Qing Dao

November 30, 2006

This is how I get around China. I show people these post-its and they take me places. It is not a foolproof. I have accepted it though as a viable means of transport. I seem to have forsaken the all-knowing guidebook and legitimate research in favor of random possibility. I land and scramble for information. Today it worked, mostly.

It all started out wrong. A friend of mine backed out on me at the last minute, no reason stated. After class I boarded a bus full of students and then had to fight my way through the young pubescent hordes yelling for the bus driver to let me out after he took an alternate route, bypassing my stop. The fascinating thing was that I was asking students all around me to tell the bus driver to stop, to help me, yet they all just stared at me quietly. There is a chance that they didn’t understand me, but surely the sight of a man flailing and shouting near the back of the bus must have resonated with someone.

At the bus station I boarded a junker, a heap for sure. Blackened on the inside from the smoke of a thousand cigarettes, I could clearly see that I was in for a long ride. I had heard that the ride would take about four hours. It took five and felt like three days. I grew fingernails and a beard. The oldest man I have seen in China rode with us. He aged as well.

People boarded at all manner of strange location, at on ramps, under overpasses, by gas stations. There seemed to be an elaborate system of phone calls and shouting out the window that allowed people to board with their various sacks. I have never seen such an assortment of paraphernalia as I have on the buses in China.

The driver drove with his window partially open the entire trip. I was cold but offered no complaint as it lessened the amount of smoke that pooled overhead. I saw some of the bleakest, greyest landscape I have ever seen in my entire life between Rong Cheng and Qing Dao. Miles and miles of tree branches and the outlines of mountains through overcast skies, harvested cornfields, piles of pasty earth, mostly colorless, except for the occasional green field of baby wheat or pink brickyard. Sporadically we came across power plants spewing clouds of smoke into the air and the early stages of cities around them. The miracle of industrialization. I saw vehicles hauling cardboard, fiberglass automobile shells, hay, pine, people, cornstalks, people lying on cornstalks, pigs.

At one point an empty bottle that had occupied a seat up until that time fell onto the floor and started rolling around. The driver told a woman to throw it out the window. I looked outside and noticed a small seating area up ahead with benches and foliage. She seemed to wait until we arrived there and threw it at the little park so that it shattered around where people would walk. The driver noted the strangeness of her shot selection as well and told her he meant for her to throw it into the bushes. She responded that she heard him, but didn’t understand him. I am not alone in this, apparently.

Upon arriving in Qing Dao I inquired what the name of the place was so that I might catch a taxi back when I return. The driver said, “Qing Dao.” I had to specify, the name of the bus station.

I caught a taxi to the hotel that Mrs. Yu had set up for me, upon my request, through old friends of hers from school. It’s still too early to say, but it seems my request contained a fatal error. I had read once in a guidebook, which I subsequently forgot to take notes from or bring, that one of the hotels near city center had rooms with balconies overlooking the sea. I thought this was great and asked Mrs. Yu if she could arrange a room like that. She unfortunately did get me a room overlooking the sea ("Perfect Life Between Sea and Mountain"), only not in city center. Qing Dao is on a peninsula. I am somewhere on the outskirts of the city, on a desolate strand of beach, from the looks of it, and it is not summertime.

There is an upside to this. While trying to coordinate the Internet in my room with the hotel staff, I befriended them and have plans for all types of unspecified fun over the next two days. Seeing the Internet not working and time slowly slipping away, I told them not to worry about it, that it was more important for me to go and eat and have fun as soon as possible, and where exactly would that be…? They told me of a place down the street (surely there must have been something lost in the translation) that was alternately beautiful, bamboo, and animals. I was drilling the boys for deeper meaning when one of them offered to take me out to at least fulfill the eating portion of my request.

We hopped in the hotel minibus and drove off into the night. I found out that my host’s name was Hu and that he had been in Qing Dao for 2 years and thought highly of the place, and though he was on the clock, it was somehow permissible for him to take his new American friend out for dinner, on me of course. I gathered that he was on sporting terms with hotel management. We drove through an upscale Qing Dao neighborhood and stopped for gas before arriving at the restaurant. In China, I find that it is quite common to pick your food out from a selection of fish tanks and plates of uncooked meat. I am always confused by this as I’m never sure what’s what. I attempted to make selections based on what Hu seemed excited about.

The food, truthfully, was excellent. We feasted on a plate of spicy fried lamb, legs of pork, some kind of fish I had seen him handle a few minutes earlier, and raw oysters dipped in wasabi and soy sauce, accompanied by a couple of Tsing Tao beers. We made suitable conversation, I think I may have a ride to the brewery tomorrow and definitely some sort of outing planned for tomorrow night, perhaps including hot pot and maybe dancing (?), and, more importantly, I felt like I had pierced the usually opaque veil separating me from China.

