The following is a collection of emails describing my travels and experiences while living and traveling in China. The title comes from a previously common Chinese word used to describe foreigners, "guizi", meaning devil or ghost. So when people ask what nationality I am, I say "meiguo guizi" ("American devil"). They usually laugh. (It's like being asked where you're from in America and saying "Arkansas redneck".)
| 30.03.2003 | Shanghai nights: spicy pigs guts, dentures in a wok, and 6th graders | |
| 11.04.2003 | The neverending saga of Cookie the Shanghainese wonderchef | |
| 11.05.2003 | I am that loser | |
| 26.05.2003 | Gone daddy, gone, the love is gone | |
| 18.06.2003 | The lamest seduction attempt in my life | |
| 02.07.2003 | Just call me MBA bartender | |
| 01.12.2003 | The Gambler (Chinese Epilogue) |
Apparently I forgot to tell a lot of my friends (and family...oops) that I was moving to the world's largest Communist country (aka, China). Well, now you know, so quit complaining.
"Why, how, when, what's wrong with you?" These are all appropriate questions you might ask. Why? Job market sucks and I went stir-crazy in San Diego after graduating from INSEAD in December. How? Logged on to the internet and found a job teacher English to sixth graders in Shanghai. (There SO many things wrong with that sentence. Me. Teaching. English. Sixth graders. Not sure how you could make that much worse actually. It already has sixth-graders and Internet in the same sentence. Ouch!) When? About a month ago. I didn't tell anyone, cuz...uh, I had this sneaking suspicion I would get my ass tossed out of the country within a few days. Hasn't happened (yet), so I figured it was safe to tell people. My contract (which says that I have two years prior teaching experience--uh...yeah...) expires in mid-June. What's wrong with you? So, so many things. But I haven't gotten food poisoning yet, so I'm doing okay. (Yes, still pissed off at Romania.)
Just to keep you reading, I'll give you the weird stuff first, then give you the normal.
Well, I have a decent apartment (with a western toilet--can't flush toilet paper down it, but at least you can sit) and a cook (included in contract) that makes me dinner every night, which is pretty sweet. The food isn't half bad (no weird stuff yet, but I suspect he'll make his move soon), but the cook is quite a character. He has a few...habits.
First--the dentures in the wok. After we eat, he goes into the kitchen and begins washing up. Fair enough. This is a reasonable thing to do after eating. Washing your dentures in the wok isn't. Which he does. I saw him do this and immediately began banging my head on the table. His hearing is bad, so he didn't notice.
Second--verbal bullets. He speaks like machine-gun fire. Now although Chinese often sounds like machine-gun fire to the western ear, he is 50 caliber. He doesn't speak English, but tries to learn a few words every meal. So he'll say, "Chinese 'he', English?" (Meaning, this the chinese word, what's the english word.) Fair enough. I'd do the same. But he ends it with the equivalent of a one-two punch, by practically screaming "Dui, bu dui?!!!!" (Yes, no?) and pointing with his finger in my face. And if I don't understand something he'll scream, "Dong ma?!!!!" (Understand?).
Third--the frickin' peanuts!!! Okay, this is a story told to me by the previous teacher that lived here. Luke, the teacher, bought a 2 pound bag of peanuts to snack on. When he came home, Cookie (as I have taken to calling the cook, cuz I don't actually know his name) immediately protested Luke eating the peanuts. When Luke took a break from eating the peanuts, Cookie made his move. He poured the 2 pound bag on the table and went through them one by one, inspecting each peanut individually with chopsticks. If it was okay, he would put it in the good pile, nod appreciatively and say "Hao" (good). If it was bad, he would yell "Bu hao!", shake his head, and put it in the bad pile. He did this with the entire bag. On later inspection, Luke found no discernable difference between the good and bad pile. And when Luke left the apartment, Cookie left a note saying he could tell him where to buy "good" peanuts. I am still scared to buy peanuts.
And when Luke called me one time when I wasn't home, Cookie kept him on the phone for 20 minutes. He doesn't speak English!!! He speaks like 50 words (badly). Luke tried and tried to get off the phone, but couldn't do it until I walked in while he was on the phone. Luke hasn't called me since.
Pigs guts. Okay, so all the stories you hear about food in China are basically true. They see no point in tossing out anything that you possibly be digested. (which is fair enough. Why waste a perfectly good intestinal tract?) So I went to REALLY good Seschaunese restaurant last night. The food is liquid fire. It's beautiful to look at, and really tasty. But the morning after, you'll probably have an intimate toilet encounter, from the chilis. (Said another way, you'll have a Mexican morning after, not a Romanian morning after.) Anyone, one of the dishes, was pig bowels. Again, beautiful, spicy, but...pig bowels. I tried a few bites, but I just don't the like texture. (Or wondering what he ate that day.) I felt like the pussy westerner, with all my Chinese friends downing the spicy food without pausing. My friends told me one of the greatest delicacies is the tubes through which the eggs of a female pass when ovulating, because there are very small and there are only two per animal. I don't even know the name of that organ! (Yeah, yeah, ill-bred male.)
Goose knuckle. This actually isn't so weird. Well, relatively speaking. I went out to dinner with the company that hired me and one of the courses during the meal was a goose foot in some sauce. Okay, I was already full from the eel and tofu I had eaten previously, but I figured I could top it off with some goose foot. So I tried eating it, but it's amazingly tricky. When I found myself nibbling on the knuckle, I figured I was out of my league and drank my beer. Now, it is a little known (but quickly learned) custom in China that the guest's glass must never be empty (and all protests will be ignored by the dutiful host). So after finishing innumerable glasses of wine and beer, Luke and I figured out to leave a little booze in our glasses. Then our host kept saying "Gam bei!" (a chinese cheers during which you empty your glass). So we decided to shut this down before it killed us. We ganged up on him, taking turns saying "Gam bei" to just him. After he figured out what we were doing he laughed and admitted defeat.
Oh yeah, almost forget. Most of the time, I'm the only white guy around, and I get stared at a lot. Luckily I'm not a blond girl. People touch you all the time on the streets (only the hair I think) without asking. But people will literally stand right next to me and stare at me. If you stare back, it won't make any difference. And sometimes, people will just follow you right next to you, matching your pace. It's not malicious, but it's really annoying after a while. But the most annoying thing is that to a lot of people, you're not a person. You're a wallet on legs. Street vendors are convinced that no matter what you might have on your wrist, you desparately need a fake watch from them. And they'll follow you doggedly saying, "Hello! Hello!" about 20 times before giving up. Okay, not everyone is this bad, but most are pretty bad. All that aside, there is some REALLY neat stuff to buy here (sculptures, antiques, etc.). I'm broke and in debt, but I enjoy looking. (But I can't look for more than a few seconds or someone will come out and say "Hello! Hello!")
