I visit the REAL Temple of Heaven, and other stories

I have something to talk to you about.
Everyone has things that give their lives meaning. Some have religion. (Being a comparative religion major has made me as agnostic as one can possibly be.) Some have family. (I love my family, but I spend ¾ of the year away from them, and I don’t plan on having one of my own.) Still others have their jobs, their communities, their goals for the future, etc.
I have something different.
I have shoes.
I started working in Evanston’s mom-and-pop shoe store last fall. It’s a pretty nice store; they sell Keens, Clarks, Merrells, the works, so my commission is usually quite good. I am good at my job, and like it because I can get up to 75% off shoes that the store sells. However, there is something missing. My shoe store has no adidas. In my mind, this is like operating a package tour to Paris without seeing the Eiffel Tower, or making a pizza without the cheese. adidas are the pinnacle of footwear.Consider, for instance, the Samba: its clean lines, its bold contrasts, its gummy sole, perfect for indoor soccer, which I do not play. Or the ZX, which goes flawlessly from the track to the club, if you get it in a good color instead of the pedestrian white and gray ones that boring people wear. Or the Forum, essential for any 80s enthusiast/b-boy or girl/stylin’ person.
The greatest of all these is the Superstar. A true marvel of modern engineering, the possibilities of this flawless shoe are endless: get a sleek black pair and wear them to impress your date! Buy one of the tricolor editions and impress everyone with your laid-back, but still super cool, footwear style. Or be my hero, buy one of the (now sadly out of circulation) Flavors of the World Vin Qing Mings, spend obscene amounts of money on an outfit that goes with orange, burgundy, and pale purple, but damn, rock them with pride, because you know that you have the actual coolest pair of shoes in the entire world.
At least, that’s what I would do.
At any rate, the Superstar is possibly the most classy, versatile shoe on earth, and they are massively comfortable to boot. I am always in search of more adidas, especially since I gravitate towards brightly colored pairs that go with maybe two outfits, and I wanted something a little more matching-y, something I could wear around. I originally had my heart set on a pair of Sambas, but maintained an open mind last night as Max and I set off for…get ready…