Beijing Diaries VI

October 23, 2006



Last day in Beijing. I wake up early to pack my things and make the key exchange with Alison. She suspiciously looks the place over. The TV/VCR/Speaker complex doesn’t turn on and she looks at me despairingly. I had unplugged it to charge my laptop. She returns my deposit. The last I saw of her she was on the floor frantically shoving loose papers into a makeshift garbage bag. I took this as my cue to leave.

I had epically overpacked for Beijing and paid dearly for it this morning. I made the prerequisite rounds, Starbucks, the bookstore, the sidewalk eatery, the tea house, all the while hauling two gigantic bags around and causing untold damage to my neck. I tried on pants with my two huge bags. I walked around carefully trying not to knock people down. I was like some awkward lumbering alien with huge unsightly growths. I felt like that terrible monstrosity, the tourist, and was embarrassed for myself.

I managed to board the metro and purchase a bus ticket to the airport. I sussed out the schedule and saw that I was early, a rare occurrence for me, and made my way around the block to the lush cafe where I had coffee earlier in the week.

Airport check-in was fairly painless. I wandered into all of the clothing, book, and souvenir shops and found a reclining chair to curl up in until take off. The in-flight corned beef sandwich was unexpected. Upon arrival in Weihai I located my luggage and walked out of the airport alone into the cool night. I felt momentarily liberated, independent, as if I had truly arrived and could finally maneuver through this strange land unattended. This was short-lived. My official re-entry into provincial life began when the taxi driver didn't understand a single lick of my efforts at Chinese. I did understand that he wanted to take me somewhere I didn't need to go. We settled on the Jiaotong, even though I wanted to go to the school. We would at least be in the right city.

I urged the driver on at the Jiaotong and eventually up the long dirt road to the dorm. Though the meter read 50RMB, the driver tried to charge me 100. We yelled at each other for a solid 5 minuted before I grew weary and gave him 80RMB. I could live with a $4 loss. Thus began my life in the dorms...

Beijing Diaries V

October 22, 2006

Mona had arranged a pedicab ride through one of the last remaining Hutong areas of Beijing. I was also staying in a Hutong area but was informed, to my dismay, that it wasn’t one of the originals and had only been reconstructed to look like an original. Upon arriving, I was again reassured after seeing how small and uncomfortable the originals are.

We rode through the narrow alleyways built during the Mongol occupation to house the city’s teeming residents. The alleyways eventually opened up onto a lake surrounded by bars, shops and restaurants. After dismounting, we met a guide who led us through some shop-lined alleyways back onto the streets of Beijing and through the gates and up the steep stairs of the Drum Tower.

Back in the day (I’d make a terrible tour guide), they would beat on the drums at certain intervals to tell time. There was also an elaborate water clock on display, one, I presumed, that had not been widely produced. While perusing the Hutong shop area I had been hurried along after stopping to buy an old advertisement for “Oh Dear” cigarettes in order to catch the drumming spectacular at noon.

After leaving the Drum Tower we had our brief encounter with the Olympic Torch entourage.

The guide led us back into the Hutong and we visited a family that still lived there, and evidently made a reasonable living showing people they still lived there. We sat in the courtyard sipping tea for a few moments before the tour masses showed up. The man of the Hutong told us that a couple from Yale had spent their honeymoon in one the rooms off the courtyard and the family had left it decorated to show people. I made a mental note to cross the Hutong off my list of honeymoon destinations.

After the tour Mona humored me while I looked at old Chinese junk and ate more Thai. I made her drink a mojito and we sat in one of the cafes off the lake and chatted over tea and coffee with rum as the evening chill set in.

Cha Shan

30

November 16, 2006

Against apathy

November 15, 2006

For the past 10 days my students and I have been doing classes on Batman Begins. It started off highly promising. Their interest was roused, they were excited and participated in class, then it devolved into nobody wanting to do anything except watch the movie. More than once I threatened to pull the movie if no one made any effort to speak English and started a minor crusade against the students who don't do anything, ever.