Anyway, enough nonsense. The teaching is tough (kids are loud and rambunctious), but I am enjoying Shanghai. It's a very metropolitan city. And I am doing what I came here to do, which is to learn Mandarin. It's part hard, part easy. The easy part is the fact that there is no grammar. No conjugations, and no verb tenses. The tough part is the tones and the script. At any rate, I'm learning, albeit slowly. And I am learning ping pong, believe it or not. Now if you have not seen Chinese play ping pong, they take it seriously. Ever heard of capoeira? It's a Brazilian martial art that's very acrobatic. The Chinese version is ping pong. They're jumping and flying everywhere. I can't even keep up. But I was told I have "promise" by a very friendly old man. He seems to have taken me under his ping pong wing. We can't talk to each other (yet), but he's very nice. The students are very friendly (outside of class) and always crowd around me and ask me to play basketball with them (they LOVE basketball). And the school gardener invited me to his greenhouse as often as I like. I haven't figured out the toilets yet and the noodles get a little old day after day, but it's pretty nice. (Admittedly, I'm a crappy teacher, and by all rights should be tried for crimes against humanity for even standing in front of a class of students.) But I guess it'll be okay till June, when I may go backpack around China for a few months. Haven't figured that out yet.
Take care. And come visit me or you suck. (Unless you're my family or Australian--the only people who have visited me overseas despite my many offers. Go Oz!)
Love
Matt
Okay, I normally try not to write my long-ass emails very often, but man, I just have so much material to work with! Bad translations, cheap toilet paper, strange names, and monologues in the kitchen! Where do I start?!
Well, how about the bad accent and translations? Now anyone who has learned a new language knows that invariably some translations fail in particularly embarrassing or funny ways (usually at the speaker's expense). For example, while living in a Germany, I once used the Sie (formal address) with a German girlfriend, which is roughly equivalent to calling her Ms. Whatever instead of her first name. This was more cute than embarrassing. But occasionally it gets worse. Like the time I tried to say something tastes like ass, an expression that simply does not exist in German, so people took it literally. Yeah... Well, Cookie (oh yeah, he's back) had a few of these. I was leaving my apartment to go to my Chinese lessons and he was trying to explain to me that we are helping each other study (his English, my Chinese--though in actual fact I avoid learning anything from him, as advised to me by every Chinese speaking person that has met him). But when translated directly, what he said was "You and I study each other." And although homosexual behavior is now legally only a minor form on insanity in China (not criminal anymore), I just do not want him telling people that we study each other every night after dinner. (And it doesn't help that someone at my school hit on me in front of my Chinese teacher, who now doesn't stop making comments.) Also, Cookie insists on telling people I am his teacher, which is sure to get me fired, given his English. I can just picture him proudly telling someone "Matt is my teach...Dong ma?!!!!" (He still hits me with the one-two punch "Du/du bui!!!" after saying something in English.) The other funny thing he said, was when he was trying to tell me to sit in the taxi. But he has trouble with S's and instead said, "Please shit in cab." No, Cookie, I don't think the cab driver would appreciate me shitting in cab. And of course, he followed up with "Du/du bui?!" Bu, bu, bu!!! No, no, no!!! I made him practice saying sit several times.
Now to be fair, I had my own screw with the language pretty early on. My Chinese teacher asked me what food I liked to eat. Being in China, I naturally responded "Chinese". When this drew a shocked response from my teacher, I sat quietly wondering what faux pas I had just made. She quickly informed me that the word "Zhong guo ren" she had just taught me meant not simply Chinese, but rather Chinese people. I had apparently just told her I like to eat Chinese people.
Back to Cookie. One time Luke and I were eating dinner with Cookie, who randomly explained to me that an American would waste the goop left over at the bottom of the wok after cooking. He then poured it into a large bowl of rice and ate it. It was just plain gross. I'm not yet convinced that the ability to digest something necessitates that one do so to avoid throwing it in the trash. Luke looked in the bowl and immediately told Cookie that he too would "waste" the goop. ("Conversations" between the three of are actually hugely entertaining.) I couldn't let this one go, because I simply couldn't believe what Cookie had said. So I found my dirty Chinese book and looked up the word poop and explained to him that that his current "meal" was on the fast track to the toilet, conveniently located 4 feet from the dinner table, via his intestines. Luke and I are keeled over laughing and Cookie is just looking at us like we're crazy. And then there's also the talking in the kitchen. It's not quiet either. I don't know what he's saying, but he seems very passionate about whatever it is. And even when he speaks in English, most of the time it is complete nonsense. Now it's okay if you have a bad accent but the words make sense. And even the reverse is quite common (this includes half of the educated people you know who speak nonsense with a good accent). But he speaks nonsense with a completely unintelligible accent. I say bu dong (don't understand) a lot.
Oh quick interlude. One very cool thing about China. You can buy a 20 roll of toilet paper for $1.15!!! How cool is that?
Okay, on to nonsense at my school. I was teaching slang English words to the students and we were on the word fat farm (a diet center
this was relevant to the vocabulary they studying with their normal English teacher). Now this actually isn't a very dangerous thing to do, as Chinese are not as
ample as Americans. So I asked one of the students to use it in a sentence after giving them an example. The student stands up (as they do when answering questions) and points to his friend next to him and starts the sentence with the word
he, I immediately cut him off and asked for a new volunteer.
One of my classes has a teacher named Mr. Zhu. Literally, Mr. Pig. After a previous teacher called him Mr. Pig in front his students, the name stuck and now students look for any opportunity to make a comment about their teacher being a pig. The phrase fat farm,
hmm, I should have seen that one coming. I asked the class to describe their teacher using a vocabulary list they had just learned. They started using them a little bit at first, and eventually completely abandoned the list and just started calling him fat and stupid. He was in the class and speaks English well. I just shook my head and stopped the exercise. After class the teacher smacked the kid on the head with book and stuck his head one inch from a full trash can (true story).
Oh, here is my favorite part. The names!!!! You wouldn't believe some of the English names kids give themselves. Chinese people often give themselves an English name to help English speakers. This is actually quite sensible. And when my Chinese gets better I'll pick a Chinese name. But I'll make sure to pick one better than Satan, Diablo, or Winner. Honestly, I just wonder where they get these names from. Satan is a girl in one of my classes (though she pronounces it Satin, which I actually find quite pretty). I discretely told her teacher that Satan might not be the most appropriate name for a girl. Fly is the name of a really short boy in one of my classes. Rawley is the name of a very intelligent girl in one of my classes. I thought the name sounded reasonable until Luke informed it's a boy's name in Britain. Another teacher named Bob told me about some of his students. One student apparently told Bob he chose the name Winner
because it means champion? Another student chose the name Stone, because he likes The Rock from
WWF, but he didn't want to copy it and be unoriginal? And there is one school where the teachers occasionally name the students. Sometimes they name the students Lou. Fair name (in American English). But the teachers do it to signal to other teachers that the kid is a
Lou-ser? And in British English it means, of course, toilet (though spelled differently).
