The China Match

So as a necessary part of my job I have to read a whole bunch of news articles, and they usually have a bunch of links to random other articles at the bottom. One of these caught my eye on Friday, mainly because its headline read ‘Cheap American Beer PBR Marketed as High-End in China.’

Yeah, that PBR. The stuff you drink when you want to feel like a cheapskate or a hipster is selling for $44 a bottle in the great middle kingdom. For some perspective, the quilt and all those groceries I bought on Thursday came to a combined $38, so buying one PBR is a pretty substantial investment. For some more, consider that i make roughly $2.25 an hour and i’m pretty sure my wage is above the median. Needless to say i’m going to start poking around the liquor stores in my neighborhood in search of this stuff, if not to buy some then at least to take a picture to prove it exists. The article’s here: http://www.designtaxi.com/news/32525/Cheap-American-Beer-PBR-Marketed-as-High-End-in-China/

So in other news, it’s 4:00 on a Saturday and I have absolutely no plans. It’s a really weird vibe, actually. I got up around 11, played videogames with Connor for a while, fed myself and went grocery shopping, and now…

Yeah…

Plans for the rest of the day, as of right now: study some Chinese, eat dinner, sleep. Maybe this shouldn’t be as surprising at is. But since I got here, China has felt at least a little bit like it used to; I’ve always thought that life just moves faster here. I was busy constantly during the week, even without homework to worry about — with the commute on both ends, work + dinner covers 8am to 8pm, and at nights I’ve been either buying stuff to help me settle in, running errands, writing obnoxiously long blogs, that sorta thing. Last night I even got to go back over to Wudaokou and have a respectably fun night out with a bunch of English speakers (who unfortunately are now all cramming for finals) and things felt more or less like they did this summer.  Sitting in my living room now, though, it’s becoming increasingly clear that things are pretty damn different.

Certainly, China hasn’t changed — so it must be that my attitude is starting to. Especially during the second half of this summer’s program, I remember this ever-present urge to go out and see everything there was to see. Time was limited, and hours in the dorm almost felt like hours wasted. With fifty friends and basically no homework, I’m sure any city can become one constant party but between the prices and the nightlife, Beijing was particularly conducive to the phenomenon. China was something to be beaten, a beast to be tamed, and if you weren’t out exploring it or at least getting drunk somewhere then you were missing out.

But now, I don’t know. It could be that I’ve got nine full weeks left, or it could be that it’s generally cold and dark outside. Maybe it’s because I don’t really have friends to share it with yet. It definitely isn’t like I’ve seen everything worth seeing, but at the end of the day for whatever reason that pressing need to go forth and conquer is conspicuously absent. China isn’t some big dirty disneyland anymore, it’s real life just like anywhere. Turns out that there isn’t anything inherent to the North Capital that means you can’t be lonely or bored; coming to terms with that means growing up a little bit, and doing that on demand is annoyingly difficult.

To be fair, I’m making a lot of adjustments all at once. I was already kinda reeling from ‘you are sorta a real person now, so you have to work and pay bills and stuff,’ and ‘you live alone for the first time in your life in a city where you know nobody, now go make friends with strangers’ without ‘you were in a bubble for three months and beijing’s not what you remember’ putting in its two cents, but now i’m just whining. Don’t read this wrong –I’m not depressed. I’m not even unhappy, and I sure as hell don’t plan on being a hermit for the next two months. But that’s not something that comes effortlessly anymore.

So I’ve got a request:

Help me out, please. Next time I’ve got a wide-open Saturday like this, what kinds of things should I do with it?

Answer in the comments: this serves two purposes. First, I’ll ostensibly get some suggestions regarding how to spend free time. Second, I *really* like getting comments on this thing because it in some way validates the time I spend writing it, so you’ll make me happy. Plus i have no idea if anyone actually reads this thing aside from my family, my plex roommates, and maybe jakob and chrissy, i think — so writing something below might give me a little better idea of who all actually reads the China Match.

If you comment I promise I won’t sell your email to anyone or whatever — if i could get rid of that requirement to comment then i would. you can just put like ‘x@x.com’ though and that’s just fine. If for some reason though you really don’t like commenting then shoot me suggestions for stuff to do next time we’re gchatting or skyping or whatever. Oh, and to clarify i’m not just looking for beijing-related stuff. could be any way to occupy time, social or no really. and even if you only see this post a month from now for whatever reason, suggestions will almost definitely still be welcome.

Thanks!

