I can't believe I forgot this!

Final Dumpling Tally: 326

List Post 1

I just finished my history final! I think it went pretty well and am very happy it’s over. The only thing I have left now is my Chinese final on Tuesday, which promises to be a beastly leviathan of an examination, but after which point I get to spend my last two days in Beijing free and unburdened by sentence structures, characters, or the Language Pledge. Other than that, there’s not much to report, other than that Zhang Ran and I made jiaozi last night and they were delicious.
As I only have about a week left here, and I feel like I’ve pretty much done everything I’m going to do at this point, I am going to start the part of the show where I make lists of things. These will be of no practical interest to anyone except possibly Arianne, but I am a type-A person at heart and enjoy inflicting my opinions on others. I need to recover from the history final, so we’ll start with…

NIGHTLIFE
Top Five Best Bars
5. Bar Blu
Sort of expensive, but the drinks are good, the music is good, the dancing is good if you come on a good night, and once I was sitting on their heated rooftop terrace and they put 300 on for us to watch. Stay classy, Bar Blu. (I’m Ron Burgundy?)
4. Lush
The student mainstay in Wudaokou, Lush not only has good hamburgers but a great, albeit early, happy hour. Their open mics are also a bundle of fun. Lush is what I’d always do before Propaganda…good times, but it gets marked down for being almost exclusively foreign students.
3. Drum and Bell Bar
I only went here once, but it was great. The rooftop terrace (I am a sucker for rooftop terraces) is beautifully positioned in a thicket of trees, the branches of which will brush you in the face if you’re kind of tall, and you have a great view of the Drum and Bell Towers, built during the Ming dynasty. Beijing’s best-kept secret, although I did find it in Lonely Planet.
2. Bookworm
I expounded on this place in great detail in the last entry, but it rules. It is also the only bar I’ve ever studied at.
1. Q Bar
Q Bar made me not hate Sanlitun anymore. It’s out of the way, has a rooftop terrace, expensive but tasty drinks, and gin & tonics with entire slices of cucumber in them. Mmm. It’s also not packed with obnoxious drunk college students, who are probably driven away by the prices. Good riddance, I say.

Top Five Best Places To Go After the Bars
5. Bar Blu
The dance floor counts as a club. I mostly just go here for dance purposes anyway, because it’s free.
4. The 24-Hour Porridge Place in Wudaokou
As can be expected, this restaurant serves delicious, hot rice porridge at all hours. It’s great.
3. Club China Doll
The best place to dance in Sanlitun, hands-down. No cover, but still stays classy, and I’ve seen a couple good DJs there, mostly playing electronic and hip-hop.
2. MAO Livehouse
This place has killer bands (Hedgehog, Regurgitator, Jens Lekman), good space, and interesting people. It’s sort of the Fillmore (or the Metro, for those of you in central time) of Beijing, where every respected alternative musician comes when they’re in town.
1. Propaganda
My heart overflows with love for Propaganda. There’s no cover, the music is awesomely bad, and it’s always SO MUCH FUN. When I die, I want to be cremated so that my ashes can be thrown over the crowd here at 2 a.m. on a Friday night. Propaganda is like rager grad school. I may never love again.

There will be more lists every day. Keep your eyes peeled.

Dumpling Tally: 293

Roommate Musings

As of today, I have exactly two weeks left in the Beezh. I have loved my time here, but by this point the weather/ pollution/ complete lack of organizational skills on IES’ part (I still don’t know when my finals are! Nor do I have regular internet access!) have made me ready to head back home and eat Mexican food with my loved ones. Nonetheless, I still have two weekends left and I am determined to squeeze as much out of them as I can while still having tests sometime in the next couple weeks.
Nothing noteworthy has happened since I got back from Shanghai, so I’m going to use this space to expound upon an aspect of my time here that I haven’t talked much about: my roommate. People keep asking about her, and I feel lucky that I get to live with her. In my experience, Chinese people are hard to meet. Even when we’re sent out into the Bei Wai neighborhood to talk to the locals for class, they’re often hesitant; we’ll ask them if we can ask them a couple questions about [Spring Festival, family dinners, their hobbies] and often anyone over thirty won’t even verbally respond to us. Instead, they’ll shake their heads and wave us away. Before I arrived here, I read all about the Chinese notion of politeness and conflict avoidance, but if I were to judge by the rude drivers and closed-off Beijingers I’ve met, I would think Chinese people were incredibly impolite.
Thankfully, there’s Zhang Ran. Although not a native Beijinger, she is adorable and super sweet (and her native Beijinger friends are too). Although our overlapping time in the dorm is short (she has classes until about the time I head out for the night), we talk quite a lot, and we’re fairly close; she’s given me advice on various issues related to the Unfair Sex, which probably would have been great if I’d ever had the chutzpah to use it, and we talk about the general stresses of collegiate life, and deciding our futures, a lot.
The one thing that stands out specifically, though, is the vast difference in maturity level between us (and, I would venture to say, between most of the other Chinese roommates in general). Example: Zhang Ran, within the past week, has acquired her first boyfriend. I probably have no right whatsoever to be talking about this, as I’m in the middle of an 18-month dry spell with the gentlemen, but I was fourteen the first time I dated; without exception, everyone I know had their first actual relationships in high school, usually toward the earlier end of it. According to Zhang Ran, though, most Chinese students don’t date until college, or sometimes later (this is applicable to young people in general, as about 90% of Chinese young’uns go to some type of college/tech school/etc.) Her boyfriend, who I have only met once, seems particularly inexperienced in the ways of romantic etiquette. Zhang Ran reports that upon seeing a picture of me for the first time, he commented that I was “prettier than her.” Fortunately, I wasn’t present at the time; if I had, I probably would have chewed him out as best I could in Chinese.
Last night, she told me she was going over to his building “to study overnight.” I bid her goodnight with what was hopefully a knowing look on my face and returned to studying. She returned fifteen minutes later saying that the guard in the boyfriend’s building wouldn’t let her in (I guess they’re equally obnoxious about curfew on the other side of campus), and when I asked her where she would have slept, she wrinkled her nose and said that she had actually planned to pull an all-nighter with him. With the workload she and the other Chinese students seem to have, I’m not surprised this qualifies as a date. The Chinese students rarely, if ever, go out – the most I’ve heard of this is a couple of the guys’ roommates getting some beers after dinner.
At the same time, I can’t help but wonder if this – the school-sponsored team jump rope competitions, the popular (among college students) brand of t-shirts with school-uniform-clad teddy bears on them, which would have gotten anyone laughed out of the fifth grade in the US – is evidence of actual immaturity, or if I’ve just become sort of numb to what’s “normal” for people my age after having spent two years immersed in promiscuous alcoholic scantily-clad* party-hearty American School (not that Northwestern is a particularly egregious example of any of these). At any rate, it’s been sort of an interesting thing to reflect on, and I’ve had to adjust my worldview to realize that the Chinese students’ lifestyle doesn’t mean they’re weird or “behind” like it would in the US; instead, it just means they’re Chinese.

Dumpling Tally: 267

*Overheard in the Northwestern student union: “Your North Face is so sexy!”

Shanghai'ed!

So last Thursday Amy, Amy’s friend (a last-minute replacement for Elise, who had lost her wallet and her train tickets), Max, and myself departed for Shanghai. Our train on the way in was a soft seat, the second choice of accommodation, as all the hard-sleeper tickets were sold out. However, this proved a very pleasant way to travel; the second car of soft seats was almost completely empty, and so, accompanied by another roving band of IES students, we invaded it and sat around its tables playing cards and very intense word games. (I defeated Max in a hotly contested round of “ghost” despite his repeated boasts that he “hardly ever lost” at it.) When it came time to sleep, though, things got less comfortable. Soft seats are analogous to plane seats: they’re about as thick, roughly the same size, and they recline the same negligible amount. I’ve never been able to sleep well on planes, and catnapped fitfully throughout the night even though I had a row of seats to myself.