Well not much more to say other than that I am still amazed at Chinese's ability
to eat. Now civilized Westerners pride themselves on their ability to
clean their plate? Sorry. Those people have nothing on Chinese. You haven't
seen a clean plate till you've seen a Chinese person eat. Though admittedly this
is more common among the older generation. Younger people are apt to waste food.
Which of course reminded of the old American adage that parents tell their kids,
eat all your food. You know there are kids starving in China. What do
they say here? There are kids starving in other parts of China? (BTW,
there is a joke in my family about that. Now kids, finish your meal, Matt
is starving in China. Anyway, for now, I still haven't developed the nerve to
clean a chicken leg the way Cookie does. It'd be cool if I could, but I just
can't stand the feel of sinew and tendons in my mouth. Fair enough. I can't even
get him to try Oreos (which for some weird reason I eat like mad in Asia nothing
else, no chips, no soda, no candy, no cookies, no cake, no junk food, etc. Just
Chinese food, green tea, and Oreos).
Take care. Hope you all had a laugh. I do every day. :)
Fro
It's official. I am THAT guy. You know the one. The guy who goes to a different country, buys the t-shirt, and wears IN the city. Yeah, I am officially one of the people we made fun of at the beaches in San Diego when I was teenager. Ouch. Pretty painful. But fuck it. Shanghai is frickin' cool city, and I'm happy to show that I like. Now admittedly I needn't have carried a McDonald's drink and apple pie in a very touristy area while wearing said t-shirt, but I figured it was tough to go much lower than teaching English to 500 12 year-olds after spending 1 back-breaking year and 35 grand on an MBA... So I bought two shirts! Hah!
Besides, I figured the fact that I can haggle in Chinese meant the locals would cut me a little slack, and admittedly I do get complimented on my Chinese within a few sentences of beginning the haggling process. Now I thought I should point out a funny fact here. My Chinese teacher taught me to ALWAYS begin purchasing something like this:
Me: Duo shao qian? (How much does it cost?)
Them: <some price>
Me: Tai gui le! Pian yi yi dian, hao ma? (Too expensive! Cheaper, okay?)
Without exception, this is how a white person MUST begin discussing price (on the streets and in some stores) in order to avoid paying 2 to 10 times what it should cost. (You can even do one better by then asking them an absurdly low price as your next offer.) It is not an exaggeration to say that Chinese people "gain face" by bragging to their friends about how badly they ripped off Westerners. Note, the point here is not how much money they made, but how badly the smart Chinese person ripped off the dumb Westerner. (This may sound harsh, but don't judge till you have done business in China. I've already been flat out lied to by my employer to get me out to a school in a different city. I got there and was "informed" that I had three hours to spend teaching the students. I was told it was a vacation, even when I asked point blank if they expected me to teach. I don't know anyone that has been here a while and doesn't have a similar story.) That said, acting like that extra 20 cents you're arguing over is a fortune is a ton of fun. :)
Back to me haggling in Chinese. As I was saying, I can pretty much do it start to finish in Chinese, which is pretty cool. Now admittedly, I get robbed like a bandit cuz I suck at the actual haggling, but at least I get robbed like a bandit in Chinese. he he (Rule of thumb, they ask Westerners two to three times what they ask locals, which is still way too much.)
Next point, no I don't have SARS. It's nice that you care, but stop asking.
On to Cookie (yeah, yeah, I know). I have apparently impressed him sufficiently to be awarded the highest compliment he could confer upon a "Mei guo ren" (American)--"Ni shi Zhong guo ren" (You are Chinese.) I received this medal of honor after explaining to him in Chinese that I am beginning to learn Han zi (Chinese characters) and I wanted to go so far as learning "xie maobi" (calligraphy painting of the characters). (I was inspired to this after walking through a park one day and seeing some older people painting calligraphy with brushes and water on the stones (no paint, just water). I thought it was so neat and so relaxing, I decided to practice when I get good enough. It was neat, though, I just walked up to the group and began talking to them and they were so surprised that I could talk to them (not very well, though) that they explained to me what they were doing and painted any characters I asked. I asked them to paint China and Shanghai, which of course they were very happy to do. (Note, I can recognize but not write China and Shanghai in Hanzi, pronounced "hahn tsih", because they both have one easy and distinct character and one very difficult character.)
Anyway, the funny part about Cookie proclaiming me to be Chinese, was that Luke was there and he "ranked" both me and Luke on a scale from 1 to 5. I earned a four and Luke earned a one or two due to not learning Chinese. But it wasn't just the number. It was the way he held his fingers so weakly and the look of mild disgust when he ranked Luke. And Cookie has this strange habit of telling us how much of our stuff he doesn't want. He'll point to something and say, "You give me, me NO want!" The best was when Luke walked in wearing new leather shoes and he did this about his new shoes! I could piss myself laughing! How random is that? Can you imagine someone walking up to and them seeing your new shoes and yelling, "You give me, me NO want!" accompanied by a vicious downward swoop of the index finger to emphasize the point. So Luke began reversing it on him, by pointing to everything he cooked and saying the same thing. It was so fucking funny!!! (I swear sometime, I'm going to setup a video camera to record dinner with three of us. It would definitely earn me money.) He also picked up my small bag of food that I bought and proceeded to pull it out item by item giving each an appropriate look of disgust before explaining (in one word, "No!") that he would never eat such a thing (like muffins, cheese, etc.).
Another strange thing is when he asks me to tell him to say words in English. So occasionally I can break through his thick Shanghainese accent enough to figure out the Mandarin word and look it up in a dictionary. Then I tell him in English and he repeats it syllable by syllable...completely wrong. Sometimes it's so wrong that after 5 attempts I just give up and await the day he uses it, I look at him totally confused, and he tells me accusatorily "You told me this word!" (well, yes, but not that pronunciation.) I can never tell whether he means very good or vinegar. In answer to your question, no, there's not much overlap between those words...but he finds it.
Lastly, he informed me I have good burping technique. And alas, Luke's is pretty poor. We found this out after he burped loudly one too many times at the table without apparently noticing it. So I told Luke I was going to make it my goal to shock him. No matter how much Coke I drank and no matter how hard I tried, he never noticed, not even once. (Note, I think my upstairs neighbors noticed.) Anyway, after getting totally frustrated (with looks of dismay from Luke at both of us--Cookie for doing it unconsciously and me for trying to get his attention), I asked him if I was doing it right and nodded appreciatively and told me that I was pulling it from down deep, which is the proper technique. I swear, sometimes I am so grateful Luke is there, because otherwise NO ONE would EVER believe my stories!!!
