the great wall

so tonight, i decided to enter into the world of chinese red wine. the first vehicle was a bottle of great wall wine. made from the grapes near the great wall near yantai. it is produced by the world renowned winery of china national cereals, oils, and foodstuffs import and export corporation. it just rolls off the tongue, doesn't it? what kind of grapes? i have no idea. just grapes.

when i bought the bottle, i asked if i could get a corkscrew as well. to be honest, i just pointed to the top of the bottle and said "i open?" they nodded and grabbed what looked like a well used corkscrew from underneath the cashier's counter. as one clerk rang my purchase up, another took a knife to the bottle and started to tear the foil off. i tried to stop her, but she kept going. after the foil was off and i had paid for my goods, i grabbed the foiless wine and the much worn corkscrew and put it in my bag. the clerk shook her head no, and took both of them back from me. it turned out that i had not bought the corkscrew--it was used by the clerks to open the wine before you left the store. unfortunately, she didn't know how to use it. she was able to screw it in, but seemed to be it at a loss for what to do after. i told her i knew, took the bottle, and popped the cork out, by this time in front of about five chinese women. a student remarked, "wonderful," and i went on my way.

once i got home, i poured a glass into a plastic cup, and gave the wine some time to let it air. the bouquet smelled okay, better than i thought it would. but when i tasted it, boy oh boy. it turns out chinese beer is better than chinese wine. it's a shame really. now i have to finish a bottle of wine i don't like.

kuai zi

kuai zi is chinese for chopsticks. i've gotten quite used to them by now. and i've realized that eating with these two wooden sticks has its advantages. because there is the ability to squeeze with chopsticks, the tactile information available is greater. i can tell if there are bones, huajiao shells, or even stiff rice. chopsticks are used by just one hand. no need to lay a book down on the table to read during lunch, i can hold it and eat at the same time.

now it has taken me some time to get used to eating rice with chopsticks but it is doable. first off, in china, all rice is very sticky, so for the most part picking up big chunks of rice with the 'sticks is not an issue. but even at the end, when the rice becomes less cohesive, it is possible to get those lone grains of rice by holding the chopsticks parallel about a centimeter apart and scooping.

now last night i used a fork, as i usually do when i'm eating western. didn't even cross my mind that i wasn't using chopsticks. i guess old habits die hard.

a philosophy salon sans philosophy salon

well this evening i rode into chengdu on my fancy new bike. i had a few things i was going to pick up at the computer towers, and then make my way over to a philosophy discussion group where we talk about gilles delueze. if you don't know who he is, join the club. turns out he was a contemporary french philosopher best known for his thoughts on immanence and his critiques of kant, spinoza, and nietchze. sounds to me like he should be more famous!

i was psyched all day, reading about deleuze and his philosophy, and to meet some new people. i always say the best way to meet people you'll like is by doing something you like. so i rode down to the computer towers and got there about five minutes after six. now this was my first time parking my bike. you pay a guy two kuai, and he watches over your bike, and a hundred other bikes and scooters. so i pay the guy two kuai, and he says something to me, as always, quickly in chinese. i say good, good, and walk towards the store. the first two doors i try are locked, so i have to walk around to the main entrance in the front. while i'm walking, i notice that i'm a salmon swimming upstream in a rushing river of chinese. i figure this does not bode well for me, but i have to try. sure enough, there are security guys at the door making sure the crowd only goes one way. darn it.

so i walk back to the bike man, he smiles, and gives me my two kuai back. man, i wish i knew chinese.

this meant i was gonna be about forty-five minutes early for the salon, so i went down to stake out the restaurant, so i wouldn't have any problems. ha. i rode around in circles for a half hour. i even came down off my high horse and asked people where it was. no one knew. so finally around 7:05 i gave up, and sat down to have some western food, and a cold sam adams. this was my first american beer in china, and it was sure good. a nice full bodied beer. chinese beer is much more like miller light. (oliver, our school's liaison loves budweiser.) i relaxed and had my meal slowly. i am reading 36 children by herbert kohl (thanks to j and piper), and i read quietly, munching on chicken fingers.

