North Korea

A friend of mine went to North Korea in October. Apparently they do allow a very limited number of American tourists into the country now on strictly guided tours. You have to be with the group at all times and can only take pictures of designated sites or your camera is confiscated. So her pictures are limited, maybe, but it is still really neat to see images of a place so isolated, controlled, regimented, and behind. Here are the pictures if you are interested. What struck me most was how devoid of people public places seemed, as if normal life was so strictly controlled that people weren't even allowed to freely and casually be outside.

Bike trouble

Today, my bicycle suffered one of its worst traumas yet. Now keep in mind that this bike was purchased for about $12, has a flat tire every other week, and rattles constantly (imagine a rabid rodent trapped in a have-a-heart trap...that's what I sound like as I ride down the street.) Anyways: so it's been really cold here recently, and so today, for whatever reason (perhaps having to do with the subzero temperatures), when I went to stop, both of my hand brakes just ripped off in my hands. That is, the plastic part that attaches the wire part to the handlebars ripped through--now the completely unattached plastic brake handles dangle uselessly from the wires, and drag on the ground. So now, in order to stop my bike, I have to do the following: a) pull futilely on the wire portion of the brake cord sort of near where it attaches to the wheel, to limited effect; b) drag my feet along the ground in an attempt to slow my lightning-speed careen through traffic; and c) yell loudly in an attempt to alert those around me that I am out of control and have no means not to hit them. (unfortunately, this is usually a wordless "AY! AY! AY!" since in the heat of the moment as I am about to crash I do not have the Chinese language capacity to say, "Watch out! I can't stop! Get out of the way!")

feline feasts

as a follow-up to my last post, the NY Times reports that apparently cats don't have it so good in China either, haha.

This article contains such excellent tidbits as: "'Cats have a strong flavor. Dogs taste much better, but if you really want cat meat, I can have it delivered by tomorrow,' said the butcher, who gave only her surname, Huang."

delights in dining

Last night my friend Jill and and I went out to get some food at the end of the day. We usually hit the gym and then grab dinner afterwards at various hole in the wall "establishments" in the area. Yesterday we decided to try someplace new. We ended up at a regular-looking place, neither clean nor dirty, neither nice nor not-nice, where we ordered some eggplant, some cold cucumber salad with cilantro, some some stir-fried egg with unnamed "vegetables," and also some snow peas. Other than the eggplant tasting like feces and the the rest of the food being bland, it was a "great meal."

There's a point to the story, and I'm getting to it: it's not uncommon for DOG MEAT to be featured on menus around here. It's certainly not in all restaurants, but you wouldn't have to search far to find some tasty, well-seasoned, tender loin of puppy. That being said, this restaurant DID in fact offer dog meat on the menu, although we did not choose to partake. About 3/4 of the way into our meal, however, a waitress entered the restaurant holding a plump dog in her arms, and took him into the kitchen. I thought nothing of this. (Animals in restaurants? Who cares? Worse things have happened.)

BUT THEN this dog gave a few shrill barks from the kitchen, there was a scuffle, then all quiet. I still didn't think much of it....until 20 minutes later all 20 waitresses and chefs and managers all sat down to fresh, steaming bowls of soup and rice. What kind of soup, you ask?

You guessed it: DOG MEAT SOUP.

IMPORTANT NOTICE

I'm coming home in January! I'll be in the States January 14th-February 4th!

Get excited everybody

Blue sky today, and clear and cold. Finally, a reprieve from the pollution.

Tonight attempting to have a "dinner party" which will potentially include roasting chicken in a toaster oven and cooking vegetables in a rice cooker. Ha.

The Brown Cloud

Living here right now is like living in the middle of a forest fire. The coal smoke is so thick these days that the air looks like milk. You can only see a couple of blocks away, if that. It burns to breathe. Great...it's going to be like this all winter.

No wonder there's a brown cloud over Asia....

In other news, it's supposed to snow tomorrow. ACID SNOW!!!!!!!!!!! AAAHHHHHHHHHH!!!

word play

There are alot of words in Chinese that come from English, but this week I discovered three that really surprised me. They are: romance (langman), humor (youmo), and logic (luoji). Logic perhaps makes sense: this is a concept totally invented by Western philosophy, and the Chinese have there own way of saying that something is logical/reasonable/makes sense. Humor I also understand; having a "sense of humor" isn't a valuable personality characteristic here as it is in the West, and once again, there are other ways of saying that a person has an enjoyable/amusing personality. Romance I don't get though--doesn't every society have romance? Isn't that sort of one of the fundamental aspects of humanity?

