Archive for February, 2011


The name of this blog has never been as appropriate as it is now. So in honor of the occasion I made myself an image macro. I loves me some photoshop. Anyway, the Cage Match proudly presents:

Round 1: Kevin Vs. Xi’an

Might be a little Scott-Pilgrim-ish, but I feel like having a blog that has 'match' in its name gives me creative license. Plus I had the idea for this long before I saw that movie, but just never got around to 'shopping something up

Before I tell relate day one’s rather stupid series of adventures, though, I do want to make a correction to last post — I’m not alone. Last night made this painfully obvious. I might be halfway across the world but I’m still connected to a truly humbling amount of people who care about my well-being. My family scrambled all the fighters immediately, and my facebook and gchat and skype exploded into a gigantic web of support that I honestly can’t claim to deserve. Connor was up at five in the morning giving me his credit card info so I could buy more skype credit to call actual phones if I needed it; my parents figured out a system to wire me cash (that I hopefully won’t have to use) within a few hours; Billie offered to put me in touch with her parents’ friends at the embassies, and about a dozen or so people called me on skype or IM’d me on gmail to make sure I was ok and to ask if they could be of any help. Collectively you calmed me down, talked me through every option I had and every step I needed to take, and a whole lot more.
It was a really moving reminder that there’re a whole whole lot of people out there who care about me for god knows what reason, and in what is probably the most heartfelt remark that’s ever appeared on this blog I want to thank you all.

Saving the what-I-actually-did-for-most-of-the-first-day post for another time, I’ll just skip to last night. Having spent the day eating mass quantities of random street food in the Muslim quarter and chasing most of it with Red Wolf beer — actually pretty damn good — 9 pm found me with a stomach ache and a pretty significant buzz.
I was with this guy named Eric, but again, he probably deserves a blog post all to himself. Sparknotes — he is a 40 year old dude from shanghai who is a Nicolas Cage fan (favorite actor! no joke!); he’s christian to the point where he refuses to go inside the grounds of buddhist-related tourist attractions, eats about three lunches a day, has a traditional Chinese outlook on guests (read: pays for pretty much all my food and won’t hear a word to the contrary), and has served as my language partner and translator since about minute five in Xi’an.
Anyway. We go to a bar, at nine, which is apparently pretty common in China because the places were already packed. I go to the bathroom and when I come back he’s ordered six more beers. And yes, he’s straight and not creepy, I swear. He’s just a good dude. In any event I get increasingly intoxicated and at one point take out a hundred kuai to buy some more beers which was a bad call because a) i shouldn’t have been drinking more and b) when i put my wallet back in my pocket, i either missed or didn’t put it in very well because when the bartender came back with my change, my wallet was gone.
This was, as they say, rather distressing. I was fairly calm at first, thought i’d just dropped it or put it in a weird jacket pocket.
Wallet wasn’t anywhere on the ground or anything, we looked all over for it and the people around us helped too. Nothing doing. Checked all my pockets four times. Started to panic a little. Realized the wallet had half of last month’s salary in it, was annoyed. Shortly thereafter I realized it also had my debit and credit cards, drivers license, insurance, wildcard, etc. Started to panic in full. Was escorted to the front of the bar. Told everyone present that they should start checking people who were leaving (this is the only solution that occurred to me). They wouldn’t. So I suggested it again, a little more… err.. assertively. Shouting. Mandarin, plenty of English curse words interspersed. They didn’t quite know what to do with me, and Eric wasn’t having any luck calming me down, so they took me upstairs to meet the bar’s manager.
When he told me that there was nothing he could to to help, I kinda snapped. Maybe broke down is more fitting. I didn’t remember at the time that I had a thousand kuai in my hotel room (good thing the hotel key was in the wallet, yeah) so as far as I knew I had like 60 kuai — the change from the beer — to my name and no way to get any more. Bar manager said he’d call the police, I pulled out the exaggerated 怎么 again to ask as incredulously as possible how the hell they were supposed to do anything. He called them anyway. They showed up, and said they couldn’t do anything. To which I had a brief moment of ‘I-fucking-told-you-so,’ spiteful happiness, before I realized that they were pretty much my last hope. Somewhere in this sorta whirlwind of running back and forth through the bar, up to the room where the manager was, out to the street to talk to the cops, and back in again, Eric stopped me and asked how much cash was in the wallet. told him the truth, which was about 800 kuai, and he straight up just gave me 800 more kuai. Did I mention how much of a badass this guy is? Holy hell.
Anyway we leave the place eventually and go back to the hotel, I use the beer change to buy a new room key, and I get upstairs and write the blog post under this one. I had somehow already forgotten about that extra 800 by that point, but remembered it this morning.
Then the facebook statuses, calling home, calling banks, everything. Then the aforementioned flood of support. Then sleep, around 3:30.

