List Post 2 - You Wouldn't Like Me When I'm Angry

Inspired by a particularly obnoxious bus commute today (crowded, slow, had to wait forever for the bus, which is probably why it was so crowded in the first place), today you get the…

IRRITATED LISTS
Top Five Worst Places to be in Beijing in a Motor Vehicle
5. The Sitongqiaodong bus intersection. Thanks to a truly nonsensical understanding of when left turns should be allowed, it takes you forever to get anywhere if you don’t make the light here. This is where I waited in traffic for seven minutes (at 3 pm, no less) one time for a single light cycle. Woe betide you if you should have to experience this at rush hour.
4. Zhongguancun Street. This is Beijing’s high-tech corridor, and it intersects with about every bus route in the city ever, meaning that someone’s always pulling in front of you and then stopping for some reason. The awful part about it here is that you can’t blame the bad traffic or the lights for your problems. You can only wait. And wait. And wait. And move forward five feet every ninety seconds or so. People often say, when in bad traffic, that “it would be quicker to walk”. On Zhongguancun, it’s actually true.
3. The Second Ring Road, during evening rush hour. I only did this once. This is why the line 2 subway (which runs directly under the Second Ring Road) exists. TAKE IT.
2. Anywhere, really. The traffic here just sucks unequivocally.
1. The intersection of Chengfu Lu and Caidian Lu. Party people will recognize this as the Wudaokou intersection, with two KFCs, the subway stop, and the inebriatastic trifecta that is Lush, Pyro, and Propaganda. It is also, without a doubt, the worst place to be in a cab ever. This is because at all hours, it is mobbed with pedestrians* who have no regard for traffic lights and will walk in giant, clumpy streams whenever they feel like it. As a result, drivers here are always leaning on their horns and driving forward slowly but insistently in hopes that people will get out of the way, but nobody ever does. It kind of has to be seen to be believed, but it is truly ridiculous.

Top Five Generally Most Annoying Things about Beijing
5. The traffic. I usually travel by subway, which gets rid of this, but taking buses for any reasonable distance always ends in pain. I only use cabs late at night when the subway has stopped running, but on the few occasions I’ve used them during the daylight, they’re not much better.
4. The subway, sometimes. It’s annoying because there’s no stop within walking distance of my school, and lines 1 and 2 are slow and (in the case of line 1) super-crowded. Lines 5 and 10, however, are quite pleasant and expeditious. Also worthy of mention is the Xizhimen subway station, which has the worst, longest transfer ever.
3. My internet is so slow. Make Facebook work, please, someone.
2. The pollution. It is truly, truly awful. For instance, today I could not see the sun! I also couldn’t yesterday! If Beijing wanted to shut down the nearby factories and half the number of cars on the road (like they did during the Olympics) I would not be opposed; that got the pollution down to Los Angeles levels. What’s more, Cody (who has been to Beijing twice before) tells me that the pollution is usually much worse than this, because the effects of the Olympic reforms are still lingering. I cannot even imagine. I have the worst cough because of this.
1. The crowding. It’s on the roads, the subways, the buses…everywhere. Getting onto a subway at the transfer stations is a contact sport, pure and simple; you put your elbows in front of you and shove, hard, because if you don’t you’ll be swept away by the tide of people trying to get out. That is, if they even can – a couple times I’ve been forced to get off the subway a stop after where I wanted to and double back because the crowds were such that I could not get out of the car. Every time I get on a subway or bus, I inevitably think about the third-world transit fires and crashes that claim the lives of everyone on the horribly overcrowded bus or car. Then I think about how many people are on the vehicle in which I am currently traveling. This is never a favorable comparison.
The honorable mention here is the staring. Thankfully, this is very uncommon in Beijing, because most people see foreigners semi-frequently or at least recognize that their city is large and important enough to play host to them. However, outside of Beijing and Shanghai, the staring – the constant, overt staring at anyone who looks foreign, without apology or an attempt to hide it – is endemic and incredibly uncomfortable. In America, there are very, very few places (outside of certain golf courses in the Atlanta suburbs) where a person of a minority race would attract any specific attention whatsoever, and, I would venture to say, nowhere where they would meet with the scrutiny my classmates and I did. This, much more than the squat toilets, run-down houses, or lack of English spoken, is what made rural China seem “uncivilized” to me, and I don’t think it can be said that China is a country that is welcoming to the outside world until this is fixed. I initially got sort of a kick out of responding to this in various ways** but eventually it just became exhausting.