The word Bingo (Bin-ge) also comes from English, in case you were wondering. As this is not a unifying theme from human history, I guess I can understand why they don't have a word for it.

roosters

Somebody who lives near me has a rooster.

Two notes on this: 1) To the owners of said rooster: You live in an urban area. I can see several 20+ story buildings from my apartment. Roosters and skyscrapers do not go together. 2) To the rooster himself: it is now 11:20 p.m. I repeat, p.m. The appropriate time for crowing loudly is, I believe, confined to about 5:30 a.m. to 6:30 a.m. I will thank you to please STOP the incessant crowing immediately, if not sooner, so that I may sleep.

FURTHERMORE, dear rooster, sir, if you do not stop in the next, oh, 3 and a half minutes, I will personally hunt you down, kill you, and make a soup out of you. It would certainly be better than the "pasta" I had for dinner.

Hangzhou, Huangshan, and Wuyuan

Last week we had off so I went with two friends to southern(ish) China. We flew to Hangzhou, a beautiful city south of Shanghai where I was living two years ago. It was really much prettier than I remembered it. When i told this to Eunjee, she suggested it is because I am not miserable this time around. Anyway, the city is centered around West Lake, a beautiful lake with many temples and islands, where Mao once had a residence (where did Mao NOT have a residence, though, really?). There is a saying in Chinese, "above us, there is heaven; on Earth, there is Hangzhou and Suzhou" [Suzhou is another city nearby renowned for its beautiful Chinese gardens]. Pictures of the lake at sunset.

From Hangzhou, we took a five hour-bus NW to Huangshan (Yellow Mountain) in Anhui province. This is one of the most famous mountains in all of China, and as such is a major tourist attraction. Luckily it's the off-season now, and kind of cold, so we didn't run into TOO many people (just a few thousand, as opposed to about a million on the mountain all at once). We spent one day climbing ("mountain climbing" in China actually means climbing hundreds and hundreds of stairs. There is no path, just stone steps--I guess this is to keep the hordes under control; you can't just let people roam free). The we spent a night at the top and got up at about 4 am the next day to watch the sunrise. It was really incredible, except for the fact that the mountain side was FULL of people. How tranquil. Anyway, the views were awesome. After sunrise, we spent the next 6 hours descending 16 km worth of stairs. The next day I felt like I was about 100 years old, my legs hurt so much. Pictures.

From there, we next took a bus south to Jiangxi Province, to a county in the north called Wuyuan. This is a very historic area, with the villages we saw having been constructed in the Ming dynasty (~1500s-1600s). The area was at one time an extraordinarily prosperous merchant base, so most of the homes were very large and beautiful and could rightfully be called mansions. The problem now is that the area has lost its prosperity; the region relies entirely on subsistence agriculture. So actually it's a little ghostly; these huge old homes are still inhabited, but families use only a few rooms and the rest of the house is deserted or used as storage space. In addition, the residents of this area (as in many rural areas in China) are all small children and old people. Very few young people are to be seen, as they all have left to find work in the cities. So the old people raise a second generation of children, and tend the fields, and keep life going, and wait for their children's income to come in.

Some really cool things we did while there: eat alot of pumpkin; get sick from the food; ride motorcycles between the villages--funnest thing ever; see a traditional funeral, complete with corpse; and go to a psychedelic cave. Scope the pictures for proof.

We spent three days in the rural area and then took an overnight train back to BJ.

Bird's Nest-a-biggle

Leah was just here, for work, which was exciting! So of course we had to go to the Olympic park, which I actually hadn't been to yet. You've all seen the pictures on TV, but it was really neat to see the Bird's Nest and Water Cube up close. This, at least, is one thing that China's really done right.







There was some sort of event going on at the Water Cube, so it was all lit up, and then people poured out around 9 pm.

OBAMA!!!

For the election results on our Wednesday morning, almost all of the Americans in my "neighborhood" gathered at an American-run cafe to watch the coverage. There had to be at least 200 of us, and not a single McCain fan in the crowd.

After he won, we went into the street and were cheering and waving signs, etc, and all the Chinese people where baffled. A few asked, "what's going on?" "what are you so happy about?" and when we replied that Obama had won, etc etc, they gave us lackluster, oh, ok's. I guess you can't expect people who have never had a single experience in a participatory governance system of any type on any scale to really understand why this is such an important event.

A few photos of us celebrating.

