Zaijian (Goodbye)

So my time here in Beijing is all but over. Today, Friday, is my last day of class, and then early morning on Sunday I fly to Hong Kong for a few days.

I have really enjoyed Beijing. When I first arrived from Tokyo I thought, in comparison, that Beijing was just chaotic, dirty, and crowded. It is: but the chaos is, somewhat, controlled, there are beautiful parts of the city: lush parks, immaculate temples, and awe-inspiring modern architectural wonders, and while you can't really evade the crowds, you get used to them. I haven't even left yet and I'd already like to come back.

Eating birthday noodles.
(although actually it is just one really long noodle, which symbolizes long life)

The host family situation was interesting. If I could go back, would I opt to live in an apartment? No. Living with a family yielded great cultural insight and offered an opportunity for language practice. It also got me away from the modern parts of the city and allowed me to see more of everyday Beijing life. On the flip side, would I do it again? No.

The Great Wall at Huanghua.

Last weekend I went to the Great Wall. There are many sections of the wall that you can visit around Beijing. The most famous is Badaling, which is a restored section of the wall not far from the city proper. It is supposedly wonderful, but the problem is that you have to fight through hordes of tourists and souvenir vendors to see anything of it. For a more genuine experience I opted to go to the Huanghua section of the wall, which is unrestored and not as touristed. The government, so I've heard, actually discourages visitors going there, as 1) the wall is unrestored and therefore possibly dangerous (no guard rails or security as at Badaling), 2) they feel that heavy traffic might be detrimental to the wall (there were definitely times when steps crumbled beneath our feet and stones moved as we leaned against the walls), and 3) tourism there takes away revenue from the restored portions of the wall. Well, Huanghua was great. We hiked around for about half a day and were about the only ones there, we had the whole wall to ourselves. The surrounding landscape was almost as impressive as the wall itself, with rivers, undulating hills, and mountains in the distance, and definitely heightened the experience.

Some portions were incredibly steep, at least this section had stairs though.

Yesterday was awesome:
Yesterday was my last day that I had the bike as I was returning it to my friend/coworker yesterday night. I think I've already said this, but biking around Beijing is awesome! It's fun, and a convenient alternative to fighting traffic in a taxi, bus, or, wow, I guess you could have a car here and drive around yourself, but wow, why, what a way to ruin your day... Anyways, so I was riding my bike to school yesterday (about a 30 min. ride), and as I do it everyday I guess I was a bit complacent. I was cruising along, I had my IPOD going and I was looking at a park to my right where a group of elderly people were doing early-morning TaiChi. The bike-paths here are between the sidewalks and the car lanes and are about the size of car lanes themselves. I was going with the flow of traffic but it's not unusual for bikes to go against the flow, and also cars cut in and out of the bike lanes, so you have to pay attention. I wasn't. I turned my gaze from the super-seniors in the park back to the road only to find a bike with a cart in tow heading straight for me. The bike took up about half the lane and I tried to swerve to avoid it but didn't have enough time. I avoided the bike but my right knee, my sweet, twice-operated-on right knee, slammed right into the wall of the cart. Everything really went into slow motion right before impact: I thought, I remember thinking this "it's going to hit my knee, it's going to hit my knee, it's going to hit my knee... yep, that's my knee". I was in shock for a bit and just crawled from the bike path to the sidewalk. The cart/bicycle driver was nice and helped me up. He apologized but I told him it was my fault. I was really afraid that I had messed up my knee, but I think it's ok. It's bruised and cut up, but it doesn't feel like there is any internal damage.

Later on yesterday I thought, "ok, the wreck had to have happened". It's a requisite Chinese story. Everyone I know with a bike has been in a wreck, I wouldn't have had the full Beijing bicycle experience without one. Also, it was my last day with the bike, so it couldn't have happened the next day, it had to have happened when it did. Haha. Take it in stride, take it in stride...

Saying goodbye to my bike the night before I was set to return it.

I had arranged to return the bike to my friend/coworker at 6:00 and then we were going to go out to eat. Around 4:00 I stopped by a market to buy a couple of shirts for work in Germany (Polo polos for $4 baby). I parked my bike alongside about 3000 others and secured it with two locks. Broad daylight. I was in the market for about an hour and then left around 5:15, 45 min. before I was set to return the bike. I walked outside, no bike. 45 minutes before I was going to return it! I walked around in circles for a bit, dumbstruck, in total disbelief. "Maybe someone just moved it."

