretty standard, but since it was more expensive than the places I tend to eat there was less (maybe no?) MSG and less oil. So it was fun, but sort of sad, as it was my goodbye to Catlin before she went back home. So stay in touch, Catlin.
08/17
Friday night I stayed in. I thought about going to see BT perform at a club literally across the street from my apartment, but I decided against going alone and paying more than I could afford, and I don't listen to his stuff much these days, anyway. So I watched DVDs. I should have studied Chinese, but I'm weak-willed. My (rather pathetic) excuse has been that I don't have a desk lamp and that it's too hard on my eyes to do it in the poor overhead lighting at night. Well, I'm buying a desk lamp today.
08/18
Jack, my flatmate's boyfriend who's sharing the apartment with me right now while Xie Fan is in Hong Kong dealing with a death in his family, invited me to go to the Temple of Heaven. I was tempted to tag along and get some Chinese practice in, but I'm trying to save these big, dramatic touristy things for when Adri or Daria (or anyone else that buys a ticket, hint to you all) come. That, plus the fact that it's the PLA's 80th anniversary and I was told I could see China's new J-10 fighter at the Military History Museum (they spoke lies) led me to turn him down and go to the museum on my own.
On my way to the subway I finally found the military surplus store I was looking for. They have some stuff there, but not the hat I'm looking for or exactly the right jacket. I really want to find navy or gray Cultural-Revolution gear.
I also took some street pictures as I biked. One illustrates the superfluous crossing guards (8 at an intersection, albeit a very large intersection, 3 visible in the photo.) Another is a sea of umbrellas on a sunny day like I discussed when I talked about combat walking. Some are construction photos, particularly of the cool new CCTV towers that are being built at an angle, eventually to be connected on top with an 'L' shape.
In the subway I noticed that there was a battery of monitors over the platform. I thought that it was a weird place for security monitors, but on closer inspection I realized that they showed every subway train door and were meant to be visible to the train conductor so he could control door closing. I thought it was neat.
I posted pictures from the museum, but other than that there's not much to say. It was absolutely crazy packed with people. I didn't understand enough of what was written on most of the signs to learn much Chinese military history, but the exhibits went back to the very beginning of the nationalist movement to the 2007 PLA anniversary with a tank simulator, updated uniforms (which look much like the US's, to much scandal), and lots of video displays that can only be described as recruiting material. Another observation is that the gift shop is on the 4th floor, way out of the way. Not only do you not have to go through it on the way out, but to get there you have to climb an awful lot of stairs to get from the 3rd to 4th floor. It was jammed with people anyway, so I guess it's not a problem.
On my way home I got a message from Scot, so we met up at the subway stop for dinner and beer. After that we started walking north up to Sanlitun, near where I work and live, to meet an MIT guy and to go to some bars. The hike is a few miles, but we broke it up with a short side-trip to Wal-Mart. I've been meaning to make the pilgrimage since I'd arrived, and I finally got my chance. It's a lot like what you'd expect from a Wal-Mart, only in Chinese. The one glaring difference I noticed was that checkout lines were short and really densely packed. We bought a durian (big spiky fruit with the strongest smell you can imagine) and cheated by having the employees cut it up for us, then continued on our hike north. I had the durian in my backpack sealed in 3 plastic bags, but it was still pretty strong.
We met Ben, the MIT guy who was in China teaching this summer, in Sanlitun, but the bars weren't really very full at 10pm. We went to Butterfly, one of the few bars I've found in Beijing that I like, mostly for its prices, and had a couple of drinks. We asked if we could eat our durian, and were surprised when they said yes. So we cracked it out. The flavor wasn't as strong as you'd expect from the smell, and was actually pleasant, but the texture was strange and soft. The waiters came by almost immediately and asked us to put it away.
We checked out Alfa, which was a fairly quiet lounge with high prices, and Nanjie, which wasn't really hopping either, but had outdoor seating next to a field and looked like it might be fun some other time. Bar Blue, winner of best in Beijing last year, seemed classy, but also wasn't packed and was way more than I wanted to pay.
So we sat at outdoor tables at Pure Girl Bar and played a drinking game with chopsticks while we people-watched. Besides lots of couples making out there were a few drunk drivers coming down the alley. One guy crashed his motorcycle about 10 feet from us. I jumped up and ran over with a couple of other people while I watched others jump up and run away- that made me feel good. The driver was a black guy with bleached hair, a sleeveless shirt, lots of bling, sunglasses on after midnight, and of course no helmet. He was ok, but he took the entire side panel off of his Honda rice rocket and destroyed one of the bar's signs. After making sure he was unhurt and wasn't about to ride off I sat back down and watched him pick at his bike and try to gather some dignity. I'd say he's an ambassador's son. I guess that because Chinese companies are loathe to hire blacks and as a result there aren't many around. The racism means that most of the blacks here, based on my observations, are with embassies or are students. Students can't buy motorcycles in China and don't tend to look that wealthy, and I guess that African embassy workers might not be that rich, either.
I went home at 3 or so, enjoyed climbing the 14 flights to the apartment, and went to sleep.
Tuesday, August 7, 2007
A Remembrance of Things Past, and almost as long.
Sorry for these epic, week-spanning posts. I'll try to write more regularly and in smaller chunks.
7/31?
Beijing weather
I think I wrote this on Tuesday, but I didn't get around to posting it. Of course it's raining again as I write now.
"I'm in the middle of the most dramatic storm I've ever seen, and that includes tennis ball-sized hail hitting Oak Ridge. Lighting flashes every couple of seconds and thunder rolls and crashes ceaselessly. The wind is whistling in the windows, and I didn't think to close the one opened a crack to dry laundry until the clothes on the line had been completely soaked through. The rain hitting the ground 14 floors down sounds like a river.
Strange city, Beijing. Tomorrow will be hazy and hot, I bet."
We had several nights of miserable weather. I was caught out in it one evening, coming back from a window shopping/exploring trip. I was completely soaked through, biking through puddles several inches deep. The water that's on the ground is filthy, of course, but the stuff falling from the sky leaves crusty deposits when it dries, so it can't be much better.
8/1?
Shopping in Xidan
I think I went window shopping on Wednesday. I went to an area called Xidan, on the southwest corner of downtown whereas I live somewhat northeast of the downtown area. The trek over probably took an hour. I had to get to the subway, take it and a transfer for 30 minutes, and then make my way to the surface.
The first mall I went to was maybe 7 levels tall, almost all underground. It seemed to sell mostly clothing, but there were some stalls selling mixed junk and an electronics store that was filled with empty shelves. I bought some blank DVDs by the disk to backup my hard drive and keep some of the many movies I've been downloading, but that was it. I asked the price on a few items, like a thin black tie that had a small gold crown at the tip, but the $8 quote scared me off. I was starving, so I found the food court. I ate at a pretty standard 'homestyle' restaurant, picking through my stir-fried chicken and cucumber as I looked down at the ice skating rink on the level below. There were little kids skating around in helmets under the eyes of staffers, slightly older kids being coached individually on hockey skills and figure skating, and a couple of young couples just skating in circles and holding hands. I remember having more observations at the time, but the only thing that sticks with me is the idea that the figure skating girls and the hockey boy were all awfully young to be training in a sport so specifically. After eating I wandered the mall a bit more, running across a Nightmare Before Christmas store. I checked it out, and it was actually an entire store selling Nightmare movie paraphernalia. Strange that a market for that exists, but sorta cool.
I went to a department store next, which was just as horrible as the one I visited when I bought my harmonica (which is, by the way, sitting inactive because of a faulty 7 hole draw. I guess that's what I get for spending $5 on a harmonica). Everything was shiny, new, and probably more expensive than it'd be in the US. I exited quickly.
The next place I stopped was probably the mall I'd heard about. It was jam-packed with people and vendors on the ground floor, and seemed more like a market than an American-style mall. I found a piercing stall and tried to find a shorter barbell for my eyebrow, but the owner didn't have any the right size. He was, however, piercing a Chinese guy's ear without wearing gloves or probably taking much else in the way of precautions. Oh, I had washed my cellphone in my pants earlier in the week, disabling it, so I had been using my Fan Xie's old phone with my SIM card. The battery was about to die and he'd lost the charger, so that was one of my missions for the day. I found the charger I needed and got the store down to a near-reasonable price, then caved and bought the damn thing for $4 when I could have gotten it for $3. I have limited patience for that kind of haggling, but I guess I should just accept that I'm poor, too, and it's a fact of life here and be ruthless. I climbed the stairs to some of the upper levels where they focused on clothes. I found a tie identical to the one I'd seen before for half the price. As I walked away the lady called after me that she'd give it to me for $3, which was tempting. The only things I was really looking for were military surplus clothing and come counterfeit Converses, but the mall started closing before I found what I wanted. I'll go back later, I'm sure, but not before checking out some markets closer to home.
It was drizzling and dark when I left the mall, and by the time I got out of the subway it was storming. Fortunately I'd anticipated this and brought my waterproof camping bag in addition to my backpack, so all of the electronics and my wallet went into it and then in the backpack before I biked through the rain and puddles, fortunately helmeted and lighted. I had to stop at the office to pick up my laptop before going home. I wrapped grocery bags around the laptop case and stuck it in my backpack, then squished my way back out into the black and wet.
8/3
On Friday went to yoga in the middle of the day so that I'd be able to go out soon after work. That meant arriving at the office early enough that no one commented when I left for the class. After work I went home and changed, killed a bit of time, then headed out to Mao Livehouse for the Ramones tribute. I misjudged the time it'd take to ride a bus at 6PM on a Friday (which was an excruciating experience I'll try not to repeat), and so didn't really have a chance to get dinner beforehand as I'd planned. So I bought some Oreos and ate them instead, hoping the sugar would get me through.