"Fragrant Mountain"

Two weekends ago, one of Eunjee's English-language students took us to Xiang Shan, or "Fragrant Mountain." He had a CAR, so we could go to one of the spots that only people with cars can get too, and thus enjoy a (relatively) uncrowded experience. Hills ring Beijing on the north and west sides, so this mountain was part of that chain of foothills. From the top, it was possible to see all of BJ spread out below. As far as the eye could see to the east and west, and to the south, the city stretched out, low concrete buildings marching forward into the pollution at the edges of the flat plain. There really are not many "skyscrapers" in Beijing; the tallest building is about 70 stories, but ones like this are few and far between. Most are 10-25 story high-rise apartment buildings in concrete, giving the city a uniform and dreary character.

I'm cold!

It would be great if they could turn on the heat here, please! There is no heat that's not central heating, so the government decides when it comes on and off, and it doesn't get turned on in Beijing til November 15th!! Our shower also stopped making hot water today--not sure what that's all about, but perhaps we need to pay our gas bill? unclear.

* * * * *

Today in a restaurant bathroom i saw the BEST SIGN EVER (well, really, Eunjee saw it, so credit must go to her).

It said:

请勿大便

which means, "please dont poop" [in the toilet, because it will clog]
BUT underneath, in English it said:

NO SHIT!

Luoyang

I have too many pictures from Luoyang to put here, so I uploaded them to a Picasa web album--you'll be able to check them out better there.

Another girl on our trip took some really incredible photos, if you want to look at more; go here.

Our train ride was AMAZING. It was really fun to get to hang out with all the teachers, who are all (except one) Chinese girls in their twenties, so we could all be friends if given the chance--aka, our interactions not limited to those involving forced sentences using ridiculous vocabulary words, such as, "the company propagandized the item in the media in order to generate sales," or "women are restricted from entering the postman profession because of their inability to lift as many kilograms of mail," or, "The goal of the Women's Federation in Taiwan is to develop and promote female virtue and handicraft arts."

So we drank a bunch of beers on the train, and arrived in Luoyang on little sleep at 7 am. The first day we saw the temples, and at night partied with the teachers. The best part of the Buddhist temples was the Kung fu demonstration, where one monk placed two spear heads on his esophagus, then proceeded to bend the shafts of the spears in semicircles by leaning forward onto the spears; another monk bashed an iron bar over his head and it snapped into 5 pieces; and a third monks threw a pin through a pane of glass to pop a balloon on the other side. If I hadn't seen that with my own eyes, I would never have believed it. Their was only a little pin-hole in the glass, and he had thrown that pin from two feet away. Can somebody explain how that is possible??

The second day we saw the Longmen grottoes, which were incredible, then split up til it was time to take the train back. Some of us chose to hang out in a park, watch Sharon play the violin, and talk to Chinese who came around the stare at this crazy crowd of blond people and to listen to Sharon play.

We arrived back in BJ at 6 am Monday morning, after a truly exhausting weekend.

Weather and Economics

Today was a really incredible day in Beijing. Yesterday was terrible; the pollution was so bad you couldn't see buildings a block away. No matter how much they tell me so, I will not believe it when the Chinese say this is "fog." It is smog, people--get over it.

At any rate, last night the wind picked up and then it started to rain hard. This morning when I woke up the sky was clear blue and there was still a 20-knot breeze out of the north (aka, Mongolia!). The air had that particular October quality to it, cold but not too much so, and even on the horizon where smog tends to collect, images were crisp. The mountains to the north and west were clearly outlined against the sky, and you could see the Great Wall! This doesn't happen so often.

* * * * *

Tomorrow we have "presentation lectures"--five minute speech and then 5 minutes answer questions. My topic is, why America deserves to fail economically. Main points of my argument: we are an economic empire that has taken advantage of our power and influence to get ahead. We have lived beyond our means for too long, never considering future consequences but only today's wealth. Without some thought for future stability, and with an indelible belief that our global hegemony will last forever, coupled with our excess consumerism and excess arrogance, perhaps we deserve what we get. If we are so stupid not too take some measure to preserve our prosperity and our influence, and then not to recognize when disaster is upon us, but blindly continue to believe that our empire can never fall, then perhaps we deserve to fail.

I think this will be a popular topic with the teachers, especially the part about exploiting others to get ahead (Cough*cough*). I hope they don't take me too seriously, although there's probably some grains of truth to what I say.

did i mention this is in CHINESE? why am I here??? Oh wait, because I can't get a job at home; there's no work because our economy is failing. So now I'm living in a city that's worse for my health than cigarettes, a million miles away, criticizing my country...A vicious cycle....

Luoyang

This weekend, IUP (that's my school) is taking EVERYBODY to Luoyang, a city in Henan province, south of Beijing. (When i say everybody, i mean 30 students and 30 teachers, plus assorted boyfriends/girlfriends, husbands/wives, and even CHILDREN. mother of god).