Top Five Things I am Most Anxious to Do Back in the US
This is after I spend time with my family and friends, of course.
5. Eat a steak. I want that steak very rare. I want it as rare as they can possibly cook it without having the Health Department get all up in their grill. I want that cow to hurt when they cut into it. I want it carpaccio. Mm, steak. I want it with a nice Pinot Noir, too.
4. Hug my dog, who is about three times bigger than all the other dogs in Beijing put together.
3. Be able to sit down on a subway or a bus.
2. Drive! I miss driving, and it will be even nicer to drive now that gas is so cheap ($1.90 a gallon, as opposed to $4.50 when I left).
1. Eat Mexican food. I’m not talking about “nachos” or “burritos” here, which Beijing does passably. I’m talking about chicken mole, or ceviche, or tortilla soup, or any of the other delicious Mexican foods originating in actual Mexico.

Top Five Reasons Why Actual College is Much, Much Better than IES
5. Actual College has most of the people who read this blog in it, whereas IES does not.
4. The breadth of courses in Actual College is much broader. I appreciate that this is indeed a language program, but the area studies classes seemed like an afterthought much of the time, which is too bad because some of them (my history class, for example) were really interesting.
3. In Actual College, you can miss class when you get sick. At IES, you had to go to the IES-approved hospital, conveniently located on the other side of town, wait in their waiting room, and get a note from a doctor stating that your ailment was sufficient to allow you to miss class that day. This was obnoxious because it meant you had to put up with an hour-and-a-half bus ride each way or an exorbitant (for Beijing) taxi fee. If we have food poisoning, we do not need a doctor to tell us this; instead, we need a day of bed rest and maybe some porridge from the nearest porridge place. Also, if we missed even one class, our home school got a Disciplinary Letter sent to them. I have no idea how seriously this policy was taken because I never had the nerve to test it, but there is something to be said for skipping class on a beautiful Evanston morning to get pancakes every once in a blue moon, and if you’re sick, you shouldn’t be forced to go to class because you’re poor and you don’t want to have to stand up on a crowded bus that probably passes through three of the Top Five Worst Places to be in Beijing in a Motor Vehicle.
2. Actual College has no curfew. Does IES know how many nights it has ruined by forcing us to be home by midnight on weekends? Also, the door is locked by chaining the door handles on the inside, meaning you can’t get out of the building past curfew either. The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory incident is apparently unknown over in these parts.
1. Actual College has no language pledge. Teachers and roving IES staff members roam the halls, and when they hear English being spoken, they’ll admonish you with a sharp “Shuo zhongwen!” (“Speak Chinese!") and scuttle off to take points off your grade. This policy is reasonable up to a point, but most of us don’t know enough Chinese to hold a real conversation, so we end up covertly gossiping behind the fridge or in the bathrooms. The worst incident I saw of this was when my friend’s boyfriend of three years dumped her because he couldn’t handle the stress of her being in China for four months (what a moron, seriously). She tearfully recounted this to a small, concerned group during break, and a passing teacher overheard and told her (in Chinese), “I’m sorry your boyfriend left you, but you need to speak Chinese.” Four pairs of utterly mutinous eyes (mine included) turned upon the teacher, who apologized after a few seconds and backed off.
It is worth nothing, though, that Actual College is not in China, and IES is, which makes up for pretty much everything.

I don’t mean to give the impression that I don’t like Beijing, or China, or that I wish I hadn’t come. I like it here very much, but being away from the US for so long has made me realized how much I love and miss America, for all its weirdness. Tomorrow’s lists will be better, because they will be about FOOD!

*Confession time: I am usually one of these people, because I recognize that it is infinitely easier to cross Caidian Lu on foot than attempt it in cab or on a bus.

**Most effective methods: grabbing a white friend, pointing, and saying (in Chinese), “Oh my god, Chinese people,” taking pictures of people who tried to take pictures of us, attempting to charge money for the “wonderful souvenir foreigner pictures” that people tried to take of us, looking straight at people and asking why they were staring at us, and telling people to not stare at us because this was a city/train station/temple/restaurant, not a zoo.

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.

This is probably my favorite photo of the whole trip, plus AQs

The last few days have been pleasant but uneventful, devoted mostly to studying for my midterm tomorrow (although last night we did go to the lovely Houhai Lake area to celebrate Pei Rei’s impending birthday, where I bought some cotton candy [pictured]). Tomorrow afternoon I leave for the historic but apparently ridiculously touristy and kitschy town of Pingyao. I get back on a sleeper train Monday morning. Ugh. Anyway, it’s time for another edition of the AQs.

Q: Why did the city change its name from Peking to Beijing?
A: Actually, they didn’t. It’s always been Beijing, but a different Romanization system was used back in the Old Times; hence, Peking. I believe the current method, called pinyin, was first used in the 1940s or so.

Q: Are there any weird, random differences between China and the US?
A: Heavens, yes. The ones that immediately jump out are the lack of certain personal hygiene products (for example, deodorant) and the homicidal tendencies of the Beijing drivers, who put crazy cabbies everywhere to shame. Another weird thing is that nobody here has a dryer. Instead, we all let our clothes line-dry. It’s not an issue of people not being able to afford dryers, it’s just that nobody has them.