Ramones tribute
There was a small crowd outside of the venue. I paid my 40RMB cover, a bit of a gamble, and wandered in. The interior is simple. There's a bar and some tables, a foosball setup, plus a staircase that leads to an upstairs lounge area. When I say lounge I mean there were a couple of couches; this place was not fancy. I went into the room with the stage, which was beginning to fill up, and hung around to people watch. Most of the crowd were fairly normal looking Chinese my age. There were a few Chinese wearing the punk uniform, and there were a handful of Westerners punked out to varying degrees. My only gesture to the evening was to wear my red boots instead of sneakers, a decision that I'd be grateful for later.
The first band was ok, but the crowd wasn't really into it. The second band was ok, too, but the place had been filling up and was starting to get excited. Both of these bands seemed to be suffering from superfluous members, like a keyboardist or an extra guitarist.
The third band, The K, was great, and by then the crowd was wired. So when the band started into a fast ska riff the already hopping (literally) crowd up front started moshing. I was right in the middle of it, and as I've mentioned before I'm bigger than most around me. The only people there who were larger were other Westerners, so as we bounced off of each other and shoving people around I gave better than I got. The previous band, incidentally, had thrown bananas out into the crowd, some of which had remained on the floor, adding an interesting variation to the mosh pit. One thing that's always amazed me in my limited experience with wailing on people at shows is how strong a camaraderie it produces. Afterwards you chat with the neighbors who you'd been standing silently next to before you started shoving them into each other. If someone falls there are instantly hands reaching to pull them up and people circle around them for protection. Someone lost a cellphone and one of the moshers spent the next 10 minutes going person to person until he found its owner. There's a code and there's etiquette and what some people might see as violence seems to create a weird community.
(Incidentally, while looking for more info on The K, I found a post online on a guy's blog that said: "One sign that the band was a hit was that a lot of crazy moshing was going on in the middle of the hall near the stage, as drunken young men, both Chinese and foreign, got caught up in a whirlpool of energy that had collected there." This amuses me because I think there might have been one drunk guy in the whole group. Ah well, I guess. The same guy expressed his doubts that the Ramones were punk, so what does he know. Also? The person who was probably moshing most enthusiastically was a five-foot-nothing asian girl. Drunken young men my ass.)
The fourth band wasn't really punk and I didn't care for them at all, so I wandered out to the bar section and had a drink, giving my exploding eardrums a quick break. I went back in time to see the 5th band, SKO, start. They were obviously popular; the crowd was out of control, but I didn't like them as much. I actually bailed about halfway through their set, before the headliners started, after maybe 3 hours at the show. I'd soaked my shirt through with sweat, my lungs were exploding, and my ears hurt. It took me a while to realize that the lung thing was probably caused by dancing in a room filled with smoke. So I started walking, trying to find a bus stop that was still in service that had a night line running closer to my place. I finally gave up and caught a cab so that I'd make it back before the elevators shut down for the evening, which I did, but only after running from the cab and even then only barely.
8/4
Slow day. Woke up late, went to my neighborhood Korean place to feed my spicy beef soup addiction. Went home, watched movies, and read Ilium. I was planning on going to sleep around 10 to wake up early on Sunday, but because of my book that ended up being closer to 2.
8/5
I woke up after a few hours, at 5:30, to meet people to go hiking. We were meeting at work at 7, but I wanted to get breakfast and pack some lunch before then, so I budgeted extra time. As I'd been told, but hadn't really seen before, in the mornings a lot of restaurants convert to breakfast places.
Fighting for change
I found one nearby and ordered a basket of dumplings and a bowl of rice porridge, plus one the fried dough sticks I saw people around me eating but hadn't tried. I did this without a menu, because they didn't have one, and all in Chinese. That's relevant because after I ordered another basket of dumplings to pack for my lunch and asked for the bill the waitress silently held up fingers. Because I'm foolish I haven't yet learned the Chinese method of finger counting and using hands to indicate numbers, which is radically different from our own and involves fists and making crosses and such. So, again in Chinese, I ask her to say the number. I think she says 7RMB, so I give her a 10. Then she says that it isn't enough, and says 12. I assume I'd misheard before because she'd muttered, and I give her 22 to make the change easier. 12 is a bit steep, but whatever. She walks off, and I sit there waiting. I see her doing other things, smiling oddly, not bringing me my change, so I call her and say that I've given her 22, not 12. She still doesn't bring any change, so I grab my bag and walk to the front of the restaurant where she's hanging out with other employees. I say that I'd given her 22RMB and I ask for the difference. She reaches into a box and gives me 2RMB, smiling at me. I'm standing with the employees, and I loudly list everything I'd just eaten, saying that it definitely wasn't 20RMB in total. The little old lady making dumplings, probably the manager, repeats my order, saying that adds up to 9.5 and tells the waitress to give me my change. I think to myself that 9.5 is almost exactly what I'd expected to pay, and hold out my hand to the waitress. She still doesn't do anything, smiling this whole time, and after a moment one of the other waitresses reaches into the box and gives me the rest of my money.
Ok. If I were a fresh off the boat newbie speaking loudly with a phrasebook I can see trying to rip me off for a few yuan. But I ordered in Chinese without a menu, so I'm not clueless and I'm not new, and when she tried to scam me I confronted her. Wouldn't the correct response be, "Oh, I'm sorry, I thought you gave me 12, my mistake?" Even then she would have been up 2.5RMB over the actual cost of my meal and I would have walked away happy at getting my change. But instead she just gave me her stupid grin as I made a scene and eventually got shot down by her boss and lost her 'tip'. I'm not quite sure how losing face works, but I'm hoping getting confronted and defeated by a laowai in front of your coworkers counts. Idiot.
I got to work and Alessandro, a UNIDO employee who'd just come back from a month's leave in Italy, was late. Hedda came, and she brought along another Norwegian from a different UN group. We went up to the office and had coffee as we waited, which was more funny than anything else, as Alessandro had asked me on Saturday whether the early meeting time would mean I was uninterested. Alessandro showed up 30 minutes later and we went down to meet him. He was driving his Land Cruiser, and his black lab Bookie was in the back, so we loaded up and headed out.
We drove maybe 40 miles out of Beijing to a place called Miyun. The Great Wall runs nearby, but we were just there to hike along the river. It was nice to get out of the city and listen to running water and insects instead of cars. The rocks looked raw and young, and vegetation grew green over everything. The haze here smelled like plants instead of city, and the effect of mist on mountains is much more interesting than it is on buildings.
Pictures of the walk.. I also updated the construction section on the pics page. I'll try to figure out a way to date my most recent changes so the new pictures can be found at a glance.
7/31?
Beijing weather
I think I wrote this on Tuesday, but I didn't get around to posting it. Of course it's raining again as I write now.
"I'm in the middle of the most dramatic storm I've ever seen, and that includes tennis ball-sized hail hitting Oak Ridge. Lighting flashes every couple of seconds and thunder rolls and crashes ceaselessly. The wind is whistling in the windows, and I didn't think to close the one opened a crack to dry laundry until the clothes on the line had been completely soaked through. The rain hitting the ground 14 floors down sounds like a river.
Strange city, Beijing. Tomorrow will be hazy and hot, I bet."
We had several nights of miserable weather. I was caught out in it one evening, coming back from a window shopping/exploring trip. I was completely soaked through, biking through puddles several inches deep. The water that's on the ground is filthy, of course, but the stuff falling from the sky leaves crusty deposits when it dries, so it can't be much better.
8/1?
Shopping in Xidan
I think I went window shopping on Wednesday. I went to an area called Xidan, on the southwest corner of downtown whereas I live somewhat northeast of the downtown area. The trek over probably took an hour. I had to get to the subway, take it and a transfer for 30 minutes, and then make my way to the surface.
The first mall I went to was maybe 7 levels tall, almost all underground. It seemed to sell mostly clothing, but there were some stalls selling mixed junk and an electronics store that was filled with empty shelves. I bought some blank DVDs by the disk to backup my hard drive and keep some of the many movies I've been downloading, but that was it. I asked the price on a few items, like a thin black tie that had a small gold crown at the tip, but the $8 quote scared me off. I was starving, so I found the food court. I ate at a pretty standard 'homestyle' restaurant, picking through my stir-fried chicken and cucumber as I looked down at the ice skating rink on the level below. There were little kids skating around in helmets under the eyes of staffers, slightly older kids being coached individually on hockey skills and figure skating, and a couple of young couples just skating in circles and holding hands. I remember having more observations at the time, but the only thing that sticks with me is the idea that the figure skating girls and the hockey boy were all awfully young to be training in a sport so specifically. After eating I wandered the mall a bit more, running across a Nightmare Before Christmas store. I checked it out, and it was actually an entire store selling Nightmare movie paraphernalia. Strange that a market for that exists, but sorta cool.
I went to a department store next, which was just as horrible as the one I visited when I bought my harmonica (which is, by the way, sitting inactive because of a faulty 7 hole draw. I guess that's what I get for spending $5 on a harmonica). Everything was shiny, new, and probably more expensive than it'd be in the US. I exited quickly.
The next place I stopped was probably the mall I'd heard about. It was jam-packed with people and vendors on the ground floor, and seemed more like a market than an American-style mall. I found a piercing stall and tried to find a shorter barbell for my eyebrow, but the owner didn't have any the right size. He was, however, piercing a Chinese guy's ear without wearing gloves or probably taking much else in the way of precautions. Oh, I had washed my cellphone in my pants earlier in the week, disabling it, so I had been using my Fan Xie's old phone with my SIM card. The battery was about to die and he'd lost the charger, so that was one of my missions for the day. I found the charger I needed and got the store down to a near-reasonable price, then caved and bought the damn thing for $4 when I could have gotten it for $3. I have limited patience for that kind of haggling, but I guess I should just accept that I'm poor, too, and it's a fact of life here and be ruthless. I climbed the stairs to some of the upper levels where they focused on clothes. I found a tie identical to the one I'd seen before for half the price. As I walked away the lady called after me that she'd give it to me for $3, which was tempting. The only things I was really looking for were military surplus clothing and come counterfeit Converses, but the mall started closing before I found what I wanted. I'll go back later, I'm sure, but not before checking out some markets closer to home.
