Mystery Beijing Superquest Funventure

Orientation is starting to wind down. I’m getting a little bored with meetings that essentially say “other cultures are weird, give yourself time to get used to it, be polite to Chinese people, they are different than us” but take an hour to do it. Fortunately, I think the last of the meetings are tomorrow. I meet my homestay family the day after tomorrow, probably. Some interesting things happened, though, like:

1. I started the intensive Chinese classes today. Damn straight they’re intensive – I had to learn forty words last night and forty tonight. This is ridiculous. I haven’t had a problem retaining them in the short term but I have no idea how many I can hold onto for any meaningful period of time. Oy gevalt. The format of the classes is nice, though; for the first hour and twenty minutes all the students on the same level (I tested into third year Chinese, right where I should be, with about 20 others) go over that day’s words and grammar. Then we split into classes of five or six, and spend the first hour of that class reviewing the grammar again, then the final time doing activities based on the theme of the words. All in all, it’s four hours of Chinese, starting at 8 a.m., which is actually ok for me because I’ve been waking up at about six since I got here so I don’t know the difference.

2. I am starting to notice that China has a lot of Chinese people, and Chinese writing, in it. I don’t mean this in a “stupid Emily” way (although, let’s face it, it probably is that way no matter how I mean it), but rather I mean that for such a big city so much on the world stage, there are surprisingly few foreigners here, and not a lot of effort has been made to cater to them. The restaurants I’ve seen rarely have English menus, people don’t know that much English, signs and businesses aren’t in English, etc. I don’t really have a problem with it, but I am pretty surprised, especially after traveling in the European Union where everyone speaks English better than I do. When there is English, it’s usually okay but sometimes not. Examples include a bubble tea place that sold “smoothles” (I thought this was so cute that I bought one), an excellent knockoff Puma bag that actually said “Fuma” on it instead (and the little puma silhouette was smoking a cigar, which you could only see if you looked really closely, but I SEE WHAT YOU DID THERE CHINA), and, my favorite so far, a Chinese guy I saw wearing a shirt that said “I love Chna”. Awesome, dude, I’m sure you do.

3. As a corollary to 2, I’ve been the subject of a couple interesting experiences. A couple days ago on campus, a guy, maybe thirty years old, comes up to me and asks me if his English grammar is right on a couple sentences. No big deal, I help him and go to one of my stupid cultural awareness meetings. But today I went to Tiananmen Square (see below), and this guy asked if my white friends and I would have our picture taken with his little daughter. We obliged, and since she was super cute I got one of us with her too. Then later we were in a park and a toddler got visibly frightened of us and ran and hid behind his mom’s legs. It was funny at the time, but you sort of take it for granted in America that no matter what you look like, no matter what your ethnicity, you can go pretty much anywhere in the country, certainly in big cities, and people won’t think anything of it except “oh, an asian/black/latino/etc.” person and will probably assume you live there unless you reveal otherwise. My three white companions and I were the only Anglos in Tiananmen.

4. Why were we in Tiananmen square in the first place, you ask? In the only worthwhile activity we’ve done thus far, we were told to get into pairs and were then given a business card-sized piece of paper with the name of a Beijing landmark or sight on it (the Chinese name, not the English one). We had four hours to get there (it started at 2 p.m.), get something to prove we were there – an entrance ticket, a picture, whatever – and get back. We were assigned a park just north of the Forbidden City, which is just north of Tiananmen square, so we relished the chance to get out of our neighborhood (which, let’s face it, is not full of sightseeing) and see some famous things. I figured out how to take the bus to the subway to the other subway to the other bus using my handy Lonely Planet China guidebook and one of the 345029873254 maps of Beijing my mom gave me before I left, and we set off, getting there with only a minor hitch when we couldn’t find the subway station from the bus stop and had to ask an actual Chinese person, who we could not understand. Once on the subway, we ran into my friend Michael (from my school) and his partner, who were looking for the same park, and became a quartet of stupid Americans on the subway. We got off and walked around the Great Hall of the People, where the Chinese equivalent of the Senate is held, the Mao mausoleum (we didn’t go in), the new symphony hall/opera house, and then Tiananmen square. It wasn’t as busy as I’d expected – no mobs of people, but quite a few were out milling around and taking pictures. There’s not a whole bunch to do there, other than briefly look at some nice Olympic-themed topiaries and escape from people trying to sell you souvenir junk. We then hopped our fourth bus (meeting up with a group of three with the same destination on our way) and finally found the park with about an hour and fifteen minutes left. We paid 2 yuan to get in (I felt ripped off at having to pay to get in even though it was less than thirty cents), and then stepped through the gate. It became clear why I had paid to get in – this was nothing like an American city park, but more of a botanical garden, with a few pagodas up on a hill. We climbed up a dirt path on the side of the hill (there were perfectly nice steps, but we didn’t know that until we were up there) and were immediately treated to an awe-inspiring view of the Forbidden City sprawled out to our south. The pagoda had ostensibly held the remains of a Buddha until the British stole them around 1900, and had a plaque commemorating Anglo imperialism on the base where the remains used to be held. Farther up was another pagoda, this one bigger with an even better view and a Buddha and some incense inside. After looking around a bit, we climbed down and walked through a series of lovely gardens and brightly painted gates, stopping in a bamboo grove to do our best panda impressions (see the picture higher up). After wandering and being upset over the squat toilets, which were the only ones available, we parted ways and Michael and I headed back to campus for another thrilling meeting about being culturally sensitive.