after my delicious meal, i began to ride out of town. the bike is a thousand times better than the bus. my perspective on the bus is so restricted. i can only see to the left and to the right, and about sixty degrees vertically. i really enjoyed seeing the city approach as i rode in when it was light. in the dark, the overpass i have to go under is lit up with what seems to be a thousand feet of blue neon lights.
it lights up the sky to a deep dark blue. light pollution can be gorgeous. every time i've ridden the bus under it, i've wanted to tell the bus driver to stop so i could get out and take a picture. when i was riding my bike, i didn't have to ask anybody.

also, you can race people. i'm a very competitive person, even when the person i'm competing against has no idea. when i passed him the last time, i told him he was very fast. i'm not sure if he appreciated it.

after the overpass, i was in the country, so i put on my tunes, and my open-ear headphones (safety is a must, children) and cruised to the music. the dichotomy of rock and roll with my surroundings makes me feel like it's the soundtrack to my travelogue. pounding on my handlebars, singing along to the presidents of the united states of america, i drew a few stares. i smiled back, and sometimes i get a smile in return. i rolled in to my apartment to company in my back by wilco. it was awesome.

all in all, it was a great night. too bad i didn't get anything done.

i like to ride my bicycle, i like to ride my bike

at 9:30 this morning, i was crammed in with a 100 or so chinese people on a double decker bus. towards the back of the first level, the floor is raised to make room for the engine. when i boarded the bus, the woman in charge of tickets kept screaming, "go to the back! move to the back!" at each progressive stop, i moved closer and closer to the back of the bus, and eventually, there i was standing with my neck at a delightful 80 degree angle, feeling like a giant. i took this as a sign that the universe approved of my course.

i got off on renmin zhong lu (the people's center road) and began to browse. one of the great things about chengdu, is that the stores are all placed together. if you want a sign made, you go to a certain street, and there are about 20 sign shops all in a row, doing the exact same thing. if you want commercial cooking appliances, head north, and you'll find a whole line of them on the third ring road. here, at renmin zhong lu, they sold bikes and scooters.

ever since i lost my bike (i think using the word stolen might be going a bit too far...i left it unlocked in front of a restaurant. oops.) i've been thinking of getting a new one. to be honest while i had my old bike i was thinking of getting a new one. we were provided with shiny new one speeders. beach cruisers, basically. i needed more power. arargharghargharrr. (i've decided all posts from now on will have some type of home improvement reference.) just cruising is not my style. i need to be passing people. moving quickly. on the old bike i topped out at like 5 miles an hour, and that was with me standing on the pedals. so my subconscious made me let my bike get stolen, so i could get a new one.

and a new one i did get. a nice orange one, 18 gears, rack above the back tire, bell and lock included. not too bad for 600 kuai (75 bucks). i took her out on the street and began to put her through the paces. chengdu is a great bicycle town. there are no hills, just flat roads. i started moving out towards the suburbs in high gear. i was surprised as i began to pass electric scooters. i was the fastest thing by far in the bike lane inside the city. it was great, weaving in and out of bikes, pedicabs, scooters, and the occasional (and illegal) car, passing them all. once i passed the third ring road, which is where the city stops and the sprawl begins, motorscooters began to appear, and i couldn't keep up. to be honest, i could no longer keep up with the electric scooters, either. i need to learn how to pace myself. i finally arrived home out of breath and happy.

i feel like this is going to add a new dimension to my understanding of chinese. my experience thus far has been a bit two dimensional. i've been sticking to the bus routes and the places i have been shown by others. now i feel like i have the ability to explore. and explore i will.

i am a musical robot

so my lesson plan this week is about robots. (which is boring, i guess, because one of my best students told me after class today she wanted to do something interesting.) i asked them if they had a robot, what would they want it to do. the answers were very telling.

