Its almost Christmas

Sorry I have not updated this is a while. There has not been all that much going on besides the usual and I have been lazy. That being said there have been a few things. First, last week I caught an awful cold that lasted for a few days and gave me a decent excuse to not go to class for two days. Partly connected to that incident, I started watching Chinese television. This includes but is not limited to:

Cartoons- some Chinese and some American, but all in Chinese

American (English) movies dubbed in Chinese- so far parts golden eye of sister act and parts of a few others

Chinese game shows- including a Chinese version of price is right and a few physical/skill testing shows that make fun of the common Chinese person’s physical ability

That is most of them, but there are also a few more like Beijing Opera and really bad music videos. I have slightly convinced myself that having these on while I study will be good for my Chinese, but I kind of doubt it. Nonetheless, they are great for a laugh.

In addition to having a cold, I also managed to scald myself. The story goes: Jason and I went to a friend’s house for dinner. He made spaghetti for us and we arrived just before he finished cooking. He turned off the noodles and grabbed the plastic strainer. Handing it to me, he asked if I would hold it over the sink. I listened to him, because I clearly was not thinking.

Fortunately the steam from the recently boiling water pouring through the strainer did not burn me. Unfortunately, when the last bit of water and noodles were poured from the pot they did not land in the strainer. Instead they landed on my left hand. I instantly ran cold water on it and for the rest of the evening kept meat or frozen goods on it, but the damage was done. We spent the rest of the night gorging on spaghetti and assorted other foods and talking. To help the pain we drank some of Jason’s mead, most of my bottle of Jameson and two bottles of French wine.

The majority of the burn is on my ring finger from just below the first knuckle on the finger almost to the next knuckle. It also is on my pinky finger around the first knuckle and on one spot on my thumb, though the worst is in on my ring finger where it extends for about an inch and a half. The morning after the incident, I awoke to find to large blisters. The larger of which was almost the size of a dime. Since then it has gotten better, though it will take a while to heal.

In last day or so the pattern from the strainer has become more prominent, which makes me very curious as to what it will look like when it heels. This is by far the worst burn that I can remember having, but at least it is just on my already scared hands. Maybe, because of the strainer, I will end up with something pretty? Like a scar resembling something drawn by a small child with a very limited section of stencils. It’s almost like one of those eggs that I had as a child. You know, the blue, green, yellow, or red small eggs/tablets that you would throw into water to see what would burst out as the shell/capsule dissolved. The only difference is, when all is said and done, my finger will not look like my favorite dinosaur or sea creature.

Other than that everything has been pretty mundane. We are getting close to the end of the term here and I have Chinese tests for the next few days and am finished on Friday. I doubt that I will do very well on my exams, because I am still behind the other students. If I had it to do over I would not have enrolled at this university and instead would have tried to find a smaller private school that would have started at the beginning for me. I have noticed that while I have learned a lot, I am missing many basic things that make basic communication difficult. Oh well, though I have learned and I will continue to learn wherever we go next.

Speaking of which, I am only going to be in Harbin until the 2^nd of January! Next week I will put together a bag to travel with and pack up the rest of my things. I will either drop them at a friend’s house for storage or take them with me to be stored with someone in the South, because Jason and I are determined to live somewhere different when we come back from our break. Harbin has been alright, but we want someplace more vibrant, more exciting and also it would be nice if it was warmer.

Break for Jason for about seven weeks but I get out a week earlier than Jason, giving me about two months. Our break is longer than most, but most Chinese will get at least a week or more off to go home for Chinese New year. This year the actual day is January 26^th. So our plans are rough but we do have a few plane tickets to give us direction. Go to this link to follow along with the itinerary below and see a places of interest.

