ReidaBlog

Happy Easter!

The weather warmed up quite a bit so I’ve stopped wearing my jacket everywhere. But without its pockets, carrying my camera is a bit more difficult. After going without for a couple of days I passed the lady in the pink pleather suit and knew I had to find a way to keep it with me. I also discovered a new hobby - fashion photography, Beijing style. More on that later.

On my 1st or 2nd week I dropped some clothes off at the dry cleaners and couldn’t really understand how much it would cost or when I should be back to pick them up. So I was quite pleased on Thursday when I dropped off a dress shirt and was able to understand the whole exchange. I even got the “it will be ready after 5pm on Saturday”. This put me in such a good mood that I agreed to go to the Karaoke (or KTV as it is called here) place with Florin, Paul, and Thao.

Now those at my last birthday will remember I’m not a big fan of KTV. In fact, I pretty much despise the whole concept. I can’t sing, I know I can’t sing…so I don’t sign. I was dismayed to find that KTV is not just an Asian disease; it seems to affect Europeans as well. I’ve found the Australians and Canadians to be strong allies although there have been a few lapses.

A quit note on KTV in Beijing. It’s everywhere - think NYC if you converted the laundry, bodegas, or nail places into KTV.

Anyway, I’d started to put together a survival plan in case I couldn’t get out of going and decided that this would be a good time to put it to the test. I’d like to thank Sean the Innkeeper for the original idea. Ok ready?

The secret is that there are songs that you speak and don’t sing. They’re not real crowd pleasers but you can then excuse yourself and sneak away. This leads to my 2 rules of surviving KTV for Americans and Australians:

1) Stick to speaking songs. Think “White Rabbit” or “House of the Rising Sun”.
2) People who like KTV like to hear themselves sing. So take advantage of the fact that once you’ve “sung” you can then sneak out without losing or causing them to lose face. They’ll be too busy singing some weird HK pop song to even notice.

On Friday we did a school arranged dinner at a hot-pot place. For those who haven’t had the pleasure, it is like fondue but your pot is full of boiling water. It wasn’t bad but I’ve had better. In fact there is a pretty good hot-pot place right across the street from school.

After dinner everyone was heading over to Pure - a bar/club in Wudaokou which is where a bunch of people have their apartments. A guy I go to school with, Charlie (Canadian), got a job bartending and then helped one of the two crazy Italians-Mateo or DJ M9 (M-IX - get it?) to get a gig. Pretty much everyone showed up. A good time was had by all.

I also got my first - “Do you speak English?” moments. Jeremy, Paul and I were chatting when these two American girls came up and introduced themselves. They were having trouble ordering drinks, so after getting them straightened out and introducing them to my friends I proceeded to chat with them. In a weird small world moment, I found out they were freshmen at DePaul and one liked Josh’s little brother Ben. They were in Beijing on spring break with an Asian culture class. It wasn’t until about 45 minutes later that I found out they actually went to school at DePauw and it was a different Ben. While this made the world just a little bit bigger it did quite a bit to clear up a very confusing conversation. Too bad Ben, they were cute.

During the week I decided to purchase a western chopstick which I now carry everywhere.

Ah, life is good.

On Saturday I went on a search to find a bar with NCAA basketball. It didn’t turn out that well but I did manage to explore a large part of Beijing on foot and I had my camera so for your viewing pleasure:

Signs

Where do I even start with this one? I wanted to comment on the “Chinese Viagra” but it’s just a little overshadowed by Santa isn’t it?

For those of you that didn’t know, apparently ’super municipal’ means ‘little roadside shop selling fake cigarettes and booze’.

One of the things you soon notice about Beijing is the fashion choices of the residents. I took these pictures within about 15 minutes of each other. However, I’ve been told it might actually be something in the water. Apparently it appears universal that the people who had been here for a semester took some of their purchases home over Christmas break only to wake up and realize you can’t actually wear this stuff in the real world. I am happy to present the March 26th collection:

Ok, maybe I’d wear a skirt over my jeans too if my neighborhood had a jean eating monster on the loose.

Why are you laughing, blue goes great with red.

And finally for my Villanova readers: Life could be worse. At least your friends don’t let you go out wearing this.

That’s all folks.

Trying to keep up-to-date…I held off on the touristy stuff this weekend (my sister and her friend Sarah are coming to visit in a couple of weeks) and I forgot to bring my camera out with me this Friday and Saturday. So what better time…

A couple of weekends ago I went out with my friend Jeremy (American - graduated from MSU in 1997 - small world) to meet his friend Jason at a very good Indian restaurant in Sanlitun (the embassy area). Jason (Canada) who has been in China for more than a year speaks Mandarin very well. When ordering he tells the waitress that he is allergic to cumin so would she please make sure there isn’t any in the food. After saying OK, we continue talking for a couple of minutes when the manager comes over to tell us that they don’t normally add extra so no problem. Needless to say we eventually got the point across and Jason is still alive. Or at least he was as of Friday night.

Jeremy pretending he is a Beijing valet parking attendant.

The manager and cooks were Indian but the waitresses were Chinese. I guess those workers at Weiner snitzel don’t know how good they’ve got it…hint, look at the forehead. Subtle I know.

Anyway…Since this was my first weekend in Beijing I didn’t yet realize how surreal China can be. After eating we head to a house party that one of Jason’s friends is holding. As I’m talking to some people I’ve just met, this guy walks in with some friends and I just know I’ve seen him somewhere before. So I ask his name. Not familiar. Where he’s from. Nope. What do you do for a living? Weatherman. Bingo!