5. While in Tiananmen square, I saw a police officer arresting a guy for selling unlicensed stuffed fuwa (the Olympic mascots). He had handcuffs and everything, and I couldn’t help but thinking, dude, he’s selling stuffed animals, there is no need for this kind of seriousness. But still, smackdown!

6. Unfortunately, I have to take a twelve-day journey to somewhere in remote China in mid-September. My choices are backpacking and camping in Tibet (obviously not, I’d actually sledgehammer my kneecaps to get out of that, and anyone who thinks I’m bluffing doesn’t know me well at all), hiking along the Silk Road (not as bad, would only use a regular hammer), and rafting down the Mekong river to the Burmese/Thai border. This involves NO backpacking and is the one I’ll try for, but unfortunately I’ll be stuck in an indigenous village for three days and it will almost certainly not have plumbing. These trips are ostensibly about experiential learning and self-discovery; I will doubtless learn that if allowed to go for four days without showering I will have even fewer boyfriends than I do now (0, for those of you playing along at home). It’s not all bad though: we get to visit the provincial capital of Kunming, which has six million people and a similar number of flushing toilets, and walk in a tea plantation! And go rafting! Yay! Regardless, I would like to propose another trip for the prissier among us:
SHANGHAI TRIP
Objectives: This trip emphasizes experiential learning in the area of China’s emergent economy. Participants will travel to Shanghai, China’s financial capital, and partake in a homestay with an obscenely wealthy nouveau-riche family, who will treat them right, serve them weird and possibly endangered seafood, and provide them with a valuable glimpse of life as one of China’s newest cultural groups. Activities include meeting with local businesspeople over dim sum and a visit to the Shanghai municipal water center, which is responsible for overseeing all of the awesome, readily accessible Western-style plumbing in the area.
Yeah, that sounds better.

7. I ate dumplings again for lunch today, so time to up the Dumpling Tally!

Dumpling tally: 14

Dumplings is good food

I slept pretty well but woke up at 6:30, for some reason. I wasn’t tired so I got breakfast with someone I bumped into on my way out the door. I was surprised how much effort it took me to get out of the building to buy something; I guess I don’t have as much confidence in my Chinese yet. Anyway, we happened on a bakery that didn’t look like much from the outside, but on the inside they had beautiful cakes (a couple cream layer cakes with dragonfruit on the top…will have to try those) and pastries. I picked out what turned out to be a sweet bun with red bean paste filling and a bottle of juice for 7 yuan. I got sort of mad at myself for spending seven monetary units on my first meal until I realized that it was seven yuan, not seven dollars, and I’d just gotten myself a perfectly nice breakfast for about $1.15. China is neat. I feel bad for any chumps studying in the euro zone now, though.

After my early pick-me-up I went back to the center for a neighborhood tour. Most people hadn’t eaten yet and were hungry, so our RA went to a mom-and-pop dumpling stand and bought giant bags of fresh dumplings, some steamed (baozi) and some boiled (jiaozi, after which my little slice of the internet is named). God, they were delicious. I have never eaten such good little dumplings – they were maybe the size of golf balls, but cooked perfectly – not soggy, not stale – and tender and juicy on the inside, steaming hot when you bit into them. I asked how much they were, and apparently they’re four yuan for a bag of twelve. This equates to about FIVE CENTS PER DUMPLING. Good heavens, what a neat place.