It was drizzling and dark when I left the mall, and by the time I got out of the subway it was storming. Fortunately I'd anticipated this and brought my waterproof camping bag in addition to my backpack, so all of the electronics and my wallet went into it and then in the backpack before I biked through the rain and puddles, fortunately helmeted and lighted. I had to stop at the office to pick up my laptop before going home. I wrapped grocery bags around the laptop case and stuck it in my backpack, then squished my way back out into the black and wet.
8/3
On Friday went to yoga in the middle of the day so that I'd be able to go out soon after work. That meant arriving at the office early enough that no one commented when I left for the class. After work I went home and changed, killed a bit of time, then headed out to Mao Livehouse for the Ramones tribute. I misjudged the time it'd take to ride a bus at 6PM on a Friday (which was an excruciating experience I'll try not to repeat), and so didn't really have a chance to get dinner beforehand as I'd planned. So I bought some Oreos and ate them instead, hoping the sugar would get me through.
Ramones tribute
There was a small crowd outside of the venue. I paid my 40RMB cover, a bit of a gamble, and wandered in. The interior is simple. There's a bar and some tables, a foosball setup, plus a staircase that leads to an upstairs lounge area. When I say lounge I mean there were a couple of couches; this place was not fancy. I went into the room with the stage, which was beginning to fill up, and hung around to people watch. Most of the crowd were fairly normal looking Chinese my age. There were a few Chinese wearing the punk uniform, and there were a handful of Westerners punked out to varying degrees. My only gesture to the evening was to wear my red boots instead of sneakers, a decision that I'd be grateful for later.
The first band was ok, but the crowd wasn't really into it. The second band was ok, too, but the place had been filling up and was starting to get excited. Both of these bands seemed to be suffering from superfluous members, like a keyboardist or an extra guitarist.
The third band, The K, was great, and by then the crowd was wired. So when the band started into a fast ska riff the already hopping (literally) crowd up front started moshing. I was right in the middle of it, and as I've mentioned before I'm bigger than most around me. The only people there who were larger were other Westerners, so as we bounced off of each other and shoving people around I gave better than I got. The previous band, incidentally, had thrown bananas out into the crowd, some of which had remained on the floor, adding an interesting variation to the mosh pit. One thing that's always amazed me in my limited experience with wailing on people at shows is how strong a camaraderie it produces. Afterwards you chat with the neighbors who you'd been standing silently next to before you started shoving them into each other. If someone falls there are instantly hands reaching to pull them up and people circle around them for protection. Someone lost a cellphone and one of the moshers spent the next 10 minutes going person to person until he found its owner. There's a code and there's etiquette and what some people might see as violence seems to create a weird community.
(Incidentally, while looking for more info on The K, I found a post online on a guy's blog that said: "One sign that the band was a hit was that a lot of crazy moshing was going on in the middle of the hall near the stage, as drunken young men, both Chinese and foreign, got caught up in a whirlpool of energy that had collected there." This amuses me because I think there might have been one drunk guy in the whole group. Ah well, I guess. The same guy expressed his doubts that the Ramones were punk, so what does he know. Also? The person who was probably moshing most enthusiastically was a five-foot-nothing asian girl. Drunken young men my ass.)
The fourth band wasn't really punk and I didn't care for them at all, so I wandered out to the bar section and had a drink, giving my exploding eardrums a quick break. I went back in time to see the 5th band, SKO, start. They were obviously popular; the crowd was out of control, but I didn't like them as much. I actually bailed about halfway through their set, before the headliners started, after maybe 3 hours at the show. I'd soaked my shirt through with sweat, my lungs were exploding, and my ears hurt. It took me a while to realize that the lung thing was probably caused by dancing in a room filled with smoke. So I started walking, trying to find a bus stop that was still in service that had a night line running closer to my place. I finally gave up and caught a cab so that I'd make it back before the elevators shut down for the evening, which I did, but only after running from the cab and even then only barely.
8/4
Slow day. Woke up late, went to my neighborhood Korean place to feed my spicy beef soup addiction. Went home, watched movies, and read Ilium. I was planning on going to sleep around 10 to wake up early on Sunday, but because of my book that ended up being closer to 2.
8/5
I woke up after a few hours, at 5:30, to meet people to go hiking. We were meeting at work at 7, but I wanted to get breakfast and pack some lunch before then, so I budgeted extra time. As I'd been told, but hadn't really seen before, in the mornings a lot of restaurants convert to breakfast places.
Fighting for change
I found one nearby and ordered a basket of dumplings and a bowl of rice porridge, plus one the fried dough sticks I saw people around me eating but hadn't tried. I did this without a menu, because they didn't have one, and all in Chinese. That's relevant because after I ordered another basket of dumplings to pack for my lunch and asked for the bill the waitress silently held up fingers. Because I'm foolish I haven't yet learned the Chinese method of finger counting and using hands to indicate numbers, which is radically different from our own and involves fists and making crosses and such. So, again in Chinese, I ask her to say the number. I think she says 7RMB, so I give her a 10. Then she says that it isn't enough, and says 12. I assume I'd misheard before because she'd muttered, and I give her 22 to make the change easier. 12 is a bit steep, but whatever. She walks off, and I sit there waiting. I see her doing other things, smiling oddly, not bringing me my change, so I call her and say that I've given her 22, not 12. She still doesn't bring any change, so I grab my bag and walk to the front of the restaurant where she's hanging out with other employees. I say that I'd given her 22RMB and I ask for the difference. She reaches into a box and gives me 2RMB, smiling at me. I'm standing with the employees, and I loudly list everything I'd just eaten, saying that it definitely wasn't 20RMB in total. The little old lady making dumplings, probably the manager, repeats my order, saying that adds up to 9.5 and tells the waitress to give me my change. I think to myself that 9.5 is almost exactly what I'd expected to pay, and hold out my hand to the waitress. She still doesn't do anything, smiling this whole time, and after a moment one of the other waitresses reaches into the box and gives me the rest of my money.
Ok. If I were a fresh off the boat newbie speaking loudly with a phrasebook I can see trying to rip me off for a few yuan. But I ordered in Chinese without a menu, so I'm not clueless and I'm not new, and when she tried to scam me I confronted her. Wouldn't the correct response be, "Oh, I'm sorry, I thought you gave me 12, my mistake?" Even then she would have been up 2.5RMB over the actual cost of my meal and I would have walked away happy at getting my change. But instead she just gave me her stupid grin as I made a scene and eventually got shot down by her boss and lost her 'tip'. I'm not quite sure how losing face works, but I'm hoping getting confronted and defeated by a laowai in front of your coworkers counts. Idiot.
I got to work and Alessandro, a UNIDO employee who'd just come back from a month's leave in Italy, was late. Hedda came, and she brought along another Norwegian from a different UN group. We went up to the office and had coffee as we waited, which was more funny than anything else, as Alessandro had asked me on Saturday whether the early meeting time would mean I was uninterested. Alessandro showed up 30 minutes later and we went down to meet him. He was driving his Land Cruiser, and his black lab Bookie was in the back, so we loaded up and headed out.
We drove maybe 40 miles out of Beijing to a place called Miyun. The Great Wall runs nearby, but we were just there to hike along the river. It was nice to get out of the city and listen to running water and insects instead of cars. The rocks looked raw and young, and vegetation grew green over everything. The haze here smelled like plants instead of city, and the effect of mist on mountains is much more interesting than it is on buildings.
Pictures of the walk.. I also updated the construction section on the pics page. I'll try to figure out a way to date my most recent changes so the new pictures can be found at a glance.
Monday, July 30, 2007
Meditation, movies, and meandering. Ok, so meandering's a stretch.
This weekend was quiet.
7/26
On Thursday I went out to dinner with Fan Xie (Bobby, my flatmate, but I think Bobby is a silly name and am going to try to stop using it) and a couple of his friends. The friends showed up at our apartment before he did, by about 45 minutes, and we couldn't reach Fan on his cell. So I met these people, a husband and wife that arrived separately, and chatted for a while. The husband works in advertisement directing TV spots and the wife does PR. As far as I can tell they're the classic upwardly-mobile young Beijingers. They drive a car (Nissan Bluebird) and 'own' a house (which I think means that they have a 99 year lease from the Chinese government, which is as close as you can get here), they're educated and in their mid-20s, and they seem pretty liberal. We went out to eat at a hot pot place nearby, then to meet a couple of their other friends at the Black Sun near my house. The evening was good, despite my $3 bottle of Guinness that was mostly disappointing. It was my first night out with all Chinese speakers, so I struggled to keep up with the language, often failing. I need to be doing a lot more of that or I'm never going to get any good.
7/27
After work I went to yoga and watched DVDs. It was a pretty quiet night. I accomplished my goal of going to yoga 5 times this week.
7/28
Pictures of today's wanderings, plus last week at Panjiayuan. I also started 2 new albums, one for random photos I take and the other documenting Beijing construction. I'll try to keep adding to them.
Workers started tearing down a wall right outside my window at about 7AM. I managed to stay in bed until about 12, but I'm sure those hours of sleep were completely unproductive, as every few minutes they'd start cutting through some rebar or sledge-hammering something solid and my whole bed would shake.