I called him and told him what had happened and offered to pay for the bike, or at least treat him to dinner. He said that I could pay for the dinner and we'd be even. He picked up the tab though. Nice guy.

The whole experience is pretty funny,my knee still hurts, but it's funny.

Chinese class (candid photo).

My Chinese has vastly improved since I've been here. It's nowhere near good, but I can get around. I finally feel like I have a really strong base. More so, I feel like I understand the language. I'm not talking about spoken or written comprehension, but I'm saying that I understand, or am beginning to understand, Chinese as a language. Its structure, its rationale, the formation of the characters, everything has a bit of sense now. I will definitely continue with it, and am sad that I'm leaving.

I've already made reservations for hostels in both Hong Kong and Bangkok, so I'm looking forward to a good next week!

13 hao, xingqiwu (Friday the 13th)

Friday the 13th!!!! AHHHHH!!! Actually here it has no meaning. But the number 4 is bad. In Chinese, the word for 4 sounds like the word for death, so it is avoided at all costs. For example telephone numbers, addresses, etc. My building doesn't have a 4th floor, it skips from 3 right to 5. The number 9 sounds like the word for long, so long life or whatever else. When Chinese people get married they usually get married on the 9th, or in September, or the reception/procession starts at 9, so as to assure that the marriage will last.

Tonight I'm going to watch Beijing Opera, which I believe is world-famous. Each region, each bigger city, has it's own form of Opera, but I believe Jingju (Beijing opera) is the most well-known, both inside and outside of China. The opera is jam packed with elegant flowing costumes, stock characters with elaborately painted faces, and traditional Chinese lyrics sung by an all-male cast at screechingly high volumes. Should be awesome, I'm excited.

Random-unrelated-ness: For those of you who didn't hear (probably all of you) the UFC just bought Pride FC, crazy!!!

*EDIT* The Jingju cast is not, and never was, all-male. I was misinformed. It is pretty sweet though.

Beijing de shenghuo (Beijing life)

So I’m now in my 5^th week here in China and am pretty well settled in.

Beijing is really interesting. It’s called the cultural heart of China, and it just has so much to see and do. I’ve been doing some sightseeing: I went and saw the Summer Palace a couple of weekends ago, and I’ve been to the Temple of Heaven, and explored a lot of the city’s Hutongs.

The Summer Palace is an immense park located to Beijing’s northwest, almost out of the city, replete with temples, gardens, pavilions, and a huge lake, which used to serve as the “summer palace” for the royal court. It is the most beautiful place that I have been seen yet in China. It’s amazing.

Bridge at the Summer Palace.

Kites flying over the bridge at sunset.

The Temple of Heaven is also a huge park located near the center of the city. It originally served as stage for solemn rites performed to pray for good harvests, seek divine clearance, and atone for the sins of the people. Inside the Temple’s walls is a massive park, and within the park are a series of four different temples, each surrounded by its own individual wall. The temples are beautiful, with really interesting, I’ve heard quintessential, Ming architecture, and in fact they looked really interesting from my vantage point outside the walls, but for me the temples just resembled the temples/buildings that I had already seen in the Forbidden City and the Summer Palace, so as the day was beautiful I saved my money, didn’t pay to enter each temple, and spent my time walking around the budding park. I’m content with my decision.

Views from the Temple of Heaven.

The Hutongs are really neat old, crisscrossing, narrow alleyways lined with family residences. I’m not sure if the Hutongs are the streets themselves, or the housing communities that they contain, but for me they are really one and the same. The houses are really old, dating back hundreds of years, in fact some of them are historic homes protected by the government. The houses are passed down through the family too, so generations upon generations of one family line would have lived in the same house. The houses are small, one story, flat-roofed ramshackle dwellings, where I assume many family members lived packed together. The communities reminded me somewhat of shanty towns, only in really old houses, and in the middle of the city. We wandered around the streets for hours, meandering through alleyways and sneaking peaks into the homes. The Hutongs are really interesting, but many of them are being demolished in Beijing’s rush to modernize, especially with Beijing 2008 on the horizon.

Hutong from above.

Alleyway within Hutong.