Luke and I had this fantastic idea how to prune the classes down to the students that would benefit from foreign teachers. Dumpsters. Every time we decide a student is a screw off, we just chuck them in the dumpster and have the class monitors wheel it out every time it gets full.
Next, there is Pajama Season. This is a Shanghainese thing. Some people just walk around in pajamas. It doesn't matter where or when (not at work though). But the strange thing is it's not their sleeping pajamas. It's not like they woke up and were too lazy to change. No. They wake up, shower, put on their outdoor pajamas, and go shopping. You'll literally see people riding their bikes on major roads in their pajamas.
And briefly, today's experiences:
1) I am more handsome than the corn. This was not a faulty translation. I was at a birthday BBQ and they had corn whose packaging claimed to be "handsome corn". I held it next to me and was informed I was more handsome. Sweet.
2) We broke the rollercoaster. At the park where we had the BBQ, there was a logjammer-style rollercoaster (a water rollercoaster). I was in the car with three light girls and when we got to the rubber conveyor belt that carries you to the top, our car just stopped. We backed up traffic and soon all cars were stuck behind us. First I hopped out to see if it was my fat ass holding things up. Nope. Then the girls jumped out and it still didn't move. Grrrreeeaaaat. (Okay, in point of fact, we went up a bit at first, then slid backwards to a stop. Then I hopped out.)
3) I "saved American face". There is of course in China the notion of face. Well it applies to representing your country as well. So after being challenged by a girl to a drinking contest, I was informed America's "face" was at stake (as represented by me). So I downed my beer (2/3 liter) and challenged her to another 2/3 liter bottle (each). After I finished first again, I decided to stop her from "saving face" all over herself by taking her next beer and replacing it with an empty can while she wasn't looking. She had "saved so much face" by then, she didn't notice.
Well, that's all for now. Long live Elvis.
Matt
It's official. My new next-door neighbor can snore through a foot-thick concrete wall. I assumed it was just paranoia at first, based on my past record of roommates, that led me to assume it was actually snoring and not just construction. After all, the wall is solid concrete. My paranoia is not unfounded. There was the El Salvadorian who smelled like a corpse and snored like a beaver with a chainsaw (and surfed the Internet in his underwear when he thought I was not there), the football player who kicked the door in pretending to be a cop while I was with a girl (the rest of the house had a betting pool on my success possibilities ranging from foul-tip to third-base), the megalomaniac who constantly informed me that virtually everything I saw was made by his company, the salesguy who confessed to me he was at an "all time low" because he was only cheating on his girlfriend with three other women, the fundamentalistic Christian who was like Quick Draw McGraw with the TV remote when anything "impure" came on television. (Gosh, what a trip down memory lane.)
Anyway, so I moved into this great new apartment (after quitting my job-yay!) and it's fantastic! It's quiet, it's in a pretty area, the room has a great view overlooking a park (a rarity in Shanghai), it's in the city center, it's just perfect. Except for the neighbor that snores with a megaphone strapped to his face. Seriously, it's inhuman. This man's snoring sounds like rhythmic drilling in the middle of the night. Through a frickin' concrete wall! Anyway, I bought a fan to create ambient noise that basically drowns it out.
So, yes, I quit my job. I know it's heart-breaking. No more kids sleeping in class, reading pirated computer game manuals in the front row while I'm teaching, talking so loud I have to yell to shut them up. As heart-breaking as it was, I figure I'll survive. Actually, I have to be serious for a minute. I was really touched at how sad some kids were when I left. Some even cried. It made me feel good that they actually cared, but I had to remind myself that I was basically a show pony and it was not my fantastic teaching skills the students would be missing. There were two things that really touched me. The first was a boy that I assumed was just talkative that the teachers told me became much more confident in my class. This is the only thing I consider an accomplishment during my time at that school. The rest was entertainment. The other thing that touched me was this really brilliant boy that I really liked was so sad when he found out I was leaving. I liked him so much because he was so friendly, brighter than probably the rest of the class combined, and...a total trouble-maker in every class but mine! Everytime I saw him he was being scolded by a teacher. But he always had this smile on his face that said, "Yeah, you're mad, but you'll get over it cuz I'm such a good student." I love this kid! Anyway, he told me very seriously that if he grows up and earns a lot of money, he's going to come to America and visit me. I was so touched. And this kid is so smart, that I expect to see him show up on my doorstep in ten years. And if he's anything like me, he'll ask to sleep on the couch!
So now I teach private lessons about 12 hours a week and study mandarin otherwise. It's sooooo much nicer! I get free calligraphy lessons from old people at the park. I just walk up and ask them to show me, and they do it happily for hours. I think they are just shocked to see a white person speaking Chinese (even if just barely). The one thing though is, while I do my homework in this nice park, every Chinese person walking by stops and stares while I practice writing my characters. Chinese take the art of writing very seriously. And with good reason. The Chinese characters are an art form by themselves. And people often judge you somewhat by how you write. So I always spend a lot of time practicing writing to make my writing look nice, and it seems to be okay. People sometimes say, "Hen piao liang", very pretty. (I practice with a drawing pen that looks nicer than a normal pen.) Although in theory it gives me a lot of speaking practice because so many people stop and talk to me, there are two problems. One, I can't understand the Shanghainese accent at all, so when they stop and talk it's just frustrating or embarassing (I end up having to say something like, "Yes, I do understand Chinese. Just not when you speak it.") But it's shows the Chinese are very open. It's quite nice actually that they are so interested in foreigners learning their language. The second problem is, it takes time away from actually learning. Again, if I could understand their accent, no prob. More speaking practice. But I can't, so it just wastes time. And there is the weird magnet factor. Oh yes, they come and talk to me too. One man today stopped and talked to me and began "helping" me to read my Chinese character flash card by reading them out as soon as I pulled the next one. Which of course helps me not at all, because he's just told me the answer. After the second one, I asked him to stop because it was not helping. Then he said, "But I think you need practice with your pronunciation." I bit my lip just in time to stop myself from telling him, "No I don't. You do." He told me I was taking the long way to learn Chinese by learning Pinyin (the Chinese sounds written in English characters). This is of course complete nonsense, because if you don't learn this you have no way of knowing what they should sound like, especially when Shanghainese people are speaking to you. The the old man told me, he hadn't heard of my Mandarin school, and therefore didn't know if my teacher was any good. He said he could come in and listen to her and judge her for me. I politely told him I was confident my teacher spoke well and I didn't need his judgement of her. (Note, my Mandarin teacher has a beautiful voice and is the only Chinese person I know whose speech I try to mimic. She is the only reason I pay the exorbitant price of my school.) He told me I needed to practice speaking (which is true) and that I could mimic his voice to improve it (which is not true). To be fair, I am quite religious about not mimicking anyone's voice but my teacher. When I find a native speaker who speaks well, I am zealous about learning their voice. I did the same thing in Germany. I met two lawyers in Dusseldorf that spoke beautiful German and just tried to mimic their voices. So anyway, this old man's offer to judge my teacher was like the fat old out of shape man offering a new basketball player to judge his coach, who happens to be Michael Jordan. I finally just ignored him because his advice was all garbage. (To his credit, his English was excellent and he was self-taught. Unfortunately, he never taught himself anything worth telling anyone else.)