THE BIGGEST ADIDAS STORE IN THE ENTIRE WORLD

Four brand-spanking-new floors of sportswear, accessories, designer goods, interactive exhibits, and, of course, the greatest shoes on the globe – all here in Beijing, in a recently built glassy tower that shines from the distance like a beacon of hope, style, and excellence, casting its light on the lesser stores in the shopping mall (Puma, Nike, Mizuno – I’m looking at you) as if to say, “Fear not, friends. There is a better way.”
I walked there from the subway stop and was immediately impressed when I stepped indoors and saw an entire concierge, with a sign to the left listing all the services the store offered: basketball court booking, exercise consultation, design customization. I felt like a pilgrim who had traveled by camel from untold miles away and finally arrived in Mecca. It was all I could do not to drop to my knees right on the spot.
I wandered around in slack-jawed amazement and eventually made my way up to the fourth floor, where, alas, there were no Sambas to be found (I still think this is a glaring omission). I did some seriously strategic, Sun-Tzu-like thinking and eventually decided on a black pair of Superstars with white trim, which were a bit more than I was planning on spending,* but I did really need sneakers, and I considered them my souvenir to myself (the first of many, indubitably). After a little more slack-jawed amazement and a couple vain attempts to explain to Max why “the brand with the three stripes” moved me with such cultish fervor, we left, shopped around briefly at some other places, and went to Sanlitun for a drink.
Sanlitun is one of the three main bar areas in Beijing (the others being Wudaokou, which I was severely unimpressed with, and Houhai, which I have not yet visited). It’s no longer considered the place to be, but there are some fairly legendary clubs nearby, and at night the entire street lights up with what look like neon, extra-strength Christmas lights – the trees and exteriors of the bars are strung with them, and the effect can be pretty magical if you allow yourself to be sort of soft-hearted and mushy about the whole affair. The people-watching is excellent, too; there’s a good mix of Chinese and foreigners, not just Anglophones, but people from all over the world. Max and I had barely ordered our beers when we were approached by two members of the Spanish Paralympic team, wheelchair-bound but definitely ripped enough to take me out without any trouble if need be (I probably do need to be taken out, in every sense of the word). We briefly chatted before they left, no doubt to another bar (on our side of the street there were literally three city blocks of nothing but bars all smashed together) and sat and watched the world go by. Unfortunately, I’d told my host parents I’d be back at eleven, so I finished my beer and hopped a cab home.
I’d told my host mom that I’d be back at eleven (the curfew set by my program for weeknights), and, knowing my new parents’ early sleep habits, assured them that I was comfortable coming home after they went to bed, because I had a key, and that it was really not necessary to wait for me to get back. However, when I opened the door, I was faced with a grumpy-looking host mom, who immediately and incomprehensibly bade me good night as she walked straight to her room.
This turn of events made me even more determined to find a way out of my living situation; I am an American college student, dammit, and I will not be made to feel like an anomaly because I like to stay out late and sometimes have fun. I’d discussed my problems with the program director before, and he encouraged me to “just wait it out,” adding that “the last student who lived there had a really good time.” Awesome for her, but people have different perceptions of fun; what is great for some people is boring for others (this is why the Golf Channel exists). I then vented to a couple more people in charge, who sympathized but told me not to give up just yet, and also talked to one of the RAs here who had lived in a similar situation. She gave me the best advice yet, which was to spend time with them during the afternoon and evening and then peace out at about nine or so, explaining that you’re a night owl, and assure them that they don’t need to wait up for you. She also promised that this would not get me kicked out of the homestay, which, although it would more or less solve my problem, might be a bit of a black mark on my record.
Today went better, though – I told them I was leaving to study, which was actually true this time, was back ten minutes before the promised arrival time (ten), and returned to see them watching TV (quelle surprise). They were watching something really insipid, kind of like the Chinese version of MXC, but they obviously hadn’t stayed up on my behalf, which made me feel better. We “talked” for about fifteen minutes (our “talking” consisted of me using the proper verbs for things that were going on, and my host mom telling me new verbs) and then I went to take a shower**. When I got out, they had gone to bed, but it was one of our better interactions, to be sure. I keep waffling on this, but right now I feel like I could make this a home if I’m not allowed to move out. They seem to let me do whatever I want, although it sometimes comes with caveats, and tonight my host dad made be this really good eggplant dish because I’d said a while back that eggplant was my favorite vegetable, which I thought was really nice***.
When I went out to study after dinner I got sidetracked by a game of badminton (which I am ordinarily mediocre at, and during the twilight when it was hard to see the birdie I was horrible). One of my fellow students, Andrew, was outside practicing his Chinese on a couple local kids who lived close to campus, periodically asking me what words meant or how to say things. After I got sick of swatting halfheartedly at the air with my badminton racket, I walked over to join him and met the kids he was with, who were clearly quite poor but super sweet. The ten-year-old girl was especially beautiful and spoke some English, so I talked to her a little while Andrew asked one of the boys some questions about kung fu and playfully pretended to use martial arts moves on the kids, to their great delight.
Some older people, presumably the kids’ parents or aunts or uncles or something, came over and starting talking to us as well. Their Mandarin was a little hard to understand (then again, everyone’s is because I’m white), but we got out of them that they were from Henan province, what their names were, how old the kids were, and some other basic information. Then they started asking Andrew if I was his girlfriend, at which point I laughed, he looked confused, and the men clarified by saying that I was “feichang piaoliang” (extremely pretty). I kept turning the compliment down, as Chinese culture dictates, but they insisted, so that was a nice boost for my self-esteem. We got some pictures with the girl and one of the men, which I will post once I receive them. All in all, several successful interactions with the locals today, AND I have a new pair of sneakers. Excellent.
I also experienced the other components of my learning schedule for the first time yesterday and today. Yesterday I met my language tutor, a sweet guy who’s studying for his masters at this university and has accepted a small salary from my program to help us speak Chinese. For one hour per student, four days a week, he has to hang out with me and at least one other girl and help us with our Chinese. Judging by the number of times I told him I didn’t understand, this is not a fun or easy job. Nonetheless, he keeps in high spirits and is very kind to me, and his Mandarin is also largely unaccented, which makes him much easier to understand than most of the Beijingers, who sound like they’re talking with a mouthful of really hot oatmeal that they can’t spit out.
Both of my area studies classes started today as well. They’re definitely the ugly stepsister to the language classes, meeting only twice a week for an hour or so, but both of mine will be fun, I think. I am taking one class on Chinese history during the Qing dynasty, the last before Chiang Kai-Shek, when Westerners started laying claim to China and doing whatever they wanted with it. That professor is an American who’s in Beijing working for his Ph.D. He’s probably in his early thirties and has a good sense of humor and a very enjoyable style of lecturing – lots of discussion, lots of helpful explaining. My second class is calligraphy, which I chose mostly because it had no homework, but that professor is one of the best people I’ve met here. He immediately gave off a lively impression – he looks pretty unexceptional, short and of average build, maybe sixty, with a pencil moustache, but his eyes always have a definite hint of sass in them. He speaks no English, so one of the higher-level students translates for him, but his Chinese is very clearly spoken and simple, so many of the people in the class can understand him anyway. As I understand, he’s a Manchurian, one of the 56 recognized ethnic groups in China, and he comes from a very ancient lineage that may or may not have royal blood in it somewhere. He showed us all his calligraphy stuff (including a $160,000 inkstone, which we will not be using, obviously) and talked for a while about why he did what he did, the history of calligraphy, etc. There was a clear rapport between him and the returning students, and he seemed like the kindest, most caring man, encouraging all of us to come to him if we had questions about ancient or “authentic” Beijing. I am really looking forward to that.