It had rained heavily the night before and the sky was a little bit clearer than normal, so I decided to go sightseeing. Because things close pretty early I booked it out the door as soon as I could. I took a couple of buses over to Dongcheng and my first stop, the Drum Tower and the Bell Tower (Gulou and Zhonglou). They're maybe 50m tall, and in the past were used to tell time. While I was there the guys in the Drum Tower played the drums to mark the hour, but other than the fact that they're cool old buildings with decent views of the hutong area around them there wasn't much to see.
After the towers I got porridge and pot stickers at a small restaurant nearby. I didn't realize how close the towers were to another place I'd been already. Mentally linking these different, distinct areas I'd visited was neat; I like it when cities start to click into place. I walked to the next place I was going to visit, on the way passing Mao Livehouse. I'd never heard of it, but the exterior was rusty bolts and sheet metal and white stenciled writing, so I noted the name and looked it up when I got home. It turns out it's a new bar/music venue that's well regarded. They're doing a Ramones tribute on Friday by local bands that I think I'll try to go to.
My next stop was going to be the Lama Temple, but they closed soon and they wouldn't give me a student discount, so I walked across the street to the Imperial College (Guozijian) and its attached Confucian temple (Kong Miao). The Imperial College was China's premier university for about 600 years, and is where the emperor would give an annual address to the elites on Confucian values. The Confucian temple houses a forest of 190 stela on which are carved the 13 classics of Confucianism. The main hall was closed for construction, which doesn't surprise me.
When the tourist sites closed I found a bus that took me straight home from the Imperial College. I was going to try to meet up with Scot and Catlin, but the logistics didn't work out and I ended up hanging out and watching more movies.
7/29
Reading, yoga, and movies. It was a relaxing weekend, but next week I'm going to a bar even if I have to go alone.
7/26
On Thursday I went out to dinner with Fan Xie (Bobby, my flatmate, but I think Bobby is a silly name and am going to try to stop using it) and a couple of his friends. The friends showed up at our apartment before he did, by about 45 minutes, and we couldn't reach Fan on his cell. So I met these people, a husband and wife that arrived separately, and chatted for a while. The husband works in advertisement directing TV spots and the wife does PR. As far as I can tell they're the classic upwardly-mobile young Beijingers. They drive a car (Nissan Bluebird) and 'own' a house (which I think means that they have a 99 year lease from the Chinese government, which is as close as you can get here), they're educated and in their mid-20s, and they seem pretty liberal. We went out to eat at a hot pot place nearby, then to meet a couple of their other friends at the Black Sun near my house. The evening was good, despite my $3 bottle of Guinness that was mostly disappointing. It was my first night out with all Chinese speakers, so I struggled to keep up with the language, often failing. I need to be doing a lot more of that or I'm never going to get any good.
7/27
After work I went to yoga and watched DVDs. It was a pretty quiet night. I accomplished my goal of going to yoga 5 times this week.
7/28
Pictures of today's wanderings, plus last week at Panjiayuan. I also started 2 new albums, one for random photos I take and the other documenting Beijing construction. I'll try to keep adding to them.
Workers started tearing down a wall right outside my window at about 7AM. I managed to stay in bed until about 12, but I'm sure those hours of sleep were completely unproductive, as every few minutes they'd start cutting through some rebar or sledge-hammering something solid and my whole bed would shake.
It had rained heavily the night before and the sky was a little bit clearer than normal, so I decided to go sightseeing. Because things close pretty early I booked it out the door as soon as I could. I took a couple of buses over to Dongcheng and my first stop, the Drum Tower and the Bell Tower (Gulou and Zhonglou). They're maybe 50m tall, and in the past were used to tell time. While I was there the guys in the Drum Tower played the drums to mark the hour, but other than the fact that they're cool old buildings with decent views of the hutong area around them there wasn't much to see.
After the towers I got porridge and pot stickers at a small restaurant nearby. I didn't realize how close the towers were to another place I'd been already. Mentally linking these different, distinct areas I'd visited was neat; I like it when cities start to click into place. I walked to the next place I was going to visit, on the way passing Mao Livehouse. I'd never heard of it, but the exterior was rusty bolts and sheet metal and white stenciled writing, so I noted the name and looked it up when I got home. It turns out it's a new bar/music venue that's well regarded. They're doing a Ramones tribute on Friday by local bands that I think I'll try to go to.
My next stop was going to be the Lama Temple, but they closed soon and they wouldn't give me a student discount, so I walked across the street to the Imperial College (Guozijian) and its attached Confucian temple (Kong Miao). The Imperial College was China's premier university for about 600 years, and is where the emperor would give an annual address to the elites on Confucian values. The Confucian temple houses a forest of 190 stela on which are carved the 13 classics of Confucianism. The main hall was closed for construction, which doesn't surprise me.
When the tourist sites closed I found a bus that took me straight home from the Imperial College. I was going to try to meet up with Scot and Catlin, but the logistics didn't work out and I ended up hanging out and watching more movies.
7/29
Reading, yoga, and movies. It was a relaxing weekend, but next week I'm going to a bar even if I have to go alone.
Tuesday, July 24, 2007
In which literary style is abandoned with the idea that a bad post is better than none
7/16
I played poker at the Syrian embassy. We played some of the more complicated games I can imagine, one of which had a full 10 rounds of betting, involved buying cards to replace those in your hand, and was high-low. We were playing limit games, which made bluffing impractical, so I tried to stick to hands with high probabilities of winning.
The embassy itself was pretty nice. China has a deal in which they give a reciprocal amount of property to countries for their embassies, so if Syria gives China an acre they get that in return. We played in the dining hall, where there were crystal chandeliers and leather couches and lots of marble.
Besides a couple of my coworkers, one of whom knew the Syrian ambassador's son and so was our in, there were a couple of Syrian embassy people (including the son), a coworker's mom, and another coworker's boyfriend. I only made about 20% profit on my buy in (which amounts to $14.40 on $12), partly due to one disastrous hand which I played perfectly, if I do say so myself, except for the losing bit. I think I'll end up going back soon.
7/17-7/19
I finally got more project guidance from Sergio in Vienna, so after meeting with Mr. Ajmal, the UNIDO representative here, I started to work on that. It's a very big project, I think. I've gone from not having anything to do to having so much on my plate I don't know where to begin. I made a list of things I know I want to look at and began with items on it at random. Hopefully that'll give me some momentum.
7/20
Linda's last day at the UNIDO office, so now I'm the youngest person here.
I was adopted for the evening by Rose, now the only person in the office close to my age, and her roommates. I met them at their place, about a 5 minute walk door to door from mine, and we caught a cab.
We went to Rickshaw for dinner, which is a hub of expats. They serve wings and quesadillas and draft beer, all for a hefty markup. It was fun, but I was glad when we left for the next place, which happened to be the other Black Sun.
This Black sun is much more of a dive bar, which is cool, but the gin and tonic I had was weak and not very good. The place was packed, also all with expats, but instead of seats and tables everyone was standing around mingling, and the group spilled out into the street, which was more interesting. It was a going away party for one of Rose's friends, but I wasn't the only random there. My cocktail conversations get more interesting after a few drinks. After my gin and tonic I started going to the convenience store next door to buy bottles of beer. At a bar, a western-sized bottle of Tsingtao might be 10-15RMB, but at the convenience stores a 600mL bottle is usually 2-3. My first beer was 3, but after that I told the shop owner that I'd be back for many more and would only be paying 2 a bottle, which actually worked. I found out he was charging other people 4 a bottle, so I became the beer runner.
I've gotten a little better at flirting with people in bars, but I missed years of practice in college that I now have to make up for.
7/21
Chinese beer gives me a nasty hangover. God knows what they put in the stuff, or fail to filter out.
I went out with my apartment mate to a late lunch at a Korean place nearby. I originally objected to the Korean idea, as I'd done barbecue for lunch twice during the week, but it turned out to be fantastic. We ordered fried rice and stir-fried potato strips with peppers, but the highlight of the meal was a spicy beef soup that I never would have ordered on my own, not being much of a soup person. The broth was rich and the beef was very tender, and the whole thing was so spicy that the back of my head started sweating. In China you commonly mix rice into your bowl of soup, which worked perfectly in this case to tame some of the capsaicin. I think I'll go back to this place frequently, especially as it gets colder. The restaurant itself is as simple as they get, there's free barley tea, it's nearby, and they have the soup.
After lunch I bought my first pirated DVDs on the street- Letters From Iwo Jima and a Zhang Yimou film, The Road Home. I spent the rest of the day watching them and finishing reading Confederacy of Dunces. I planned on going to sleep early and waking up to be a tourist on Sunday.
7/22
I woke up early, but when I looked out the window it was too hazy to go sightseeing, so I rolled over and went back to sleep. Unfortunately, since the tourist site and my lead on used bikes were close together that also meant delaying my bike purchase.
I woke up later and went to Panjiayuan, Beijing's huge open-air market selling just about everything antiqueish and craftsy that you can imagine. I didn't buy anything, just wandered for a couple of hours. I'll probably go back at some point later in the year and buy myself a statue or some paintings; they had some similar to paintings I'd liked at 798.
I played poker at the Syrian embassy. We played some of the more complicated games I can imagine, one of which had a full 10 rounds of betting, involved buying cards to replace those in your hand, and was high-low. We were playing limit games, which made bluffing impractical, so I tried to stick to hands with high probabilities of winning.
The embassy itself was pretty nice. China has a deal in which they give a reciprocal amount of property to countries for their embassies, so if Syria gives China an acre they get that in return. We played in the dining hall, where there were crystal chandeliers and leather couches and lots of marble.
Besides a couple of my coworkers, one of whom knew the Syrian ambassador's son and so was our in, there were a couple of Syrian embassy people (including the son), a coworker's mom, and another coworker's boyfriend. I only made about 20% profit on my buy in (which amounts to $14.40 on $12), partly due to one disastrous hand which I played perfectly, if I do say so myself, except for the losing bit. I think I'll end up going back soon.
