Swine Flu Totally Ruins Plans

My buddy Mark is coming to visit and travel around China with me in 7 days. He and I are fairly bummed at the way events have turned out, though, because his flight was originally scheduled to arrive in Beijing on Tuesday/Wednesday but has to be moved back because of Chinese visa complications. Apparently the Chinese government a few weeks ago pushed back the number of days needed to receive a visa. Six business days is sooo not cool.

Before we got this news, there was a slight-ish chance that we were going to be able to check out North Vietnam (Hanoi, in partick) for a couple days, and that would have been deliriously exciting. Alas.

However, we might still get a chance to check out a smaller Chinese city instead; perhaps Xi’an, the ancient capital with the terracotta warriors, or maybe something else. I need to go do some homework and figure out some stuff.

Commie Camo Couture

So camouflage is totally popular here. Not terribly surprising, I guess, for a fairly heavily militarized country, but still. I cringe every time I see a dude dressed head to toe in his camo duds. But then again I’m a stuck-up fashionisto. Not that I dress all that well, but as long as I believe I have the ability to do so, I totally exculpate myself from being a wrinkly little hypocrite.

But on to bigger and better thangs. Again, I feel awfully contrite that I haven’t posted on this deal-i-o in for-evs, so awful in fact that I’m hyphening everything I can to speed up this typey-typey.

Hmmm. But how have I been doing lately? Pretty solidly, I would say. To stay with the fashion bent, I saw a funny t-shirt a girl was wearing on the subway last night. I hazily remember it saying something like, “Clownpracticing Not Make Jackass”. It had a picture of hands shaking. Completely incomprehensible awesomeness. I really need some shirts like that. As of right now, I have no clue where to find these gems, but I’m gonna start reconnoitring that shit heavily. That is a Christmas-present must fo’ sho.

In one of my discussion groups last week I was discussing traveling abroad. One of the women in the group had had the opportunity to go to Bangalore on a business trip. She was telling me how much she enjoyed feeling so special and different there. This feeling was no doubt helped by the fact that EMC was paying for a driver to handle her every whim and fancy, but she also mentioned how neat it was to look so different from everyone else. I think she also mentioned how much she enjoyed being far lighter-skinned than everyone else (she’s a pretty tan Chinese person), so perhaps there was a bit of some subconscious melanin-ism there, but mainly she explained how she really dug checking out this completely different culture. It was cool being able to talk to a Chinese person who had been out of the country, for though the Chinese love to travel and be tourist-y, travel generally consists of heading by train a few hours to some “famous” hill, mountain, or National Park here in the Middle Kingdom. Not too many of the employees here, including the middle-aged ones, have been outside the country.

I also got to talk to another employee who went to North Vietnam a few years back. He said he loved it. Apparently, though, the Chinese government won’t allow, or wouldn’t allow (point is, he couldn’t), Chinese citizens to see the wealthier and more developed southern part of Vietnam. Maybe the CCP was worried about people seeing the stark economic differences between communist and capitalist rule.

Speaking of the CCP, in a somewhat expected but still amazingly far-ranging move, the government here is blocking almost every possible international-ish, free-speach-ish web site they can get their non-democratic hands on. Check out this New York Times article right hurr:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/03/world/asia/03china.html?_r=1&hp

Interesting stuff. I had noticed in the past week that some sites that I had normally been able to gain access to were being blocked for some reason. If you hadn’t heard, the anniversary of the Tiannamen Square Crackdown or “massacre”, depending on your mood, is tomorrow, Thursday the 4th of June. Yes, it’s been 19 years and 364 days or so since Deng XiaoPing, the revered leader of China who opened the doors to capitalism and the West, gave the go-ahead to the military to break up the democratic protests using a boatload of force.

I actually talked with some discussion groups about the 20th anniversary recently (and got into some trouble for doing so). Zhao Ziyang, the Party Secretary at the time of the crackdown (basically the highest official in the Party other than Deng, but not the government), was one of the more liberal members of the Communist Party at the time, and his soft-line stance towards the Tiannamen Square Protests touched off his fall from Party leadership. Zhao lived out the rest of his life after 1989 under house arrest in Beijing, but he secretly recorded audio cassettes of his account of the events leading up to June 4th and somehow snuck those babies out to trusted friends and family. Zhao died four years ago, but his memoirs were published last week to coincide with the 20th anniversary. You can check out the Economist book review here:
http://www.economist.com/displayStory.cfm?story_id=13688045

Interesting stuff. Okay. I’m off. But I hope you like the post, and I hope you’re enjoying your own slice of democracy wherever you are. You can’t get very fat on the servings over here.