January 2^nd - I fly from Harbin to Beijing and Beijing to Kunming, Yunnan. From Kunming I will take a train and a bus south to reach and cross the border into Laos. I am going to Laos primarily because I need to leave China because of my visa, but I am staying for about a week because Laos sounds pretty great. I am not sure what I will do, but a UN World Heritage Site maybe in my future. If anyone has any good information let me know. All I know is that I will probably stay in northern part of the country because I will only be there for a week.

January 9^thish – Jason will fly from Beijing to Kunming. He may be in Beijing for a few days prior to this depending on how quickly he decides to leave Harbin. We will meet up in the next couple days, depending ground travel times and where we meet up. Depending on how cool Kunming is, I may meet Jason there or we may meet up in the area near the border, because we have heard that there are some really beautiful and interesting places there.

After we meet up we will spend the next few weeks traveling wherever we want for how ever long, while eventually working our way to Guiyang, Guizhou. We will honestly stay in a place for as long as it is interesting and then move on. We have heard of a few fun things to do such as hikes and cool cities, but we do not have any firm plans besides our next plane ticket.

January 29^th - We fly out of Guiyang headed for Xi’an, Shaanxi in central China, to stay with one of Jason’s Chinese roommates from the summer. I am not sure what is planned for our stay but I am sure that it will be great since we will have such an awesome tour guide.

January 8^th - We fly from Xi’an to Guangzhou, Guangdong in the South. From here it gets a little fuzzy. We will meet up with a few of Jason’s friends from Pomona and maybe a friend of mine from Bellingham. Our only obligation after this flight is to get Jason to Hong Kong for a Fulbright meeting that starts on March 3^rd.

My goals for the trip are:
1) Have fun and enjoy China
2) Practice my spoken Chinese (this will be inevitable)
3) Eat lots of good, spicy, Southern Chinese food.
4) Take lots of pictures (because I have not been taking very many so far)
5) Setup/figure out where we are going to live next. This means finding a project, another university, or a contact.
6) Meet up with Amy G!

Also, as promised here is a link to the tiger park pictures as well as a few others on my brother’s site. Here is a clothed dancer at a new bar that we went to a week ago, another one, and some that are really good.

On behalf of the industrial art planners of the city of Haerbin and myself, I wish you all Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays!

A whole heck of a lot

The week before this was the most irregular week I have had since arriving, although the weekend proved to be the really unexpected part. It all started during the week when I began to actually understand the Chinese in class. Yep that’s right, I am learning this stuff regardless of how ridiculously difficult it is. Not only that but I am learning it so well that one of my teachers gave me a present in class for doing so well. (The present is a small trinket on a string of a double fish, which is said to bring you luck or something. I have attached it to my cell phone to help me blend in.)

I think I mentioned before that I stopped going to my listening class and for a few reasons. The first being the quality of the tape and textbook, which is the reason that I gave to the other students to pass on to the teacher, although the teacher herself as well as the “boom box” had something to do with the decision as well. So I was, to say the least, thoroughly surprised when I was told the teacher had changed materials on account of me… sort of.

Apparently my decision to not go to a worthless class made sense to other students. The result was one who was not going at all anymore and a few absences from students who previously held perfect attendance records. In a class of six students this is a big impact. I was less surprised about the change in materials after hearing this. Needless to say, I have returned to the class and the text is better although, and this is not surprising, the teacher is not. Oh well, at least for the majority of the class she conveniently lets the “boom box” do the talking for her.

The second unexpected thing that happened to me last week was that I had a dream. I briefly thought about parodying MLK Jr. with the description of my dream but I think that a fair few people have done that already so I will just tell you instead. I dreamt in Chinese! Now if that is not impressive, I know it is not so because you have heard me try to speak. In any case, I was astonished when I woke up the next morning and started preparing to go to my Chinese class only to realize that I had studied for it unconsciously the night before.

Now on to the weekend. Friday was rather quite. Jason and I had two friends over for a movie and then I went to bed early to finish the book that I had started at the beginning of the week. As a side note, I think that this marks the first time that I have ever finished a book in four sittings and is therefore evidence against my longstanding belief that I am slow reader.