7/17-7/19
I finally got more project guidance from Sergio in Vienna, so after meeting with Mr. Ajmal, the UNIDO representative here, I started to work on that. It's a very big project, I think. I've gone from not having anything to do to having so much on my plate I don't know where to begin. I made a list of things I know I want to look at and began with items on it at random. Hopefully that'll give me some momentum.
7/20
Linda's last day at the UNIDO office, so now I'm the youngest person here.
I was adopted for the evening by Rose, now the only person in the office close to my age, and her roommates. I met them at their place, about a 5 minute walk door to door from mine, and we caught a cab.
We went to Rickshaw for dinner, which is a hub of expats. They serve wings and quesadillas and draft beer, all for a hefty markup. It was fun, but I was glad when we left for the next place, which happened to be the other Black Sun.
This Black sun is much more of a dive bar, which is cool, but the gin and tonic I had was weak and not very good. The place was packed, also all with expats, but instead of seats and tables everyone was standing around mingling, and the group spilled out into the street, which was more interesting. It was a going away party for one of Rose's friends, but I wasn't the only random there. My cocktail conversations get more interesting after a few drinks. After my gin and tonic I started going to the convenience store next door to buy bottles of beer. At a bar, a western-sized bottle of Tsingtao might be 10-15RMB, but at the convenience stores a 600mL bottle is usually 2-3. My first beer was 3, but after that I told the shop owner that I'd be back for many more and would only be paying 2 a bottle, which actually worked. I found out he was charging other people 4 a bottle, so I became the beer runner.
I've gotten a little better at flirting with people in bars, but I missed years of practice in college that I now have to make up for.
7/21
Chinese beer gives me a nasty hangover. God knows what they put in the stuff, or fail to filter out.
I went out with my apartment mate to a late lunch at a Korean place nearby. I originally objected to the Korean idea, as I'd done barbecue for lunch twice during the week, but it turned out to be fantastic. We ordered fried rice and stir-fried potato strips with peppers, but the highlight of the meal was a spicy beef soup that I never would have ordered on my own, not being much of a soup person. The broth was rich and the beef was very tender, and the whole thing was so spicy that the back of my head started sweating. In China you commonly mix rice into your bowl of soup, which worked perfectly in this case to tame some of the capsaicin. I think I'll go back to this place frequently, especially as it gets colder. The restaurant itself is as simple as they get, there's free barley tea, it's nearby, and they have the soup.
After lunch I bought my first pirated DVDs on the street- Letters From Iwo Jima and a Zhang Yimou film, The Road Home. I spent the rest of the day watching them and finishing reading Confederacy of Dunces. I planned on going to sleep early and waking up to be a tourist on Sunday.
7/22
I woke up early, but when I looked out the window it was too hazy to go sightseeing, so I rolled over and went back to sleep. Unfortunately, since the tourist site and my lead on used bikes were close together that also meant delaying my bike purchase.
I woke up later and went to Panjiayuan, Beijing's huge open-air market selling just about everything antiqueish and craftsy that you can imagine. I didn't buy anything, just wandered for a couple of hours. I'll probably go back at some point later in the year and buy myself a statue or some paintings; they had some similar to paintings I'd liked at 798.
Monday, July 9, 2007
These days I spend a lot of time eating.
7/5
Thursday night I went home after work, showered, then headed right back out the door to meet people at Guijie, or Ghost Street. The area is famous for its food, everything from high-end restaurants to people frying things on the street. There are some specialties, like spicy crayfish, and the whole place is lit up with red lanterns. I met Linda from work, who I'd invited, and then we joined up with Scot, Catlin, and a number of people they'd invited from couchsurfing.com. There was Ru Shyan, who's a visual arts major working for the Chinese Olympic Committee and helped with the torch; Spring, a sophomore from Harvard doing... something; Matt, engineering major from Cornell working for GE; Bill Bowles, who quit his job and is traveling the world with a video camera and a satellite modem keeping a video blog; and Aaron, a Chinese national who works as an editor for the People's Daily. In a huge coincidence, we all (minus Aaron) had ties to Massachusetts. Catlin's from Wellesley, Scot and I from MIT, Matt had gone to high school there, Spring and Linda were from Harvard (and knew each other, but didn't know the other was going to be around), Ru Shyan's from Wheaton, and I can't remember Bill went to... Amherst, maybe? But it was strange to pick a sample of westerners in Beijing and come up with all MA types.
We picked a big hot pot place. They have two kinds of broth to cook in, sort of like fondue. One was garlickly and almost like a chicken broth, the other was oily and spicy. We ordered trays of raw lamb, beef, bok choy, spinach, mushrooms, etc. and started cooking. The hard part is to either hold the thing you're cooking in a boiling pot filled with flavor-adding... chunks, or to drop it and try to find it and fish it out later. The other difficulty was trying to fit cups, plates, trays of food, bottles of beer, etc. all on a table with a big hole in the middle for cooking. Dinner was great, and I had fun talking with the others; there were a lot of shared interests, but fairly different backgrounds.
Afterwards we started walking. We found some good hutongr, Beijing's narrow, winding alleys, filled with courtyard houses and small businesses. We bought popsicles (yogurt flavored for me again... I'll branch out soon) and explored the area in the dark. I don't know how safe I would have felt doing it alone, at least carrying valuables, but we were rolling like 10 deep, so it wasn't an issue. We bought a couple of bottles of beer to drink as we walked, one of the few liberties I feel like the Chinese can enjoy that we in the land of the free are denied.
I had broken my nail clippers, so when we found what looked like a closet with the contents of Wal-Mart jammed in I asked and managed to buy some for 40 cents. How, you may ask, did I break my nail clippers? I broke them trying to trim my beard. Sort of. See, the beard trimmer I brought was new, specially bought from Kohls for the extravagant price of $15, chosen for its portability. It has these different attachments for trimming different lengths, as such devices do, but I seem to have left certain parts necessary for their use back at home. So I decided I'd just whittle the large attachment, which I could use, down to size. Rather than hack at the outside, which would have meant pushing the jagged bit against my face, I cut the underside where the attachment locks into another plastic bit on the trimmer. This process took, over the course of 3 days, at least 2 hours, a different nail clippers, 2 different steak knives (ineffective), a pair of scissors (absolutely useless), and finally a box cutter I bought at a 7-11 on Ghost Street. The box cutter did the trick, resulting in an intricate sort of terraced piece of plastic, and now I've finally trimmed my beard. Of course, the charger for the damn thing is 110 volts, so I still need to buy a voltage converter, but I've saved myself from buying a new trimmer.
Anyway. Nail clippers at the closet Wal-Mart, then since the buses had stopped for the night I caught a cab home.
7/6
Friday I skipped work. I wasn't feeling in peak form, maybe in part because of the food the night before, but I think it was mostly the result of a long week and not really having felt rested in a while. So I slept until noon, then I woke up and went out to find some lunch. I went to a Chinese fast-food place near my apartment, which was probably the first truly bad meal I've had here, then I got some corn flavored yogurt at the grocery store to wash it down. Corn flavored yogurt's very tasty, and fits well into my campaign to try to eat the weird stuff. I bought some fairly expensive grapes on the way home, which a few days later as I write this are mostly uneaten. I should get on that.
I studied some Chinese, watched Lord of War, and hung out a bit waiting for Scot and Catlin to come over. They got lost trying to get there, so I went downstairs and walked a couple blocks to meet them. We got dinner at a restaurant near where I'd had lunch, the highlight of which was the catfish soup. The wisdom of eating bottom-feeders while in China is questionable, but I think that I'm probably going to poison myself to some extent no matter what I do, and we didn't really think about it until after we'd ordered.
We went back to my place and had some beer and baijiu, but at that point everyone was exhausted. We had decided to go to Shanhaiguan on Saturday to see the spot where the Great Wall comes out of the sea, so we were trying to arrange that trip on my slow and feeble pirated internet while endeavoring to not falling asleep. Well, Scot passed out sitting on the floor and leaning forward with his head on my couch, Catlin and I wrestled with the intertubes. At the end we didn't really have a plan, we just knew we were meeting at the train station at noon. Bobby, my flatmate, came back just as we were finishing and told us that they'd shut down the elevators for the night, which was unwelcome news. Apparently they do that at a certain hour, which I wasn't aware of. Since it's a little bit hard to get to the street from my apartment I walked Scot and Catlin down the 14 flights of plaster-covered and crumbling stairs (currently undergoing renovation), then, of course, had to climb back up the 14 flights. There are no floor numbers, so I tried to count as I went. It didn't work very well, so starting on maybe the 11th floor I was leaving the staircase to try to find apartment numbers on the doors. Most apartments aren't numbered, either, so that was a bit hard.
Anyway, I made it back, showered, and crashed. Showering is rough right now because the fluorescent tube in the bathroom is dying and not so much a light as a dim. It's a weird shape and we haven't found a replacement yet. So I've been showering and shaving with my bike headlamp sitting on the shelf for a little bit of extra light. I've been showering a lot, too, since it's hot and humid and I walk around in dress clothes all day. Because of the weekend trip I still don't have a bike. I have to get on that, too.
7/7
on Saturday I got up at maybe 9:30 to get to the bank for cash to pay some of my rent before I left town. I'm still finding my way around the neighborhood, so the errand took maybe an hour of walking around looking for a bank and getting back. I packed, then caught the subway to the Beijing train station. Scot and Catlin got off the same train from a different car, so we met up immediately and went to find tickets. There are about 5 different places to buy tickets, depending on where you're going, but after some searching we found our counter. Fortunately Scot had checked the railway website to get our train's number, otherwise we might have been in trouble. Tickets to Shanhaiguan on the T11 (T for Tebie kuai, or extra fast) were 47RMB, or about 6 dollars. They were standing tickets, though. To get a seat you generally have to buy in advance. We had time to kill, so we found lunch in the alley next to the station: a big bowl of noodles with meat and hot peppers.