So it was my birthday yesterday…

And I ate Papa John’s pepperoni pizza to celebrate. Yes, they have Papa John’s here. And, surprisingly, not only did the pepperoni taste like good ol’ American-style minced animal, the pizza tasted almost the same. It was excitingly, tantalizingly similar. Needless to say, or needful to say, since I’m saying it — I really never  should use the phrase “needless to say” ever again — that was an awesome dinner, and only relatively expensive. The pizza (delivered! yay for Westernization) cost 114 yuan (yuan=kuai=RMB=0.147 dollars), which is basically 17ish dollars. Not too shabby for a meal par excellance.

I also watched “Into The Blue” with my roommates, a summer-y hot babe and hot dude kind of movie that was easy to digest along with the pizza slices. Oh — forgot to mention. I got a new roommate. The old french guy moved out, and a new french guy moved in. C’est la vie. The new guy is actually really awesome and very nice, and I like him a lot. He just graduated from college and is here in Beijing doing an internship at EDF, the French electricity company. So he’s a swell addition to the apartment.

I just finished giving a presentation to some employees here about the sorry, sorry state of American public schools, a favorite subject of mine recently. I gave a short and quick PowerPoint presentation detailing some statistics of American public school students and of Washington, DC in particular, and then I had them watch a very cool 20/20 show titled, “America The Stupid.” It’s good stuff. I totally recommend you watch it. It was mentioned to me by a friend and I found the video on YouTube. It’s a 40-minute long video on why introducing choice into our school systems would be a good thing, and why public primary and secondary school education as it now stands is bad. And why letting it stay that way is a bad thing. I think the Chinese people enjoyed watching it. Though the audience eventually dwindled down to about half of the original attendees. But that was more indicative of their time-constraints than of the program. But yeah, I think it’ll lead to some good convo’s with some of them, and a re-evaluation of their views on an American education. A good kick in the perspective is never a bad thing.

That’s all. I’m gonna watch the new Star Trek movie with some buddies tonight. I hear it’s good.

Discussion Groups Yesterday

So, I have 15 hours of discussion groups per week, and after the formalities (“how was your weekend?”) that’s fifteen hours to talk about stuff missing thirteen hours of stuff to talk about.

So I’ve been having the students watch one of my favorite shows on television, Mad Men (on AMC), and then discuss it in class. So far, it’s been a mixed bag. It turns out that it’s pretty difficult for most of them to understand everything that’s happening in the show, and then it’s difficult to get some of them to watch a forty-five minute show every week. But yesterday and Monday, the show led to some interesting chats. The 2nd episode focuses on whether or not the wife of the main character should go see a psychiatrist, how a new secretary is handling the male attention in the office, and how the main character, Don, handles the question of “what women want.” It led to some discussions of psychology and its acceptance in China, the pre-feminism attitudes towards women and the options available to them, and lastly, being gay or lesbian in China. I think the discussion meandered over to that final point in the first group by way of psychiatry and why one would seek a doctor out. It was a cool chat. I learned that lesbian bars are called “LaLa bars”, and maybe some other stuff, but yeah, I definitely will remember “LaLa bar”. I just watched Good Morning Vietnam, starring Robin Williams, in which his character quips, “lesbians, or as I like to call them, women in comfortable shoes.” Great movie. Good mix of funny and dramatic. I wonder if lesbians here also tend to relax their feet more than their man-lovin’ counterparts. Or if high heels are just the way to go, straight or un-straight. Maybe I should check out the feet situation at a “lala baa” and find out.

 

Another funny “Chinglish” thing that I just remembered is that there is a clothing store here in between the subway station and my job that’s called Clio Coddle. With a picture of a Crocodile. Which is an exceedingly obvious rip-off of Lacoste. If you can’t see/hear the switch from Clio Coddle to Crocodile, just pretend like you’re really bad at English and squint your eyes, if that helps.