“CCTV 9″ (China’s state run English language station).
“Yes”
“That’s really cool, I knew you looked familiar. So did you major in meteorology?”
“Nope”
“Ummm…well how did you become the weatherman in China?”
“I was teaching English and one of my students did some video editing work for CCTV. One day he tells me they need a new weather man, do I want the job. Oh, let me introduce you to my friend Rob, he just got here from the States and I got him a job as the other weatherman.”
“…nice to meet you Rob…what were you doing before coming to China.”
“Just graduated with an English degree…”

So to sum up…get an English degree…go to China…teach English…become a weatherman on an international cable channel.

And while I’m on the topic of weather. Here is the yahoo weather forecast from a couple of weeks ago. Detroit might have clouds but Beijing has smoke.

The next day I went to the Chinese National Art Museum with my language exchange partner, Eve. Who happens to be an art history major. Eve was kind enough to show me every picture in the museum. The museum is quite nice except that… Apparently if you donate a collection you can have your collection exhibited. And if your collection has a couple of your own pictures then…might as well hang them up while we’ve got the hammers out.

So to sum up…Picasso…ancient Chinese watercolor masters…some dude’s paint by numbers.

After the museum Eve and I walked through the main Beijing shopping district on the way to the ‘great public transportation escapade’ where I learned that locals get just as lost as I do.

So to sum up…Fred and Ethel just in from Iowa City for the 2008 Summer Olympics try to find the bus that will take them to the gymnastics’ finals…hahahahaha.

Then about a week ago some us went out to an area called Houhai. It was pretty swanky and had a good crowd but we managed to claim our own little booth at a place called Lotus Blue.

Sasha and Veronica.

Ross (English), Thao (Australian), and me.

After Lotus Blue we headed back up to our part of town and stopped at a club called Propaganda. My picture doesn’t do it justice. I’ll work on getting a better one.

Rent 8 Mile. Now take the club from the final scene and replace all the black people with Chinese and Koreans. Switch the rapping contest to dance club. Toss in some Russians and various westerners. That’s Propaganda.

Needless to say it was fun.

I thought I’d wrap this up with a couple of signs from ChangCheng.

Not really sure what this has to do with buying a lift ticket.

What crowd and what service…specifically.

Huh? My own propaganda?

Suddenly I know what it’s like to be a cab driver when I hop in and say:
“I want go to rice eat horse. Where?”

I did my first real tourist thing this weekend. I went on a school organized trip to the Great Wall (Chang3Cheng3 in Mandarin - I’ll explain the numbers in another post). What can I add to Richard Nixon’s: “This is a great wall.” comment? Except maybe that instead of “Great” Wall it is “Long” Wall in Mandarin.

It was both more and less and impressive than I thought it would be. Somehow I had always pictured it as a really big wall built across the plains near Mongolia and I’m sure that somewhere along its 3000+ mile length it crosses plenty of plains. However near Beijing it is built along the mountain crest. This is impressive, not only was the wall built but it was built on some pretty inhospitable terrain.

When I saw the Pyramids I was amazed at how much bigger they seem in person. I had the opposite reaction to the wall. To be fair though, when you see something like the pyramids you get to see the whole thing at once. And as clear as the day was I only saw a tiny slice of the wall. When you try to comprehend how big it is you have to think about the length and not the height.

I’ve been told that winter is the best time to visit. Although it is a bit chilly the sky is sunny, clear, and there aren’t a lot of people. Which is exactly the conditions we had. Ok on to the pictures.

First just a couple pics that try to capture how impressive it is. In most of the pictures you can see the wall running along the mountain peaks in the distance.

You can see the wall following the land off into the distance.

This picture is taken right after getting out of the gondola. I was told the wall actually gets as high as 2300m around Beijing. We were also told that one of the hardest parts about building this section of the wall is that there wasn’t much water. As a result sections were built without mortar, sort of like the Incas.

Apparently the wall was acutally more useful as a highway than a defensive site.

You can also see it off in the distance.

Ok, enough with the scenery, I suppose you can buy a postcard and get better pictures. This trip was organized by the school so quite a few people went. However, since they set departure time at 8:30am on a Saturday there were probably less people than you’d expect.

That’s Sasha (Australia), Me, Veronica (Germany), and Mira (Denmark).

Just thought I’d point out how nice the day was and that there weren’t many people around. Perfect for us tourists.

One more step back and Matt can have my comic books.

Here I am trying to copy the picture Mom, Dad, and Matt took.

Mira asked me to take a picture. I did with her camera, but since it was just film I got a bit nervous that I’d cut off her head or something so wanted to make sure I had a backup just in case. I didn’t want to be referred to as “that guy who messed up my only picture at the wall”.

When we got to the top we could walk left and climb the moutain (what you see behind me) or go right and head to the giant slide. Giant slide you say? Of course, this is China, you didn’t think they’d miss the opportunity to enhance the great wall with a giant slide and loud pop music did you?

Supposedly they used to patrol the wall on horseback. Bit of a tight squeeze here though.

“Yeah, but show me the slide…”

Not all that tall, or maybe I’m just really short.

Ok, Ok, here’s the slide.

Of course when I saw this I wasn’t about to walk back down to the car.

That was fun. I wonder if the other wonders of the world would be better with rides - Pyramid water park anyone? I bet I could make a bundle with a Grand Canyon Helicopter ride, oh wait…