I’ve gotten into a rhythm where I go out usually about three nights a week. Once I found it, the bar/club scene here is really great. Drinks are really cheap, usually about $1-$4 for both mixed drinks and beer, and I think I've seen about $10 on the really high side. This is cheap, but for China it’s comparatively pretty expensive. Consequently, most bar’s/club’s clientèle are either foreigners or pretty well-to-do Chinese. A cheap $1 beer for me isn’t so cheap when you’re a Chinese waitress making 50 cents an hour, and my semi-expensive $10 mixed drink is simply unattainable. That being said, the nightlife here for me is great. Most places resemble western clubs/bars, and mainly play American, or at least English language music, with a spattering of Chinese songs mixed in. We usually start out the nights going to ex-pat bars or college dives, and then end up at the dance clubs later on. One time the night continued on to the karaoke pod too, which is always fun. It’s so easy to meet girls here too, I’ve met so many. If you’re outgoing and you can speak a little bit of Chinese, they love you.

My friend's last night.

Club story: One of my really good friends that I made here is a 24-year-old German guy from Frankfurt. He was here for four weeks and returned to Germany last week. On his penultimate night here six of us went out for a farewell celebration to a nice dance club and dropped $25 dollars each to buy 3 bottles of Johnny Walker Whiskey and two bottles of Coke. Now, this was after already starting out at another bar, and he had been drinking since that afternoon, so he was already feeling pretty good by this time. We arrived at the club about 12:30am. We drank, dance, mingled, and by 2:00am no one knew where my friend was. I called his cell phone and a Chinese guy answered. I was somewhat taken aback (by this time I was pretty drunk as well so it didn’t really seem sooo strange that some random Chinese guy was answering my German friend’s phone). I handed the phone to my Chinese friend and he was told that they had just gone to a different bar. Ok, we still had a lot of whiskey and were having fun, so we stayed. The next day I tried to call my friend to ask him how his night was but his phone wouldn’t work. He called me later though, from a different phone, and the first thing that he said to me was “Matt, can you tell me what I did last night?” He couldn’t remember anything after leaving the dance club that we were at, in fact he didn’t even remember leaving. His roommate told him that he got home at 6:00, but he had no idea how. His hand, he said, felt like it was broken, and his wallet and cell phone had been stolen. He described it as a “Dude Where’s My Car?” night, where he just had no idea what happened. Crazy, but somewhat funny. He’s a great guy, I’ll definitely hang out with him in Frankfurt.

Geoff asked about food… The food here is both great and not so great. Beijing Roast Duck is probably one of the most delicious dishes that I have ever had. The duck isn’t really seasoned, spiced, or marinated, but the meat itself is just sooo succulent, so wonderful. It is served with duck sauce, sugar, garlic, cucumbers, onions, and (depending on where you go) a variety of other ingredients, which you can mix to your liking along with slices of duck in a flour wrap. It’s fantastic. Hot pot is also a Chinese staple. It’s a big pot of boiling water (plain or spiced) in the middle of the table, and you order raw meat, vegetables, noodles, whatever, and put it in the pot and boil it yourself. Then you take it out and can dip it in a variety of sauces (peanut, barbecue, etc.). Lamb, beef, noodles, and vegetables are staples, but you can also order, which I have, or rather have had ordered for me, such delicacies as congealed lamb’s blood and pig’s brain. Ummmm. Baozi and jioazi, large and small Chinese dumplings, are also great. Some of the food isn’t that great though. Here in Beijing, I think in Northern China in general, everything is prepared with a ton of oil. Everything is incredibly greasy, oily, and fatty. Also, the Chinese seem to really like bony things, so pretty much all of the dishes have a ton of bones. At home, my host father is used to it, so he eats really bony fish really quickly and just spits the bones out everywhere, or probably swallows some of them. I just can’t eat those dishes though because it’s just too difficult to get through all the bones to the meat. A lot of restaurants will serve chicken feet as appetizers, which have no meat, just skin, but the Chinese like to suck it off and nibble on the bones.