*For some reason, all the stuff in the adidas store was more expensive than it was in the US. I have no idea why this is; the average Chinese person is much less likely than the average American to be able to afford such luxuries, and, as Max pointed out, all the stuff is made in China anyway, so if anything they’re saving on shipping costs. What a weird country.

**Even more pernicious than the Zhangs’ habit of staying in is their shower. They have a normal Western toilet and sink, and a tile floor, but the shower is one of those European-style jobs that just consists of a showerhead on a long, flexible hose that you move around and spray yourself with wherever you want. The weird thing here is that there’s nothing on their floor to keep the water in a contained area; the floor is just flat in the entire room, so if you get any water on the floor there’s nothing to keep it from spreading out over the entire room. The bathroom has several Rubbermaid bins, maybe a foot and a half in diameter, apparently used to collect the water and then pour it directly down the drain, but a) it’s really hard to get the water in the bin when you’re spraying it on yourself and b) the drain kind of sucks so when you pour the water out, it usually backs up a bit and then the floor gets all watery anyway and you have to whisk it into the drain with your foot. There’s probably a better way to do this but I have no idea what it is.

***A not-so-nice thing I ate today: blueberry potato chips. I thought it was a mistake or a joke at first, but the little campus convenience store had them right next to the other bags of Lay's in normal flavors. I figured I couldn't not buy them, so I got one and ate about half of it before I just couldn't handle it anymore and threw them out. They tasted exactly like blueberries and potato chips at the same time. Weirdest thing ever.

Meet the parents?