…and to think this morning I was pretty sure that I wouldn’t be blogging today. But then tonight happened, and it was completely awesome. Once I got off work I went to go have dinner with a friend of mine from highschool named Matt, which was cool because a) we could both speak in non-broken english, b) he’s someone who i’m actually friends with as opposed to a coworker — not that i don’t really like my coworkers and c) it was in wudaokou (more on this later). Matt’s been doing an intensive language study for the last 5 months but is about to go home and finish his majors in chinese and business. Oh, and he’s looking to go into the hospitality industry in asia. Just for the record i’m doing asian studies and economics (probably NU’s closest equivalents to chinese and business), am currently working at a chinese travel company, and have spent the last 5 years working for dad’s vacation rental site. So needless to say we spent most of the conversation telling stories about stupid things we’ve done in china, making fun of our highschool friends (we love you, colin scully), and discussing the merits of dicking around with… liberated… fire extinguishers, which is apparently one of his hobbies. Fun times all around.

Anyway after dinner we went our separate ways and I decided to go to the lotus center, because i was already in wudaokou so why not. walking from the japanese place that i used to eat at all the time to the lotus center, though, triggered some really weird emotions. I’m not quite sure why but there was something about walking that extremely, extremely familiar route — seeing the crazy night market across the street, passing the little corner store where we used to make beer runs at all hours, walking right by all the little clothing stores blaring random electronic music that always did and continue to put me in a better mood no matter what — it was a little overwhelming. Not to sound like a complete wuss but a lot of memories hit me very, very hard all at once; i may or may not have gotten a teensy bit choked up. Which seems out of place for 五道口大街 (the main street) because it’s not particularly quaint or anything like that, but i guess it’s charming in it’s own bustling, noisy, crazy sort of way. the chinese word 热闹 comes to mind.

But really, there’s something to be said for actually knowing an area like I know at least that part of wudaokou. This knowledge has a lot of practical utility, especially in china, where asking where to buy things will often get you sent a miles out of the way (see this post) when simply knowing where they are beforehand will take you down the street, if that makes sense. So yeah, because I still don’t know my home neighborhood very well at all I chose to go blanket and grocery shopping in wudaokou’s loutus center because i know that place very, very well — and i found everything i needed within fifteen minutes, no problem.

Carrying it home, on the other hand, was a little trickier. Crowded chinese subways aren’t particularly conducive to big bulky blanket bags (boom alliteration!), and bicycles even less so. I normally get stared at the subway enough as it is, but shuffling around this huge comforter thing took the stares to a completely new level. Unfortunately I just couldn’t bring myself to care because there’s pretty much nobody in the country at this point who i’d be embarrassed to run into while carrying a big pink quilt (i’m pretty sure it’s a quilt, i haven’t actually opened it yet) — which is why i’m putting it on the internet!

And just for funsies, here’s the rest of the groceries I bought. Now at this point i imagine that my friends from this summer are all probably just shaking their heads, and the rest of you who don’t already know better are probably realizing “wow, he apparently has the palate of a six-year-old.” To which i’d reply … yeah pretty much but that’s when my sense of humor stopped developing too, so at least i’m consistent.

The point of this blog, if there was one, was just to say that it’s weird how much seeing a familiar face, walking down a street or procuring a blanket and comfort food can affect somebody, but it’s certainly boosted the hell out of my morale. Which was already doing pretty well in the first place, considering the ‘holy crap i am in china’ elation hasn’t quite worn off yet. Still though, tonight was a very good insulation against the fact that my roommate just left to hong kong for a while, the cashier at the store gave me like nine of those jiao bills (the financial equivalent of a bitch-slap), having to make the transfer from the 10 to the 4 which usually makes me hate humankind and specifically any chinese woman who has given birth to a child in the last 50 years, etc.

edit: Oh, and the little notepads in the picture are to be carried around with me at all times, so that when i learn new words i can write them down. if i’m going to be here i might as well learn the language, damn it. also, writing about biking with the bag o’ blanket reminded me of this article that i found today which you should check out (it’s short!) unless you happen to be one of my parents. Having read it, it occurs to me that while biking around one-handed with the blanket was probably pretty bad, i’ve been biking around the last several days with my headphones in; considering that horns passed turn signals as the preferred means of auto communication in china a long time ago, i’m kinda coming to realize that this is probably the most dangerous thing i’ve ever done, so i’m going to stop. yay!