The neighborhood around the school is quite nice, mostly retail space. By this point it’s a cop-out to say that “China is a land of contrasts”, but it really is interesting to see the way Beijing has adjusted itself to the modern world. Example: while we were ordering our dumplings, which were located on a decent-sized street with grocery stores and restaurants on it, we saw an old man out walking his chickens. How’s about that.

Also, I found out that the reason my dorm room looks like a hotel is because it is a hotel. The university keeps hotel-ish rooms that it rents out to people who are staying there for the short term. That explains a lot.

Dumpling tally: 4

En route

In-flight notes:

The flight left at 11 am, San Francisco time. (Due to a possibly erroneous time zone listing in the back of the United Airlines “Hemispheres” magazine, I am not sure what Chinese time this is.) I was seated in coach toward the back of the plane, but the flight is REALLY empty. I’m in the aisle seat on the right side, and I have the entire three-seat block to myself. Most of the other people I can see have a block or row to themselves too; I have never been on a flight with this few people in it.

11ish: Plane begins to take off. As no electronics can be used yet, I start looking at the duty-free shopping catalogue in the seat pocket. I have just enough cash on me to get a bottle of Johnny Walker Blue Label. I decide against it, because that is dumpling money, is what that is.

11:30: In-flight programming is turned on! I am excited about this until I look in the back of the magazine and determine that the only thing I want to watch (Kung Fu Panda, shut up) isn’t for about six hours into the flight. I want to stay awake about 45 minutes so they can serve me my lunch, so I resign myself to watching what’s on, which is an episode of Dirty Jobs. The first job shown is this guy who works at a wild animal park, and for the first fifteen minutes they only show the guy playing with baby lions and etc, which doesn’t look that bad at all. Then there’s this twenty-second-long (I counted) shot of a giraffe peeing, and then they show the guy coming to mop the floor. So the dirty job is…cleaning up giraffe pee? I hope I don’t have to explain American culture to any Chinese people, because I’m not sure I get it myself.

Noon: I get my lunch (a disgrace to chickens, sauces, and “udon” noodles everywhere) and eat it while watching TV, which has switched to Deadliest Catch. The boat I am rooting for is named the Northwestern and has a captain named Sig Henriksen, which is the nicest Norwegian name ever.

12:15: I never find out if the Fighting Norwegians catch more crabs than the other boat, because I take one of my mom’s homeopathic jet-lag pills and some Tylenol PM, stretch out on my entire row (!!!) of seats, and conk out.

4:30: I wake up and eat my snack: cup of noodles. Perhaps United is trying to expand its share of the college market. I amuse myself by eating jelly beans, reading “Hemispheres” from cover to cover (a thankless task, since at least a third of the magazine is devoted to golfing, wine, and various airport terminal layouts) and listening to the in-flight alternative rock radio station. I’m not really sure why I’m doing the latter, because I have at least two-thirds of the songs they play on my iPod., but for some reason I feel compelled to sit through the lowest-quality version of “Fell On Black Days” I’ve ever heard while I’m waiting for the movie to start.

6:00: KUNG FU PANDA!

8:15: After a run-through of the Sky Mall catalogue, I have now exhausted all of my provided reading material. I’m not sure if I should try and sleep more or find something else to do. While flipping through the music channels, I land on “Love In This Club” and am overjoyed in that awesomely-bad, Top-40-featuring-TI* way. In the meantime, the screen is showing the same thing it always shows between movies, a program I have started calling Where’s the Plane? Right now, Where’s the Plane? says we have just reached mainland Russia, which is good because if we have to make an emergency landing it won’t be in the water. I am kind of hungry for the second lunch I was promised.

8: 27: Horrible thought – what if the cup noodles were my second lunch? OH NO!

9:00: Another crisis averted. It is announced that the flight attendants will be coming through soon with a “light lunch”, which is a passable lasagna. I am also given a cup of “Chinese tea” which is quite good.

9:45: Where’s the Plane? has returned. As we get closer to Beijing, it gets much more interesting – the maps are more detailed, and the numbers they show actually change. We are set to land an hour ahead of schedule.

10:30: We land and I disembark.