The downside to quitting my job?
No more Cookie! I know, it's almost heart-wrenching. Will there still be stories of weirdness and eccentricity in the life of Matt? Rest assured, there will. I am a weird magnet. I attract the "interesting" people in any area. Fortunately for me, I'm pretty unfazeable. The loonies come to me, and I just smile, nod, and go on my merry way. "Yes, toothless old man, thank you for your advice that I should throw away my Chinese books and just listen to the radio until I speak fluently."
Just to prove that I haven't lost it, I made a new friend whose name is...Rock. (So now I can send you emails with subjects like, "Hanging with the Rock".) "It means stone in Chinese" he informed my English friend Luke. Luke was torn between strangling him for make such an innanely obvious statement and screaming "No shit! It's my bloody language!" for giving him an English lesson. (Note, you may recall from a previous email that Chinese people tend to take ridiculous English names. I almost had a class called "Choosing your English name". I was going to begin class by holding up a dictionary and saying, "This is a dictionary. If your name is in it, it can't be your name.") Anyway, in fairness Rock is a very nice guy, if a bit (okay a lot) naive. He informed me in the same breath, "You should get a Chinese girlfriend. But be careful, Chinese people lie all the time." I asked him, "But if they lie all time, why would a want one for a girlfriend?" He told me, "Oh they'll stop lying once they are dating you." Riiiiiggghhhtttt. I'll get right on that one.
I loooove the awful attempts at pirated names you'll see on fake merchandise sold in China. (Intellectual property is a nonexistent concept in China. Everything is copyable. You can buy any DVD for a dollar.) Anyway, before I came to China, I wondered, "Can I still buy all the high-quality stuff we have in the West?" So while walking through a store I was very reassured to find that in fact I call find all the finest goods that are "Mode by Italy", Carveen Carein underwear, and the latest Northface dress-shirts (note, Northface does not make dress shirts--they make mountaineering equipment and some travel clothes. Didn't you know about the Shanghai Northface outlet? Yeah, they are here outfitting all those Shanghainese mountaineers that climb all the mountains in Shanghai.). The funniest was the Carveen Carein underwear. This is ridiculous for two reasons. First, Chinese have trouble with the R not the L, so it doesn't make sense that Calvin Klein would end up with an R in it. Second, because they just have to copy the name and not speak it, there is no reason it should be wrong in the first place when it is written on a package. At least the o in Mode by Italy looks like an a, so confusing it makes sense. Carveen Carein is just wrong.
Okey dokey, doggy daddy. That'll do it for now I expect. I'd just like to end this email with the following SARS update:
More people die in England every year from falling down stairs than have died from SARS worldwide. So when you are packing that face mask for your next trip to China, make sure you strap into your climbing harness before you go down the stairs to catch your taxi.
m
PS I met a girl whose porn name is Fluffy McEntire. She's not a porn star, she just has a porn name. I think this is a good idea that we all should adopt. Just like most Chinese people have an English name just in case they meet English speakers, we should all have porn names in case we meet porn stars.
It wasn't my seduction attempt, but rather an attempt on me. And admittedly using the word seduction is a little melodramatic. It went something like this...
I was sitting in my park (yes, it's my park now) doing my homework. I have begun to sit strategically in this park now, because otherwise I get ambushed by random people who want to offer advice on how best to completely screw up any serious attempt to learn Chinese. If not that, just random people walking up and asking for my phone number and email. No introduction. Just hello, can I have your email? So I found a spot in a corner, which was not ideal because I could be ambushed from behind, but it was awkward for someone to do so, so I figured this was the best I was going to do. So I sat on one of two perpendicular benches and placed my bag on the other bench near me, so someone could not sit down directly next to me. (I know this sounds pathetic, but otherwise I get no work done.)
Anyway, I was doing pretty well. I had an hour of work done when a lady begins to walk over. I could tell by the way she was walking I was screwed, so I buried my face deep into my book. Didn't work. She sat down next to my bag and immediately asked for my "ming pian" (name card). (She didn't say hello or anything.) I said I didn't have one (true), because I don't work for a company (also true). She was a little confused, because there is this myth that white people = big company (as opposed to MBA graduate = unemployed). After she managed to work her head around this one, she then asked me if she could come over to my hotel and take a look. I said I don't stay in a hotel. I live here, in an apartment. Then she asked if she could come over and take a look. This completely confused me. I just didn't understand why she wanted to come look at my apartment. So I asked why. I was guessing either a) she wanted to clean my apartment or b) she wanted to sleep with me. I assumed the former was more likely, but I didn't want to be rude if that's not what she meant. When I asked her why, she looked uncomfortable and just repeated her request (in Chinese, it was not a language failure on her part). I suppose if the woman had been attractive I might have connected her with the idea of sex, but it completely escaped me at the time. When I finally figured out what she was proposing, I said no thank you. This seemed to stun her.
Now I'm not being judgmental about random women offering me sex. I mean if I was in Sweden and a beautiful blonde girl came up and offered the same thing, well, every guy's dream come true, right? What I found so ridiculous was everything that occurred after I turned down her first offer. And the final request just stunned me.
So she spent some time grappling with the idea that either I was dumb and didn't understand what she wanted or had just turned her down (because deservedly enough, western males have a bad reputation in Asia). So after she got past that, she asked why I was here and I said to study Chinese, which is what I was doing. She immediately says, "Wo jiao ni" (I'll teach you!). First problem, she doesn't speak English, so not possible. Second problem, speaking a language does not equal the ability to teach it. One of my friends couldn't understand why I was turning down his offer to teach me for free instead of paying for it, as I do now. (Umm...because teaching is a profession that requires training...which you don't have...) Third problem, as was obvious from the fact that I was doing homework right in front of her, I already have a teacher, which is how I was able to talk to her at all.
Next offer: "You have friends here?" Okay, I'm thinking, where is this question leading? So I say yes, some. "I'll teach them!" Well, because I want to keep them as my friends, I figured I should turn down this completely selfless offer. I said no thanks, all my friends have teachers or speak Chinese already. I could tell she was getting hugely stressed by this point. I did actually feel bad for her, but, having a lot of experience in recognizing a total lack of interest, I know when to quit. She didn't.