Day 1: This is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things
I woke at 7 am with the recorded announcement that we’d be arriving in Shanghai shortly. Despite approaching China’s largest city, the view of the countryside from the window looked as provincial as any countryside I’d seen in Shanxi or Yunnan: the same poor farmers in their fields and thin brick houses, heated by the same coals that sent plumes of smoke lurching into the already filthy air. I was equally unimpressed once we entered Shanghai proper. It looked almost exactly like Beijing, with nondescript concrete buildings punctuated by China’s uniquely hideous 1970s apartment blocks. By the time we stepped out of the (standard) train station, I started to worry that I’d wasted my time and money coming here. This was not alleviated when we tried to catch a cab to our hotel, which, judging by the map I had, was a fairly short ride from the train station. The first cab we hailed tried to make us pay a flat rate of about $9, a huge sum given the short distance. The second told us it was “too far.” Finally, a third cab talked to the hotel receptionist to find out where exactly the place was and cheerfully took us there for a fair and reasonable $3. The legendary sneaky Chinese people who consistently try to rip foreigners off seem to have eluded me thus far, but it was a frustrating experience; I don’t think anyone’s tried to overtly cheat me until the first cab driver (the Silk Market is different, as it’s their job to cheat you) and it was a frustrating experience.
The cab dropped us on the corner of a little lane branching off what looked like a fairly major road. Before we even checked in, though, something caught our eye. Baozi! A tiny stall was set up a mere twenty feet from our hotel, and a cluster of hungry Shanghainese, ranging from businessmen in suits to the quilted-pajama-wearing townsfolk* inexplicably found everywhere in China, was gathered around waiting for their fist-sized steamed bundles of joy. We joined the fray and eventually got some delicious pork and potato baozi. Full and relatively happy, we checked into the hotel and caught up on sleep until lunchtime, at which point we went back for more baozi, this time including a delicious veggie variety with mustard greens, all for only 15 cents each.
We braved Shanghai’s subway system (not actually hard; we only used one subway line the entire trip) to go to the Bund, the town’s equivalent of the Magnificent Mile. Situated along the Huangpu River, the Bund showcases some of China’s finest treaty-port architecture, including exclusive clubs that Chinese and women weren’t allowed into at the time, old stately bank buildings, and the still-functioning customs house. For the first time since arriving in China, I got the feeling that I could have been somewhere else. The style of the buildings reminded me of what I’d seen in Vienna or Prague, and they didn’t have even the faintest tinge of Chineseyness to them save for the small red flags fluttering at the top. For all their stateliness, though, the Bund didn’t make for super-interesting strolling. The buildings were all either offices or the occasional luxury retailer, and except for a luxury phone store called Vertu that Max wanted to look at, nothing caught our attention.
So what’s on the other side of the river? The exact opposite of the Bund’s buildings: ultramodern, sleek skyscrapers, the most ridiculous of which is the Oriental Pearl TV tower (pictured above – you’ll be able to tell which one it is because it’s ridiculous). This part of town, called Pudong, was visually arresting, but my Lonely Planet book told us that it lacked anything of real interest to visitors, so we didn’t venture over there. (Yet.)
After the Bund wore out its welcome, we made our way back to the main shopping street, Nanjing Lu. The eastern part of the street, closest to the Bund, was obviously overdeveloped for tourists and was crammed with neon-lit shops promising clueless white people knockoff jade statues, “Chinese” jewelery, ostensibly high-quality tea, and other such souvenirs. Even though the area was pedestrianized, it was a madhouse. The cars that would have been on the road were replaced by packs of Chinese people who seemed just as determined to disrupt the natural flow of foot traffic. We eventually struggled out of this section of the street and escaped into…a mall.
Shanghai has SO MANY MALLS. Most of the ones located on East Nanjing Lu were nice but not unreasonable, getting more and more expensive (and the items sold within getting less weirdly ugly and Chinese) as we headed farther west. This strip of street had seemingly endless malls, all of them huge; we actually got lost in one twelve-floor behemoth. By the time we got home, we were all mall-ed out, and we had seen two more Vertu stores (according to Max, Manhattan has a grand total of one). Their phones, which in China retail for upwards of $10,000, sold at about the rate of six per week, according to one of the workers, mostly to Chinese and Japanese people. This sort of summed up the atmosphere in Shanghai; the city proper is overflowing with more luxury than anyone could ever possibly need, or even support, in its rush to become cosmopolitan and “modern”. In a lot of ways, this was great: the city was cleaner (although the pollution was still pretty bad) and laid out in a much more familiar and Western way, but it was also very weird to feel distinctly poor in a developing country.
After returning to the hotel (and the dumpling stand) we decided on dinner at a Moroccan place called Barbarossa, in the middle of People’s Park in the city center. The recommendation in Lonely Planet** did nothing to prepare us for the restaurant/bar/lounge’s beautiful sitting. The building looked like a softly lit Moroccan palace and sat delicately aside a pond in the middle of the park. During the summertime, when the weather was warm and the curtains open, it must be nothing short of magical. We quickly ordered (the kitchen was about to close) and enjoyed some amazing food, the kind all too rare in Beijing: a delicious, lemony, flawlessly herbed chicken tagine and a salad with arugula, blue cheese, and pears. I was never a huge fan of salads of any sort, but this was the first one I’d really had since arriving in China, and it was delicious. We contemplated staying at the restaurant for drinks, but decided they were too expensive, at about $8 each (keep this number in mind for later, kids) and headed back instead for a good night’s sleep.