first we had the violent robots. these robots were to kill people my students didn't like, burn down the school, rob banks. one student wanted their robot to kill gwb, then make the student delicious food. an interesting diaspora there.

the next are the lonelibots. these are designed to be friends, keep secrets (that's a must), and play tennis, soccer, and computer games with the students. i tried to make the point that when they played computer games against enemies not controlled by humans, they already were playing with a robot, but for some reason that didn't fly with my eighth graders. one better student wanted to liberate her robot from mundane tasks, and for it to have emotions. "it would be just like a human, but its brain would be simpler."

studybots were the most prevalent. all the students wanted a robot that would do their homework, take their tests, etc. the most creative answer thus far is a shape shifting robot that could take tests for a student as well as taking the place of the parents when there were parent/teacher conferences.

finally, there were parental units. many of my kids wanted robots who would teach them about the world, go to work and give them pocket money, do the housework, and one girl went so far to want it to keep her on task. she mentioned that her parents were always at work, and she often watched television or played computer games when she should have been doing her homework. she thought a robot could solve her problem. another said she wanted a robot to do house work because her grandmother spent too much time cleaning and the student wanted her to have time to "play with other old people."

and finally, a few girls wanted a robot to play piano with them. god love those people and their musical robots.

(if you don't know what i'm talking about, rent spellbound. it's great.)

things i see regularly

rides outside stores for little children that play jingle bells.
bicycle tires burning on the sidewalk.
men with quarter-inch long fingernails. (it's a status symbol, showing that you don't work with your hands)
street sweepers playing happy birthday.
children relieving themselves on the street, sidewalk, supermarket or bus floor.
ducks' and chickens' heads, pig snouts, occasionally whole butchered yaks.
crowds of people standing around watching others scream at each other over a fenderbender.
live turtles and frogs at the supermarket.
police officers (or at least people in the drivers seat of police cars) reclined and passed out.

things i don't see regularly:
the sky
a good grilled cheese
uniformed police officers

here is a map of chengdu foreign languages school. the yellow thumbtack marks my building, on which i live on the second floor of sixteen. the five buildings above (northeast) my apartment are the "primary school" attached to the chengdu foreign languages school. what a mouthful. to the left of the primary school there are eight identical buildings. these are dorms that hold the 6,000 students in six grades, 7th to 12th. that means there are about 750 teenagers in each dorm. incredible. below the dorms is the giant square building with a courtyard that holds all the classrooms, as well as a tv and radio studio, computer labs, an infirmary, and a/v labs. on one side of the classroom buildings is the gym complex (that's that big oval building), and on the other side is the cafeteria and the library (no books to speak of).

so there's the tour. if you want to check out my neighborhood here are the coordinates. get google earth and check it out.

30°44'3.27"N
103°58'47.63"E

i am currently reading a memoir by john pomfret, one of the the first american exchange students to study in china after it was opened in 1979. he tells the story of five chinese students and the hardships they faced.

in a chapter called outside the gates, he talks about the sexual repression present in many of the chinese men and women in the early 80's. both men and women had to wear shapeless mao coats, and pre-marital relations, kissing included, might land you in jail. relationships between chinese people and foreigners were forbidden, and at nanda university, parties thrown by the foreign students are banned.

in a quarter century, much has changed. women still dress conservatively--there is no midriff showing here--but it is clear they are women. short skirts, leggings, and knee-high boots seem to be the fashion these days. as i walk through the local university campus students can be seen kissing cheeks with hands on the smalls of backs. it is clear that dating is acceptable, at least at the university level.