One of the 25098734 Chinese words I had to learn today meant “succeed at a test or trial”. How timely.
Friday was a fun day – we did another “mystery Beijing” trip, except this one was sort of modeled after The Amazing Race. In teams of four, we were given clues that led us to different places in Beijing, where IES staff would give us the next clue, etc. The first one to return from all the stops won. We lost despite having taken a cab everywhere. Fortunately, everything is super cheap. After that we had a fancy dinner to celebrate our last day of orientation (HUZZAH) and then I met up with my friend Max (those of you who don’t know him from school will recognize him as either my BFF Arianne’s boyfriend or the kid who’s obsessed with looking up islands on Google Earth) who is also spending the semester here but at a different school. After some fruitless walking around we decided to cab it over to a club in another part of town with some of his eight-hour-old British friends from school. The club was amazing – it was the archetypal fancy-bordering-on-ridiculous expatriate-ish club – not least because ladies did not have to pay a cover charge (although the ridiculous phenomenon of seven-dollar-drinks was alive and well – why places charge that much for something I could make is beyond me). I danced my little heart out until about 3 a.m. and then headed back for the last night in my hotel-dorm.
In the morning I packed, absconded with the hotel-dorm’s shampoo, body wash, toothbrush, comb, and anything else that wasn’t nailed down, took a walk, and fairly promptly got lost along a back road. I’ve heard people (in my textbooks…) say that Beijing is laid out very practically, but I assure you that in my part of town nothing could be further from the truth. I’ve found it nearly impossible to do things like walk a block over – the streets aren’t laid out in a grid, and they frequently dead-end or turn or don’t intersect with the other streets like they should – which has led me to some interesting places. For example, yesterday I just wanted to buy a peach to eat, so I went to get one from my fruit-vending lady* and then decided to just walk south a block and go back to school down the next street over. However, this proved impossible, and I found myself wandering about two bus stops’ worth of distance farther than I’d intended to go. (Buses don’t stop every five feet here like they do in the US, so this is a pretty significant distance, probably a couple miles or so.) I finally found a street that led back the way I wanted to go, which to my pleasant surprise ran along between a canal and a pretty park area. However, on the same walk I saw probably the most severe poverty I’ve encountered here thus far: houses with plywood sides and tin roofs, ragpickers whose “yards” are filled with junk that they sell for however much is possible, etc. I know that it’s hugely clichéd to say that “Beijing is a city of contrasts” (special thanks to Gawker for calling out every stupid journalist who says that) so I won’t say it, but the gaps here between rich and poor are probably the biggest I’ve ever seen. As I walked past the ramshackle houses, I invariably thought back to the night before at the club, where people who wanted to sit at a table in the room with the dance floor had to order a minimum of RMB 2000 (about $300) worth of drinks. The tables were all in use, and about half of the occupants were Chinese. The reason I know this is because Max and the Brit Squad and I unceremoniously got kicked off of a table because we didn’t want to order the equivalent of a bottle of Special Stoli each just for the sake of resting our feet.
At any rate, I eventually did find my way back to school, headed to the supermarket** to buy a notebook, and made another excellent discovery, this time food-related. I’ve been eating street food with great frequency because I usually don’t have the time to sit down at a restaurant, and when I do I can’t read most of the menu. With street food, though, you just point and pay, and it’s always good. This time I stopped at a small stand that that sold chuanr (pronounced chu-ar, or churrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr if you’re in Beijing), skewers of mutton developed by the Uighur people, a minority group native to the westernmost part of China, north of Tibet. The Uighurs are ethnically Kazakh/Kyrgysz (OH SPELLING, CHECK IT)/Uzbek/etc, and they are Muslim so they don’t eat pork, which is the default meat for most Chinese. So instead, they take skewers of seasoned lamb and quickly cook them in hot oil, as the woman running my lunch stall did today. It was delicious – hot and greasy, and the pieces were pretty small, so it was easy to eat and all you got was flavor, instead of eating big chunks resulting in an uninteresting wad of meat in your mouth at the end. I got two normal chuanr (the skewers were pencil-length) and a chicken one that also looked really good. It had this white stuff in between the chicken pieces, which I thought was fat (the Chinese eat a lot of fat by itself – it’s in chunks on most of the chuanr I’ve seen and has even been the “meat” in one dish I ordered at a restaurant. Thing is, though, it’s always been really good. Yes, I am disgusting.) but I am now about 99% sure was cartilage. I ate it anyway, because the seasoning was superb and I didn’t want to waste my delicious chuanr, putting cartilage in first place for Weirdest Food Eaten Thus Far. I would not recommend it.
I hurried back to the hotel-dorm to pack my things and prepare to meet my host family. They ended up living in an apartment complex literally right next door to my school, which is super convenient. The Zhang family has two parents, probably about my parents’ age, but retired – the mother was a doctor, and the father owned his own company – and a 28-year-old daughter named Bin Bin, who is super cute and speaks English quite well. However, Bin Bin doesn’t live here, and only comes over a couple times a week at most. The Zhang parents are both very kind, but they don’t speak a word of English, and they don’t seem to understand my Chinese that well, which is probably because it’s not very good. I have trouble understanding them too, frequently, and without Bin Bin around to help out it’s been difficult making conversation; my confidence in my Chinese has gone down since I’ve started talking to them and realizing they didn’t understand a lot of what I was trying to say. However, they are obviously very caring (right off Mrs. Zhang offered to help me with my homework), sweet as pie, and Mr. Zhang is a good cook. (They also have this adorable Pekingesey-looking dog who they are constantly feeding meat to. As a result, the dog is massively fat and waddles around a lot, but he’s cute as the dickens and very friendly). I felt bad for these people and quite uncomfortable myself; I didn’t want to seem unfriendly, aloof, or ungrateful, but it’s hard to have a conversation when people don’t really understand each other.