Day 2: The Gao Sheng Huo***
This was by far the most fun day. The previous day left a little bit of an odd taste in my mouth, between the lovely but empty Bund, the omnipresent flashing neon and squawking vendors of East Nanjing Lu, and the weird commercialism of the luxury stores. We woke up late, grabbed some dumplings on the way out, and headed on foot to the French Concession, described as an elegant, low-key area with shops and cafés.
Though most of the journey there showcased the same omnipresent construction and heavily trafficked streets I’d come to know and despise in Beijing, the French Concession itself was a treat. It’s not a clearly delineated area, and it sort of sneaks up on you, at least the way we approached it from the north. You notice that the buildings are statelier and better kept, and that the trees lining the roads don’t look like haphazard afterthoughts, like they do in Beijing; instead, they are healthy, leafy, and happily growing. The neighborhood reminded me of the nicer side streets of Belmont, Fremont, Ballard, or maybe a less-busy Rockridge (here I have successfully hit the Chicago, NorCal, and Seattle residents with a slew of comparisons so that all of you can hopefully imagine what this is like), in architecture, demeanor, and retail options. We stopped at a hipper-than-Ikea home boutique, a shop selling luxury herbal teas, and innumerable small, classy clothing stores. Unlike the little clothing shops ubiquitous in Beijing, these stores carried more than shoddily made, thin knit cardigans that would have looked at home on girls ten years younger than the actual intended consumer. Instead, these little places had the kind of effortless cool found in little boutiques in San Francisco, or other celebrated creative cities in the US. I was smitten until I saw the price tags, but eventually caved in at one particularly amazing store called Source. The bottom and top floors had men’s and women’s clothes, shoes, and accessories in the hip-hop tradition, but the top floor also had a large, empty section that was currently playing host to an independent art exhibition showcasing photos and printmaking. It also had a fully functional DJ deck and bar, and apparently hosted many excellent events throughout the year (including, to my great joy, the adidas Originals opening party in 2007). I couldn’t help but think how much fun it would be to party in there.
Speaking of adidas, this same store would play host to one of my happiest moments of the trip. The very astute among you may recall not only my joyful pilgrimage to the adidas megastore in Beijing but my taste for a specially produced shoe entitled the Flavors of the World Vin Qing Ming. As these wonders had been discontinued in 2007, I despaired of ever finding one and assumed they’d all been bought up by more affluent sneakerheads.
Enter Shanghai.
I moseyed over to the sneaker section and immediately saw a real live Vin Qing Ming ahead of me. I rushed to cradle it in my hands with the same care with which one would handle a baby panda (they’re about as common). One of the store workers, noticing my ongoing mystic experience, came over and informed me in English that the shoe was a limited edition run, etc, so forth. I responded in Chinese, “I know, they’re my favorite brand and I’ve been looking for this shoe for a year!” which prompted them to compliment me on my Chinese. I didn’t get the shoes because they were over $200, but I did get a shirt, and as the girl at the register rang me up in broken English, I heard the salesperson say “Don’t worry, she speaks Chinese well,” which made me feel really satisfied. Chinese people will readily tell you your Chinese is awesome, even if you can only say hello, when they’re trying to sell you something (always) but to overhear two coworkers talk like that was extremely flattering.
We shopped around for a while longer but returned to a Lonely Planet-recommended café for dinner, which for me was a delicious focaccia sandwich and a banana crepe. Back at the hotel, I decided to do something I’d had my heart set on for a while: take advantage of China’s lack of drinking age and a nice blouse I’d bought in Beijing to finally live the high life. Amy and her friend decided not to join me because my super-cool plan was too expensive, but Max and I put on our finest (for me, this was the aforementioned blouse, corduroy pants, and flats) and headed over to the Jinmao Tower, China’s tallest building and home to the world’s highest bar on the 87^th story.
Both Friday and Saturday, Shanghai had been overcast and drizzly, although the temperature was pleasant enough. By the time we went out, it was outright raining, although not very hard, and the city had a lovely, foggy, Seattlesque feel to it. The close fog obscured the tops of the tallest buildings, including ours, but lent the rest of Pudong an ethereal, floating feeling as the multicolored neon lights and logos shone faintly through the haze.
Once in the tower, we took our first of three elevators to the 53^rd floor, where we got a chance to look around. Already, the city looked impossibly small, and we were only a bit over halfway to our destination. The 53^rd floor and up belong to the Grand Hyatt Shanghai, and this, their “lowest” floor served as a lobby with its own bar, which we eschewed in favor of a second elevator to the 56^th floor, which had another bar and a couple restaurants, as well as the elevator to our final destination. (It’s also worth mentioning that an adult ticket to the observation deck on the 88^th floor is about $10.)
We were welcomed to the bar the minute we stepped off the elevator and ushered to a darkly lit table about ten feet from the window. The fog was so thick that it obscured the ground entirely from this point, which was sort of disappointing, but also amazing in that it gave the impression that the building has just sprung into the heavens from nowhere, and had no basis in the terrestrial world. Feeling emboldened by my settings and my temporary classy life, I ordered a $14 drink called a “Dragon” (ingredients: Courvoisier VSOP Exclusif, Kahlua, Bailey’s, Grey Goose, and milk) which, despite all the alcohol that was ostensibly in it, had a delicious coffee-milk taste. This pricing was average for the bar. In fact, the champagne cocktails on the list all sold for at least twice as much as my drink, and a number of premium whiskeys were offered that sold for about $500 per glass. Perhaps inspired by our fancy surroundings, Max and I spent most of our time at the bar talking about medical malpractice lawsuits before returning to the hotel.

Day 3: Follow Chairman Mao’s Cultural Revolution, Fight American Imperialism
or
I Love You, California Pizza Kitchen
We woke up at a similarly late time, ate a similar lunch (tasty dumplings!) and then went over to yet another place suggested by Lonely Planet, the Propaganda Poster Art Center. I was glad the book suggested it, because I never would have found it on my own. It was on a residential street, in a typically ugly Chinese apartment complex. Once we walked to the back building, we had to take the elevator down to the basement. It was the sketchiest, least museum-y museum I’ve ever seen.
Somewhat unsurprisingly, we were the only people there. The collection of posters was impressive, though, and the ones on display were just a fraction of what the curator, a kindly older man who spoke great English, owned (some were traveling, some were on sale). Since we were the only group there, he showed the four of us around and explained the political climate that led to the creation of these posters, all of which glorified Mao, communism, and peasants and denouncing all forms of capitalism and imperialism. “The Americans always really like the anti-American ones,” he said, showing us a stretch of posters in which square-jawed, hearty laborers destroyed tanks piloted by fat American businessmen. “They were very common in China, too, until 1972. That was when Nixon came, and all the artists were told to stop making them.” I love Communist kitsch, an affinity installed by my visit to the Czech Republic a couple summers ago, and I had a great time at the museum. In my mind, though, the most interesting posters were the ones with only characters scrawled on them, kept in a small side room. I went in alone and was looking at the when the curator stepped in and started to explain what was going on. These posters, called “big character posters,” were common during the Cultural Revolution in the 1960s, when intellectuals and capitalists of all stripes were denounced. At universities and in city centers across China, people were forced to write these posters denouncing their family, friends, teachers, and even themselves to avoid severe political persecution at the hands of the Communist Party. Some parts of the posters were written and underlined in red; these were quotes from Mao’s works. My favorite posters were the ones that had had the original characters written over, usually broadly with a big brush. These were the works of vandals, people who had dared to disagree with the poster’s original contents and risked who-knows-what to voice their disagreement, no matter how silently. The posters were huge, written on butcher-paper sized rolls, and one of them lasted five sheets of paper, an illegible (to me, anyway) forced screed against something the Chinese government probably supported now anyway.
We then went over to the west section of Nanjing Lu for more shopping. Unlike the eastern section, this part of the street was blanketed with only luxury malls selling only luxury Western brands (Dior, Prada, Bulgari, etc.) The stores were all weirdly empty, as their merchandise was well out of range of even upper-middle-class Shanghainese, but we spent an enjoyable hour strolling and coveting before we decided that our love for the West should not start and end with window shopping. Instead, we decided, the time was ripe for some delicious American chain restaurant food, so we went into a California Pizza Kitchen, an establishment I abhor in the States,**** and ate a delicious meal of pizza, Coke (with free refills!) and salad. I was having too much fun being American to give up my temporary Western lifestyle when the meal ended, so afterward, at my behest, we popped into Starbucks and sat in the lobby of a nearby luxury hotel to drink them. Other than the occasional Asian person crossing our field of vision in these places, we truly might as well have never been in China.
Shanghai doesn’t have Beijing’s ancient history by a long shot. (It wasn’t much of anything until the Europeans made it into a treaty port in the mid-19^th century.) However, it is infinitely more Western, and more civilized (I’m going to use that word despite all the baggage it carries with it) than anywhere else I’ve been in China. If you’re visiting the country, stay in Beijing, and get a feel for what “real” China is like. That being said, if I had to live here in the long term, I’d move to Shanghai, no question. As long as I was being paid on an American salary, that is.

Dumpling tally: 240

*For some reason, grown adults think it’s acceptable to wear quilted pajama sets, which more often than not have cartoon characters on them, out in public. I thought that in cosmopolitan Shanghai this would not happen, but I was wrong.