So for the past several days when it’s gotten to be around bedtime I suddenly remember that my room gets really cold at night and I still only have two sheets. Every morning I swear to myself to either invest in a blanket or get a chinese girlfriend asap but every night on my way home from work I’m never motivated enough to go find a store where i can buy… either, I suppose. Anyway in lieu of a blanket i’ve been using my heavy jacket, which would be fine, except that it’s the same jacket that I’ve been wearing around during the day. Which is to say that it’s been outside in Beijing for a prolonged period of time, so for the last three nights i feel like i’ve been sleeping with a chain-smoker. delightful, yeah?
At this point i’m legitimately still writing this blog because I fear bedtime. damn it’s cold. but Rayco leaves for hong kong tomorrow, and he said he’ll leave me his electric blanket, so that’ll hopefully fix the situation. but i should probably buy my own stupid blanket anyway though, because when he comes home he’ll want it back and i’d really like this to be my last night sleeping under the jacket. egh. i must smell terrible. maybe that’s why the girlfriend thing isn’t coming along so well, come to think of it.

So it turns out that being a commuter in one of the biggest cities in the most populated country in the world is just about as much fun as one might expect. The relatively low standard of living means that most people still can’t afford cars (although this number is increasing, causing huge traffic issues) so the public transit systems are really strained. Sometimes this past summer, particularly in those last two weeks, I’d forget quite how many Chinese people there really are; we were running around for the most part in the middle of the day, when everyone was at work. Today, though, I rolled out at 7.30 and was obligated to fight through constant swarms of people clogging the streets, the subway, and even the elevators in my building — it took literally ten minutes to get upstairs. My poor sense of direction didn’t help the situation, and on my first commute in China I wound up taking the 10 in the wrong direction, turning around, getting off at the wrong stop anyway, leaving the subway and sprinting around for a mile or so, frantically begging for directions in what couldn’t-have-been-comprehensible mandarin, running back to the subway, finally getting to the right stop but getting briefly lost in the mall that said stop is attached to, giving up and running the long way around the mall instead of through it, and then missing my first elevator due to being out-swarmed by the bolder, pushier chinese. After all that you’d expect me to be late, but I know myself well enough to leave ample time for me to dick around and take wrong turns anytime I go somewhere for the first time; I was upstairs by 9:05.

Present-tense time!
So I walk in the door, at which point the front desk criticizes me for being late, gives me a laptop that’s been preloaded with my login code, takes me to my desk and begin training me. Luckily I’m decently well prepared because they thoroughly responded to the “when should I show up and what should I bring” email that I sent them days ago, so I learn quickly and start doing productive research by noon.
I definitely did not really discover that the office opens at ten, and the two secretaries in the building had clearly either forgotten or never been told that I exist and am coming today, which I didn’t at all see coming when they stone-cold ignored aforementioned email. They certainly didn’t just throw me in some random conference room in the back of the office to stall for time, where I surely am not drafting this blog post on an index card. Sigh.
They say I get to have lunch with someone who has a job for me, and that my computer will be ready sometime after that. Which is all well and good, but it’s 9.45, so they tell me to leave for the time being and go kill two hours. I opt to go buy batteries for my dictionary. The upscale mall that the subway station is attached to is apparently too classy to stock such plebeian items as batteries, so I get to go to the electronics market instead. Think about the phrase ‘electronics market’ for a second. The place I’m going isn’t a singular store, but is maybe 75 or so stands all transitively inhabiting one big building. This model kinda makes sense for T shirts, or fruit, but these guys are trying to vend you printers out of like, “wang-fung’s electric stuff shack.” They particularly wanted to sell me cameras, which honestly just doesn’t strike me as an impulse-buy item. Maybe I’ll come look at a $3 T-shirt if you’re loud enough, mr storekeeper, but with a camera i think one either wants one before going to the store or doesn’t want one at all, and in the former case will probably go specifically shopping for one at a legitimate location, or at least somewhere that isn’t actually held together with masking tape.
I eventually find some batteries and make the mistake of asking how much they are, instead of just opening with my own offer. The lady at the desk tells me batteries are 10 kuai, but when I try to buy a two-pack (it is worth noting that they *only* come in two-packs, so when she priced them that way that’s all she could have been referring to), the guy next to her is like “no, no, ten kuai per battery.” I am at this point in no mood for this shit so I go right to the walk-away, and they immediately offer both for ten. Successfully haggling used to make me feel proud and happy but this time it just made me slightly irritated that they’d even try to pull something as blatantly stupid as attempting to double the price at the last second. Bah.