I go through passport control, which is interesting in that it has a set of little buttons below the person in the booth. You can rate their level of service by pressing “greatly satisfied,” “satisfied,” “line too long,” and “dissatisfied.” I was “satisfied.”

Then I waited with some other people from the program at the baggage claim, made awkward conversation with them while waiting for the people from my program to show up, changed money, waited for our bus to show up, and then drove to the university, where I’ll be staying for a few days before I meet my family (I found out for sure that I have one but I still don’t know who they are). On the drive there I was struck by how green Beijing was – they’ve obviously spruced it up a lot for the Olympics, and it all looks very new (some areas were still being planted as I drove past them), but it looks great. On all the highway medians** and on most blocks, there are little grassy areas with flowers, or small parks, or tall skinny trees.

Most of the buildings we drove by were either dilapidated apartments or furniture stores. We did, however, go by the Bird’s Nest and the Water Cube, where I took the world’s worst moving-vehicle picture.

We arrived at the university in about 40 minutes – it is a nice-looking campus, with fountains and courtyards and badminton courts. I registered and got the key to my “dorm room” and went inside, expecting something like the Northwestern dorms with a communal bathroom…

OH MY GOD. The dorm room is like a hotel. It has a giant room with two double beds, an office room with a TV at least as big as mine at home, a fridge/freezer combo, a desk and armchairs, and a private bathroom with a shower/bath and a normal toilet (yay!). The only weird thing so far is that when I turned on the shower the water ran the color of weak black tea for about five seconds, then turned clear. It’s obviously okay to shower in it, but that drove home the “don’t drink the water” lesson pretty well. Guuh.

*Does TI have any of his own songs? What is his relation to T-Pain? Help.

**Ok, so I know that people in Beijing like to ride their bikes everywhere, but people just take them on the highway. The highways have a bike lane, but the on-ramps don’t, so if you’re some old Chinese man on a one-gear bike, you have to share the on-ramp with trucks and buses. Who came up with this?!?!?!

Pack it up, pack it up...

A couple of my friends who have gone abroad have ostensibly (favorite word) taken days to pack. This is ridiculous. I just did it in two hours. The only things I still need to pack are pictures of my family and a bottle of our world-class wine, which I am bringing my hosts as a gift. Sadly, since I am that awkward age where the government deems me capable of dying for my country but not sufficiently responsible to buy a Mike's Hard Lemonade, the wine will have to wait until my mom gets back from the store. Otherwise, my life is in my suitcases, except my Reefs, which I am not bringing. I like to think I'm keeping them at home because they weren't on the Recommended Packing List, but really it's because I couldn't stand it if anything were to happen to them.
People keep asking me how I feel about going abroad for a semester.
Are you excited? ask the random acquaintances. Of course I am; I'm going to China for three and a half months. Come on.
Are you anxious? asks my mom. Not really. I'm a little worried that I'll have a hard time communicating with the locals at first, but it's post-Olympics Beijing, so they probably all speak English anyway. Besides, my Chinese is certainly good enough to get around, if not hold a conversation. The only thing I'm really worried about is the thirty to sixty new words we're required to memorize every day of class. Look, maybe in the Chinese schools this is normal, but I'm a product of the American education system. From the earliest ages, we eschew reading and math for naptime, playing in the dirt, making musical instruments out of shoeboxes, and self-actualization. Then we complain about our jobs getting outsourced. This tangent is over...now!
Are you scared about getting SARS? asks the kid who worked with me at the fair. Shut up, kid, you work at the fair. (Wait, crap!)
Mostly, I am curious. Curious as to who my host family will be, curious to come to know a city that's modern enough to build architectual wonders but backward enough to sentence political dissidents to "re-education" through labor, curious to find out what a scorpion tastes like, curious to set foot in all the places I've read about and seen on TV.
The next time I update this, I'll be in Beijing. If there's a fried scorpion stall in the airport I'll be able to answer one of those questions. If not...they will have to wait.

A couple Olympic links

The NYT has a couple Olympic-related sites I thought were sort of neat today:
Play, their sports magazine, has a neat assortment of Games-related stuff and a supply of interactive graphics so bountiful that John Lavine would die in joy if he saw them. (If I'm lucky, maybe he already has!) I particularly liked "Bodies of Work."
Their Olympics blog, Rings, is a little heavy on the sportsball for my taste, but apparently the Olympics are actually about sports, not food or politics, so I can't get too mad at them for it.