**I am deeply in love with Lonely Planet, even after reading the excellent confessional Do Travel Writers Go To Hell? by Thomas Kohnstamm, which everyone should read. At any rate, every place they’ve recommended has been amazing.

*** High life.

****Max, a New Yorker, and I got into a huge argument about thin crust vs. deep dish pizza. Everyone who is at all smart knows that deep dish is infinitely better, and so I will not discuss this matter any further.

Yonghegong Picture Post + Lamarama Pt. 2

Some time ago, Zhang Ran asked me to make her and a friend some American food. After trying very hard to think of things that didn’t involve ovens, pasta, or cheese (none of which are readily accessible) I ended up asking my parents, who recommended a Cajun dish with shrimp and spices sautéed in about a stick of butter. They sent me the spices from the US, and last Tuesday I finally ended up cooking for the two of them, plus Jackie and Dan. The dinner went over wonderfully and was finished off with a pot of Dan’s precious American coffee, brought to China by his visiting parents (the Chinese kids hated it, and I got to explain that this was what actual coffee tasted like). You can never go wrong with too much butter.
The rest of the week was pretty dull until Saturday night, when I went with Max, Michael, Jackie, Dan, and a couple others to the Dumpling Restaurant. (I don’t even know the name of it; it’s just called the Dumpling Restaurant as far as I’m concerned.) Max had figured out previously that ordering the dumplings with colored wrappers did not cost extra, so our dumplings were not only delicious but easy on the eyes. They all got eaten promptly, and everyone loved them. After that Max and I headed out to Sanlitun [obligatory comment about how I’m over Sanlitun] and met up with Amy, Becca, Cody, and some others for excellent dancing. One of the bars we went to also had 300 playing on a TV screen on the terrace, which was the awesomest thing I’ve ever seen.
The sky was relatively clear today (this means that the brown haze wasn’t quite as noticeable as it usually is) so Max wanted to go back to the Yonghegong Lama Temple. We made our way over there but decided to buy some incense to burn at the altars, which I hadn’t done before. It was incredibly cheap – 70 cents for about twenty sticks, which didn’t smell like anything in particular but had Chinese and Tibetan writing stamped onto their sides in shiny, foiled letters. The store where we stopped (bordered by ten other stores just like it) had all sizes, colors, and packages of the stuff imaginable, from the tiny, thin sticks people use in their burners at home in the US to meter-long sticks the width of sausages.
Upon going in, I was again surprised not only by how many people were there to worship but by their diversity. There were the kind of older people you’d expect, but also a lot of young adults, especially young women who couldn’t have been more than five years older than me, dressed in jeans and heels. My history professor once made an offhand comment about how all the temples in Beijing were packed the week before the gaokao (like the SAT in China, but more important and more stressful, as it’s the sole determining factor in whether you get into college) by students praying for good scores. I wonder if these people were really Tibetan Buddhists or if they just wanted something; I guess when I think of devout Buddhists I don’t envision girls in Gucci sunglasses and gold jewelry, and I think the use-religion-when-you-need-it strategy is kind of shallow and insulting. However, I burned my incense and bowed three times at the altars right alongside them, even though I’m not Buddhist, so I’m certainly not any better. It was a crisp, late-fall afternoon, and my layers of jackets kept me nice and warm as I trundled through the temple complex, sunglasses on. Afterward we went to Nanluogu Hutong, and although there was a temporary setback when I discovered my pudding place to be closed, we found a beautiful, cozy coffee shop and took shelter from the cold around a pot of tangy lemongrass tea. I feel like I’ve seen everything there is to see in Beijing, pretty much, and so I’ve been going out exploring a little less. The weather is also getting rapidly colder, so screwing around in the city parks is much less appealing than it was a couple months ago. I find myself missing Yunnan and its tropical climate a lot.
I’ve been getting sort of fed up with a lot of the smaller quirks of Chinese life lately, which I’m sort of embarrassed about, because I feel like I’ve been here long enough that I should have adapted to them by now. I don’t think it’s culture shock; I feel like that would have kicked in long before, and these things aren’t surprising me so much as wearing down my patience a tiny bit each time I see them, like (appropriately) Chinese water torture. The food at the small restaurants where I eat, although delicious, is beginning to run together, and I’m getting a little tired of the fairly limited options available for $1. As a result, I’ve been eating out at nicer places more and more frequently, which makes my tummy very happy but is causing me to burn through money fairly quickly. I probably need to start having noodle soup more often; it’d be good in this weather and I haven’t familiarized myself with it yet. The uniquely Chinese habit of hawking and spitting giant wads of phlegm on the ground (or the bus, or the floor in a couple particularly appalling instances) has always grossed me out, but it’s starting to bother me a lot of late, as has the tendency to let toddlers relieve themselves in the street. Beijing’s awful drivers are annoying (but, as Max pointed out, that’s not a cultural thing but a straightforward safety concern) and honk too much. To top it off, every time I leave the room to go out for the afternoon or the evening, my roommate gives me a reproachful look and comments that every weekend, I “disappear.” I always invite her out with me, but she declines, saying either that she doesn’t like bars or she has too much work to do. I’d like to get a sense of what she does in her free time, but she never seems to leave. I’m sure the “too much work” line is true – Chinese universities have infamously strenuous curricula – but if I have no work to do I don’t see why it’s not okay for me to go have fun. It’s not as though I’m blowing off my scholarly duties, either; she sees me studying quite frequently, and when she didn’t believe that I got such good grades while leaving the dorm so often, I showed her a couple of my recent quizzes. We are starting to talk more, though, which is good. Recently we have confided in one another about our boy problems. Her advice was probably much better than mine was.
On the plus side, I am going to Shanghai! I will be accompanied by Max, Amy, and Elise. The IES kids get Friday off and have the weekend for independent travel. I wish we had longer (when you have class Thursday afternoon and Monday morning and plane tickets are a little much for a student budget, your options are limited) but I probably would have chosen to go to Shanghai anyway, as I am a city person and Shanghai is China’s biggest city, with 20 million people. Shanghai is not only warmer than Beijing, but is known for its own special variety of dumplings, which I look forward to ingesting in their natural habitat. We’re taking an overnight train in Thursday night and coming back the same way Sunday night, which is nice because it cuts down on hotel costs (although our hotel is only $40 a night and has a private bathroom). I’m sort of proud of myself; I went to the travel agency and got the train tickets all by my lonesome in Chinese, even having a conversation with the ticket guy about my options (hard-sleeper on the way in wasn’t available, so I got soft-seat instead). I can’t believe that after all the time I’ve spent here, I still get nervous about using my Chinese in public like this, but I was probably happier than I should be to have pulled it off. The hotel, however, was booked online and in English. It is fairly central and close to a subway station, which is really all I need.
I also got surprisingly homesick for the first time this week. Recently, Beijing has been vacillating between sort-of-tolerably cold and frigid, and the weather was leaning toward the latter on Monday afternoon, when I found myself in Sanlitun with some time to kill. While I was wandering around their giant outdoor mall I was offered a free sample of either hot cocoa or apple cider outside of a juice bar. I took the cider, proffered happily in a tiny Dixie cup, and drank the sip’s worth slowly. It wasn’t fake, like I’d expected it to be; as it turned out, all the juices were fresh-squeezed, and every cup of cider came with its own cinnamon stick. It tasted just like the cider my mom makes every Halloween night, and as I squeezed into one of the tiny room’s three chairs and watched the wind blowing the pedestrians around outside, I was reminded of the Christmas season in Seattle, or Chicago, or even little Sebastopol. For a brief moment, I missed the wreaths hanging from the light poles, the festive holiday lattes at Starbucks that I’d never order because I didn’t like coffee, or the patterns the frost makes on the windows in the morning when you wake up. I ordered the biggest cup of cider they had and spent a pleasant twenty minutes chatting with the girl at the register in Chinese about where I was from and what we did for the holidays in the US. Midway through our conversation she asked me nervously, “I heard Americans really like apple cider. Does ours taste like it does in America?” I assured her that yes, theirs was as good as any I’d ever had on the other side of the Pacific, and watched as a huge smile spread across her face.