Coming back to China, I couldn’t fairly describe the experience as a culture shock, because it isn’t shocking any more, per se. Generally speaking, I know what to expect, but at the same time it still feels like a cultural slap in the face, of sorts, a la ‘HEY WELCOME TO CHINA IT’S REALLY CROWDED AND DIRTY AND COLD AND PEOPLE WANT TO RIP YOU OFF ALL THE TIME ALSO BUY THIS CAMERA.’ The difference is that culture shock can be endearing, but a lot of the funny little quirks (oh, that old lady just unabashedly elbowed me in the kidney to cut me in line!) are rapidly becoming less cute and a lot more obnoxious. Do you have to spit in the subway, friends? That really can’t wait?

Anyway so far my job itself is concerned, I probably won’t be writing about it much because everybody and their brother has told me that writing about work is a terrible idea and will get me fired or sued or something. All I’ll really say is for the time being I’m researching some really interesting stuff, and if my concern that i’ll run out of work to do for said research tomorrow proves unfounded then it’s going to be a really enjoyable internship.

I can’t recall the last time I was this tired. It’s 9:30pm here now, which is 7:30am in Austin, funny because I left at 6am the previous day in Austin, having stayed up all that night. Yay for nyquil-induced naps on planes, boo to flight attendants for interrupting and ending said naps to make me buckle my seatbelt over the outside of my jacket, attempt to serve me water, yell a bunch in english at the people who don’t speak english next to me, etc.

All this stuff will get more coverage in a bit, but the very quick rundown of my situation

House: Small, but highly livable. In a hutong, which i find hilarious. Weird bathroom setup. Very near tiananmen and wangfujing. Went to wangfujing for dinner, incidentally. Will have to remember to talk about the women there, and coffee/tea scams

Roommate: Very nice guy, fluent in chinese, british accented. wins all around

Internet: Working! slow, but the NUVPN lets me on now, so no more ultrasurf headaches

Weather: Cold, but no snow. Am not complaining. Oh, and still redonculously polluted. but hey, not like that’s a surprise anymore

Mental state: slightly delirious due to sleep deprivation, but otherwise extremely pleased and excited about the weeks to come.

Very, very hard to believe i’m about to fly back to the states. It’s not that i’m not ready to go, but rather that i’ve just really gotten used to it here. the prospect of returning to a country where turn signals are used more often than horns, everybody is comprehensible, not every discernable experience involves a fight, and things cost seven times more than they should is at present a little bizarre to me. i’m looking forward to it though. back in austin at 11pm, ish.

再见，北京。

All settled into the new hotel today. Said goodbye to Qinghua and Wudaokou; probably won’t be back for a while. Sold my bike and moved out relatively without incident — except that somebody stole the pot to our hot water heater, which sucked. Like, it absolutely had to have been stolen. Weird situation. Anyway we’re in the exact opposite end of town now, in southeast beijing. Gotta go northwest again tomorrow to do some internship stuff that I should have resolved when I lived ten minutes away, but I’m stupid, so now I get the privilege of spending most of my day subwaying around.
So far as the hotel goes, checking in was a pain in the ass because it always is, but now that we’re here the place is pretty nice, especially considering it’s only 11 usd a night. Hot water at any hour is always a plus. Lack of internet that actually works well is a bit of a minus. Won’t even load my blog properly without me waiting for like half an hour so posts might be a little slower coming these days. I’ll write stuff down on notepad though, and maybe publish everything when i get home.
Dan and i had a really interesting conversation at dinner today with a woman who took pity on us when we were trying to order food. Not that there should have been a problem in the first place — the dish explicitly came with vegetables and rice, but the fuwuyuan felt the need to double check that we really actually wanted rice or something, and it got really confusing. Anywho we talked about the chinese government, tibet, mao, perceptions of homosexuality, all sorts of fun stuff. Apparently it’s cool for guys to hold hands here but not cool for them to share a hotel room, so everybody thinks Dan and I are gay. As if we’re not getting stared at enough already, because there are no other foreigners around here, and we stick out rather severely. Apparently Chinese dudes traveling together will always get two rooms, even if there are twin beds in the room, to avoid coming across as gay. Seems like a waste of 22 bucks to me.
Also, I apparently look british? And strict? Chinese people are strange. Nobody in the restaurant pegged me as american though, which I guess i’m cool for the time being; there are certainly worse things than being taken for a brit. Alright it’s late and i gotta be up early tomorrow, so i’ma cut this one short.

