My roommate is awesome.
Ever since I got her the hot drink on Tuesday night to help her sore throat, we’ve been engaged in a no-holds barred game of Generosity Chicken: we keep getting each other stuff, each thing slightly nicer than the last, and due to the Chinese laws of politeness and my desire to not look like a Foreign Devil, we know that sooner rather than later the other person will pop up with a gift. On Wednesday night when she got back from her meeting, she brought me back a huge chocolate bar. I reciprocated Thursday morning by giving her the jar of jam my mom made. Unlike my host family, she enthusiastically dove right in and pronounced it delicious, better than any she’d had in China. Then when I woke up on Friday, she had a bowl of oatmeal with seaweed and dried shrimp waiting, and informed me as I groggily sat down to eat that jianbings were bad for me, and she had therefore found me a different breakfast. I got her some scones Friday afternoon, and she gave me a bag of tea from Sichuan. This will probably only stop when one of us gets the other person a car. At the same time, she is not above giving me a hard time, and is gently but constantly teasing me about getting progressively fatter. (She kept feeding me Milk Duds tonight and then saying “oops, my fault” whenever I ate one.)
There are some weird cultural differences, though. The first time I wore my towel wrapped around me to go take a shower, she freaked out, and I quickly reassured her that everyone else on the floor did it, too. Then today I came back from a shower and she had a couple guy friends in the room, and they flipped. It was like I’d walked into the room naked. They promptly skedaddled outside while apologizing profusely, and then apologized some more when they came back in. I kept assuring them that I really didn’t care (which I didn’t – I’m of the belief that if you can see it in a swimsuit it’s not a big deal) and not to worry about it, but it was sort of odd how strongly they reacted to me showing relatively little skin.
Another interesting conversation went down a couple days ago. As we were getting ready for bed, she asked me why Americans changed their clothes every day, and if we washed them after wearing them once. I told her that unless the clothes got dirty, we wore them more than once before washing them, and she asked again why we wore something different every day. The best answer I could come up with was “because if you don’t, people will wonder why you’re wearing the same clothes as yesterday,” which is no kind of answer at all. I really never thought about it much; maybe someday I’ll figure out why this is such a cultural norm.*
Thursday was a bust, filled with classes, but Friday afternoon I had time to take a break and ended up going to Nanluogu Hutong with one of Pei Rei and Cody’s friends, a chill kid from Northeastern named Daniel. He seems to like wandering around aimlessly as much as I do, so I am happy to report that I may have found a new exploring buddy. I finally got my pudding, too, which was just as delicious as ever. Then that night I went out for hotpot with Max and Zhang Ran, which was fun because by the end of it we were all just good-naturedly trashing on each other and Max got all his grammar questions answered.
Saturday consisted of homework until the evening, when I met Max and some of his friends for dinner at the same dumpling place we went on Monday night. This time was even better, because there were more people, so we could get more kinds of dumplings (my favorite had cilantro, glass noodles, tofu, and peanuts) for less money per person. In the middle, I realized that I’d just eaten my hundredth dumpling of the trip, and celebrated by eating more dumplings.
We then went out to Sanlitun by ourselves, since everyone else seemed to have something else to do at nine pm on a Saturday night (this would become a theme for the night). After wandering around the area and being accosted by doormen at every awful, generic bar on the street, we finally found a couple chill places, got a beer, went to Bookworm and read for a short while (it’s free to read all their books while you’re in there, so we worked our way through a couple chapters each of various Chinese fiction novels), and then went to meet up with some more of Max’s friends. For reasons not clear to me, they all needed to head back around midnight, and Cody, who was supposed to meet us, bailed, so we wandered around some more looking for something to do before heading over to a place called Bar Blu, where some of Max’s friends ostensibly were. We never found them, but that soon became irrelevant because Bar Blu had a dance floor with many people on it. Although sufficiently fun, it was not Propaganda; the crowd seemed less into it, the music lacked a certain je ne sais quoi** (although they did play Flo Rida’s “Low,” which has been notably absent from Propaganda’s oeuvre thus far), and there were no awesome Koreans who were tearing it up while the rest of the crowd stood back in quiet, awed reverence. Nevertheless, it was a good way to kill some time.
And why did we need to kill time, you ask? We were planning to visit Beijing’s famed Panjiayuan Antique Market, which was only open on weekends. It’s essentially a giant flea market, and although pretty much all of its “antiques” are fakes, there are still plenty of knickknacks to be found from all over China. However, word on the street (by “the street” I mean “Lonely Planet Encounters: Beijing”) was that in order to get the good stuff, you had to arrive with the professional buyers at opening time, which was listed in my guidebooks and Wikipedia as 4:30 am. We got some food, sat around on the streets of Sanlitun watching the drunken, expatriate world go by, and when it came time to go we hailed a cab and headed for the building.
When we got there, it was clear that something was off. According to my watch, the market was scheduled to open in five minutes, but the area looked completely dead, and there was not another person to be seen. We went inside and checked, and the woman at the desk told us the market actually opened at six. Neither of us wanted to wait another hour and a half – I was already exhausted and whining for coffee – so we just headed home. Even this proved difficult. I quickly hailed a cab outside, but upon telling the driver where I wanted to go, I was told that it was “too far”. We argued with the driver for a while about this, especially since it was too early for public transit to run so I had no other way of getting back. Eventually he agreed to take me and I paid the highest cab fare I’ve seen yet in Beijing, then returned and somehow got a severely disgruntled (not that I blame her) fuwuyuan to let me back in. Really, though, isn’t that the point of being a cab driver, taking people places? I wasn’t even going outside the Third Ring Road and he still kept saying it was “too far”. Before arriving here, and even after arriving here, I had heard all sorts of things about how friendly and wise the cab drivers were, but thus far I have found them only impossible to understand and unhelpful – often they don’t even know where my school is.
Jackie woke me up with a phone call at about 11:30 this morning wanting a shopping buddy. I was not one to turn this down, especially since she wanted to go to the Silk Market, so I met up with her and we set off in search of a leather jacket. She eventually found one that suited her, and along the way I got my bargaining freak on with a hat, some Uggs,*** and a sweater. I have definitely improved since I first started there: whereas I got overcharged on my first few visits (and kind of on the Uggs, even), I knocked the price of the sweater down from about $95 to $12, and the hat from $25 to $8. Even my Asian friends are impressed (it’s well known that vendors will knock the price up hugely if you’re white because they think you don’t know what’s up). Also, for your viewing pleasure, here is a picture, which I did not take, of acceptable/unacceptable phrases for vendors to use at the Silk Market. The #9 unacceptable phrase, which for some reason wasn’t translated, means “you’re a man,” which I think is funny.
Dumpling tally: 124
*And maybe I’ll figure out who Mike Jones is. Unfortunately, or perhaps fortunately, he seems to have faded from the scene before anyone found the answer.
**I actually do sais quoi. Quoi is insipid lyrics about getting with chicks in your limo backed with the simplest synth and bass riffs known to humankind.
***I have promised to uphold the Responsible Ugg Users’ Code: I will only wear Uggs in natural shades (no pink, blue, purple, etc.), I will never wear Uggs with external fur on them, I will never wear Uggs with a skirt that has a hemline above the knee, and I will never wear Uggs when it is above 55 degrees Fahrenheit. Northwestern sorority girls, take note.
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