We made it to our gate, running to make the departure time, but it turned out that the train was delayed and we ended up sitting around for about an hour. The train station is massive and crawling with people. There's nowhere near enough seating, so we sort of found a corner and squatted to avoid sitting on the filthy floor. I checked out the bookstore (Esquire in Chinese and a magazine about Chinese military hardware), saw the huge internet bar, and tried unsuccessfully to find a deck of playing cards for sale.
When we finally got onto the train it wasn't too full; we had plenty of room to stand. When people get up to use the restrooms and such the standing people sit down to rest their legs for a moment. We chatted with some other passengers and as a result ended up sitting maybe a quarter of the time. The main problem with standing is squeezing to the side to let people pass, and people do pass. They go to the area between the cars to smoke, they use the squat toilet restrooms that empty onto the tracks, they wander around, who knows, but there are constantly people coming and going. The train workers come through with carts of as wide as the aisle, which are hard to dodge, they bring brooms and sweep up trash on the floor, they adjust baggage on the overhead bins, and they sometimes checked tickets. A few standing passengers had tiny collapsible seats that they'd unfold and sit on in the aisles, which after a while seemed like a great idea.
It took probably 3 hours to get to Shanhaiguan. We left the station to look around and were immediately set upon by hordes of touts trying to get us to take cabs or go to certain hotels or eat at the touristy restaurants. We remembered to go back into the station to buy our return tickets, and when we got out we heard, "Look, white people!' and were approached by the only other caucasians around, who didn't speak Chinese. It turns out, believe it or not, that they were from Johnson City, Tennessee. Small world, folks. So we took taxis with them to go check out the cheap Lida hostel we'd read about in the Lonely Planet. In Beijing they use a meter to determine your cab fare. In Shanhaiguan we negotiated a price with the cabdrivers ahead of time. The base flag drop price in Beijing is 10RMB, we did the trip to the hostel for 5 per cab. Small town living, I guess. The hostel had acceptable beds for $2.50 each, so the 5 Johnson City folks and I got two triple rooms. Catlin and Scot had brought camping supplies and were going to try to camp on the Wall. I didn't have camping gear, but I was game for roughing it with them until it started to rain just as we arrived at the hotel.
After dropping off bags we all headed out to get food nearby. Scot and Catlin and I have gotten into the habit of checking menus before sitting down at restaurants. We have a couple of criteria, a sort of basket or index like you'd assemble to measure cost of living or inflation. Our basket includes Gongbao Jiding (Kungpao chicken), eggplant strips, and a 600ml bottle of local beer. I'd like those 3 items to be under 30RMB combined, or about $3.75. So we turned down a couple of restaurants (one proprietor scoffed, "But where are you going to eat?" when we told her it was too expensive) before finding an acceptable place. We ordered a few dishes off of the menu, then Scot and I headed over to the seafood chill chest to point out things we'd like but didn't know the name for. So we ended up with mediocre squid, strange sea cucumber (which we're glad we tried but probably won't get again), and exceptionally good scallops in addition to our land-based food. Restaurants also don't seem to like to bring you rice early, the philosophy here being that you eat the good stuff before filling up on rice at the end, so we've also had to ask them to bring the rice early so that we get to eat it with our food. I haven't decided whether I should try to get used to the Chinese way or keep my portable America in this situation. I don't think it's a particularly important philosophy, as no one's really thought the rice request strange, so I might keep eating it throughout the meal. I talk about food a lot, sorry.
After dinner Catlin and Scot headed off towards the coast to find a spot to hide and camp, which we presume is illegal. The Johnson City people and I bought some beer at a corner store and, since the rain had stopped, decided to try to get on top of the wall somewhere in town just to hang out and drink. We got distracted, however, walking by a park where they were playing music and there were a ton of people dancing. There were also these multicolor lights in rows across the plaza, changing colors and blinking. It looked sort of like a runway. We decided to walk across their dance floor and check it out. We were immediately approached by a couple of people who wanted to dance with use, and then once we got through the crowd and sat down on some benches we were still attracting attention. I had a bottle opener, but I decided to be social and approach a couple of older people nearby and ask to borrow theirs. I chatted with them for a bit, then tried to make my apologies and rejoin the group, but they suggested I bring the others over instead. So I did, and after a few minutes the 6 of us were surrounded by maybe 30 Chinese all trying to talk to us. I was the only one who spoke both Chinese and English (besides on 16 year old kid who claimed to be 28 and spoke a bit), so I ended up running around and translating. The rockstar effect is apparently pretty common in China, but since I live in Beijing, I'm dressed like I'm not a tourist, I probably walk around scowling, and I'm not blond I haven't really gotten any of it, yet. So it was fun for a while, and my sense of humor does apparently translate, at least to some extent, but I can't imagine living like that. I think I might really like to try to live somewhere farther west at some point, so I might have to learn to deal with it. We bailed after a bit to make it back to the hostel before they closed the doors for the night, and just hung out in the room for a bit.
Ok, so the next day was much more exciting, but I'm really sick of typing right now and I'll leave it to post sometime tomorrow.
Thursday night I went home after work, showered, then headed right back out the door to meet people at Guijie, or Ghost Street. The area is famous for its food, everything from high-end restaurants to people frying things on the street. There are some specialties, like spicy crayfish, and the whole place is lit up with red lanterns. I met Linda from work, who I'd invited, and then we joined up with Scot, Catlin, and a number of people they'd invited from couchsurfing.com. There was Ru Shyan, who's a visual arts major working for the Chinese Olympic Committee and helped with the torch; Spring, a sophomore from Harvard doing... something; Matt, engineering major from Cornell working for GE; Bill Bowles, who quit his job and is traveling the world with a video camera and a satellite modem keeping a video blog; and Aaron, a Chinese national who works as an editor for the People's Daily. In a huge coincidence, we all (minus Aaron) had ties to Massachusetts. Catlin's from Wellesley, Scot and I from MIT, Matt had gone to high school there, Spring and Linda were from Harvard (and knew each other, but didn't know the other was going to be around), Ru Shyan's from Wheaton, and I can't remember Bill went to... Amherst, maybe? But it was strange to pick a sample of westerners in Beijing and come up with all MA types.
We picked a big hot pot place. They have two kinds of broth to cook in, sort of like fondue. One was garlickly and almost like a chicken broth, the other was oily and spicy. We ordered trays of raw lamb, beef, bok choy, spinach, mushrooms, etc. and started cooking. The hard part is to either hold the thing you're cooking in a boiling pot filled with flavor-adding... chunks, or to drop it and try to find it and fish it out later. The other difficulty was trying to fit cups, plates, trays of food, bottles of beer, etc. all on a table with a big hole in the middle for cooking. Dinner was great, and I had fun talking with the others; there were a lot of shared interests, but fairly different backgrounds.
Afterwards we started walking. We found some good hutongr, Beijing's narrow, winding alleys, filled with courtyard houses and small businesses. We bought popsicles (yogurt flavored for me again... I'll branch out soon) and explored the area in the dark. I don't know how safe I would have felt doing it alone, at least carrying valuables, but we were rolling like 10 deep, so it wasn't an issue. We bought a couple of bottles of beer to drink as we walked, one of the few liberties I feel like the Chinese can enjoy that we in the land of the free are denied.
I had broken my nail clippers, so when we found what looked like a closet with the contents of Wal-Mart jammed in I asked and managed to buy some for 40 cents. How, you may ask, did I break my nail clippers? I broke them trying to trim my beard. Sort of. See, the beard trimmer I brought was new, specially bought from Kohls for the extravagant price of $15, chosen for its portability. It has these different attachments for trimming different lengths, as such devices do, but I seem to have left certain parts necessary for their use back at home. So I decided I'd just whittle the large attachment, which I could use, down to size. Rather than hack at the outside, which would have meant pushing the jagged bit against my face, I cut the underside where the attachment locks into another plastic bit on the trimmer. This process took, over the course of 3 days, at least 2 hours, a different nail clippers, 2 different steak knives (ineffective), a pair of scissors (absolutely useless), and finally a box cutter I bought at a 7-11 on Ghost Street. The box cutter did the trick, resulting in an intricate sort of terraced piece of plastic, and now I've finally trimmed my beard. Of course, the charger for the damn thing is 110 volts, so I still need to buy a voltage converter, but I've saved myself from buying a new trimmer.
Anyway. Nail clippers at the closet Wal-Mart, then since the buses had stopped for the night I caught a cab home.
7/6
Friday I skipped work. I wasn't feeling in peak form, maybe in part because of the food the night before, but I think it was mostly the result of a long week and not really having felt rested in a while. So I slept until noon, then I woke up and went out to find some lunch. I went to a Chinese fast-food place near my apartment, which was probably the first truly bad meal I've had here, then I got some corn flavored yogurt at the grocery store to wash it down. Corn flavored yogurt's very tasty, and fits well into my campaign to try to eat the weird stuff. I bought some fairly expensive grapes on the way home, which a few days later as I write this are mostly uneaten. I should get on that.
I studied some Chinese, watched Lord of War, and hung out a bit waiting for Scot and Catlin to come over. They got lost trying to get there, so I went downstairs and walked a couple blocks to meet them. We got dinner at a restaurant near where I'd had lunch, the highlight of which was the catfish soup. The wisdom of eating bottom-feeders while in China is questionable, but I think that I'm probably going to poison myself to some extent no matter what I do, and we didn't really think about it until after we'd ordered.