Dumpling Tally: 200 (double centennial!!!)

Eggs and Incense

One of the weird things I’ve noticed about Beijing is that in many ways it seems Westernized on the outside, but the modern trappings are just for looks. For example, several times I’ve seen stores advertise that they accept credit and debit cards (rare in China, where almost all purchases are made in cash), and then waited in a giant line because there’s no credit card machine, and all the purchases have to be phoned through to the credit card company.
I thought about this again a couple nights ago, when Max and I went to a concert at the brand-spanking-new National Center for the Performing Arts, colloquially known as “The Egg”. Right across from Tiananmen Square, the Egg has been open for less than a year and is surrounded by an artificial lake under which you walk through a hallway to enter the building. There are three theaters inside: one for symphonic music, one for plays and Beijing opera, and one for opera and dance. (I was in the symphonic hall watching a Dutch ensemble of maybe fifteen musicians playing international, modern pieces.) The interior of the building was built at a huge cost; with the construction and maintenance costs averaged out, each seat is worth $70,000 (yes, dollars, not yuan). The lobby is gorgeous and wood-paneled, and there’s not a straight line in sight – everything is gently curved, matching the egg-shaped exterior. Everything was beautifully and softly lit, and what wasn’t made from dark, flawlessly polished wood was granite or crisply frosted metal. It was an absolutely gorgeous place, nicer than any performance center of its type that I’d ever been in. If it had been located in the US or Europe, it would have been the type of place where even the cheapest tickets set you back $40 or so, and if you went in wearing anything less than a nicer dress or a suit you’d be noticeably underdressed.
I wore a dressy pair of jeans, blouse, and a sweater, but was still worried that I would be the Ugly Informally Clothed American watching a nice concert in this beautiful building. Once I sat down and looked around, though, I realized that I was at least in the upper third, clothes-wise. We got the cheapest seats available – about $14 (although after intermission we moved to better seats) – but the people sitting in the front row, which cost at least $60, were dressed much more casually than either of us. Jeans of all types were by far the most common article of clothing, and the guy occupying one of the nicest seats was wearing a hoodie and track pants. It obviously wasn’t an issue of being able to afford nicer clothes. Instead, it was more like it had never occurred to the audience to dress up (or sit up straight, or not sleep through the concert, or not read a book during the performance). I enjoyed the music, but it was sort of a weird experience. I felt like I was seeing all these people from China’s new middle class who had money but didn’t really know how to operate within the lifestyle this money could buy them. Then we went back to the Dumpling Restaurant. I love you, Dumpling Restaurant.
Then, the next day, we decided to brave a particularly frigid November afternoon to see the changing of the leaves at Fragrant Hills Park, which is located roughly nowhere.* Fragrant Hills is known for its many hills, which are covered in maple trees that ostensibly change colors beautifully in the fall. Although it seemed like the right time to go and see them, the trees were still mostly green, which surprised me given how late in the year it was. Although the park was huge, filled with pagodas, ponds, and small gardens, it was clear that all roads led to Incense-Burner Peak, on top of a GIANT hill (Wikipedia says it’s 1,827 feet up, but the ache in my hamstrings says it’s twice that high) overlooking the rest of the park and all of Beijing. Unfortunately, the day was both overcast and particularly polluted, but if you stared through the hazy atmosphere you could see the Summer Palace across the way.
Anyway, the Thing To Do was clearly to get to the top of the peak somehow. We were presented with two options:
1. Pay about $9 and take the chairlift to the top.
2. Walk for free.
Noticing all the old people and small children going up and down the steps at the foot of the hill, I figured that it couldn’t be that bad, decided I didn’t want to spend that much money, and set up off the stairs. This was an absolutely horrible decision. Ten minutes in, my legs hurt and I was out of breath, because the path up literally consisted of nothing but steps. Several times, we were fooled into thinking the climb was over by inconvenient crests of the hill. (This picture was taken at one such place just over halfway up.) Just as the light was starting to dim, we finally reached the top, which I celebrated by sitting down. I am actually glad that I climbed up, because it was good for me, and I apologize to the much faster and nimbler Max for whining so much. Nonetheless, I happily paid my $9 to take the chairlift back down, plus an additional fifty cents for hot chocolate. Taking the lift down offered a perfect view of the northwestern part of the city, and as the sky darkened, I could see the lights and roads spread out in front of me, the headlights of the cars flowing through traffic. It was absolutely stunning, although I regret to say that my thighs are not looking as good as I thought they would, given how uncomfortable walking is. Afterward we went for hotpot with a couple of Max’s friends** and then I met up with Dan, Pei Rei, and Dan’s parents, who were visiting from out of town, at, of all places, Pyro,*** where they graciously bought us a pitcher of beer and a pizza. Today was spent working, because when you use up your weekend on a culture/disgruntled exercise binge, you are left with little time for memorizing vocabulary words.

Dumpling Tally: 182

*I thought the Summer Palace was sort of out of the way, but I had no idea. Fragrant Hills is only five or six miles outside of Beijing proper, and there are buses that run there, but it seems weirdly rural and out of the way.

**The colder the weather gets, the better hotpot is. Even the spicy section, which I usually shy away from, tasted delicious.

***I feel like this sentence has too many commas. I know it’s grammatically correct, but it just seems like a lot of commas, is all.

Temple of Heaven Picture Post/Vital Statistics

These are all pictures of the Temple of Heaven, built* during the Ming dynasty at the behest of one Emperor Yongle, who is Max’s favorite for some reason, and used for the emperor to come and pray for future harvests. Since then it’s been restored three times, most recently in 2006. The temple’s most notable building, the round Hall of Prayer for Good Harvests, is a very famous Beijing landmark and was, as expected, mobbed with tour groups, but the surrounding park was very peaceful, and we had a fun time wandering around and getting about a bajillion free tea refills at the coffee shop in the park. Afterward we went to the dumpling restaurant I’ve mentioned before, upping the Dumpling Tally admirably.
It has come to my attention that now people are reading this who have not met me. Hello, you! Since this post is not sufficiently meaty, I will provide you with a quick rundown of my fascinating** life and times: I was born in Seattle and still call it home, as all my relatives live up there. At age five I was forcibly located to a small town in Northern California. Although I’ve spent the majority of my life there, I don’t think of it as the place I’m from; it’s more of a holding tank, although it was a nice enough place to grow up. Now I go to college in Chicagoland. How I feel about this depends on the time of year – if you ask me in October through April I’ll probably roll my eyes and say something about how I could have done no work in high school and gotten into the University of Hawaii, but ask during the summertime and you will hear me gush effervescently about it until I’m blue in the face. The real truth is that the winters suck beyond what the English language can convey, but the first two weeks of June make up for every pile of snow you accidentally step in several times over. I like my actual university a whole bunch, though. I am co-president of College Feminists with my excellent friend Arianne, who is both the brains and the beauty of the operation (I am probably the muscle, whatever that means) and on Model Congress team, which I am quite good at due to having done it for four years in high school. I work part-time at a mom-and-pop shoe store, which I love. I really hope they hire me back when I return; I was great at selling shoes, but with the economy the way it is I have no idea if they’ll need me back there. In my spare time, which I have a surprising amount of given that I’ve taken course overload for the past year while working 20 to 25 hours a week, I knit (I have been doing this for ten years and am really good at it), read, eat food, and attend fifteen-person iPod ragers, where I dance until the wee hours of the morning. I also go out to coffee a lot, which is weird considering that before coming to China I hated coffee. I’m of Norwegian descent and am immensely proud of this (in fact, this piece ran in the NYT recently and made me homesick almost to the point of tears, but this is where I’m from and where I’m going back to someday). In an ideal, pipe-dream world, I would have gone to culinary school instead of college and started a really nice, authentic Chinese, prix-fixe Michelin-star type of restaurant on the shore of Puget Sound. I do not consider myself particularly materialistic, but have an inexplicable passion for adidas sneakers. I drive a 1992 Volvo 240 sedan (or at least I do when my little brother isn’t busy absconding with it and filling the CD case up with his CDs). I am bad at every sport ever invented, with the possible exception of skiing. Before coming to China, I ran for exercise, not because it was good for me but because all the runners I knew had really nice legs. I love corduroy and the song “The Seed” by the Roots. I hate limp handshakes, insincerity, cauliflower, being cold, and whoever decided to cancel The OC. My favorite food is Tibetan food, I think Adam Brody is the most gorgeous human being ever to walk the earth, and I am currently trying to nominate Girl Talk for a Nobel prize. That’s pretty much it.