Anyway, Luoyang in the center of the Yellow River valley and was one of the seven ancient capitals of China. (the capital for 9 dynasties over 1500 years!--that's 96 emperors!)

A famous characteristic of Luoyang is the Longmen grottoes, a UNESCO World heritage site. It's an enormous complex of caves (over 1350) with over 100,000 Buddhist statues carved into the rock. This carving began in the 4th century and continued through til the 10th century. Basically, this stuff is REALLY OLD, but unfortunately, the massive amounts of air pollution are rapidly causing much of the carving at the grottoes to deteriorate. The quality of the art there is quickly diminishing as air pollution worsens and eats away at the living rock. It's good to have an opportunity to see this really neat cultural center now, before its UTTER DESTRUCTION!!!!

Additionally, and more importantly any Jackie Chan and/or Jet Li fans, Luoyang has the Shaolin temple, where Kung Fu was INVENTED! Apparently, kong fu was first developed at Shaolin Temple as a form of gymnastics to combat the immobility of meditation. Monks observed animals and carefully imitated their movements. Over time, kong fu turned into a mechanism of self defense.

Get this: Shaolin monks are enormously disciplined, and since childhood train everyday from dawn to dusk. Only after 20 years of training can someone consider himself proficient in kong fu. Some of the training they undergo daily includes: 1) for hand strengthening, thrust hands into bags of beans repeatedly, and then bags of sand when that gets too easy; 2) for fist strengthening, punch a brick wall repeatedly; 3) for leg strengthening, run with bags of sand tied to the knees; 4) for head strengthening, repeatedly strike the skull with bricks.

Go do that everyday for 20 years, and then you will be able to do the following:
1) break iron bars with your head and concrete slabs with your fists
2) balance on one finger
3) take a sledgehammer blow to the chest
4) hang from a tree by the neck

Apparently we will be able to see these feats when we go.

All 60 of us are taking an overnight train there and back (9 hrs each way). Sweet.

Minotaur

Hilarious!

courtesy of Mika Green

http://www.craigslist.org/about/best/min/733317143.html

Olympic Sailing Site!

Qingdao was actually a really neat city, with strong legacy of being a former German colony; much of the architecture from that period remains, giving the city an oddly European character in some parts (ok, maybe that's a stretch, but it might have a European character if you used your imagination and also squinted your eyes when you looked at everything so you couldn't really see what you were looking at). Everywhere there were Beijing 2008 logos, and TONS of big pictures all over the city of the sailing events. Below, a Beijing 08 logo with a Tornado (the catamaran class at the Olympics).




Qingdao is one of the four major ports of China and also a MAJOR naval base. You could see tons of container ships coming in, as well as a number of naval ships.




Beaches of HUMANS!!!!




And THEN we went to the Olympic site, which was cool to see (although no boats left). I liked that it was open to the public for a very low entry fee so people could enjoy the water and the skyline.







The skyline LOOKS pretty, but don't be fooled; it was actually HIDEOUS and neon and flashing and totally garish at night.

Qingdao Beer Festival 08

Two weekends ago we took the train to Qingdao (the city SE of Beijing where the sailing Olympics were held) to go, not to the Olympic site, nor to any cultural and historic places of interest, but to an international beer festival. Seriously, this is a big deal, people. GERMAN BEER. GOOD BEER. REAL BEER. It's not available here.

So, 6 hours by high speed train (you could have told me I was in Europe and I would have believed you; the train was brand new and gleaming and traveled at 170 km/h), and we're there.
The "beer city," as it was called, was really what we'd call a fair or a carnival: rides and stalls and games and snacks. Oh, and huge tents all over the place selling beer and providing live entertainment (Korean popstars, fire breathers, etc).

Qingdao beer was cheapest, and came in bags. They didn't really get the concept of pouring beer on a slant so as to reduce the foam....


Somebody had a frisbee? So we drank out of that alot.




Chinese people were REALLY psyched about us white kids, and we barely bought ourselves beer for two days straight; we were constantly toasted and given beer, drinking with Chinese of all ages and types, even children as young as THREE (I kid you not!)

Too bad we missed our train back on the third day because nobody could quite make it out of bed in time to get to the train station before that train blasted the hell out of there.

Watch the Smog Rise Over There

Last night, I was studying at a cafe (yes, you heard me, a cafe, where they sell coffee, and paninis, and salads) with some other IUP students. It was Sunday night, and everybody, far from being rested after a relaxing weekend, was beat from 2 days of partying. People started going home early.

At 9:30, I left to go home to bed. At 12:30, I was still not asleep. At 1:30, I think I finally stopped watching the clock.