Saturday started slow, but by noon Jason and I found ourselves holding tickets to the Harbin Tiger Park and contemplating buying a chicken, duck, sheep, or cow to feed to the tigers. This park is no joke. It’s only similarity to a zoo is that it holds wild animals in cages. In all there are probably more than 200 tigers being held at the park. Their cages are rundown, weeded, tracks of land enclosed by tall chain link fences and some barbed wire. They feed the tigers out of Toyota 4runner that is rigged with wire armor over critical areas such as windows, tires, the engine compartment and the roof. To release the smaller animals, the driver opens the door throws and closes the door very quickly, although the tigers are quicker and I not once did I see a chicken reach the ground.

Our tickets bought us a ride in a similarly armored bus. The bus went from one area to the next stopping for pictures occasionally, but speeding along dirt roads for the rest of the time honking the horn to clear tigers from the road. There were several sections all with double gates at the entries and exits that would alternate to ensure that tigers did not make it out of one area and into the next.

After going through several areas we disembarked the bus wearily because the gate behind us was left open although the secondary gate was closed. We entered a long, snaking, raised walkway that was enclosed by two fences, about eighteen inches from apart to create a buffer, made of half inch wire. This boardwalk led us through a large area that more resembled a zoo enclosure with fake concrete rocks and a few frozen over ponds. The enclosure held at least twenty tigers, maybe even thirty.

As we walked along looking at the tigers a woman walked up behind us pulling a little, not so red, wagon with cages on it. The cages held chickens and they were for sale. For less that seven US dollars you could feed a chicken to a tigers, or several tigers, while it was tied by one foot at the end of five foot long walking stick. Although we did not purchase any chickens we did get to witness the action. It was like playing keep away. The chicken end of the stick was stuck through the fences and bobbed up and down as the tigers would cluster together and eventually begin to jump for the chicken. I had never seen tigers jump and I am glad that I have never encountered in the open. I definitely would have underestimated its speed and never would have guessed that it could jump at least fifteen feet from a stand still.

After that excitement we loitered watching the tigers in the nearby enclosures and eventually made our out. On our way we say cheetahs, lions, jaguars, and even a liger. According to the informational board next the latter a liger is defined as “affinity between lion and tiger”. I took this to mean that when a lion and a tiger fall in love… you get a liger. We went to the park with a few friends and after a late lunch and a quick sweet we parted ways.

Jason and I headed over to a friends house to get free stuff because he was moving and stopped by a grocery store on the way. We found dark beer! Two types of it actually both made in China. We have since tried one of them and it was not anything close to what we were hoping for but I am holding out hope for the second type. Then I rushed home and got ready to go to dinner.

Dinner was planned to be a Beijing duck restaurant. For those of you who have not heard of Beijing duck, it is basically a duck roasted whole in a very specific type of large oven. In Beijing, many of these ovens have been in use for a long time. This means that in Harbin Beijing duck is not nearly as good as it is in Beijing, hence the name. I went with a Russian classmate and a Latvian friend who also lives in our building. The duck was alright, but the spicy clams were amazing!

After dinner my Russian classmate invited us back to his apartment to drink cognac and eat dark chocolate. How can you refuse an offer like that? You cannot and I did not and it turned out to be a very interesting night. The cognac was French and it was delicious. The Russian dark chocolate was very dark and amazing and it was perfect with the cognac. What made the night even more interesting was drinking the entire bottle, as I think is tradition, and then promptly going out to meet other people at a bar. I hurt dearly the next day but oh was the cognac delicious.

I spent most of Sunday recovering. I got up from a nap at around four and shortly after I received a call from the same friend had gone to the tiger park with us. We had been invited to go to dinner with her, Tera, her friend from Indiana who was originally from China, Danni, and his cousin Wilson. The dinner was being held by the Mayor or Vice Mayor of Commerce for Harbin. Since Danni and Wilson’s family is well to do in the south of China, they were more or less required to socialize with important figures such as the Mayor of the City. We had talked about this the day before, but we were caught a bit off guard because the call came so early. We arrived at the restaurant at five and did not leave until nearly eight.