After one particularly exhausting tirade I asked if any of them ever wanted to get married. After sufficient embarrassment, one of them said that everyone wanted to. Then I asked them if they ever wanted to have kids. This was even more embarrassing, but they admitted that, yes, they did want to have chidren. I then asked them what they would do if their child, in the middle of class, wasn't paying attention like he was supposed to, but instead was vigorously shaking a bottle of water on his desk for no apparent reason. I pulled the bottle out of the guilty party's desk and re-enacted the scene. This brought barrels of laughter and widespread approval. I told them that's how I feel, like they're my kids screwing up and it frustrates me. They understood. I asked them why they don't make any effort in class. After rounds of silence one student spoke up and said that no teachers ever cared about them. It was all suddenly very after-school special. I told them I cared about them and consistently made efforts to involve them and they still didn't do anything in class and I asked them what I should do? What do they want me to do? They told me not to do anything.

Truthfully, in 31 days they leave for the factory and will probably never speak another word of English in their lives. I had them for approximately 50 days, and, if anything, showed them a good time. I'm pretty sure that was enough.

Chinese Men

Marlboro would like to use this in their next ad campaign.

The Crawling Shrimp of Rong Cheng

It tastes like crab.



While at the Jiaotong I decided to veer, momentarily, from the relative safety of the roast pork. Rong Cheng, situated near the seaside, is home to a wide variety of shell fish and crustaceans, my favorite of which is pa xia. To eat pa xia, the crawling shrimp, one must remove the spiny shell from the elongated tail portion and bite off the exposed flesh. The head covering can be removed as well, and whatever nerve bundle exists there sucked, but that's optional. I prefer not to.

Windy mountaintop

November 15, 2006

Two Mondays ago, I don’t think it’s unreasonable to say I was evacuated from the dorms. I was sitting in bed editing at the time when I received a call on my cell from Ms. Chu telling me that she and Chief Jiang were waiting outside. I asked, for what? She told me that it was too cold and that I would spend the night at the Jiaotong Hotel.

A note on the Wei Hai Engineering Technology College, it is built on the top of a mountain next to the sea and is still under construction. "Windy mountaintop" doesn't do it justice.







Part of the mountain was leveled, I hear, much to the dismay of the local villagers, to make room for the new facilities, designed by an architect, they tell me, from the warmer southern region of China. The dorms currently house over 1000 young men, women and teachers.







I think the villagers had less say than the people on the other side of the fence.



I won’t lie, I was frankly thrilled at the prospect of spending a few more nights at the Jiaotong and avoiding the daily wrath of Wang, our cranky steward. I walked outside where one of the Chief Jiangs sat in the driver seat of his car with the window down imploring me to hurry, hurry (“Kuai, kuai!”). I’m not easily rushed in any culture, the result of years of intense comfort and relaxation, and I’ve learned to ask all of my questions in China before going anywhere. I stood my ground to find out where I'd be going exactly and for how long, and then told them that I would be back in a moment, after I packed my bag. This elicited a flurry of refusal, no, get in the car, what would you possibly need a bag for? I told him that I was going to get my toothbrush and a change of clothes. He told me that the Jiaotong had toothbrushes. Clearly, he hadn’t spent any amount of time there.

I got a phone call about 5 minutes into packing my bag, inquiring what could possibly be taking me so long. I looked out the window, and, not seeing the sky falling, only snow, and thinking I probably had at least a few more minutes before everything was frozen solid and we'd be trapped at the school until spring, I finished packing my bag.



My dorm room in disarray during the time it was too cold to sleep there (the lights in the room are blue):



View from the school at night:



I was warmly received by the Jiaotong staff who seemed to remember only the good times we miscommunicated and not the bad. Shortly thereafter, surprisingly, I was told to hurry, hurry and drop my bags off and then come back downstairs so they could take me to dinner, at the Jiaotong. The Jiaotong is quite the hot spot for meals, weddings, office parties, and late night drinking, incidentally. In the two-and-a-half months that I spent there they also managed to build and entire addition that now houses one of the newest and most popular hot pot restaurants in town. The sound of construction mingling with cars parking in the morning was as much a part of my daily routine as their lovely corn meal porridge.

Chief Jiang opted for a private room in the old Jiaotong and lit up myself and Mr. Joon, who had accompanied us, with a bottle of wheat liquor. It was suddenly much warmer.

I had one of my infamous restless Jiaotong nights and the next morning, hangover in tow, made my students watch 45 minutes of Waking Life, a dialogue heavy philosophical cartoon, in complete silence, as revenge for their behavior the previous day.

Beijing Diaries IV

October 21, 2006

No plans today. I set out on a mission to find a current issue of Time Out Beijing. I check Starbucks, the bookstore, every newsstand I pass, no luck. A man stops me on the street and inquires, in English, about my business in Beijing. I tell him I’m looking for a magazine right now, would he be interested in lending a hand? He leads me across the street into the lobby of a posh hotel where they have free English language local events magazines for their guests. I help myself. He tells me that he is a teacher and invites me to come to an art exhibit. I tell him sure, why not, I’ll have a look, and we cross the street and walk into a building, up the stairs, to a small room on the second floor wallpapered with traditional Chinese prints for sale. I see they have also hornswogggled a South American and are holding him captive. I inspect a few of the prints and make my escape.