Starting to miss america a little to be honest. Home before too long though; this last week really has flown by.

Welcome to Panda! pretty much sums this trip up. They’re by far the most cared for animals in the zoo, put front in center in their own special five-extra-kuai-to-enter enclosure. But they’re cute, so I guess I can’t complain too much.
Aside from the pandas, though, the zoo is “depressing as all get out,” to borrow chrissy’s rhetoric. The whole place isn’t particularly well maintained, the animals were generally walking around on concrete, and the state of the cages is just pretty sad.

Spoiler alert, there are some rather sad pictures of animals incoming. The bears were probably the worst, because they were both kinda dirty and walking around in concrete and trash. Not the nicest setup. The rhino, one of my favorite animals by far, was sporting a splintered horn and confined to a big muddy pit. Maybe not the worst pen possible but I feel like an animal that has focused millions of years of evolution purely into getting a big spike on its face is badass enough to deserve better. Maybe it’s just me. Bah.

The big cats were incredible, but had the most cramped conditions of all. It’s possible we just saw them during a special display hour or something, but each one was in a cage about the size of the double i’m sitting in now. Kinda a bad situation.

It wasn’t all bad, though. The monkeys seemed happy, and had a big roomy cage to swing around in. The pandas were certainly content. The emus get fed more popcorn than they know what to do with. There’s always a bright side, but sometimes it’s hard to see around all the crap that’s broken in this country. Speaking of — today, in line for the zoo, a homeless person asked me for some kuai. I initially ignored her, because I am an asshole, but then I watched her for a little bit. I noticed she was pretty deformed, and her hands could serve no other purpose than to hold an empty bowl, and even that just barely. So I grabbed two kuai because that’s what was readily accessible — mind you, that is thirty fucking us cents — and went to give them to her. She smiled at me and gave me the most sincere “谢谢” I have ever heard in my life. Absolutely, utterly heartbreaking. Literally almost drove me to tears.
It reminded me that by no fault of my own I’m in an extraordinarily advantageous position on this planet. I’m a relatively wealthy white male from the current world superpower. I have a stable family, loving friends, and a good education. At present I have perfect freedom to do basically anything I’d like. I can pretty much always spare thirty cents and not look back. But some people, most people, don’t even have half of these things. No matter how many poor decisions I make or good ones they make, I’ll always be better off. It’s a little ridiculous really, and I know I can’t help all of them, and I know thirty cents isn’t going to resolve anything. The best I can do is make sure I don’t waste what I’ve been given. Weird thoughts to have outside a zoo.

Or, perhaps more accurately, “How to lie to the Chinese.”

Today’s just going to be some random highlights from the Shanghai trip, because I don’t really have time to cover the whole thing and this gives me an excuse to be lazy with regard to fluidity. In return you get a bunch of little anecdotes as opposed to the standard long-form craziness. Everybody wins!

Day 2: Mike took us to People’s Square, which is a pretty standard Wangfujing-esque street ‘o’ chaos. Notable for: its pretty substantial, utterly nonsensical, almost certainly dangerous vehicle traffic; having at least three pizza huts within one mile of one another; the HJ building (Connor and Mike have very dirty minds. Plus we’d just been talking about how KTVs — usually karaoke bars — in China are occasionally “all inclusive,” if you understand); and the fact that it dead ends into the Bund.

The Bund basically consists of another mile-long stretch of buildings that some brits set up in the early 20th century. It’s one of the biggest attractions in Shanghai because it’s so damn pretty, plus it runs along the bank of the Huangpu river and consequently has an incredible view of the city skyline.

Moreover, the Bund area features a way to cross the Huangpu river called the Sightseeing Tunnel. This was the sum total of my knowledge about the thing until it was time to get on, at which point Mike asked “you remembered to take your hit of acid first, right?” God, I wish I had. Turns out the Sightseeing Tunnel is an experiment in “Personal Rapid Transit.” All well and good, except that after they load you into the little gondola-sized subway, they play techno music and flash lots and lots of lights at you and drive you past a bunch of creepy wind-flail dolls and say random shit like “Nascent Magma” and “Paradise…and Hell” in creepy English and Chinese and basically it is terrifying and ought to be avoided. Whew.

P.S., the other side of the river is also really pretty.

Day 3: Started with a temple nestled quaintly under a bunch of skyscrapers, because this is China, dammit. Zoning laws are for scrubs.