Q: So we’ve heard about the street food. What about the rest of the food?
A: I’m actually a touch burned out on street food now (it’ll be back by the time I get back from Pingyao, though). Instead, I’ve taken to self-catering a bit more; I’ve gotten acquainted with the local supermarkets, my favorite of which is the giant Chaoshifa a couple bus stops away (Chaoshifa is an ubiquitous chain of supermarkets, not unlike Safeway or Dominick’s or what have you). My favorite thing for snacking is yogurt. Ever since fresh milk products have been pronounced safe to eat, I’ve had at least one carton every day. It’s delicious, and comes with delicious little chunks or jelly and fruit in it. My favorite thus far has been coconut grapefruit, but there are so many flavors it will take me a while to work through them. When my friends and I go out to eat, we go to places called xiaochi (“little eating”), which serve things like meat and vegetables over rice, fried noodles, soup, etc. for around $1 to $1.50 a plate. The Western food here is expensive ($6 or so a plate) but usually okay, and the Chinese “fine-dining” restaurants, of which I have only been to two, are maybe $10 a plate on average but delicious. At the end of the semester I’m going to blow $20 on a prix-fixe menu. This is exorbitant in China, but I love how cheap it is to eat here if you stick to Chinese food, which I have no problem with.

Q: What do you miss from home?
A: Oh man. A lot of things, but they’re mostly really small. A partial listing: my source of income, readily accessible hot chocolate, a dryer so that my jeans don’t get all stiff when I air-dry them, pants that fit me, Mexican food, reading the newspaper every morning, not having to remember to bring toilet paper with me every time I go to the bathroom, Chinese classes with 25 words a week, other classes, driving places, Honey Bunches of Oats, scones, granola, Comedy Central, dance ragers (although Propaganda mostly makes up for this), Clarke’s, my piercing place in Wicker Park, cooking, my philosophical conversations over Cold Stone with Miller, not having to divide everything by seven to figure out how much it costs. And there are also the bigger things: Miller herself, Arianne, Chelsea, Abby, the Fems exec board, everyone else who I’m too [thoughtless/forgetful/lazy] to mention, the knowledge that, in the same state, there are people I can spill my entire soul to, and my family. And my dog, who I will not eat.

Q: What’s Chinglish?
A: Chinglish is what happens when Chinese people try to speak English. In China, it’s most commonly found on clothes, which will look normal at first glance, but then you’ll read them and realize that the words don’t make sense, or even that the words consist of random Roman letters, which I guess is enough to fool Chinese people. It’s also quite prevalent on menus; Michael and I got dinner a couple nights ago at a porridge place, and their picture menu was a gold mine (our favorite was “bean curd with the American law”). So far, though, the best one has been on a t-shirt I found while shopping in Wudaokou, which read in large letters across the front “Run for British Prime Minister – You Too.” I would have bought it if it were my size.

Q: You go a lot of places. How do you get around?
A: Public transit, baby. If you’re willing to get a little creative with the bus and subway transfers and walk for maybe twenty minutes, you can get anywhere in Beijing you want to go. The subway is fast and efficient, but there’s no branch near my school (I have to take the bus to the subway station and then switch) so that’s kind of annoying. The buses are fine, except when the traffic is particularly bad, but unless you know where you’re going the system is difficult to use, as there’s no trip planner or even route map available online. Both the buses and the subways are always crowded. The buses stop running around nine, and the subways stop at 11:30, so if you want to get anywhere after that you have to take a cab, which is cheap by US standards but comparatively expensive in Beijing. I usually only take the cabs when I’m returning from going out.

Q: What music do young people listen to? Do they all listen to Hedgehog?
A: Sadly, no. The female roommates listen to incredibly treacly Chinese pop songs, although one of them said she liked Death Cab (note to self: talk to this person more). They are also all under the impression that the Backstreet Boys are still cool, and have an odd selection of English-language pop songs with a lot of keyboards that I promise nobody in any Anglophone country has ever heard of. However, for a truly horrifying example of what America has done to the Mandarin world, go on YouTube and look up MC Hotdog. There's also a popular song called In Beijing. The lyrics mostly revolve around things like Beijing having pretty girls, hosting the 2008 Olympics, and how you can go to the Summer Palace.