It’s Been Too Long

Sorry ’bout that. I can’t begin to apologize to myself enough. But I can begin to write.

First thoughts: There are so many heels in China that I feel like I’m at the University of North Carolina.
Yeah, so that wasn’t great, but I thought I’d try it out. Point is, LOADS of chicks wear high heels. All the time. The only place I haven’t seen high heels is at the gym. And I probably wasn’t looking hard enough. More rumination to come. Much more to chew on.

Hanging Out With Peeps, Post-Easter

I had a really great weekend. Slept in the new place, and it feels oh so fantastic. I did laundry for the first time last night, and knowing that it’s pretty easy to do was somewhat of a relief. I also met my roommates, who are two equally nice people. The girl who lives on the top floor of the duplex, Haillie, is an Indonesian girl who spent a good chunk of her teenage years in Kentucky and graduated from the “University of” right there in Lexington. She works in Internet Marketing as an analyst for a company specializing in placing internet ads on the websites of newspapers. She told me it’s pretty rough right now. The dude, Oliver, is a French grad school student who is actually only in the apartment for two more days. He’s doing his research and thesis on cross-strait relations between Taiwan and China, and the increasingly lax travel restrictions. He seems like a really nice guy. He had a hot girlfriend, too, which is never shabby.

I got to hang out with a Princeton ‘08 kid who’s here in Beijing as a Princeton-In-Asia fellow working for an environmental NGO. Real nice dude. He was kind enough to show me around the city’s fun places a bit and I got to meet a lot of his friends and friendly random acquaintances. I found it really easy to meet strangers and I found myself hanging out with two Russian “businessmen” late one evening, which was entertaining. It seemed like their business was importing luxury vehicles into Beijing and the rest of China. I didn’t ask how legal their venture was, but from their general aura it seemed like they weren’t the sort to pay too much in taxes. Solid dudes, though, and really fun to talk with.

My job in WuDaoKou is fairly far from my apartment nearby GuoMao, and today was the first morning that I did my new commute. It actually wasn’t all that bad, I found, though I was really scared that it would take me a long time to get here. I set three alarms for myself this morning, which was lucky, because only one went off and I snoozed right through that one. I had forgotten that my cell phone also had an alarm in it, and that was the lucky charm this morn. The walk to the subway from the apartment took about 15 minutes today, and the whole commute….I’m thinking……maybe took an hour and 15 minutes. But since I don’t have to get into work until 9:30, it’s honestly not that bad. And probably good for me to practice, anyway. I think forcing myself to get up early is probably a good thing. Can’t hurt the whole self-discipline and routine deal.

I also became friends with the people who run a restaurant a few feet away from the entrance to my apartment building. They were really nice and spoke absolutely no English, but then the two guys’ little boy and girl came out and it was fun speaking a few words of English to them. They knew “Hello”, “Welcome to Beijing”, and “My name is N-I-C-K”. It was cool. I think I might have dinner there most nights from now on. Easy way to nosh.

So I Gave a Presentation at Work Today

About myself. It wasn’t a very thrilling PowerPoint, I am sure, but I think it got a few things across. I had a rapt audience of maybe 20 company employees, hanging on, or at least staring on, at my every word. Very exciting stuff, I am. I gotta bounce out of work now. I’m meeting up with a friend.

Oh, I signed a lease for a new apartment! I’m so, so happy. It’s crazy luxuriant and all that. Tres Habitable.

Elaboration, Weekend Edition

Heyyooo,

So my apartment doesn’t have internet access, which makes life somewhat more difficult and different and unbloggable. Not that I think I would blog that much more anyway, but still. Blog is a terrible word. Really don’t like that. But journal sounds too quaint. So I guess I’ll stick with ‘blog. Hmmm. Okay, I guess I’ll try to tell you a bit more about my weekend, or my Saturday night-Sunday, because I really haven’t said much at all concerning it.