So at this point, I just wanted to end the conversation, which was taking way too long, going nowhere, and making her and me feel uncomfortable. But then came the next request. "I'll be your girlfriend!" What? Did I understand that correctly? Yes, I'll be your girlfriend. Umm, thanks, you're very kind, but no thank you. This stunned her again. She asked are you single? I said yes. Then she sat there staring at me confused. I was wondering, does she think I'm gay now because I am single and didn't take a random stranger's offer to be my girlfriend? I could tell she really felt she was losing face now, which admittedly she was, but she wouldn't leave and solve the problem. Then came the final request.
Okay, then can I have two yuan?
What?! Why do you want two yuan (Chinese money) from me? "To pay for the bus fare." What?!
At this point I was in total disbelief. This final request meant either:
Anyway, I finally said no (I was just fed up). So I said sorry I have to study now and just went back to my homework. She sat there for another ten minutes before she finally got up and left without another word. I did actually feel a little bit guilty. Clearly nothing that happened was my fault, but sometimes other people screw up so spectacularly you can't help but feel bad for them. I didn't understand why she didn't just leave after it was clear I wasn't interested, instead of staying and losing more face (which was clearly upsetting her).
Anyway, this email is especially for all my female friends who complain about lame pickup attempts. Don't complain until you've had a guy spend a half hour making ridiculous offers and then ask for bus fare home since you turned down all his previous offers (all this without ever introducing himself).
Yeah, yeah, yeah...just call me the gigolo. "No sex? Okay, how about paying for my for bus fare?"
matt
Three things you can do with an INSEAD MBA:
Now you may not have realized how important in international MBA is in landing the latter position, but allow me to extol the virtues of pursuing an MBA if you are considering bartending or teaching English. Clearly the first two require an MBA, but that is the obvious route. I mean, sure, in twenty years you'll be stinking rich, retire early, have traveled extensively, and have managed thousands of employees. But will you be able to mix a Cosmopolitan and explain to 12 year olds the difference between "affect" and "effect"? (See this is the type of entrepreneurial logic that gets you accepted into business school.)
So why the MBA? Well, consider. I have no experience teaching English, but right after getting my MBA, I landed this position quickly with no interview. My MBA was in sparkling letters on my resume. Coincidence? I think not. Now I knew INSEAD's ranking was suffering lately due to low employment statistics, so I made sure to include in their survey of post-graduation employment my $6000/year contract and my sign on bonus of $400 (plane ticket) and $6/day in travel expenses. Hey, every little bit helps, right? Anyway, back to the value of the MBA. So during my first few months here, I was thinking, well, as fascinating a social life as schooling 12-year-olds in basketball provides, I thought it might help to meet some people of my own age. So I asked a local bar owner about bartending. He told me needed someone for upstairs. While discussing my potential value as a bartender I mentioned that although I had no experience bartending I did have an MBA, and lo and behold, I landed the job! Why do I think that got me the job? Well it sure wasn't my computer science degree! :)
Okay, okay, enough crapping on. I started bartending and it's pretty cool. There is a bar here called Amber that is really a hot social spot that I liked immediately and hung out at occasionally (only occasionally because, I may be funny, but funny don't pay for drinks). I'm not exactly sure how it happened, but I just began talking to the bartender casually a long time ago, asking him about bartending in Shanghai. Obviously with educated Chinese university students costing about 50 cents an hour, there is no reason to hire foreigners. (There is SO much labor in China it is dirt cheap--it has nothing to do with human rights--there's just WAY too many people and way too few jobs--minimum wage would be murder in China.) So I immediately canned the idea. Anyway, the owner is a nice guy, also from California, and I kept talking to him every time I went it or would just stop by and say hi even if I didn't want a drink. Anyway, two weeks ago, he told me just opened up the upstairs and needed someone to bartend. It's pretty slow, so Quick-Draw McGraw bartending skills aren't an absolute necessity. The job doesn't pay much, but it has a decent bar tab as compensation, which was a big holdup in my social life (clubs where westerners go in Shanghai are more expensive than in the west). So I figured, I would get to meet people while bartending, get free drinks that I can have other nights during the week when I'm not working and have something relatively social and free on a Saturday night. So I started last Saturday. It was okay. A little slow because of the 'critical mass' problem. People walk upstairs, see no one sitting there, and go back down. Two minutes later, someone else goes up, sees no one and goes back down, and so on. I told the owner he should give people free drinks to hang out there for half an hour to start the evening out. Hasn't taken up the idea yet. Anyway, I'll do it for a while. I dig the bar, and as a bonus within a few months I should be able to whip up drinks pretty well. So if you come out to Shanghai, drinks are on me.
Okay, so you read my boring life, I'll give you some more random crap for entertainment.
The Pied Piper of Shanghai
Well, as I explained before, I get mauled at the park whenever I make the stupid mistake of practicing writing Chinese characters there. I made such a mistake today. Now strangely it is okay when I do something even more exotic such as practicing calligraphy with the "old masters" of Jingan Park, but I think this is because the "teacher role" that people seem so anxious to fill is already taken by my "teacher", a local in his late 30's whom I consider a good friend. We have trouble communicating, because his English is minimal and my Chinese is still not good enough to understand the Shanghai accent, but we manage my "lessons" through a lot of pointing, noises, and generally laughing at my bad calligraphy. Anyway, so I can do that, because few people will come up and correct my teacher or try to usurp his "role", as that would make him lose face. (Besides, there's only a few better than him that could correct him.) So I'm safe when I'm with him.
But when I make the mistake of whipping out my drawing pen and practicing writing characters on paper alone, lord oh lord, is that a BIG mistake. I sat down again today, using my strategic sitting theory, which sometimes works, but usually not. I sit down on the bench and stretch my legs out so no one can sit right next to me, and then I put my bag on the bench right next to me, so no one can sit on my other side. It's about the best I can do, short of putting up a sign saying, "Please don't teach the foreigners". Anyway, today I made the stupid mistake of thinking I could finish writing my characters before anyone saw. Big mistake. Now I have used tactics as juvenile as faking a phone call as soon as I see someone walking up to teach me, but today I was approached by some friendly kids, and I assumed it was harmless enough to talk to some 8 year olds. Wrong. The 8 years and their dads were actually quite harmless. Friendly, overenthusiastic to speak English, perhaps a bit spastic, but basically nice. And kids don't demand your undivided attention the way adults do, so I could practice writing and talk at the same time. Well, it's all fun and games until the crowd forms. After a few minutes, a man walks up to my left, where my bag is, to no avail, strategically placed. He shoves it up against me and sits down where it was. Crap. Land mine disarmed. He immediately pulls out this sheet of paper full of nothing but numbers and begins singing and pointing at the numbers. I have no idea what he was attempting to enlighten me about. This is by far my most mystifying experience. I simply have no idea what he wanted to do. Now, as I said, I can't understand the locals at all due to their accent (picture a beginning English speaker stranded in Arkansas and you have an idea of my situation), but I could understand the kids, because they had no Shanghai accent. They spoke accent-free Mandarin. No problems. Talking just fine. The old man tries talking to me and sentence after sentence I just look at him bewildered and say, "Ting bu dong" (hear, don't understand). I finally gave up and just talked to the kids. He persisted. I didn't know how to explain to him that the child spoke better Chinese than he did. Ouch! Severe loss of face. So I had a brilliant strategy of telling the kids I had a friend drawing calligraphy. The hyperactive kids ran back and forth about 5 times pointing at random people and asking if that was him, before I actually managed to explain to them which one he was. He saw me and came over enthusiastically (really a nice guy). He sat down next to me and I was SAVED from the man behind. So I thought.