This morning I woke up, had some of the worst pastries ever for breakfast with a warm bowl of powdered milk and felt sorry for myself until Max called and asked if I wanted to go to the Summer Palace that afternoon. I immediately took him up on it; the Zhangs were spending their day watching TV, and I wanted to get out and explore. After a subway/bus/cab ride there, we spent a few hours walking around the giant park, which was built as a playground for some of the last emperors (and Dowager Empress Cixi, who is pretty much the same person as Austria’s Empress Sisi and pronounced more or less the same too) during the very hot summers. It was a gorgeous day – the sky was clear and blue, with very little trace of the pollution that has plagued the city for the past couple of days – and we had an excellent time fooling around with three kinds of popsicles in our hands (including a corn-flavored one, which was far and away the best) and seeing the beautifully restored temples and halls, which all had names that followed the pattern of “Hall of [overly romanticized adjective] [prissy noun]”. The most impressive, though, was Cixi’s marble boat, ostensibly commissioned with the Chinese navy’s money and very lavishly painted. The boat is about as long as two semis and has a lower floor and a balcony, and was apparently the place to party if you were in the good graces of the Qing royalty.
We went back to the area around my campus and hunted for street food, which consisted of three kinds of dumplings, chuanr, little egg-custard tarts that were ridiculously flaky and delicious, and bottled rose-flavored tea, which is possibly the most delicious and refreshing beverage I’ve found for the hot days here. We took our haul and sat on the steps of a restaurant and talked about various things, including me telling him the Cheerio joke, which he did not find that funny. I had been asked to be home by five for dinner, which was served promptly at five. I wondered why it was so early, and after the second night in a row that the Zhangs went to bed at 8:30, I understood.
When I was trying to decide between staying with a family and living in a dorm with a Chinese roommate (my other option) my BFF Abby, who had stayed with a family during her tenure in Aix-en-Provence, told me that the most important thing was to be sure that I was happy with the family, and to speak up if I didn’t feel like it was a good environment for me. I feel bad because I had really wanted a homestay, and had told the director that, but I feel like it’s too much freedom to give up. The returning students I’ve talked to from this program all listed their favorite things – going out for karaoke with their Chinese friends, dancing on the weekends, taking nighttime walks in the parks and people-watching – as things that would be impossible for me to do when my host parents go to bed an hour after sunset. I want the freedom to live in a dorm on my schedule, study late at night if necessary (and it will be, since I have more words to learn than you can shake a stick at), and go out with friends if the situation calls for it. Since both the Zhangs are retired, they stay in most of the time, and I don’t want to spend my evenings watching Mr. Zhang change the channels in his boxers and then have the apartment to myself starting at 8:30. When I signed up to live with a host family, I envisioned a family who had the hobbies the program director assured me were common: going out to eat, making new friends, touring Beijing. I don’t like to be alone, and I’d like someone to go out to eat with, someone who could be a friend. Having a Chinese roommate, who is more flexible and possibly knows some English, is sounding better and better. I would love to make some Chinese friends who are around my age, and even Bin Bin is pretty well out of that age group. I came to Beijing to see how Chinese people lived, but I’d intended to live the life of a Chinese student, someone whose lifestyle I could identify with. The Zhangs don’t seem like they’re very well-off, either (host families get a stipend from the program for letting a student stay with them), so I feel weird asking them to go out for dinner or go sightseeing somewhere that’s within my reach, but may be financially difficult for them. I tried to break the ice by asking what their favorite places in Beijing were, to see if there was somewhere cheap or free that we could go, but after asking four or five times and not being understood I gave up.
This is by far the bigger problem - I am basically incommunicado with my family. The fault for this definitely mostly lies with me, but I’m a little confused since many of the other Chinese people I’ve talked to, be they at the supermarket showing me where the towels are, telling me what’s in the dish I just ate, or making conversation with me while they drove me to the club, have seemed to understand me pretty well. With my new family, though, I can count the number of sentences I’ve understood on one hand. A day and a half spent with them doesn’t sound like a lot, but imagine living in your own parents’ house and understanding three things they’ve said over the course of 36 hours. I have tried everything in my admittedly small arsenal: asking them to say things again, speak slower, use simpler words, etc. I’ve even resorted to writing things down on a couple of occasions, because we do not understand what the other person is saying. Most of the time I can tell if what they’re trying to say is a question or a statement; if it’s a statement I smile and nod, but if it’s a question I try to see if I can get by with the Chinese equivalent of “uh-huh”. When I ask them something, or try to talk to them, the same thing happens: they usually look confusedly at me, and I generally end up telling them that I’m sorry and not to worry about it. I feel trapped here. There is a waiting list for people who would like to live in homestays but whom the program director wasn’t able to fit in. I know a couple of those kids speak better Chinese than I do and don’t want to go out frequently, if at all, and I think they would fit in here better than me. The Zhangs are very kind, and from what I can deduce from their demeanor, very friendly. They are sweet people and they deserve to live with a student who can talk to them and who can fit into their lifestyle. I don’t want to live under a dusk-to-dawn house arrest for a semester, especially not when there are other students who would likely be a good fit for this homestay but aren’t able to live with any family. I think tomorrow I’ll ask the designated homestay RA if there’s still time to switch; when I moved out yesterday the students who weren’t in homestays were still in their dorm, so I don’t think it’s unreasonable or a lost cause. I hope not. I feel deeply embarrassed that I’m so unhappy here, in large part because I promised myself I wouldn’t be one of those obnoxious American students who only cared about going out all the time, and I can see how someone might perceive me that way now. I absolutely didn’t come here to have that be my focus in any significant amount, but I’m not sure I can have a good experience here living the lifestyle of someone fifty years my senior, and spending time in China is too precious an experience to spend it being upset, bored, and unable to talk.
(I’m not actually as depressed as I sound; I had a great time at the Summer Palace eating the Cornsicle today, and I’ve met some friendly, funny, and kind people from my program as well. I’m just unsure and uncomfortable about the living situation.)