Saturday night, as I previously related, I finally got out of bed post-9 pm and took a quick – for me – shower. To take a shower in Zuo’s apartment has taken me some time to get used to. No surprise here, but you have to be able to operate well in a tight space if you want to get so fresh and so clean clean. When I step up and into the bathroom, the toilet and sink and bathtub all crowd together into the Dilbert-cubicle sized room, leaving me about two and a half square feet in which I can dance around in and do the macarena. There is no shower, per se, just as in Japan, and the standard operating procedure consists of holding the corded shower head over my head and letting it wash over me. The temperature control is in the kitchen, however, so this morning I had to walk out nakey and ask Zuo if he could please make it a tad warmer – I felt bad about troubling him but I generally can’t sit frigid water, nor stand it, so I just gathered up my American-ness and went for it. The toilet, by the way, can’t be flushed. Instead, I fill up one of the wide, shallow plastic bowls that he keeps in there and dump it in and let gravity do the work.

SO. Post shower. I had some trouble finding the Internet Bar, but I finally headed down the alleyway that my boss Dan told me about and got all Internet-goosebumpy. Going up to the counter with four teenaged-ish Chinese dudes ahead of me, I realized that I was sort of freaked out about not knowing whatsoever how to say that I just wanted an hour of Internet. There was some English on the sign behind the counter, but it had nothing to do with buying an hour’s worth of internet. After the girl ignored me for a bit, she turned to me and I raised my hand meekly and showed her my pointer-finger. “One?” I’m obviously really, really good at sign language and using my hands in place of words in general, and this was no exception. She requested 3 kwai, which is a tad less than 50 cents (the exchange rate is about 6.8 RMB to the dollar), and I happily handed it over and received a little receipt with four separate strings of digits on it. Getting onto a free computer in a room filled with Asian techno-geeks – mostly teenaged boys – playing what seemed to be World of Warcraft-like stuff, I turned on the computer and found that I was supposed to enter two numbers out of the four. I began to formulate a plan to see if someone could help me out, and immediately went about putting on my confused, dejected, and read-no-Chinese look, which as it turned out came quite naturally to me. A very nice Chinese dude who happened to come in the room was kind enough to input the numbers for me and I was in like Vin.

I checked my email and all that and saw that my buddy Logan, who was the trip translator on my Princeton Summer of Service trip to Hunan in 2006, had emailed me with his phone number. I now had a cell phone – I’ll totally relate the sweetness that is cellular-ness at some point – and gave him a call and took a cab to meet him at his place. And his place, in comparison with my man Zuo’s, is basically palatial. A palatial apartment is what it is. Thing is crazy luxurious. Of course, Logan is an Investment Banker in China who managed to keep his job through the latest round of layoffs, most likely because he’s amazingly smart and without a doubt a harder worker than I, but yeah, he sits in the lap real well. I, indubitably, had an absolute blast and stayed for the night and took the most amazing shower in the morning. Totally awesome. I’m pretty sure by now that a really nice shower is about the first thing I really care about in life, and I’m glad that based off that info I can now safely begin to plan the rest of my life around this nice little fact.

In the morning, I woke up before Logan and finished watching the pirated version of The Dark Knight that we had started the night before. We then met up with Owen Fletcher, Princeton ‘08, and his girlfriend at this nice Taiwanese restaurant in the Soho district of Beijing. I have no clue what the origin of the name Soho is and whether it’s related to the NYC one, but at least it’s easy to remember. We had a really nice lunch there. I completely stuffed myself, and I’m pretty sure I’m fatter today than I was on Saturday. But anywho. We took a cab over to possibly the most tourist-friendly shopping mall/center in Beijing, “The Silk Market”, and wandered the stalls. Lots of fake polo’s and ties to be found, with an abundance of polo horses of all colors and sizes – you know, those really huge and aggressively douche-y ones. They had those, too.

However, the main treasure, in my opinion, is to be found upstairs on the 3rd floor, where the custom tailors have their silks and fabrics laid out. I’ve really wanted a nice tuxedo for a long, long time now, so Logan and I began to bargain with some of the sales-girls (they’re all girls, by the way….I wonder if the owners think boys won’t be able to sell stuff?), which is always a fun process. After some long explanations by Logan that I am a student and don’t have much money, if any, one salesgirl offered me a price of 800 kwai for a tuxedo. Another salesgirl at a different tailor’s shop offered 600 kwai for what she termed “nylon” or 800 kwai for what she thought was the highest-quality, 180-count thread material. I honestly couldn’t tell the difference, but whatever. The 800 kwai works out to about 120 dollars, which is SOLID. I wish I could get the price down lower, though.