Well, this is problematic

I was robbed in a bar tonight.

I am in Xi’an. Not even my home base in China. Just some random city where I’m traveling.

Aside from the cash I had in my backpack, I have no access to money whatsoever.

I have no mailing address. They won’t send a credit card to the hotel, and even if they could, they have no mechanism by which to do so before I leave Xi’an. I leave in 3 days (today is technically the 4th) and the soonest they can mail something is the 9th.

In sum, I have 1000 kuai to my name; that is $151. I am pretty sure my hotel and plane ticket back to Beijing have been paid for. If not, I can’t quite articulate how completely fucked I am. I have no credit or debit card. They’re canceling my credit card now. If the cancel voids my plane ticket, I have no way to get home. I still have my passport.

Parents trying to help. Not much they can do. Bank can’t get me a card until 5 days from now; and even then they can only send it to my office. God knows how that will work. I don’t even know if my office has a proper mailbox. But it does have an address, which is better than trying to send a credit card to my fucking 胡同。 Hutong, by the way, means alleyway. And off of said alleyway, you have to have a special RFID card to get into my little courtyard thing, at which point I am house 8. I’m pretty sure it doesn’t have a mailbox, but even if it did I don’t really have a way to communicate how to find it. So there’s no way for me to receive mail in Beijing aside from sending it to my company’s front desk and hoping for the best. So basically pending divine intervention I won’t have any money for the foreseeable future.

I’m scared, poor, and very, very alone. I have a sorta-friend that I made named Eric; he has been a huge help with translation, but even he can’t get my wallet back. I am not sure what to do.

I want to see the terracotta warriors tomorrow. This involves spending about 150 kuai, from what I can tell. That’s like 25 bucks, which wouldn’t be a big deal at all if it wasn’t a significant portion of my total funding at present.

Shit. I’ve been awake for 21 hours; I’m exhausted but too nervous to sleep.

What am I supposed to do?

…is pretty damn hard. Mainly because they don’t run cabs. Not that I could look up cab services easily anyway, because the house ran out of electricity as soon as I got home from the miaohui (just to make things more exciting, the power went out in exactly the same instant as a massive firework exploded so I couldn’t tell if like, a fuse had exploded or not). My roommate forgot to mention that we have an electric bill that works the same way as the gas — namely it runs on a special special card which one may only replenish at the bank.  Guess what sorts of establishments are closed for the holidays? So no heating or internet for a while.

Fortunately these two pretty sucky things combined to be not so bad; because I couldn’t cab out in the morning, I had to subway to the airport and sleep in an airport hotel. Which meant that I was both able to get more sleep and significantly warmer. I was actually going to stay in the airport proper but got accosted by one of those guys who invite you to come stay in their ‘near-the-airport’ hotel. You know those suspicious looking dudes who you’re never ever supposed to trust? Mm. I hope the wind appreciated my caution.

In truth, 200 kuai cheaper and a free shuttle was just too tempting. Was a fun van ride, actually. Just talked about language with the driver, and he had me leave three separate audio recordings of how to say the word ‘elevator’ on his phone. Got to the hotel, successfully haggled a 30% discount from the posted price, got to my pretty-darn-sketchy-but-whatever room and promptly knocked out at like 10:30.
This 5:30am though found me in the same van (meant to seat seven) with maybe ten chinese people, half of whom were very clearly sick. Every once in a while in this country I get hit with a rush of perspective — like, a ‘what the hell i am i doing in this situation? Clearly I do not belong here and instead should really just be in my bed in Austin right now.’ This morning’s was particularly strong, but passed quickly.

Some quick observations on New Year’s in Beijing —

  • Fireworks must cost next to nothing, because from the looks of the sky everyone in Beijing has purchased about seventy-five.
  • If fireworks cost next to nothing, I think stores actually pay you to take their firecrackers. Writing this from 6pm Xi’an time, I can honestly say that in the last 18 hours, with the exception of the subway and the plane, there has yet to be ten solid seconds that haven’t been broken by at least one firecracker, more commonly a four-foot-long string.
  • Aside from groups of people actively setting off fireworks, nobody is in the streets at all with the very notable exception of Germans. I have yet to find an explanation for this phenomenon. But I walked for about a mile, and passed maybe 20 Chinese guys setting off fireworks, and 20 people from Germany all watching them. Maybe this is just the street by my house, but it was hella weird. The subways were empty all day, too. I don’t get it.
  • A lot of fires get started from fireworks hitting trees. You can tell because people will launch them anywhere where there’s a clearing on the ground, regardless of what’s above. Charred branches all over the streets this morning
  • But that’s ok, because instead of trying to ban fireworks, china just hires a fleet of middle aged women to bike around with carts full of fire extinguishers. They wear special white jackets and red armbands and are pretty much the best
  • Did I  mention the fireworks? Because there sure were a lot of those.