Food story: Another one of my friends, another German, traveled down to Shanghai with two visiting friends. They went to a restaurant and he was translating the menu and ordering for himself and his friends. In Chinese, the name for most meats is the name for the animal followed by the character ‘rou’ (meat), so you have the character for cow followed by the character ‘rou’, and you’ve got ‘cow meat’ or beef. The same holds true for pig rou, sheep rou, and also donkey rou, and even, yes, dog rou. Anyways, he read what he thought was the character for cow. It looked a bit strange so he asked the waiter, in Chinese, if it was beef. The waiter didn’t say ‘cow, but said something that sounded like ‘cow.’ As they were in Shanghai, my friend chalked up the seeming slight difference in pronunciation to the Shanghai dialect. They got there food and they were eating some really fatty, really bony, really disgusting meat. They couldn’t eat it. My friend knew it wasn’t beef but had no idea what he had ordered. He called over the waiter and asked what it was. The waiter tried to explain, and then resorted to charades and used his hand to make jumping motions on the table. My friend made bunny ears but the waiter said “no, no, no” and told him to follow him. They went over to a fish tank, and my friend was just mystified, he had no idea what it was that he just ate. There was no way rabbit was in the fish tank. The waiter looked around for a while but couldn’t find. My friend had to know so he insisted that he look again. Finally the waiter smiled, got a net, and fished out a plate-sized toad.

ConocoPhillips (COPC) has an office here in Beijing, and last week I went and met with the president of COPC China, who introduced me to COPC’s operations here in Asia and presented some of the projects going on in China. The scale of these projects, like the scale of everything here in China, is just massive. He also gave me a tour of the facilities. The office was really impressive, and really interesting because everything was laid out in accordance with fengshui. When I was there I met an American reservoir engineer, a real nice guy, probably about 27 or so, who has been with COPC for four years and has been working here for a little over a year. He gave me a lot of great information about COPC as a company and also about life/working life here in China. The best part though, he had an extra bike which he is letting me borrow. Awesome! The weather is finally getting a bit warmer here, so it’s so cool biking around the city. I'm whizzing through streets, and I've got a totally awesome bell: Ring, Ring, I'm coming through! Traffic is crazy though, so I’m hoping I don’t die. The streets are so congested, and I've heard that some 1000 new cars are added to Beijing's streets each day. Actually though, more than the traffic, I'm more worried about my bike getting stolen. Both my Lonely Planet guidebook and my school’s administrators strongly suggested that if you want a bike in Beijing, under no circumstances are you to purchase a new one. My bike is new. When my friend showed me the bike he wanted to give me I couldn’t stop smiling. I told him “I don’t want to take this. It’s going to get stolen”. He said not to worry about it though, “if it gets stolen it gets stolen, that’s China.” He’s already had three bikes stolen, but he said that he buys new ones because his Chinese friend is adamant that he not buy a used bike. “Buying used bikes,” his friend says, “just encourage the bicycle theft industry, as about 85% of used bikes are stolen bikes.” His new bike only costed about $35 anyway.

We’ll see what happens. I’ve got two pretty sweet locks, but I guess that doesn’t matter much. As of now I still have it though, well, at least I think so, it was there when I parked it this morning…

At my school I attended a week-long Chinese medicine/massage class. It was great, and really interesting. He asked for volunteers to demonstrate the massage techniques and I jumped up there. Wow, it was fantastic. I don't know how much I believe in the effectiveness of the massages, pressure points, herbal remedies, suction techniques, whatever else when used to treat actual diseases, but one day the Chinese doctor, our instructor, showed us acupuncture. Crazy stuff! I had one needle in my knee, one, and my whole leg felt numb. My friend had one needle in his forearm, and he couldn't move his arm. Strange stuff.

My back, two days after I volunteered to help demonstrate some kind of suction therapy technique.

China is sooooo cheap! I eat lunch everyday in business district near my school, so my meals are a bit more expensive, but I'm still only paying $3-$5. If I go out of the commercial districts though, I can eat full meals for as little as 80 cents. I take a bus everyday, which costs me 5 cents, if I take the subway its about 4o cents. A twenty minute taxi ride is about $3. I bought 3 custom tailored, fitted dress shirts for Germany this summer and payed $10 a piece. I bought some Dolce & Gabbana jeans, the shop assistant assured me they were authentic, for about $13, and even then I'm pretty sure I got ripped off (it was my first time bargaining). Speaking of which, you bargain for just about everything here, which is both fun and frustrating. Also speaking of which, most everything here is fake. Just about every girl is walking around with a Louie Vuitton or Prada purse, it's funny. I've bought quite a few pirated DVDs here, recent ones like "300" and "The Perfume" for $1 a piece. I'm going to try to buy the new TMNT movie (I know it probably sucks but I'm curious to see it). This fakeness extends past clothes and DVDs though. When I was at the COPC office they told me that they have a lot of problems buying quality materials, electrical components, whatever here in China, as most everything is either fake, faulty, or really cheaply made. Interesting...