The man behind me taps me on the shoulder and is holding two tubes and asks me, do you know what this is? I said no. I was lying. I knew exactly what it was. A flute. NO!!! Why me!? I turned around and pretended like I now had an obligation to talk to my friend since he had come over. I showed him my characters, to make him my "teacher" again and pre-empt offers of advice on how to write the characters. The man behind me immediately begins blaring the flute in my ear. This may sound strange, but it is sometimes a real booster of "face" to be acknowledged by foreigners publicly, even more so to be seen as a teacher of a foreigner in public. (This is why I like my friend so much. He doesn't care about that. He's just a really friendly guy.) So I wasn't interested in talking to the Pied Piper of Shanghai, because he wasn't trying to be helpful, he just wanted to be seen talking to me. When I didn't talk to him, he began blaring the flute to make it impossible to talk to my friend. It worked. It was way too loud (and not at all good). I look up and now there's about 15 people surrounding us (and my friend Luke who has showed up by this point, stunned as ever at my inability to avoid drawing a crowd), and...wait for it....someone is filming us!!! What?! An old man playing the flute (badly and loudly), young kids speaking English, and a local teaching a foreigner how to write Chinese. I guess this is newsworthy. (Speaking of which I have been quoted in the newspaper as "getting free Chinese lessons from locals at the park". I'm so screwed.) Anyway, although I'm used to being photographed while writing my characters, I've never been filmed before. I don't make a big deal about photos. I take pictures of locals when I travel, so I'd be a hypocrite to get pissed off at them taking pictures of me (even if it makes you feel like a zoo animal). But I just didn't know what to make of the "film crew". Anyway, the music was so loud and the crowd so big, I gave up trying to do work and asked my friend to show me some calligraphy to get away from the group, without making the Pied Piper lose too much face. Not surprisingly, when I got up to leave, he stopped playing the flute. The crowd dispersed immediately. He mesmerized them! (Or stopped their brain from functioning anyway.)
The moral of the story: Be loud, rude, obnoxious, and show no interest in learning the local culture.
Have a nice day.
matt
I knew my trip was off to a good start when the lady started screaming at me for peeing on her garbage heap. During a short break on my first bus ride in Western China, I hopped out to take a leak. (A little known advantage of traveling in developing countries is that you never have to go far to find a toilet. Chances are you're standing in one.) Now, if you start with the premise that anywhere's your toilet, then adding some rain means it's already flushing, so in theory, I could have just unzipped outside the bus door. (This isn't as bad as it sounds, some people don't even bother to leave the bus.) So after a little investigation, I determine the large garbage heap 50 meters from the bus was a safe bet. Standing there, shivering in the rain (at about 8000 ft), enjoying the zen moment of peeing on the garbage heap, I was jolted back to reality to find a woman standing at the door of her run-down house yelling at me in Chinese for peeing on her garbage heap. It was only in retrospect that I thought of telling her I was cleaning it for her.
Welcome to southwest China! Yeah, it's not club med, but how sweet! I came back tired, injured, underweight, and in need of a rest, but I would SOOO do it again. In the two and a half months I was travelling I saw beautiful scenery, ate great food, and met some really great people. (Okay, okay, I also saw shitty scenery, ate crappy food, and met some not so great people, but let's not dwell on that.)
My journey started in Shanghai and Beijing with my dad. We climbed the Great Wall, which according to Mao means my dad and I are eligible for hero status at some point later in our life. It was amazing. The area is beautiful (just try to ignore all the kitschy tourist stuff) and the wall is enormous. Then we ate Beijing roast duck (again, eligible for hero status--thanks Mao). We also saw the Forbidden City, which is where the emperor used to live. Really old, interesting architecture. Definitely a highlight to a China visit. Then we wandered around the summer palace, which is built around a large lake. Then my dad went back to California and I flew to Lanzhou in Gansu province. Let's start here...
I don't recommend Lanzhou other than as a entry to the Tibetan region. The province of Tibet does not fully encompass Tibetan culture, so even if you can't get into Tibet, like if you're a foreign journalist, you can still experience it in the provinces east of Tibet. From Lanzhou I went south to Linxia (also not so interesting) and then on to Xiahe. Xiahe is a neat Tibetan town with a pilgrimage trail with over 1000 prayer wheels. I did the trail and spun all the prayer wheels. Man! What a workout. Those prayer wheels weigh a ton! Push 1000 of them everyday and your right-arm will look you haven't had a girlfriend in years. Anyway, I met a great group of people (90% Israeli) at my guesthouse and hung out with them en-route for the next week. It was really fun. I have a great picture of their self-proclaimed "Israeli refugee camp" (their dorm room with clothes and stuff hanging everywhere). One day we went out to eat lunch and right before we got to the door, a lady steps out holding her son and he pees right in front of the door. About 3 feet from us and 1 foot from the door. The peeing wasn't so strange (maybe just that she was aiming at her son at us?), after all kids don't wear diapers in China, they just wear pants with a large slit up the rear and no underwear. So anytime they gotta go, they just squat and pee--in the street, in the bus, outside of the restaurant...yeah, lot's of public urination in China. (Less common in large cities, but I'll never forget the kid that peed in my elevator in Shanghai in front of his parents and then got off at his floor a few seconds later. What, you couldn't wait 30 seconds to use your own toilet?!)