Actually caught a random dragon dance happening on the street. Really awesome. Check out that line of black cats though...

Yeah. That’s a middle-aged man wearing a rabbit hood and playing a vuvuzela. You don’t know how tempted I was to just leave this up as the sole picture in today’s ‘photoblog.’ Because really, anywhere I go from here is only going to be downhill.

That said, I decided there were other pictures that were sufficiently pretty (or creepy, as the case may be) to warrant posting anyway. Today is Chinese New Year’s eve, and all the festivals are starting to kick off. If you’re interested for whatever reason, the full list of things I can go to is here. I get home on the 7th and have the 8th off, so I’ll be going to at least three more of these (there is no way in hell I’m not going to the Qianmen lantern fair, but for whatever reason that’s conveniently staggered a week off from the rest).

Just a pinch of context, to avoid confusion: The Spring Festival (Chunjie) and “Chinese New Year” are the exact same holiday; and I’ll be using the terms interchangeably. To explain the vuvuzela man as much as such a task is even possible, 2011 happens to be the year of the rabbit. As a sidenote to any of my friends in Chinese, although rabbit is “兔子,” calling it “兔子年” is a common foreigner mistake that will make people giggle at you. It’s just “兔年.”
Anyway for Chunjie everybody gets a whole bunch of time off to go to their hometown (300 million people travel at some point during this week), set off truly ludicrous amounts of fireworks, and hang out eating various types of pastries with their families. It’s pretty awesome. During the week surrounding it, temples traditionally throw these big festivals called MiaoHui — 庙会, literally Temple Assembly. As far as I can tell, these festivals’ primary purpose is to equip the entire Chinese population with surplus cheap-plastic-toy inventory. All the stuff that either couldn’t fit on the boat to the states or was too weird to be sold there, conveniently ready to buy in one place! That was the theme of the Ditan one, anyway, although the website claims it is supposed to be about romance, or something? It wasn’t just chachka, though; they had a lot of performers and handicrafts and stuff too. Was neat. Look look!

This picture only included because it's hard to articulate how off-putting it is to see the subway like this. I immediately got a very bad feeling I was doing something wrong. Where the hell was everybody?

Alright so I'm off the subway. There's YongHeGong, the temple. But is the fair inside that, or what? Don't see anyone here at all. I'll look around...

...oh.

WELCOME TO DITAN MIAOHUI WE HOPE YOU DON'T THINK OF THIS RABBIT WHEN YOU'RE TRYING TO SLEEP TONIGHT

(ALSO CONSIDER THIS A CHALLENGE: BY THE END OF THE FESTIVAL YOU MUST BE CARRYING SOMETHING LARGER AND MORE POINTLESS THAN WHATEVER THE HELL THIS RABBIT IS HOLDING OR ELSE YOUR ANCESTORS WILL SHAME YOU FOR ETERNITY). On this front, the little girl on the right is doing pretty well.  And… back to pictures

Found everyone.

It's like a diablo, but isn't balanced the same way becuase it only has one end. When you finish your routine you spin it on the small end like a top. This guy second only to vuvuzela-rabbit in badassery

Part of Chunjie involves turning anything red that can feasibly be turned red. And for everything that can't, tape something red to it or hang something red on it, damn it.

Anyone with insight regarding what the hell this thing is, why it is popular, or most importantly why it is wearing what appears to be a diaper is invited to enlighten the rest of us in the comments

Lunch-on-a-stick. Snack street picked up and moved here for the day. They had their employees put on different hats, fooling precisely no one.

Really cool cymbal+dance troupe. So cool I took a video...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BQXi2t0tn14
I spoil you.

Alright so you guys may or may not remember this, but Russell and I have a longstanding tradition of giving each other weird random crap from foreign countries. This picture demonstrates exactly the problem with this Miaohui; everything was an option. I felt like I was cheating. Those Hitler matches (this post has a good picture of them) took me forever to find, but now one store offers angry chili peppers, zombies, and bellsprout? Too many choices — I balked. I’ll find something later though, I’m sure

Hehehe. I pointed out the typo to one of the workers in the stand next door, and ended up taking to her and her buddy for like half an hour. Fun times

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