Dumpling tally: 23

*A uniquely Chinese quirk I’ve noticed is the fruit stand: my neighborhood has a TON (like, two or three on every small block) of fruit vendors, all selling more or less the same selection of fruit for almost identical prices. Most of these people have small storefronts, but quite a few operate out of their vans or even on a big blanket set out on a street corner. I am quite sure the latter two are illegal. By far the most omnipresent and popular fruit is watermelon, but I’m not entirely sure why this is; it’s not especially cheap compared to the other fruits for sale, but every vendor always has a ton in stock and most of the people I see shopping for fruit check out the watermelons.

**The supermarket is also sort of different from those in the US. The produce section is virtually nonexistent, as the overwhelming presence of fruit vendors like the ones mentioned above renders it unnecessary. At the supermarket nearest to me, the top floor is pretty normal-looking and has most of your standard-issue food,*** tweaked a bit for Chinese tastes (for example, live seafood). The bottom floor, though, has weird things like towels, shoes, and ready-to-hang art. The really cracked-out part is that despite the bottom floor being patrolled by no less than four police officers (not rent-a-cops, but actual police officers), the store sells a lot of obviously fake designer stuff, like the Fuma bag I saw the other day. After witnessing the Great Fake Fuwa Raid of ’08, I thought that knockoffs would have all but disappeared due to the Olympic-induced increased police presence, but none of the officers seemed to care.

***At the seafood counter, I saw a flat metal tray full of egg-sized live brown pupae. I was looking at them wriggling around in this really perturbing way AND THEN I SAW THIS LADY GIVE THE SEAFOOD GUY 2 RMB AND SHE JUST ATE IT, LIVE, LIKE YOU WOULD EAT A CARROT STICK OR PERHAPS A COOL RANCH DORITO. EW EW EW EW EW EW EW EW EW EW!!!!!!!!!!! Unfortunately, I promised myself before I left that I’d tried every weird food offered to me except dog meat (which is apparently only served in Korean restaurants anyway), so if someone asks if I want a live pupa I’ll have to take them up on it. Evidently, though, the more common method of preparation is to stir-fry them, which kills them. I’m not sure which is worse: having that kind of blood on my hands, or eating a live pupa.

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.