Monday at lunch, my friend Alex said, "God, last night, I just tossed and turned for 4 hours. I couldn't fall asleep for the life of me."

Another friend agreed, "Yeah, I was exhausted but slept so restlessly. I went to bed at 9 and hardly slept."

I said: "Me too! There must have been something in the air! I lay awake for 3 or 4 hours before I finally fell asleep."

Eunjee called me half an hour later. She said I woke her when I left in the morning at 7, but it was ok since she had been sleeping poorly anyway. She said, "I lay awake forever and then when I finally fell asleep I kept waking up! And, then today, in class, all of my classmates kept falling asleep at their desks! Everybody said they hadn't slept much. I swear, there's something in the air!"

Everybody was using the same words to describe this odd phenomenon. The only conclusion we came to was that there really IS something in the air. Something like, oh, I don't know, massive quantities of industrial exhaust and car fumes. We've had two days of (relatively) beautiful weather, and then last night nobody slept, and then today the air was so thick and hazy it looked like you could cut it with a knife. A friend tried to convince me it was "fog" but I'm not buying it. I've seen plenty of fog, and this shit is not the same. It is nasty and makes you want to choke.

Air pollution is normally measured in micrograms/m3. In New York City, the average level is around 10 micrograms/m3 on any given day. In Beijing, 200 micrograms/m3 is standard, and many days it is much worse. I've heard that living here is about as equivalently bad for your health as smoking 5-7 cigarettes a day.

Apparently not sleeping is the least of my problems.

BITE MY NECK.

This one's for Dugan. And Barbara Mann.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/wales/2134693.stm

The Time I Almost Got Deported

So yesterday, I ran into some trouble with the police. (Quite unusual for me, I know).

"Aliens" in China on a non-tourist visa are required to register for a permanent residence permit (sort of like getting your green card). You have 30 days to do this before your visa expires. In order to register, you must submit to a health examination to check that you are in good health and aren't bringing any dangerous diseases or conditions to the Chinese populace, which according to the government, is completely devoid of things like AIDS and STDs, of course. Additionally, you must register at your local police station and obtain a temporary residence permit, just so they have you on record, or something. So those things are time-consuming and inconvenient, so about 2 weeks ago I finally got them all sorted out. So then, the next step (apparently) was to go to the Tsinghua University Foreign Student's Office, where they can help you start your visa registration process. The way this office works is as follows: Doors open at "9 am." This actually means 9:30 or 9:45, whenever somebody feels like it. Therefore, around 7:30 am, people start to amass outside the doors. When they open, there is a crazed rush to the desks. Running, pushing, shouting, shoving things in peoples faces, climbing over the desk and chairs to be closer to the workers--all permissible.

So after I had been to this office several times, I thought I had successfully started my registration process. At least, I had a little piece of paper that said because I had started it before the day my visa expired, I was fine. OR SO I THOUGHT!!

They kept telling me to come back every few days to do some other piece of the process, so yesterday when I when back, they told me there was no way they could help me because my visa had expired.

Well, no shit my visa is expired! I fucking KNOW that, and that is why I have been here FIVE TIMES THIS WEEK. Maybe if your office had any SEMBLANCE of organization or efficiency, you wouldn't have LOST ME, and i wouldn't be an ILLEGAL ALIEN.

So now I'm told I have to go to my local police station, obtain a new temporary residence permit, then go to the city Public Security Bureau and register. It's 3 pm on a Sunday, everything closes at 5 pm, and then there is a week-long holiday. F-ing great.

Go to the local police station, hand over my passport and previous registration, which is ripped up. A new one is printed and stamped. "Can I have that, please? I need to go to the Public Security Bureau."

"No. You need to go to the somewhere somewhere and do the something something."

"I don't know what that is."

"You know, the somewheresomewhere. For the something."

"Um....but I was told I need to go to the PSB."

"No. The something."

By now I'm in tears, I have no idea what's going on, nobody speaks a word of English, I have an expired visa, and my passport has been confiscated, and I can't have it back. So then I try to leave and am told I can't. Oh-kaaaaaaay.

"Wait a little."

Having no other option, I wait two hours until the office closes. Then I'm told to go outside, where there is a police car waiting for me. My passport is handed to me through a window with bars, I'm told to give it to the police officer in the car, and then get in.

"Get in?"

"Get in."

They were being nice about it; everybody was smiling, but since I wasn't in on the joke, I didn't think it was all that hilarious.

30 minutes later, I'm delivered to the Haidian district police headquarters and led through a rat maze to an office,--"this is the crying foreigner"--where a really nice police officer talks with me, and then--this is the BEST PART--forces me to write a self criticism of why I allowed my visa to expire, and apologize. IN CHINESE.