We went back to my place and had some beer and baijiu, but at that point everyone was exhausted. We had decided to go to Shanhaiguan on Saturday to see the spot where the Great Wall comes out of the sea, so we were trying to arrange that trip on my slow and feeble pirated internet while endeavoring to not falling asleep. Well, Scot passed out sitting on the floor and leaning forward with his head on my couch, Catlin and I wrestled with the intertubes. At the end we didn't really have a plan, we just knew we were meeting at the train station at noon. Bobby, my flatmate, came back just as we were finishing and told us that they'd shut down the elevators for the night, which was unwelcome news. Apparently they do that at a certain hour, which I wasn't aware of. Since it's a little bit hard to get to the street from my apartment I walked Scot and Catlin down the 14 flights of plaster-covered and crumbling stairs (currently undergoing renovation), then, of course, had to climb back up the 14 flights. There are no floor numbers, so I tried to count as I went. It didn't work very well, so starting on maybe the 11th floor I was leaving the staircase to try to find apartment numbers on the doors. Most apartments aren't numbered, either, so that was a bit hard.
Anyway, I made it back, showered, and crashed. Showering is rough right now because the fluorescent tube in the bathroom is dying and not so much a light as a dim. It's a weird shape and we haven't found a replacement yet. So I've been showering and shaving with my bike headlamp sitting on the shelf for a little bit of extra light. I've been showering a lot, too, since it's hot and humid and I walk around in dress clothes all day. Because of the weekend trip I still don't have a bike. I have to get on that, too.
7/7
on Saturday I got up at maybe 9:30 to get to the bank for cash to pay some of my rent before I left town. I'm still finding my way around the neighborhood, so the errand took maybe an hour of walking around looking for a bank and getting back. I packed, then caught the subway to the Beijing train station. Scot and Catlin got off the same train from a different car, so we met up immediately and went to find tickets. There are about 5 different places to buy tickets, depending on where you're going, but after some searching we found our counter. Fortunately Scot had checked the railway website to get our train's number, otherwise we might have been in trouble. Tickets to Shanhaiguan on the T11 (T for Tebie kuai, or extra fast) were 47RMB, or about 6 dollars. They were standing tickets, though. To get a seat you generally have to buy in advance. We had time to kill, so we found lunch in the alley next to the station: a big bowl of noodles with meat and hot peppers.
We made it to our gate, running to make the departure time, but it turned out that the train was delayed and we ended up sitting around for about an hour. The train station is massive and crawling with people. There's nowhere near enough seating, so we sort of found a corner and squatted to avoid sitting on the filthy floor. I checked out the bookstore (Esquire in Chinese and a magazine about Chinese military hardware), saw the huge internet bar, and tried unsuccessfully to find a deck of playing cards for sale.
When we finally got onto the train it wasn't too full; we had plenty of room to stand. When people get up to use the restrooms and such the standing people sit down to rest their legs for a moment. We chatted with some other passengers and as a result ended up sitting maybe a quarter of the time. The main problem with standing is squeezing to the side to let people pass, and people do pass. They go to the area between the cars to smoke, they use the squat toilet restrooms that empty onto the tracks, they wander around, who knows, but there are constantly people coming and going. The train workers come through with carts of as wide as the aisle, which are hard to dodge, they bring brooms and sweep up trash on the floor, they adjust baggage on the overhead bins, and they sometimes checked tickets. A few standing passengers had tiny collapsible seats that they'd unfold and sit on in the aisles, which after a while seemed like a great idea.
It took probably 3 hours to get to Shanhaiguan. We left the station to look around and were immediately set upon by hordes of touts trying to get us to take cabs or go to certain hotels or eat at the touristy restaurants. We remembered to go back into the station to buy our return tickets, and when we got out we heard, "Look, white people!' and were approached by the only other caucasians around, who didn't speak Chinese. It turns out, believe it or not, that they were from Johnson City, Tennessee. Small world, folks. So we took taxis with them to go check out the cheap Lida hostel we'd read about in the Lonely Planet. In Beijing they use a meter to determine your cab fare. In Shanhaiguan we negotiated a price with the cabdrivers ahead of time. The base flag drop price in Beijing is 10RMB, we did the trip to the hostel for 5 per cab. Small town living, I guess. The hostel had acceptable beds for $2.50 each, so the 5 Johnson City folks and I got two triple rooms. Catlin and Scot had brought camping supplies and were going to try to camp on the Wall. I didn't have camping gear, but I was game for roughing it with them until it started to rain just as we arrived at the hotel.
After dropping off bags we all headed out to get food nearby. Scot and Catlin and I have gotten into the habit of checking menus before sitting down at restaurants. We have a couple of criteria, a sort of basket or index like you'd assemble to measure cost of living or inflation. Our basket includes Gongbao Jiding (Kungpao chicken), eggplant strips, and a 600ml bottle of local beer. I'd like those 3 items to be under 30RMB combined, or about $3.75. So we turned down a couple of restaurants (one proprietor scoffed, "But where are you going to eat?" when we told her it was too expensive) before finding an acceptable place. We ordered a few dishes off of the menu, then Scot and I headed over to the seafood chill chest to point out things we'd like but didn't know the name for. So we ended up with mediocre squid, strange sea cucumber (which we're glad we tried but probably won't get again), and exceptionally good scallops in addition to our land-based food. Restaurants also don't seem to like to bring you rice early, the philosophy here being that you eat the good stuff before filling up on rice at the end, so we've also had to ask them to bring the rice early so that we get to eat it with our food. I haven't decided whether I should try to get used to the Chinese way or keep my portable America in this situation. I don't think it's a particularly important philosophy, as no one's really thought the rice request strange, so I might keep eating it throughout the meal. I talk about food a lot, sorry.
After dinner Catlin and Scot headed off towards the coast to find a spot to hide and camp, which we presume is illegal. The Johnson City people and I bought some beer at a corner store and, since the rain had stopped, decided to try to get on top of the wall somewhere in town just to hang out and drink. We got distracted, however, walking by a park where they were playing music and there were a ton of people dancing. There were also these multicolor lights in rows across the plaza, changing colors and blinking. It looked sort of like a runway. We decided to walk across their dance floor and check it out. We were immediately approached by a couple of people who wanted to dance with use, and then once we got through the crowd and sat down on some benches we were still attracting attention. I had a bottle opener, but I decided to be social and approach a couple of older people nearby and ask to borrow theirs. I chatted with them for a bit, then tried to make my apologies and rejoin the group, but they suggested I bring the others over instead. So I did, and after a few minutes the 6 of us were surrounded by maybe 30 Chinese all trying to talk to us. I was the only one who spoke both Chinese and English (besides on 16 year old kid who claimed to be 28 and spoke a bit), so I ended up running around and translating. The rockstar effect is apparently pretty common in China, but since I live in Beijing, I'm dressed like I'm not a tourist, I probably walk around scowling, and I'm not blond I haven't really gotten any of it, yet. So it was fun for a while, and my sense of humor does apparently translate, at least to some extent, but I can't imagine living like that. I think I might really like to try to live somewhere farther west at some point, so I might have to learn to deal with it. We bailed after a bit to make it back to the hostel before they closed the doors for the night, and just hung out in the room for a bit.
Ok, so the next day was much more exciting, but I'm really sick of typing right now and I'll leave it to post sometime tomorrow.
Monday, April 16, 2007
Center of the Universe
In addition to all of the more philosophical (pretentious) stuff I just posted, this is also a journal, and one of the things I really wanted to talk about was this past weekend. On Friday I drove down to NYC with a few friends from No. 6, partly to go to the Annex party at the Sixer apartment in the Upper West Side and partly to get out of the house while we hosted prospective freshmen during campus preview weekend. They annoy me with their bright, "We got into MIT!" faces. Also the house is dry while they're around, and my liver demands consistent exercise. It's like walking the dog, only with more slurred speech.
I'm not even entirely sure what to write about. I know that every time I go to NYC I love the place more and more. I grew up as every good kid who likes to think he's from Boston does, hating New York very passionately. It's just that I try to think of myself as a scientist, and this unsubstantiated ideology demanded testing that proved it to be unfounded. I love New York. I love that it's open all night, and that it's huge and busy and chaotic. I can picture myself living in a few places I've been to. Berkeley for sure. Maybe Tuscany. The idea of Vancouver sounds nice, but I've never been. But I feel like I could absolutely live in NYC. One problem is that I have a biased opinion of the place. I tend to go on weekends, with friends, to have a good time. I've never had to work there, for example, so my memories of the place are all happy and fuzzy. Well, the fuzziness is probably more the booze than anything else.
So this trip had a few high points for me. The first was on Friday night. We went to a bar in the Upper West, and then a few people expressed interest in dancing, so we went downtown to a place called Home. Three of us taxied down with Conor, who as we got out of the taxi told us to have $20 ready and to only talk to the transvestite, but not really anything besides that. So we walked straight past the winding line and Conor palmed the be-lipsticked and fur-hatted man a $20. I guess he was more of a doorman than a bouncer, he wasn't very intimidating. But he said, "4 people is an awful lot for $20", all the while looking with disapprovingly-pursed lips and a frown at my jeans and t-shirt. So I wordlessly hand him my $20 and walk past him. Now, the other two guys with us could have followed me right in, but since Conor had told them to be ready with $20 they each handed him the bills they were holding as they walked in. I think they thought they were paying a cover, the idea of bribery hadn't quite sunken in. Ah well. The inside of the club was really upscale. The people were all attractive and rich, the decor was red and leather and decadent, and the place was packed and bouncing. The DJ was playing 80s music layered with hip-hop beats, think Sweet Child of Mine meets Mos Def. This was also the first place I've ever been to (anywhere) that ignored the public smoking ban. I don't really dance much, so I decided to justify the cover with the fact that Conor was buying the drinks and that I had an opportunity to play anthropologist. I spent a long time watching guys with popped collars get shot down by girls with short skirts. There was everything shy of actual intercourse happening on the couches and against the pillars around the room. My favorite, though, was watching the other wall flowers. I feel like I was having a lot more fun than they were. They seemed to want to be dancing or flirting or whatever, but for some reason weren't. I, on the other hand, knew that I was completely and utterly out of place, and that somehow freed me from feeling uncomfortable, which was pretty cool. After the club we got pizza at the Pizza Bar, outside of which a homeless(?) guy hit me up for a contribution to the Rockefeller Negro Pizza Fund, which is apparently a common line, but it worked on me for a buck. I have a lot easier time giving money to people who make me smile than to people who try to make me feel pity or guilt. Anyway, that night was great.