Dumpling Tally: 167

*Fun Temple of Heaven fact: the Hall of Prayer for Good Harvests is built without cement or nails, which is impressive given that it’s hella tall (scientific term).

**HA

Pingyao

This past weekend, all of the IES students were put on a weekend trip to a nearby-ish destination. I went to Pingyao, an overnight train ride east of Beijing. I had been told beforehand that Pingyao was very touristy, so I wasn’t particularly looking forward to it, but I was going with my closest friends and figured I could handle the kitsch for three days. Boy, was I ever wrong. We set out Thursday night from Beijing’s train station (which has been designed to look like Tibet’s Potala Palace…oh, China).

Day 1: I Could Have Done That in Two Hours
Our sleeper train arrived at about 7:30 in the morning. We got our stuff and disembarked, expecting a bus to take us to our destination. However, what awaited us were not buses but…large golf carts! Apparently reputable vehicles are not allowed in the streets of Old Town Pingyao, so we had to take an alternate form of transit through a gate in the old city wall.
Pingyao is about in the middle of Shanxi province (not to be confused with Shaanxi province, where the terracotta warriors are), two provinces west of Beijing. It was historically a very important part of China, used both as a strategic point for various armies and as a center of commerce (Pingyao itself) and religion (the Buddhist Wutai Mountain, where some of my classmates went). Now, though, it kind of sucks. The economic changes in China have sort of left Shanxi behind – its climate is dry, dusty, and frigid in the winter/scorching in the summer, so farming is difficult – and most of its income comes from its large but rapidly dwindling reserves of coal. The pollution wasn’t nearly as bad as it is in Beijing, but the Shanxi residents’ persistent attempts at farming make for awful erosion in an already parched ecosystem, so the constantly dusty air meant my lungs didn’t get the respite I’d hoped for. In addition, it was cold, cold, cold. I lived in my commemorative Yunnan Trip hoodie the entire time, as did many of my tourmates,* which prompted us to frequently make wistful comments like “I bet Xishuangbanna is really nice this time of year.”
“New” Pingyao looks like pretty much any other place in China, but the Old Town is beautiful, at least at 8 am. It reminded me of a less-restored Dali, but more typically Chinese: all the buildings had the slanted, tiled roofs, the intricately carved wooden doors, and the paintings of traditional Chinese people in traditional Chinese clothes. Instead of being painted over and re-carved, though, all of these buildings had been left more or less untouched on the outside, which I liked. It lent the town an air of authenticity that I would be clinging to desperately in a couple hours. As we drove to our hotel, I thought of towns in the American Old West – dusty and wooden.
Our hotel, like all hotels in the Old Town, was in a converted one-story courtyard house. There was a restaurant in the front, and behind that was a courtyard lined with rooms. I was rooming with Becca again, and much to our delight, we got a room with a kang bed. Invented during the Qing dynasty (the last one before the nationalists took over in the early 20^th century, and the dynasty in which Pingyao was a thriving commerce center), the kang is a huge, huge bed (ours was maybe ten feet wide) on top of what was traditionally a fire pit but is now electrically powered stuff. At any rate, the kang is very big and very warm. I immediately knew why this was necessary; as previously stated, Pingyao in late October is not a warm place.
After settling in, we headed out in a group to explore two of commercial Pingyao’s most important sites. Almost immediately, we were joined by other tour groups, all led by flag-wielding young women frantically barking into microphones. This was about when Pingyao’s charms started wearing off. Although the Old Town was a beautiful place to explore when it was relatively unpopulated, it was a different world entirely when mobbed by tourists and souvenir vendors. Given my distaste for touristiness of any kind, I started becoming more and more irritated.
Our first stop was the office of a bodyguard company. Merchants were frequently coming in and out of Pingyao during the Qing dynasty, carrying huge amounts of goods and money, so bodyguards were needed to protect the businessmen and their cargo. This office not only handled the business side of the bodyguard operation (we saw the offices where companies reconciled their accounts, for instance) but also trained the bodyguards – we went to a courtyard filled with rusty weapons and paintings of people practicing Chinese martial arts. Apparently the bodyguards were very skilled: their salary was extremely high, and the company was so confident in their talents that they promised merchants that, in the event a robbery were to occur, the company would compensate them for the loss of their goods and “punish” the slacker bodyguards.
Our next stop was China’s first bank, also in a giant courtyard complex. Although the bodyguard operations were very successful in protecting goods and money, the system was still pretty inefficient, and so some smart people in Pingyao devised a system in which promissory notes could be written in one office and delivered to a branch in another city, whereupon the promised amount of money would be given to the person indicated on the note (this is actually more like a Western Union office than the banks we know and love/hate today, but the Chinese banking system developed from it). Each branch had a special watermark and a secret code used to indicate the date, recipient, and amount of money, and to prevent forgery. Since the robbers couldn’t collect on checks bearing someone else’s name, robberies dropped dramatically. The banking system was historically interesting, but aside from the architecture (lovely, but the same as everywhere else in Pingyao) the buildings itself weren’t that great – just offices furnished with mannequins in Qing clothes.
After the bank, we were given free time to get our own lunch and wander around until the late afternoon. The moment we stepped outside, we were immediately surrounded by mobs of Chinese tourists wanting to take pictures of us. This was a step up from Yunnan, where we had only been stared at, not photographed. Jackie, Becca and I thought quickly and started demanding that people pay for their “special souvenir photos.”** People were very taken aback, because we (myself especially) were quite loud, sharp, and insistent about it. Once we started speaking Chinese, demanding money, and pointing at people who still had their cameras out, the photos stopped, except for a few people who began fishing their wallets out before our chaperones, a teacher and a 23-year-old office assistant who spoke perfect English, assured them that although we didn’t like being gawked at, we were just joking. I wonder how much we could have made from that – probably enough to buy lunch.
Or so I thought. In a group of six or so, I wandered around looking for a cheap place to eat, comparable to Beijing’s $1.50 restaurants. We went through all the main streets, but every restaurant we found had the same food and was empty and expensive. After a wild goose chase through the side streets of Pingyao, which, we found, were strictly residential, we resigned ourselves to eating at a pricey but very nice hostel, where we sampled the local delicacy of kao laolao: thick buckwheat noodles fried with meat and green onions. We spent the rest of the afternoon strolling, shopping, and exploring a relaxing and lovely Confucian temple, which provided a peaceful respite from the touristy Old Town. The star of the day, though, was Pingyao’s freshly made peanut brittle, produced as follows:
1: Take a stump.
2. Spread some shelled peanuts and honey on it.
3. Hit it until it’s flat and looks like peanut brittle.
4. Let it cool.
5. Sell each IES student a kilogram of it for about $3.
It is impossible to overstate how delicious this was, especially when it was warm. It seemed like the only authentically Shanxi thing I was likely to find (true) so I got some for myself and some to bring back to Zhang Ran.
We met up back in our guesthouse’s lobby to get our scripts for the next day’s performance. We were set to perform a traditional Chinese comedic lawyer dialogue (yes, really) for Chinese tourists the next day. The four speaking roles were immediately snapped up by fourth-year students looking to brown-nose the language pledge section of their grade (the fourth-year teacher was one of our chaperones), while the rest of us needed only to dress up and stand on the sidelines. This was fine by me; I just wanted to escape the experience with as much dignity as possible, and memorizing five pages of lines in Chinese wasn’t my idea of a fun night.
We had a bit more success with dinner that night. The same group of people from lunch found a hostel that advertised apple pie. Although nobody ended up ordering it, the food was a bit cheaper and the owners were very friendly. We also invited a thirtysomething Chinese appliance salesman who was in town on business to join us for dinner, so we chatted with him for a while and gave him an English name (Thomas) at his request. Apparently some of the less studious students among us found some semblance of nightlife in Pingyao, but I chose not to waste $30 on drinks in a dump of a town with no ambiance or post-sunset activities. Instead, the dinner crew retreated to our giant kang and played a very intense and long round of Uno. I have never heard such insults as when Amy played one “Draw Four” too many on poor Elise, who bore the brunt of her wrath the entire game.