After that, though, I had my first practice with lying to people in China. We were attempting to go up this building (the one that looks like a bottle opener) because it’s the tallest one in Shanghai, and is actually the tallest observation deck in the world, which is kinda cool. After our first three lines (as evidenced by the expo, the Chinese love their lines), we were able to actually buy a ticket, at which point we realized there was a student discount. For kids seventeen or under. Which would be a problem, had my Qinghua ID not been misprinted to say I was born in 1900…
Long story short, the people at the desk were presented with a six foot tall kid with like 4 days worth of scruffy beard presenting a Chinese college ID that says he’s 110, insisting in Chinese that he is seventeen years old and fervently denying that he has any other forms of identification on his person. They were, understandably, kinda at a loss for thirty or so seconds, after which the people behind me started complaining and they gave me the discount. This was a good warm up for later that night.

Anyway after I believe five lines we actually made it up the damn thing, at which point Connor became really uncomfortable at the combined height and ever-churning chaos of Chinese dudes running around and yelling a lot, which is pretty standard. If you’re curious, this is what Shanghai looks like at night from the tallest observation deck on Earth. And here it is from over a urinal. Coolest pee I’ve had in a while.

Ok last story for the night, because this post is getting long: after the bottle opener building, we went back to the world expo. Unfortunately it was about 9.30 by this point, and the expo stops selling tickets at 8 and stops letting people in at all at 9. Of course, we only learn this after we buy tickets from a scalper (an expo parking lot attendant) who promises that the doors are open until ten. We buy his tickets, and go to a random exit of the fair to make sure we can get in. The guy tells us the actual entry times, which is disappointing. So we turn around, and have made it about twenty yards when I turn to Connor and say “F*** it, this is China, lets bribe them.” Mike freaks out a bit and retreats, which sucks because his Chinese is better than mine. Connor’s all for it, though, so we go up to the entry guards and I tell them how important the expo is to me (in chinese of course) and offer the two of them 200 kuai. Considering that it was $30 US, that’s not very much of a bribe. They refused the money, sadly, but they were happy enough with me for trying to take me to their buddies at the actual entrance. So he walks me over there, and the entrance people are like “hell no, doors closed forty five minutes ago.”
So I start lying.
A lot.
“I’m going back to Beijing tomorrow,” I say. “I promised my friends I’d take pictures, and the swindler (new vocab word!) who sold me the tickets said I could get in! I’m very sorry about this, but the expo is very important to me, and I’d like to see it just once” This stream of lies continues for maybe a minute, at which point they cave and go ask the police officer if it’d be ok to let us in.
The police officer is having none of it, at first. But then I start complimenting China, telling him how this expo is famous all over the world, and how important it is for the country and how much I want to show China off to my friends. He liked this. We got in. It was definitely the best Chinese I’ve ever used; Connor told me afterward that he’s never heard me that fluent before. I suspect this is because my real first language is deceit instead of English — when I was trying to lie to the officer, I was way more concerned about making the lie convincing than I was thinking about the actual Chinese, which just came automatically.

We rounded out the evening by getting some beer and Irish cream in the pub next to the Ireland pavilion — naturally the very last building on the grounds to close — and running around the Expo at night. A lot of the groundskeepers were actually really cool about letting us poke around their pavilions a little bit, so even though most things weren’t open the trip was definitely worthwhile.

So I’m back in Beijing safe and sound (平平安安!), and I’ve got a lot of new stories to tell from the trip — they’ll be up on the blog shortly — but first I thought I’d just publish a collection of some of the coolest pavilions that I saw at the Shanghai 2010 world expo. I went three times, so all three days will be mixed together. It won’t be hard to tell which is which, though: day 2 was rainy, day 3 was a late-night visit, and day 5 is everything else.
I apologize in advance to my benevolent webmaster, Mr. Geoffrey Hill, for any data charges he incurs for this post being rather memory-intensive. I promise I will pay you moneys, please to be not breaking my kneecaps.

Without further adieu, the 上海世博 ：城市，让生活更美好。

This one was modeled after sand dunes. Look at it from farther back.

Connor inside North Korea.

That should be about everything! I have a couple more expo pictures but I can mix those into the next couple blogs.

It feels very odd to say it, but I think I just had my first solo Chinese excursion that I can label “authentic” without any qualification. No tour guide, no teachers, no fluent friends to mediate conversations, no other white people anywhere, and most importantly not a word of English. It was really, really cool.