From Xiahe we went south to Langmusi, a pretty little alpine town straddling the border of Sichuan province and Gansu province. (We slept in Gansu and ate lunch in Sichuan.) Our first night, we arrived really late and there were no street lights, so we walked to our guesthouse in the dark. After a while the girl in front of me shrieks and nearly trips over a frozen dead donkey. The donkey stayed there for about three days. We don't know who took it. (Or what they did with it.) On a hopefully unrelated note, it was in Langmusi that I ate my first yak burrito and yak burger (aka, Leisha's famous Big Mac Yak Attack). It was soo good! (Actually I only had the Baby Yak--the Big Yak was the size of a pizza.) So we hung out in Langmusi for a few days in hopes of seeing a sky burial (Tibetan Buddhists take their dead monks to mountains and chop up the bodies and vultures eat them), but unfortunately it was not to be. Probably not a Kodak moment anyway.
Leaving Langmusi, we headed south to Songpan and went on horse treks. It was pretty sweet, $10 per day all inclusive. They set up your tents, clean your horses, and cook your food. (They don't wash their hands in between, but what do you want for $10/day?) From Songpan I went on alone to Jiuzhaigou, a gorgeous park with crystal blue lakes and waterfalls. This was my favorite place in China. I hiked around for two days and stayed in a neat wooden Tibetan guesthouse. It smelled of freshly cut timber. Although I usually enjoy traveling alone, sometimes you have moments where you wish you had someone to share it with. My time at Jiuzhaigou was one. One downside of the place though is that the Chinese tourists swarm out of the buses at the nice spots, and all take their picture in front of the best lookout without stopping to actually look at it. And if you try to go stand and actually look at it (instead of just taking your picture there and moving on), you are quickly motioned to leave. Hugely annoying. But I still loved the park.
From there I went on to Chengdu, capital of Sichuan. Two days later I left because it sucked. But I did visit the panda breeding ground, where I saw the Stevie Wonder Panda (he moved his head and upper body just like Stevie Wonder). One of the tourists started singing "I just called to say I love you." Then I continued south to the Grand Buddha (several hundred feet tall, carved out of the cliff) at Leshan. Next I went on to Kunming, capital of Yunnan, also not too great, but I did meet some friendly locals that showed me all around. It was especially cool, because they didn't speak English, so spoke Chinese with them the whole time--woo hoo! Then I ended up in Dali--a city where backpackers take a vacation. This was a really nice town. I just sat around and relaxed, ate good food, bumped into friends I met earlier, met new friends...and rode the dumbest horse on the face of the planet. I went on a one day horse trek with another American I met named Andy. While we returning to town, my horse started running. Under normal circumstances, a respectable thing for a horse to do. Except mine decided to run perpendicular to the trail off into the trees. I pulled on the reins so hard its head was vertical. And it still didn't stop. Inspired by this stroke of brilliance, Andy's horse starts running too, but quickly realized it wasn't a great idea. Mine eventually stopped, though I never figured out why. I decided to name him Trigger--remember Roy Rogers' exceptionally intelligent horse? Trigger, he ain't.
After a few days of watching Andy ask his girlfriend to stop shopping, we all headed out and met up in Lijiang. Also a really cool town. It had lot's of carved wooden buildings and canals running through town. From here, as a group that we later called the Fellowship of the Ring, we went hiking in Tiger Leaping Gorge. We stopped for lunch and I ordered fried rice. Fried rice comes and I start eating. Tastes okay, so I thought. A few bites into my meal the cook comes out and tells me "Maybe the rice is bad. I should take it back." Now ordinarily, you can't get a Chinese business owner to accept anything back, even on threat of pain. So when a cook comes and asks for it back...you give it back and pray for a painless death. A short while later, he came back with fried noodles. A few bites into it I find a maggot. Now the obvious question is, if the "better" meal had a maggot in it, what did the "bad" one have? Ewwww.
We spent that night at a guesthouse with a beautiful mountain view...and large marijuana fields. Now you might think the owner would sell the marijuana. But if you think a little longer and remember that she also owns the restaurant at the guesthouse, you quickly understand why she gives it to backpackers for free. She doesn't smoke it herself. She just eats the seeds. :)
The Fellowship disbanded after the trip. It was actually quite sad. We had a great time, but everyone was heading out there own way. Fortunately I still get emails from them about being very drunk in various South East Asian countries. Anyway, next I went on to Guizhou province for a few days and then to a city called Yangshuo in Guangxi. SOOOO COOOOL! Relaxing in warm weather, eating roast chicken and drinking beer, sitting on a bamboo raft floating down the river, getting sick...well, that wasn't so great but the rest was cool. I hung out here for a week, mainly because I caught a cold that lasted for about three weeks (basically till I left China). My favorite quote for this city was from a British girl, "I'd rather fuck a broom than sweep a Beijing railway station." (After I copied this quote into my journal, she signed it for posterity.) Then I went to Zhengjiajie in Henan province. Really beautiful. I definitely recommend.
From there I went to Xi'an and saw the Terracotta Army. This is an excavation site where they have unearthed thousands of terracotta soldiers protecting a tomb. The soldiers are 2000 years old. Really cool. There's also great Muslim food in Xi'an. My trip began to wind down here, as it was snowing, I was sick, and I had injured my knee at Zhengjiajie, mainly from hiking 10+ miles everyday for 2 months. So I caught a train back to Shanghai and checked into a foreign student dorm at a music conservatory. I spent the next week saying goodbye to friends, visiting museums, using up my bar tab at the place I used to bartend, and generally bringing my trip to a close.
All in all, I have to say, man! what an experience. I originally moved to China for lack of anything better to do for a year that I expected to have a poor job market. I left 9 months ago and spent six months of it in Shanghai and the rest wandering around China. In that time, I have made friends that I believe I will keep in contact for the rest of my life. I had diarrhea so bad it showed me what famine must feel like. I bartended at a great bar in Shanghai. I counted pennies because I didn't have money. I saw some of the most beautiful scenery in the world. I showered in a toilet (no, a toilet, not a bathroom) and stayed in the shittiest motel of my life for $2.50 (way too much). I ate AWESOME food. I ate shitty food. I learned Chinese. I had my picture taken 5 times a day by overzealous Chinese people. I soaked up sun while reading a great book. I froze in an unheated apartment in the winter in a country where I didn't speak the language and didn't know anyone. I had a FANTASTIC time!
I hope I've provided a bit of entertainment over the last nine months. I've certainly had a few laughs (some only in retrospect and most at my own expense). I'd like to briefly say thanks to Luke for swapping bitch-sessions about teaching and bearing witness to Cookie the Shanghainese Wonderchef so I have proof he really was that weird, Pascoe for his great travel tips and his wife Xindan for helping me out of the innumerable screwed up situations I found myself in, Jeremy and his wife Kate for getting me drunk, my dad for visiting (the rest of you suck), and all the Israelis, Belgians, Dutchies, Yanks, Irish, Brits, and others I met while traveling that in one way or another made it an experience. Stay in touch.
m
End quote:
"You never count your money when you're sittin' at the table. There'll be time enough for countin' when the dealin's done."
--Kenny Rogers