Later that night, I ate KFC alone while Logan finished up some work for a business trip he was leaving for on Monday. I bought a “pirated” copy of Warren Buffett and the Interpretation of Financial Statements, which I know isn’t thrilling stuff but I’ve honestly wanted to read it for a bit now. It only cost 20 kwai (’bout 3 bucks) and the quality is basically the same as a legit one. Very exciting. I had no idea they would sell pirated books in China. Or, I guess I sort of expected that they would, but I didn’t in all my life expect to see this one. The dude above the subway station was also selling a copy of Guns, Germs, and Steel for 30 kwai, which I also wanted to get, but I have so many other books right now that I figured I’d wait that one out.

Once Logan was done, we met up with a friend of his from Beijing University and went to this massage place that he has a VIP card for, and I proceeded to get exceedingly comfy. The guy with bad eyesight – Logan said that blind masseuses are the best in China, because they can feel where all of your stress is and go about releasing it; Logan told me he got the best guy for me – went to work on just my head for about ten minutes. It felt soo comfy. “Hen Shuufu.” It was a fantastic time, though Logan told me it was actually fairly pricey. I need to find a nice massage joint where I can get my stuff felt up on the cheap. That would be a nice weekly sojourn, me thinks.

I really did this post up, so I hope you enjoyed reading that. Toodles.

A Fantastic Weekend Behind Me, Massage and All

Hey y’all,

I had a great two days this weekend cramming all sorts of funness and enjoyment into the 48 hours available. Oh, scratch that. I actually slept a lot — basically 24 hours with gaps in between — from Friday night until Saturday at 9pm, trying to clock in to the local timezone in a very badly planned way. However, once the somnambulatory haze wore off, I showered and headed on a five-minute exploratory walk down my very dark street to find the closest “wangba”, or Internet Bar. But first, I’ll try to describe in a bit more detail my living situation at the moment.

I live with this really nice old dude whose name is Zuo Yu Jing. I just try to call him “Zuo”, but I’m pretty sure I’m still, if not mutilating it, at least sucking all the Chinese goodness out of it. He’s an extremely warm person, with these kind old eyes set into a worn, wrinkled face. He used to be a gardener at the Temple of Heaven, and it shows. Another thing that shows, and makes noise to boot, is the wear and tear of a long indentured servitude at the hands of Mr. Marlboro. Or Mr. Marlboro’s Chinese Cousin. Whichever. Dude LOVES to smoke. I guesstimate that the guy goes through maybe half a pack in 90 minutes? I’m no expert on tobacc-y, but however you pro-rate that shit, I’m thinking he gets it done. An artifact of this decades-old habit is that about every 5 or 10 minutes or so, my man Zuo begins hacking his lungs to death to get a nice, solid smoke-loogie out of his throat. I sort of cringe every time I hear him start, because I just feel terrible for the guy.

Other than the smells and sounds, Zuo has about every knicknack and pet-knack that you could imagine just straight-up littering his apartment, in a really cherished and loved way. Packrat might be a suitable term. Next to my bed on the right are located two separate fish containers, one a tank holding one quite large snail and no fish and the other a shallow bowl atop a conga-shaped porcelain object with a small very dead fish inside. “Si le”, I told him, chuckling. “Dead.” It might be gone now, but I’ll have to check later tonight.

My bed is in the living room. It’s very, very nice of Zuo to let me stay with him in the first place, because there honestly isn’t much room even for him to get around. I’ll have to snake out my camera at some point and capture some photographic niceness of the place, so you can see what I see, but until then I’ll have to make do, ’cause I’ve been lazy. Speaking of lazy. I’m at work, so I feel like I should start working on my PowerPoint presentation that I need to prepare for Thursday. I’m gonna tell my colleagues a little about myself and Princeton. Zai Jian!

So I’ve Been In Beijing For a Day And It’s Awesome

Yup. I’ve been e-mailing the whole world about it and it’s gotten kind of tiring, so I don’t think that I’ll elaborate here much. But yeah, so far, so really good. I’m staying with this really old Chinese divorcee who’s really chill and loves to chat. I can’t understand 94% of the stuff he’s telling me, but I’m pretty sure that if it washes over me enough I’m gonna get really wet. Or at least moist.