I’ll elaborate, but first I want to talk just a little about the trip itself. As you’ve probably surmised, I’m sitting in my hotel in Shanghai right now; I consider this an accomplishment for a few reasons. First, ordering a taxi last night whilst still just a little drunk (hey, it was the last day of finals) was pretty tricky. It is worth noting here that when the phone robot tells you that there is an “English” option, empirically it actually means “you are still basically going to have to do this in Chinese, but maybe we’ll let a few English, taxi-related nouns slip if we really have to.” Also, my cell kept constantly dropping the call halfway through the reservation, so I switched to Anna’s. Of course as soon as I did they kept calling my phone back so I was at one point forced to hold two simultaneous conversations in Chinese on both phones, which was pretty sucky.
Anyway the reservations got made, and I picked up my four hours of sleep for the second night running, and would have kept right on sleeping had the taxi driver not angrily called me at like 6:05 and demanded to know why I wasn’t outside. Or at least, that’s what I’m pretty sure he was demanding. You’ll sympathize if you’ve ever talked to a Beijing cab driver before — they are a famously heavily-accented bunch, and past a certain point the Beijing accent just sounds like one is attempting to speak around a mouthful of gravel. Add this accent to a crappy $20 phone and the “I have slept for 4 hours and been awake for 20 seconds” state of mind, and you’ve got today’s wakeup.
Turns out that I had forgotten, silly me, that my phone’s alarm clock doesn’t work when the phone is charging. 当然。
Funny thing was that Anna’s doesn’t either, so I called her and woke her up as I ran down stairs, and was able to stall the guy a little bit by loudly grumbling about how long women take to get ready, and apologizing profusely. In actuality Anna got ready even faster than I did (I took four minutes, she took two) and we actually both made it on the cab by 6:10 or so. Not too bad.

The airport was straightforward enough, because most things were translated. There was a small hiccup near the start though, when I went to the desk of my airline and asked for my boarding pass and they told me they were for flight changing only, and that I should go to the “Q.” So I walk until I find a big row of kiosk-style boarding pass machines labeled in groups from A to M. They’ve all got pretty lengthy lines, and several of them have my company’s logo on them. I am here briefly torn between trying to find the missing letter Q and assuming that the lady was trying to tell me in English to get in the Queue in front of one of the China Eastern kiosks. I look everywhere for the former, fail, then decide to pursue the latter. This doesn’t work, and irritates the kiosk people who helpfully yell Q at me some more but won’t show me where it is.
Eventually I just get super confused and embarrassed and wind up having to ask a Chinese lady what the letter Q means (真丢人) at which point she laughs at me and points to the special China-Eastern-Airlines-flying-from-Beijing-to-Shanghai-Hongqiao booth, labeled Q, crammed in some corner alone across the hall from A and B. Damn it, China. Whatever. At least I got to eat some 包子 at the Flavor Tang, which was awesome.

Anyway, the rest of the journey was pretty uneventful. Once I got to the hotel though, I realized I had no plug adapter, and thus couldn’t power my computer. A nerd and his internet are not long parted; as any XKCD fan will tell you, it was an unacceptable situation. So I talked to the front desk about it and they wrote down the address for some random mall like 40 minutes away. The gas station lady said to go to the same place. I grabbed a taxi and had gone maybe a block and a half, though, when I passed this store. “Well gee,” I thought. “Those sure look like the characters for ‘electronic’ and ‘devices’ but surely everybody wouldn’t be sending me 40 minutes away if I could just buy my plug here.” And then I passed this one, at which point I just yelled at the cab driver to stop, paid him like 10 kuai and got out maybe three blocks from where I’d gotten in. If I had just walked for a few streets, I would have passed two very large, very imposing electronics stores. Finding the right adapter inside the second one took me maybe two minutes and thirty kuai; a forty minute taxi in shanghai is like 80 or 90 kuai. Each way. Lesson learned yet again: always wander around a little before you commit to anything here.

I’m glad I went to the second store though, because on my way back I wandered down a side street and started talking to this dude about where he liked to eat. He pointed at the place he was standing in front of, which I hadn’t realized before was actually a restaurant. I wonder why. I’m not sure that calling this place a “hole in the wall” would really do it justice, because half of the store was haphazardly strewn around the street in front of it. I do know, though, that they don’t get a lot of 外国人 (foreigners) coming by, because when I showed up like the whole family came and chilled on the porch-ish-thing with me and just talked about anything they could.