"Statement for Overdue Stay: (You are required to state in detail reasons and responsibilities for your overdue stay in China as well as your attitude toward the penalties.)"

So I wrote out my little story, and then the guy told me to add at the end: "I know I am wrong, and I am very sorry. I am willing to accept the punishment."

Then, I was given a transcript of a supposed "interview" (let's call it an "interrogation") that this police officer did with me, where I admitted who I was, what I had done, and why, and told to sign it.

haHA! I love it. Then I was allowed to leave, and told to come back Oct 6, after the holiday. I don't know what will happen then. Probably "accept the punishment."

National Week

So this week is the National Holiday (marks the founding of the PRC in 1949) so everybody gets the week off. Naturally, wanting a break from studying, I'm going to attempt to travel a bit, but face two obstacles: 1) don't have a passport; it's been taken from me by the "Public Secuirty Bureau" to obtain my permanent residence permit. This makes it difficult to even travel domestically. But we're going to attempt. 2) every single person in the country tries to travel this week. So imagine Christmas, everybody going home for the holidays, planes and trains packed, flights delayed, everything disorganized, etc. Then, add ONE BILLION to that. US pop=300 million China pop=1.3 billion, right? Also consider the fact that their is virtually no air travel, and no personal cars, so everybody in the country is packed into the rail system. So I expect it will be quite an annoying and difficult week to travel.

We're going to Datong, a city in Shanxi province. Shanxi is a province to the southwest of Beijing, just south of Inner Mongolia and in the Yellow River Basin, and at the beginning of the desert. Apparently it's one of the poorer provinces in the country, and Datong is a major coal processing center, with the third largest coal strip mines in the world. It's also supposed to be a very polluted city. So why, you ask, would I ever want to go there? Nearby are the following: ancient Buddhist caves with rock carvings (a UNESCO world heritage site), a hanging monastery that's supposed to be cool, and one of the five sacred Buddhist mountains in China. So hopefully we'll be able to escape the pollution and the crowds at these sites.

But I think I've gotten pampered here in Beijing; where I live I don't attract nearly the amount of attention that I did in China the first time around. Not really looking forward to that part of traveling to China's less developed regions.
Shouts of HELLO!!!!! get tiresome. Listen, man, don't talk to me. You don't know me. You don't want me to reply, you just want to yell at me. HELLO! HELLO! Sometimes I want to turn around and just scream HELLO!!!! right back at them, in their faces. mostly i ignore it if possible.
I also really like, Look at her yellow hair! It is so....yellow!!! And, wow, our foreign friend knows how to use chopsticks!!!!! Yeah, what a fucking miracle, man, if I didn't know how to use chopsticks I would frigging starve to death in this country.

Anyways, pictures when I get back.

Par-tay

Last night our roof terrace was put to good use...we had our first party! This marks a very important landmark: we have enough friends to have a party!! Haha, definitely thought for a little while that we'd never get there. Our party was pretty small, but somehow today the house is a mess. Standard. The roof terrace was a delightful place to drink some beers, as anticipated when we first saw the house a month ago. Yay! Woke up not feeling so good today though....maybe next time a little less "white liquor." Hmm, maybe that's why I have a sore throat today, because my esophagus was burned to hell last night by the dinosaur piss I was taking shots of. I'll have to do further studies to corroborate this theory.

I;m blessed to know you~~

I LOVE these personal ads on beijinger.com:

who am I?
A tall girl of great intelligence with exotic looks (not like traditional petite Chinese girls)
An exuberant girlie with some fancy ideas, study hard and play hard, like doing workout, hiking, watching chicken flicks ,reading novesls and digest and embrace different cultures,like getting suntanned and eating yummy food and finding new friends from different cultural and social background.
A nice girl caring about her friends , like to do charity to the poor and underprivileged people, always makes her friends and folks laugh until they cannot stop, because she wanna make them happy when they are with her.

what kinds of friends am i seeking?
a sense of great humor, to be nice ,righteous and international minded, like to do some risky adventures in their lives, and wanna be blended with different cultures, , a fan of sports ( hehe, atheletic girls and boys are ideal company )like soothing and tranquil places when you wanna be alone for yourselves and wanna read your books. Like trying to do delicate homemade foods and drinks with your friends just for fun at spare time, like to share your unique opinions about life~~~~

I am writing this ad in the hope of finding some friends, Well, if you think you stack up to the “person”I list above, share some common interest with me and wanna be my friend, why not ad me in ur msn
vin_jade@hotmail.com, thank you

I think I'm going to message her some time: "Hi! Do you think we can watching some chicken flicks together?"