Day 2: I Also Could Have Done That in the Same Two Hours
The morning started with the same unsatisfying breakfast as the first day: lukewarm porridge and cold buns. I ate and ate but never felt full, which surprisingly never happens to me with Chinese food.
Then we regrouped in the lobby for a lesson in Chinese paper-cutting. We weren’t expecting to make anything brilliant, but were a bit disappointed when we were all required to make butterflies. Then the guy who was teaching us did it wrong, so we ended up with two halves of a malformed butterfly instead of a whole malformed butterfly. At the end he confessed that it was his mom who made the beautiful paper cuttings he’d been trying to sell us the whole time.
We had free time until the afternoon, when we toured Pingyao’s old courthouse and jail. After walking through an interesting array of torture instruments, we watched some professionals in fake costumes put on a court dialogue similar to the one we would be performing, at which point we were ushered into a back room and shoved into ill-fitting polyester robes and hats that had covered I-don’t-even-want-to-know-how-many heads, then shoved back out to an exceptionally giggly band of tourists. I halfheartedly yelled at them to pay for the pictures they were taking, but this was ineffective, and there was no way I could complain about them taking pictures because this time, we actually were the tourist attraction.
We were put into position onstage and started the dialogue. The crowd was pretty rude – I overheard them saying snotty things about the speaking abilities of the students who had lines, which I shushed a couple times by hissing “How’s your English?” at them – and the play had all the flow of a pile of bricks. Some of the jollier students stayed behind when it was over to take pictures with the tourists, but I fled back to the changing room, threw the clothes off, and found a quiet corner to be alone in. All the staring had started to make me almost physically uncomfortable, and I wanted a few moments to myself. The whole experience was without a doubt the nadir of my time in China so far.
We had more free time for the rest of the night, so we were led up to the supermarket by another group. Thankfully, there was a nearby restaurant that had our coveted $1.50 bowls of noodle soup, so Becca and I filled up and called it an early night.

Day 3: The Deepest Pits of Smell
We awoke for a bus (a real bus this time) ride to the Qiao family mansion, which had been home to one of Shanxi’s most prosperous merchants, about an hour out of town. A couple people said they would have liked to stay in Pingyao, but most of us agreed that we’d seen all the town had to offer, and the group as a whole was happy to get out.
I hadn’t seen any of Shanxi’s countryside on the train ride in, since I’d slept the whole way there. As I looked out the window going to the mansion, I was struck by the poverty I saw. The highway was flanked on both sides by what seemed like miles after miles of auto repair shops, and what little arable land was behind them was used for cornfields irrigated with dirty, sludgy water. I don’t think I’ve ever seen such a depressing place.
As we pulled up to the mansion, I let out an involuntary groan. The tour bus parking lot alone was, I kid you not, the size of the Northwestern campus. We shuffled out of the bus through countless rows of souvenir vendors, although I did stop for a grilled yam, one of my more beloved street foods, especially in the cold weather. The mansions themselves were about a twenty-minute walk from the bus lot and were infinitely worse than anything I’d seen in Pingyao; I could barely see the walls or hear our guide due to the overwhelming crush of tourists. The buildings were indeed beautiful (the complex was used to film Zhang Yimou’s “Raise the Red Lantern,” for those acquainted with the greatest hits of Chinese cinema) but impossible to appreciate among the masses of people. Tourist groups notwithstanding, my throat was also getting hoarse from yelling “TWO KUAI!” at people trying to take pictures of us, so I was happy to leave.
We then got back on the bus and went to the provincial capital of Taiyuan for lunch. Although the ride in showcased more depressing poverty, the city center of Taiyuan was surprisingly very nice. It was clean and modern, with a lovely town square in the center that reminded me of the courthouse square in Portland. We got a good, cheap lunch, complete with dumplings (although the restaurant didn’t have rice, mysteriously) and then toured a vinegar factory. A lot of people complained about this, but I actually really enjoyed it. Chinese vinegar is made from fermented sorghum, not grapes or apples or whatever is used in the Western world, and we came in close contact with the machines that cleaned the grains and the pots in various stages of fermentation. As the distilling process continued, the pots became smellier and smellier, and the rooms hotter and hotter. By the time we reached the final room, my eyes and nose burned from the stench. Nonetheless, I always like seeing how food is made, and the factory used pretty traditional methods to make their vinegar; it was sitting there and bubbling of its own accord in big clay pots just as it had been doing for hundreds of years (and some of it smelled like it had been sitting out for a hundred years, too).
After that we had three or so hours of free time before our train left, which most of the group used to watch a Chinese horror movie (in the movie theater, you could rent a private room). Even with Josie, the office worker, there to translate, the movie made little sense – it was something about a girl going through all the levels of hell in an abandoned dorm building, but the hells were really just a figment of her imagination created by her evil psychologist. About halfway through, Josie admitted that even she didn’t know what was going on, so we all just laughed about it.
At the Taiyuan train station, we met up with the group from Wutai Mountain, which included excellent people like Dan and Michael. We had a nondescript train ride back and got into Bei Wai this morning at about nine, at which time I had two jianbings for breakfast despite my roommate’s protests.
The entire time I’ve been here, I’ve been on this hunt for “real” China – something without the modernity of Beijing, but also without the fakeness that hordes of tourists bring. I sort of came to the realization on the Pingyao trip that “real” China doesn’t exist. Real Chinese people don’t wear conical hats and farm rice. They live in cities like Taiyuan and go on big group tours to places like Pingyao. Even if they do farm rice, they have satellite TV and wear jeans. Like it or not, China is modernizing rapidly, and the longer I spend looking for some semblance of ancient China, the more and more it will disappear and become Westernized. Considering some of the Shanxi toilets, this is a good thing. Really though, I was probably a little overzealous in expecting as much Chinese-ness as I did. Now that I’ve gotten this into my head, I feel like I’ll enjoy my remaining time here a little more.