As a slight aside to my classmates who bash the 新实用汉语课本, our textbook, it absolutely saved my ass today. I see the menu in this place and the only thing I can fully make out is 炒鸡丁, an extremely recent vocab word which translates — admittedly awkwardly — to (stir)fried chicken cubes. What’s funny though is that just yesterday, I had an oral examination in which I had to tell my teacher what I’d do when a friend of mine presented me with a tasty dish. I had rehearsed a speech about how to praise a good 炒鸡丁 chef and display my gratitude sufficiently. I definitely used about 3/4ths of it today as I was talking to the cook and her family; it was incredible (as was the dish itself. 很好吃）Plus it, along with rice and a fanta, only ran me 10 kuai. Probably one of the best meals I’ve had here.

In any event, I hung out at this place and just talked to these guys, their kids, and their friends wandering by on the street for about an hour. Combined with my hour-long conversation with the dude next to me on the plane, I’ve spoken more Chinese here in one day than I’ve done in probably my past week here combined, and I honestly enjoyed every second of it. I’m going to have a really good time here, I can tell already. Plus, Connor shows up in like 3 hours, so I don’t have much of a choice.

“Open at 10, 15% of what they offer,” they said, “especially if you’re obviously a 外国人(foreigner).” A few months ago, I was hearing this kinda thing all the time — in this case from one of the study abroad briefings, but also from my brother, his Chinese friends, and apparently everybody else who has ever been here. That all sounds well and good, but for those of you who haven’t done this before, imagine finding a jacket on sale in mall or something being sold for $60, and just take a second to think about how weird it would be to look the shopkeeper straight in the eye and tell him “yeah, I’m only paying six for that.”

Because it’s weird as hell. I mean, I guess I’ll get used to it but for now it’s still extremely bizarre, particularly considering how cheap things are to start with. In that example, for instance, the jacket wouldn’t be 60 bucks, it’d be 60 人民币， or roughly nine USD. And you have to act like paying nine bucks for a jacket is outrageous, because obviously paying ninety us cents is much more reasonable. They of course won’t do that, so they’ll haggle you up to 25% of original asking price, and you leave with like a $2 jacket. Most normal thing in the world.

So yesterday, I was in this mall down by the Beijing Zoo, which I actually haven’t been to yet but I’m sure will happen pretty soon (get pumped for future pictures of pandas incoming). It looked like this, except this was by far the neatest, most quiet, and most organized corner in the store. Anyway, this lady in the middle had a bunch of shoes in a very small space, and I wanted some. I hadn’t ever haggled on my own before but it’d seen it done, and I wanted to go out that night for July fourth.

So I go in, ignore the salesperson, and pretty quickly pick out some Nikes that I _kinda_ like; I can’t overstress here how important it is to only appear moderately interested, because the more you look like you want something, the more you’ll have to pay — which might (I don’t actually know) be one reason why girls on average get worse deals than men. I mean, I bet when a girl finds that one purse that matches perfectly with her most adorable dress and she absolutely has to have it, the salespeople can tell and exploit that.

I ask how much they cost, and she won’t tell me, probably because she wants to see how much she can trick the stupid American into paying for fake Nikes. She instead goes to get them in my size and lets me try them on and walk around before she’ll even start to discuss price. Eventually, though, once I look relatively happy with them, she offers 280元, a little over $40. I say I want to pay 50, because I’m not quite ballsy enough to ask for 4 dollar shoes yet.
Note: Her price wouldn’t be particularly unreasonable in the US, but then again shoes there would have been real, and therefore probably wouldn’t have such obvious issues with quality. Here, though, paying anywhere in the ballpark of 300 kuai for anything short of a full, tailored suit is utterly ridiculous.

She tells me my Chinese is great — she is lying — and that she’ll offer me a good price, 230. I tell her to stop joking around (别开玩笑, one of my favorite phrases), then ask for 50 again. She shakes her head, so I get up and just leave the store. I’m maybe five feet away when she pulls me back in. She doesn’t look happy, but says me she’ll go down to one hundred, and that’s her lowest. Which is a shame, because my highest is 60. I walk again. Ten relatively uncomfortable seconds later, I’m paying $9 for nikes. A little while after that I paid another 60 kuai for a dress shirt, but only down from 100.

In any event, I probably could have done way better, but I’m still proud anyway, damn it. Was gonna talk about July 4th here but the post was getting a bit long and it wasn’t that interesting anyway. 再见！