We followed it up the next day with a an Irish pub brunch that started at 2 and lasted until 6. We rolled into the pub 9 deep, so they opened up the glass doors for us and we basically owned the place for a few hours. We lingered after the meal and had a few pints. I don't normally drink during the day, but there was something so appealing about sitting around after eating, watching people pass on the street, and chatting with friends that justified an exception for me.
We left the pub and I split up with the group to see Ting Qi, a girl I'd met at a party in Cambridge the previous week. She's four degrees of separation from me, a friend of a friend of a friend of a friend, from Taiwan to Costa Rica to Wellesley. Her friend (3 degrees) hooked up with Anton when they were at the house last week, and Ting Qi and I spent the time while she was waiting chatting in Chinese. She goes to NYU, and I mentioned that I would be going down the next weekend, so we decided to get dinner.
I had some time to kill after the pub and before meeting her, which I managed by wandering around Chinatown. That was the farthest south I'd ever been in NYC; I tend to stay more uptown. It was awesome; the feel is completely different. I'm amazed by how quickly the neighborhoods change. You cross an avenue and all of a sudden all of the signs are in Chinese. You cross a street and you're in Little Italy and the restaurant window decorations are signs for cappuccino rather than roasted chickens.
The Grand Street subway station in Chinatown comes up in a park. I saw a big crowd watching people playing handball (which I'd never seen before), so I stuck around. I figured out by watching that this was a grudge match, as far as I could tell between members of gangs. The people on one side of the court all seemed to be wearing blue hats of different types and people standing on the other side all had clothing with hearts on them. There was lots of shouting, some of it angry, and a lot of the spectators seemed to be from the neighborhood but not directly connected to the players. I wish I'd asked someone to tell me what exactly was going on that made this game so important, but I felt like too much of a voyeur and a tourist. So I just watched. I don't know anything about handball; I was trying to figure out the rules as I went, but everyone else seemed to think that it was a really well-played and close game. Only when one team finally won did it occur to me that maybe I didn't want to be around to see the fallout. Nothing dramatic happened. I watched a lot of side bets resolved; big wads of money changed hands. One of the losing players, the guy who missed the last play, walked off quickly, to my mind trying to avoid eye contact with his 2 little children following him out of the court. That handball game is my archetype of New York. There was a tight, local community that I didn't quite understand, a subsection of this huge city that I didn't even know existed. It was a street event that I just stumbled on while wandering around. It was diverse and urban and maybe a bit seedy. I loved it.
So I waited a bit longer, then met Ting Qi and a couple of her friends at the subway station. We walked a few blocks to a Cantonese restaurant, where there was a long wait for a table, during which I recognized several faces from the crowd at the handball game. Dinner was good, and apparently authentic, and my Chinese is definitely getting better, even if we did spend almost all of the time speaking English. After dinner Ting Qi and I went uptown to the No. 6 Annex party, which was fun if unremarkable. Ting Qi went home to Brooklyn (which I've still never been to) at 3 or 4 just as the party began to die down and it started to rain (which hasn't stopped since). The Annex Sixers managed to fit 10 guests on the couches and a small blowup mattress, we watched some Aliens on TV, and all fell asleep.
So that, and a long drive back in the pouring rain and heavy traffic and the dark, was my weekend.
I'm not even entirely sure what to write about. I know that every time I go to NYC I love the place more and more. I grew up as every good kid who likes to think he's from Boston does, hating New York very passionately. It's just that I try to think of myself as a scientist, and this unsubstantiated ideology demanded testing that proved it to be unfounded. I love New York. I love that it's open all night, and that it's huge and busy and chaotic. I can picture myself living in a few places I've been to. Berkeley for sure. Maybe Tuscany. The idea of Vancouver sounds nice, but I've never been. But I feel like I could absolutely live in NYC. One problem is that I have a biased opinion of the place. I tend to go on weekends, with friends, to have a good time. I've never had to work there, for example, so my memories of the place are all happy and fuzzy. Well, the fuzziness is probably more the booze than anything else.
So this trip had a few high points for me. The first was on Friday night. We went to a bar in the Upper West, and then a few people expressed interest in dancing, so we went downtown to a place called Home. Three of us taxied down with Conor, who as we got out of the taxi told us to have $20 ready and to only talk to the transvestite, but not really anything besides that. So we walked straight past the winding line and Conor palmed the be-lipsticked and fur-hatted man a $20. I guess he was more of a doorman than a bouncer, he wasn't very intimidating. But he said, "4 people is an awful lot for $20", all the while looking with disapprovingly-pursed lips and a frown at my jeans and t-shirt. So I wordlessly hand him my $20 and walk past him. Now, the other two guys with us could have followed me right in, but since Conor had told them to be ready with $20 they each handed him the bills they were holding as they walked in. I think they thought they were paying a cover, the idea of bribery hadn't quite sunken in. Ah well. The inside of the club was really upscale. The people were all attractive and rich, the decor was red and leather and decadent, and the place was packed and bouncing. The DJ was playing 80s music layered with hip-hop beats, think Sweet Child of Mine meets Mos Def. This was also the first place I've ever been to (anywhere) that ignored the public smoking ban. I don't really dance much, so I decided to justify the cover with the fact that Conor was buying the drinks and that I had an opportunity to play anthropologist. I spent a long time watching guys with popped collars get shot down by girls with short skirts. There was everything shy of actual intercourse happening on the couches and against the pillars around the room. My favorite, though, was watching the other wall flowers. I feel like I was having a lot more fun than they were. They seemed to want to be dancing or flirting or whatever, but for some reason weren't. I, on the other hand, knew that I was completely and utterly out of place, and that somehow freed me from feeling uncomfortable, which was pretty cool. After the club we got pizza at the Pizza Bar, outside of which a homeless(?) guy hit me up for a contribution to the Rockefeller Negro Pizza Fund, which is apparently a common line, but it worked on me for a buck. I have a lot easier time giving money to people who make me smile than to people who try to make me feel pity or guilt. Anyway, that night was great.
We followed it up the next day with a an Irish pub brunch that started at 2 and lasted until 6. We rolled into the pub 9 deep, so they opened up the glass doors for us and we basically owned the place for a few hours. We lingered after the meal and had a few pints. I don't normally drink during the day, but there was something so appealing about sitting around after eating, watching people pass on the street, and chatting with friends that justified an exception for me.
We left the pub and I split up with the group to see Ting Qi, a girl I'd met at a party in Cambridge the previous week. She's four degrees of separation from me, a friend of a friend of a friend of a friend, from Taiwan to Costa Rica to Wellesley. Her friend (3 degrees) hooked up with Anton when they were at the house last week, and Ting Qi and I spent the time while she was waiting chatting in Chinese. She goes to NYU, and I mentioned that I would be going down the next weekend, so we decided to get dinner.
I had some time to kill after the pub and before meeting her, which I managed by wandering around Chinatown. That was the farthest south I'd ever been in NYC; I tend to stay more uptown. It was awesome; the feel is completely different. I'm amazed by how quickly the neighborhoods change. You cross an avenue and all of a sudden all of the signs are in Chinese. You cross a street and you're in Little Italy and the restaurant window decorations are signs for cappuccino rather than roasted chickens.
The Grand Street subway station in Chinatown comes up in a park. I saw a big crowd watching people playing handball (which I'd never seen before), so I stuck around. I figured out by watching that this was a grudge match, as far as I could tell between members of gangs. The people on one side of the court all seemed to be wearing blue hats of different types and people standing on the other side all had clothing with hearts on them. There was lots of shouting, some of it angry, and a lot of the spectators seemed to be from the neighborhood but not directly connected to the players. I wish I'd asked someone to tell me what exactly was going on that made this game so important, but I felt like too much of a voyeur and a tourist. So I just watched. I don't know anything about handball; I was trying to figure out the rules as I went, but everyone else seemed to think that it was a really well-played and close game. Only when one team finally won did it occur to me that maybe I didn't want to be around to see the fallout. Nothing dramatic happened. I watched a lot of side bets resolved; big wads of money changed hands. One of the losing players, the guy who missed the last play, walked off quickly, to my mind trying to avoid eye contact with his 2 little children following him out of the court. That handball game is my archetype of New York. There was a tight, local community that I didn't quite understand, a subsection of this huge city that I didn't even know existed. It was a street event that I just stumbled on while wandering around. It was diverse and urban and maybe a bit seedy. I loved it.
So I waited a bit longer, then met Ting Qi and a couple of her friends at the subway station. We walked a few blocks to a Cantonese restaurant, where there was a long wait for a table, during which I recognized several faces from the crowd at the handball game. Dinner was good, and apparently authentic, and my Chinese is definitely getting better, even if we did spend almost all of the time speaking English. After dinner Ting Qi and I went uptown to the No. 6 Annex party, which was fun if unremarkable. Ting Qi went home to Brooklyn (which I've still never been to) at 3 or 4 just as the party began to die down and it started to rain (which hasn't stopped since). The Annex Sixers managed to fit 10 guests on the couches and a small blowup mattress, we watched some Aliens on TV, and all fell asleep.
So that, and a long drive back in the pouring rain and heavy traffic and the dark, was my weekend.
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