The dinner was ridiculous. There was way too much food ordered, yet we were expected to eat a lot of it and at times it was even put on our plates for us. There were two stages of food. The first was more than enough to fill everyone at the table, yet after we had all eaten what we wanted of it another round came out. I was stuffed to the brim with food by the time that my plate was taken away. The same went with drinks. There were more than a few calls for the Chinese version of “cheers” as well as the call to finish your drink. This was followed promptly by refilling your glass or having it refilled for you.

The table was a large round table with a large glass plate in the center that spun to allow access of the food to everyone. Jason played translator for most of the night as he and Wilson were the only competent mandarin speakers at the table. The other guests that attended were a nationally famous TV anchor and her daughter, who Tera may be tutoring in the near future. The Mayor was a very friendly woman with a sense of humor and many other well honed social skills. One to note for china, was the ability to pick up the bill even if it was never brought to the table. It is common in China for people to fight over the bill and I mean fight. There are of course rules such as the guest to a city will never pay, but that does not mean that there will not be a fight first and there was.

Over all the night was quite an experience and one that I will not soon forget partially because we did it again on Wednesday night. That’s right. We were invited out to dinner with the Mayor, or whatever her title is, for the second time in four days. This time it would only be three of us because Danni and his cousin returned to Guangzhou. Other than that we knew nothing of what this dinner was supposed to be about. We had thought that it might have something to with teaching English, but again we were only guessing.

We were picked up at the front gate of our university at five by the Mayor and her driver and then picked up Tera before heading off to a restaurant, the name of which Jason could not make out. After a bit, we pulled up to a large building with a rotating door, parking lot attendants and a parking lot. As most of do not know, parking lots are rare in Harbin, usually cars are parked on the street or it is even more common for people to take taxis, the bus, or walk to their destination. So a parking lot usually means it is a big deal and as soon as we stepped in we knew it was true.

The restaurant was called (something in Chinese) Fisherman’s Wharf and they had some great seafood. We ate raw salmon, prawns, some other type of seafood (it was red and white and the texture was similar to squid), and bitter melon and cooked abalone, squid, shrimp, smoked beef, whole shrimp and small fish (everything except the head), fried minnows, and so much more. The other people that came were an author and provincial administrator of education, a director for one of the national television stations, an engineer (of some rank I’m sure), and two musicians from a nearby university (one was a pianist and the other specialized in Chinese opera).

The night again was full of food, drinking, and conversation although this dinner was much less formal because, with the exception of us, all of those that attended were friends of some sort. It was great fun and amazing food. Afterward the mayor rode home with one of her friends from the dinner and sent us home in her car. The driver went the extra long way and drove extremely slowing on the way, we think because he wanted to talk to Jason. He invited us to eat with him at some point also and he and Jason exchanged numbers.

While out buying ice skates I saw something that was absolutely astounding. It is winter here and there has been ice and snow on the road for a few weeks now. There are no snow plows or sanding trucks. Instead people just drive on the roads as is and a few of them slow down but not many. With that said, it is stunning to see that there are still a good number of bicycles, motorcycles, and scooters on the road. Besides just the conditions it is also bitter cold to be out on a road at any speed.

I thought that I had seen it all but yesterday I saw something to top it all. All of the cycles are used to carry items and people, usually in excess of what they should. Yesterday I saw a scooter with two men on it carrying a 20-25 foot ladder. It wasn’t attached to the side of the scooter or pointing straight up, instead one end of it was tied onto the rear rack of the scooter while the other end trailed 20-25 feet behind. At the far end of the ladder a set of wheels had been attached to keep the ladder from just dragging because that would be just silly.