Dinosaurs!

I have perfected a number of my dinosaur impersonations. Obviously my specialty is still the velociraptor (claws poised for attack, prancing lightly across the floor, mad gleam in my eyes) but I'm also really good at the tyrannosaur, the pterodactyl (obvi) and working on an anklosaurus (but it's kind of hard when I lack the long barbed tail.)

Kimchi ice cream

Me: I want ice cream!!
Eunjee: Well, we have kimchi...

Kimchi and ice cream are not related!!! Frozen cream and sugar or pickled spicy cabbage....hmm....

censorship

What does the NY Times say today that China has blocked? I can't get the news!!!

Beware the Thief!

My beautiful bicycle that cost me less than 20 USD new, and broke every other day, has been abducted by thieves. It lasted about two weeks. Good thing I didn't pay much for it. I think next I will try for a "Wolfs Brand" bike. I hear they're quite popular.

Kaoya!

I am having so much fun here!

Today: 4 pm. Wake Up (alot of catching up from the past week and last night had to be done). 5 pm. arrive at Roast Duck Restaurant. 5:30 pm. Dine like emperors on magnificent and delicious Beijing Roast Duck. Order 3 bottles of "white liquor" and 15 beers. 6 pm. Drunk. 7 pm. Pay the bill. 35 kuai each for as much roast duck as you can eat and as much beer as you can drink. $6 US? How incredible is that?? 7:30 pm. Hit the bars with a bunch of boys from school. Discuss sex, economics, American politics, and international relations. Being around a group of people with a universal similar interest (can you guess what it is?) is really neat, and I like the fact that people aren't stuck up like I expected them to be. Most of them are older than I am (mid and late 20s?) and so have interesting experience and insight to share.

Chinese Are Smart

Things Chinese People Have Invented:
1. The Fire
2. The Wheel
3. The Noodle
4. The M.S.G.
5. The Squat
6. The Paper
7. The Printing Press
8. The Compass
9. The Fireworks

CuanDiXia Village

This past weekend we took a trip to the countryside. We went to a village in the mountains about 3 hours outside of Beijing that was constructed ~500 years ago in the Ming dynasty and was an important stop on the trade routes from provinces north of Beijing to the capital. The houses are all traditional style, with four rooms surrounding an open-air courtyard.



Look closely--you can see his split pants. (Chinese babies don't wear diapers, they just wear pants w/ no crotch, and get potty trained really early).


PICKLED LIZARD!!!








So we were hanging out on this mountain top by a temple over looking the village, and a local Chinese guy started talking to us.
"Where are you from?"
"The US."
"Hmm...the US. People in the US eat lots of beef."
"Yes...."
"People in China eat lots of pork."
"Yes, we know."
"Pigs are stupid. The reason Chinese people are stupid is because we eat too much pork!" He said this accusatorily, as if 1) we had somehow suggested that we thought Chinese people were stupid and as if 2) the reason they had to eat so much pork was because we were hording the world's entire supply of beef or something. On purpose.
So then, next:
"Why does your President Bush want to go to war so much? Why do you people just like conflict? We Chinese are very peaceful people. We have a saying, we will not kill on purpose or for food, but if a wild animal comes onto our land, we will kill it." Basically, attack only if threatened.
We didn't even try to argue that point....
And THEN, the crowning jewel:
"Do you know, America doesn't actually belong to you."
"Oh....? To whom does it belong, then."
"Well because you know, the real people of America are the American Indians. You people came from Europe and killed them all. And actually, the American Indians came from Asia, so actually America belongs to Asia."
Ok, OBVIOUSLY no point even attempting to defend ourselves against those very well thought out and well informed points, but they do raise some obvious counterpoints: 1) N. America was populated from Asia about 30,000 years ago 2) Europeans and other immigrants did do terrible things to the indigenous peoples in the area, no denying it, but have you HEARD of Tibet? 3) I personally did not kill any American Indians, and you personally did not walk across the land bridge in the Bering Sea; therefore, please don't act as though this is a personal vendetta.
So then, after that, this guy challenged our classmate Ben to an arm-wrestling match. Clearly, this was to prove the superiority of his race and country. It was a fight to the death. Observe his extremely serious expression while Ben appears to be having fun.



A Cultural-Revolution era slogan that still remains on the wall of a house. It reads, "Use Mao Zedong thought to arm our minds!!"

Some local fauna

This moth, I swear, was part grasshopper. I kid you not. It had enormously powerful legs and went leaping around all over the place when I tried to take a picture of it. Furthermore, it didn't seem to want to open its wings in order to have its portrait taken. What a jerk.