Our minority cultures, let me show you them

This will be short, since the keyboard I'm using has sticky keys and I'm supposed to meet up with people soon and and and and and
The day before yesterday I hopped an obscenely early flight to Kunming, in the southern Yunnan province, for two weeks of solid, regimented, IES-organized fun. I slept more or less for the entire plane flight there (this is a testament to how sleepy I was), but perked up once arriving in Kunming, the "city of eternal spring". The climate was indeed pleasant and springy, but the city itself didn't impress me much - there just wasn't anything to do, short of shop fruitlessly, which I did. I also visited a pleasant park with a group of people and went on the bumper cars with some overzealous middle-aged Chinese men, but I went to bed that night feeling like I'd exhausted most of Kunming's possibilities.
Fortunately (?) the next day was full of scheduled activity time, which started with a Kunming lunch specialty - noodles and meat cooked in hot broth - and continued with the most fruitless field trip ever, to Asia's largest flower auction house. This had a lot of potential, but the auction was not for about six hours, so the giant warehouse was largely empty, occupied only by a handful of bouquets and some people doing quality control (checking to make sure the flowers were pretty enough? I don't know). Kunming also has a legendary flower market, but we don't get to visit that until the last day of our trip so we can bring the flowers back to the Beezh with us.
After that we headed to Xi Shan (the Western Hills park outside of the city) for a wonderfully short hike up to the Dragon Gate, an altar dedicated to dragons and various Daoist deities. If our guide had it correct, the symbolism was as follows: the carp on one side of the gate symbolized an ordinary person who hadn't yet taken the Confucian government exams. By jumping over the gate (the exams) the carp could turn into a dragon (a bureaucrat). This was ridiculous, but I had a good popsicle on the way down so I considered the activity a draw, fun-wise. We went back to the town center for a stunning dinner on my friend Andrew's recommendation and then walked back along the lake, near which all the buildings were lit up with twinkling neon lights. I suddenly found myself with a new love for Kunming; the scene reminded me of Sanlitun without all the drunk morons and with personality.
We arrived at the hotel ready to take our sleeper train to the smaller town of Dali. I had never really traveled by train before, and based on last night, I wouldn't recommend it. The bunks were pretty much the same thing as graham crackers (in terms of stability, thickness, softness, square footage...everything except delicious taste, not that I tried) and stacked three high. The train also made periodic ten-minute stops waiting for other trains to switch tracks, which disrupted my sleep whenever it happened. All in all, a rough night for sleep.
We arrived in Dali tired and smelly this morning, and after a mediocre breakfast and some showers set off for a pretty good lunch in a touristy hotel. Afterwards came the Nightmare Forced Cultural Experience that was the Bai Minority Cultural Villa. Our intinerary had promised us a visit to a "traditional Bai village" so I was dismayed to see that the village was more like a theme park - you had to pay to get in, and once there, you could watch locals of questionable ethnicity unsmilingly shuffle their way through "traditional" Bai dances* wearing cheap, polyester costumes and Nikes. The entire thing really pissed me off for some reason I can't fully put my finger on; I guess it just bothers me that people are bastardizing and dumbing down this culture to make it a tourist attraction for stupid white people (and also stupid Han Chinese people, apparently). These people and their culture aren't Disneyland, and they aren't there so that their customs can be pimped out, ogled at, and then purchased. I wanted to ask our guide how many gift shops the traditional Bai villages had, but I forgot the word for "gift shop" which was probably for the best. All that aside, I'm a little annoyed at the way the trip is set up - we've seen some neat things, but all the restaurants we've eaten at with the group have been touristy and empty, and when I came to China I intended to live the life of a student local, not a tourist.
Happily, we next moved on to some random lady's** actual traditional Bai house, where she taught us how to make cheese with the milk from her actual cow, who was hanging out in the stable about twenty feet from everyone else. I did not try my hand at the cheesemaking, but some of my friends did, and it did not look easy. The cheese was malleable and dough-like in its new form but was then wound around thin poles to dry before this family sold it. The family was incredibly warm and kind to us, and I couldn't help but notice that despite their traditional clothes and way of life, the TV in the living room was a big hit.
Finally, we went to a tye-dye factory nearby. The Bai are credited with inventing tye-dye, and we got a brief run-through of all the steps and a taste of some indigo tea, which was actually blue. It was interesting enough, but I was happy to get back to the hotel and have some time to explore on my own.
I have some really mixed feelings about this trip so far - all the best times I've had have come spontaneously, instead of being a forced march by an overly-enthusiastic tour guide. I think traveling is almost better with one or two people, where you can just do what you want on your own schedule. The level of touristiness here is also pretty appalling - I can understand why it exists, but IES has been operating here for close to 20 years, and I'd hoped they could come up with more authentic things for us to do.*** All in all, I'm really looking forward to getting back to Beijing for more Chinese (I feel like our language lessons have gone by the wayside here) and more chances to explore on my own.

*I'm pretty sure one of the men's dances was taken directly from the Broadway version of Jersey Boys.

**To the best of my knowledge, our guide literally picked this woman up off the street. WUT.

***And with better nightlife. There are seriously no good clubs anywhere near anywhere we're going. Is one night of dancing too much to ask?

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?!?!?!