Dumpling Tally: 139

*All of Yunnan Trip’s best ladies were back: Amy, Jackie, and Becca, plus a superb young woman named Elise whose father worked for the US Embassy. As a result, Elise has lived in excellent places like Denmark and Greece. None of the dudes were with us this time, though.

**Around town, there were various opportunities to pay and get your picture taken – with the monkey in costume, with the guy in Qing clothes, in the “traditional” bridal sedan, etc. – so I can’t pretend this was an original idea.

The Great Wall of Sound

First, a couple interesting news items: the Chinese government is still trying to hush up the milk-powder scandal by threatening volunteer lawyers who are willing to prosecute families’ cases (the BBC has determined that fresh milk now is safe, and the only concerns are products manufactured a while ago with the milk powder), and they’re also considering a proposal to allow rural farmers to sell their land, which would increase the rural-to-urban migration (already huge). Thanks to the NYT for both of these and my grandpa for sending me the second one.
This weekend has been, in true Beijing fashion, a contrast between old and new, and a totally rad one at that. Last night Max and I went to see a Beijing rock band called Hedgehog at a place named Mao Livehouse, at the north end of Nanluogu Hutong. Hedgehog came highly recommended, and I figured I should dive in to the local scene eventually, so we paid $9, met up with a couple other people (a Chinese screenwriting student and a Swede from Max’s program who I kept wanting to hit on and then getting cold feet and therefore not hitting on) and settled in.
Mao Livehouse is a pretty spartan performance space: black walls, raised stage, railing about halfway back in the room (maybe 35’ by 60’? It was quite small), and painted all black, although the walls were covered in scrawled graffiti: the word “punk,” names of bands that had performed there, various profanities, etc. The opening band was a Swedish duo who spent their half-hour set ripping off Belle and Sebastian and Sondre Lerche and not succeeding, so we were all happy when Hedgehog took the stage.
They were an interesting group to behold. (The band only plays in the video from about 1:00 to 3:30.) The guitarist/vocalist and bassist both looked like James Iha circa 1994 (the bassist even had the sparkly v-neck sweater to back it up), but their drummer was something else entirely. A tiny little thing with a bowl cut, she couldn’t have stood more than five feet, and she wore a long-sleeved blouse buttoned up to the collarbone and Mary Janes. She looked like she should have been in some cram-school math class, not in a place like Mao Livehouse, and certainly not performing there.
And then they started playing.
The schedule flyer I’d received described Hedgehog as “indie pop,” which wasn’t entirely accurate. To my great joy, they sounded sort of like early Smashing Pumpkins, all with this great Smells Like Teen Spirit guitar tone. The guitarist and bassist played very solidly together, at several points busting out a feedback solo or a Guitar Hero-esque fling-your-instrument-around maneuver, and the guitarist had a wonderful air of completely not caring what his vocals sounded like. The drummer was the most fun to watch, though. I had her pegged as Meg White after she started the first two songs off with parts I probably could have played, but she amped it up admirably, and by about halfway through the set she was just a monster. It was like Animal (from the Muppets, fools) had been reincarnated in the body of this tiny Chinese girl; I would not have been surprised to find out that she not only eats hi-hats for breakfast, but does so without butter or syrup. Anyway, she was completely ridiculous (seriously, watch the video from 3:00 to 3:30), and the band played an awesome set, although I felt it was a bit brief. They’re apparently around Beijing a lot, so I’ll try and make it back to see them again sometime.
After some confusion about whether there was another band playing (only two were listed on the flyer, so I thought it was just the opener and Hedgehog, but it turns out there was more to come) I found a new place at the railing near the front of the stage and waited for the next band. The band in question, Regurgitator, turned out to be “120% Australian!” (as one of the rowdy Australian guys near us said) and came out dressed all in white, although the clothes ranged from tennis outfits to American Apparel stuff. This explained the surprisingly large Australian contingent at the show; although I’d never heard of Regurgitator, they seem to be fairly high-profile in their homeland, and a large band of increasingly inebriated, large, rowdy Australian students (they probably all played rugby or “football” or something) had come out to show their support. Regurgitator had four people: a guitarist and bassist, who split the vocal duties, a keyboard player, and a drummer.
I have no idea how to describe them, but they were not “indie pop.” There were elements of punk (a lot of elements of punk), the B-52s, hip-hop, and a bunch of other things I can’t even remember. They got the crowd going really quickly, and within three songs or so people were crowd-surfing, yelling and requesting songs, and the beginnings of a mosh pit had formed. Most of the people in the front half of the room were merrily jumping around like collegiate morons, myself included, and, as people invariably jumped into other people, the mosh pit grew and grew. By the time their relentlessly energetic set was over, I was covered in sweat, much of which was probably not my own (those Australians, man). I had been elbowed countless times in the ribs and spleen and shoved into people I’d never met by people I’d never met, and I’d done the same to those around me. It was excellent; good, sloppy, dirty, exhausting fun, and Regurgitator played really fun music. They’re doing another show in Beijing on Wednesday, so I might drag along Pei Rei and some of the other IES lame-os who missed out on this one.
After that, the four of us headed out to Sanlitun,* where Max’s friends ostensibly were. It turns out that they had been there at one point, but had either gone to a club (which we weren’t dressed for and didn’t want to pay for) or to buy yams.** We ended up at Bar Blu and danced for a short while, but the music left a lot to be desired, so we called it a night pretty soon after that.
Then, this morning, I went to do that most archetypal of Chinese things: climb the Great Wall of China. I had waffled on signing up for the trip at all, as I figured that it was one of those lame, mandatory tourist things to do, but IES was paying for it and buying us lunch, and I figured I had to see the Great Wall at least once.
We visited a remote part of the wall, which to my great surprise was completely devoid of vendors, gift shops, and tourist trappings of any kind. In fact, we were the only Westerners I saw on the trip – there were a fair amount of Chinese tourists, but far fewer than I would have expected given that it was the Great Wall. I’m glad I went to this specific place; it was completely overgrown and unrestored (a couple times we had to climb sheer faces with our hands and feet) and the views were amazing. Autumn is coming to Beijing, and the trees in the surrounding steep hills were beautiful shades of golden, orange and red. The air was beautiful, clear, and blue, as well, which was a nice break from the pollution in Beijing, which seems to have been particularly strong the last few days. I took some stellar pictures, my favorite of which is myself with Pei Rei and John Cho (up at the top, note the Regurgitators t-shirt).
I returned exhausted, as much from my lack of sleep the previous night as from the strenuous climb up the wall.*** Tonight will be an early night in, with large amounts of the hot chocolate from Jenny Lou’s and my mom, vocabulary words, and watching Weeds online. Tomorrow will probably also be pretty low-key, although I might go shopping in Wudaokou if I’m able to walk.

Dumpling Tally: 133

*I really don’t even like it there that much, but I always find myself there for some reason. WHY IS THIS.

**Yams are one of the new, winterized street foods that has popped up with the advent of cooler weather. They’re grilled until soft and then sold by the weight. They are incredibly sweet, beyond delicious, and the smell as you pass by someone cooking them is absolutely maddening. The other wintery food is freshly roasted chestnuts, which also smell great but are a pain to eat.

***If there is any justice in the world, I will wake up tomorrow morning with the most flawlessly toned legs the Pacific Rim has ever seen. Of course, the world is an unfair place, and I will still not fit into Chinese pants.