More Old Summer Palace Pictures

Old Summer Palace

The Old Summer Palace is located in the northwest corner of Beijing a couple of miles from where we live. It was originally constructed in the 1700s as an imperial summer retreat, and at its peak apparently had over 200 temples, palace buildings, and other structures surrounding hundred of lotus ponds and gardens. In the 1860s, the entire complex was burned and destroyed by French and British troops as part of the Opium War(s).

Now all that's left are the hundreds of lotus ponds and some piles of rocks in the trees. But it's pretty peaceful, with lots of old people just hanging out.



The remains of the imperial library.


Beijing water taxi.


Dried lotus flower pods.

Jerks!!!

Courtesy of Lauren Dennis we have the following news story:

Jerkface(s) of the Day Award: Everyone involved in the theft and subsequent destruction of a motorized wheelchair belonging to a woman with cerebral palsy in Cumberland, Md. First, two pre-teen girls stole the chair and took it for a joyride. Later, some unidentified man was seen riding around in it, until 23-year-old Wiliam J. White successfully offered that man a pack of cigarettes for it. White then sold the wheelchair to a friend for $165, and then later, when he learned through media reports that the wheelchair had been stolen, reportedly took the chair back and dumped it in a ditch, rendering it non-functional. Nice job, the lot of you. [Cumberland Times News]

Art Beijing

This week we went to Art Beijing, an exhibition of contemporary Chinese art. It was...interesting, certainly....

Prevalent images included: Mao, Red Guards, Communists soldiers, Karl Marx, young Chinese women in semi-pornographic poses, the Last Supper (in which the three pictures behind the "diners" would for some reason always be Marx, Lenin, and Mao), Andy Warhol-esque faces, Coca Cola, and Marilyn Monroe. Oh, and Hello Kitty. ("Hello, Kitty!!")

Does putting Mao's face and a Coke bottle together in an abstract painting make art?

A lot of the stuff was extremely reactionary and/or simply imitations of other art or cultural themes. A lot of the material was so stale (how many images of Mark, Lenin and Mao do I need to see? I know your country is Communist. I get it.) that it was easy to get fed up quickly. Moreover, so much of the symbolism was so overt it was sickening (ie, a flock of sheep in Tiananmen Square in front of the federal buildings. Chinese people have limited rights and are told how to think and act by the government??? Wait, really? I've honestly NEVER heard of that before. I'm so glad you brought it up subtly so I could really reflect on the situation.)



The photography exhibit was better, much better, than the art section, I thought, although maybe this just reflects my inability to properly appreciate fully the deep meaning of an image of Hello Kitty juxtaposed against AK-47s in a field of young Chinese schoolchildren wearing Red communist hats.

One of my favorite things was a set of pictures that used images of trash heaps to recreate traditional Chinese landscape water color paintings. Click on the pictures to enlarge and look closely.



And then I just really like this one.

Unite Your Thoughts!

In class today we were learning a grammatical structure using the word "to unite." So we gave some examples, ie, unite a country or unite a people. And then the teacher raised the following: Do you think that people's thoughts can be united? For instance, she said, Chinese people's thoughts are all united around the concept of the family as the center of societal organization. And then she said, do you think that by uniting people's thoughts, we can better manage society? If people's thoughts are all united, and their ways of life are similar, then societal organization will go more smoothly. She said, we Chinese, from the time we are very small, all learn to have united thoughts. She gave some examples about the nature of family and of collective identity in Chinese society.

I asked, is this your view or the government's view? Her response was basically, it doesn't matter. It is traditional for Chinese people's thoughts to be united around many issues and it is the nature of collectivist society. If the government further promotes thought unification as a means of managing and/or controlling society, this is just in keeping with tradition, and is thus perfectly acceptable.

I think we in the West always think that the Chinese think as we do: they are censored so thoroughly that they always say what they "should," no matter what the circumstances, but inside they have individual thoughts and views on all issues, the same as Americans; the only difference being that they are not free to express them as they choose. Now I don't actually think this is perfectly true: I think that "thought unification" really is so complete that the average person's views really are in keeping with society's and with the government's. Thus they don't toe the Party line, if you will, out of fear or repression or something like that, but because the Party line IS the collective view on any given issue.

Test-driving our cooking

Last night we made a deluxe stir fry and KIMCHI PANCAKE, which was AMAZING. If you've never had it, go to a Korean restaurant RIGHT NOW and order it. Or, just buy some kimchi, and put it in pancake batter, and fry it.



Then tonight we made dumpling soup, which was kind of good, except that the dumplings disintegrated and then we added bean sprouts, which made the whole thing taste like dirt.