It is cool and damp outside but I decide to walk around more. Two hours later I am lost on one of my long stupid walks. The laptop in my backpack started to feel heavy after the first hour and it is now getting dark and beginning to drizzle. I think, worst case, I can catch a taxi, but that seems extravagant and I keep telling myself that it may be around the next corner. It eventually is and I stumble onto familiar grounds from a new direction, though not the one I intended. I find refuge in my neighborhood teahouse and start mapping out a plan for the evening.

As night falls, I make my way to the Outback Steakhouse. Sad to say, but after two months of Chinese cuisine, I wanted a proper steak. Outback looked the same, tacky, faux-Australian, but felt unfamiliar. It lacked the happy chatter of the wait staff.

Afterwards I boarded a taxi for an evening of aural weirdness. Some Norweigian duo was playing their laptops in the art district and I opted for that over Chinese death metal and national rock. The music consisted of long droning over synth-washes, much what I expected from the brief description. People sat in their seats with their eyes closed. I drank a beer and chatted up some Americans who had also come for the show. We exchanged war stories and I gathered that I was in a far stranger situation.

Dorm Life

November 7, 2006



This is a picture from the time my window fell two stories down to where the men smoke cigarettes. Luckily, no one was smoking at the time. As you can see from the picture below, the window was of significant size and could have caused severe damage to a man smoking a cigarette.



At the time, I was engaged in a furious foot chase around my dorm room, trying to coerce various flies toward the window, which I would open when they were close enough and shoo them out. This was my plan of attack. You can imagine my surprise when the window left the premises.



This is the room where the students eat meals.



This is the room where I eat meals. Sometimes I eat out.



This is a meal. Most meals are variations on one another. Usually there is bread, noodles, or rice, sometimes all three. Other recurring menu selections inlude either pork fat, chicken parts, cod fish and squid mixed with either celery or red and green peppers. Occasionally, the tomato. Today we asked for more food because we were hungry and they gave us a plate of boiled cabbage.



This is the codfish and the celery.



This is hard-boiled sparrow's eggs and celery.



This is one of the places in my room where cold air comes in. Notice the daylight. I shoved a sock in it.



I thought this might be a fire hazard.

Beijing Diaries III

October 20, 2006

Mona texts early to postpone our daytrip until the afternoon. I take the opportunity to drink caramel macchiato at Starbucks. I miss the little things. I sit on a couch and blog while caffeinating and eating a pastry and fruit bowl. Outside a student approaches and asks if he can practice his English with me. I tell him, in English, that I’m looking for an English bookstore and maybe he can help me. He leads me across the street to a four-story bookstore and we peruse the lit section. I purchase Newsweek and For Whom the Bell Tolls. Student wants to spend the day drinking coffee with me and practicing English but I politely ditch him to eat fried duck and meet up with Mona.

I underestimate the distance to the metro and to my destination and arrive late. On the metro I read Newsweek and feel like I’m in New York and it takes forever to get anywhere. Mona is waiting with more pastries and we sit and talk while waiting for the bus. The bus trip is long and I nap briefly before arriving at Fragrant Hills.

We walk up a slight incline toward the mountain along a street lined with food and junk vendors and crowded with people who have come to see the leaves change colors. We buy doughy Korean pastries with sweet goop inside from these people:



Walking up the mountain, Mona tells me stories about when she was 13 and she had to wake up at 3 in the morning to come here with her grandparents to fetch clean water before the long lines formed. I picture her grandparents as kindly old Chinese with buckets and eternal grins. The air is cold and clean. The leaves, unfortunately, have not changed colors.

Mona’s aunt picks us up in a car and we drive to Mona’s grandfather’s house for dumplings. I meet her mother and grandfather and he tells me to keep my jacket on in the house because it gets cold. He stays in the living room eating dumplings and watching the news while we sit in the kitchen and I practice my Chinese and amuse my hosts. Mona had previously offered to take me to a big Beijing nightclub but I find out that this isn’t her scene and she is just doing it to be kind. We opt instead to sit around the living room and talk to each other without shouting. She tells me that the neighbor feeds over 20 stray cats on a daily basis. I mention, in case they have not already figured it out, that the cats will keep coming back. She says that they believe that cats have lives too and should be cared for as all living things.

I take the metro back and watch DVDs I bought the day before at a steakhouse I was led to by a stranger on the street.