at the high school level, it seems as if the thought has yet to enter my students' minds. virtually none my students socialize in coed groups, unless it is during a game of basketball. throughout the halls, you see boys hanging out with boys, girls with girls. in the sophomore classrooms they seem more comfortable with each other than they do in the 8th grade classrooms, but loud, class-wide, spastic laughter greets any joke about a relationship. now granted, the seniors are in another building, and may act differently, but in my experience there seems no place for the romantic relationship in high school. perhaps they are too busy studying. perhaps america's children just move to fast. either way, it's nice not to have to see necking teenagers everywhere you look.

waking up in the middle of the night

there are no time zones in china, despite the fact it is the fourth largest country in the world. that fact means when it is 7am in beijing, it is 7am here, despite the fact we are about 1200 miles apart as the crow flies. that coupled with the lack of daylight savings time makes me think my 7am is alot like an american's 4am. when i wake up it is completely dark out. as i walk over to breakfast the sky has lightened a smidgen, but it is still too much like night. by the time i have eaten, gotten prepared for class, and answered a few emails, it is light, but still no sign of the sun, or silhouette of the sun, as i am used to. call me spoiled, but i like waking up with the sun. there is something, dare i say, natural about it.

last saturday night iwent out for my first karoke experience in china. it brought back many memories, and here are a few highlights.

my first karoke experience was a table set up in my high school's dining hall. as we ate a special dinner that consisted of a bunch of fried food (i can't remember what the occasion was) my dorm mates and i went up and sang bohemian rhapsody. (i'm not sure if my college friends realize how far back the group singing of bohemian rhapsody goes back for me.)

my next experiences were in taiwan. there were quite a few, but i think unchained melody on the bus after watching a bootlegged copy of star wars episode one before it was released in the states. the video feature two asian people doing pottery together. how sweet.

the other very memorable time was when we visited a cultural village at sun moon lake. it was like a taiwanese version of williamstown. after our tour and after we had all donned vintage taiwanese garb, we were treated to a dance performance. after they cleared the stage, they gave us the opportunity to sing karoke. justin man, ms. fontaine, and i, in our traditional taiwanese clothes, sang a delightful rendition of knock three times.

this ktv, as they call it here, was not as family friendly. the bar was smoky, and they projected the picture and words onto a blank wall, and people sat in their seats and sang. that way there wasn't as much pressure. i convinced a chinese guy i met there to sing unchained melody with me. it was great. brought back some really nice memories...

the chinese spit very unusually. they spend a lot of time phlegm clearing and gathering. they seem to relish making the loudest noise possible, like glass-pack mufflers that one might drive around dc in the 60s. they make a lot of noise, but when it comes to the actually spitting, they lean over and let it dribble out of their mouth.

now i, brought up on the chairlifts of king ridge mountain, do not spit that way. ithis is where this blog might get a bit graphic...feel free to skip the next part.

like a good glass-pack clearing myself, but i need to rocket the loogie away from me. i rest the loogie on my tongue, and while it's sitting there, i purse my lips to create a wind tunnel. i raise the loog up into the path of the airway, and foom! it's off like one of those cylindrical containers you put mail in at an old timey office and lost.

there's no force to chinese spitting, no strength. i am planning to stage the first spitting revolution of 2006. i better get busy. 2006 is running out.

notice how i no longer mince my words. thank you chinese censorship!

so midterms are coming up, and my students are freaking out. now, i'm always one to procrastinate to the last minute, even the last second, but i'm afraid i'm getting teacher-y in my old age.

tonight my 8th graders have an oral exam. they are given a topic, and they are meant to speak 10 sentences on that topic. i have wondered today if i could do the same thing in chinese. the answer is certainly not. well, maybe if it was about food.

the frustrating thing to me is, they have this native speaker in their midst for about 2 and half months, and they do nothing. but come the night of the exam, they want help on speaking. i stopped my lesson plan and tried to switch to something that might be beneficial for an oral exam, but i quickly realized there was nothing i could do with thirty kids that could be helpful. so i continued on.

one of the activities in this week's lesson plan is an icebreaker type thing centered around sleep. you have to find someone who...overslept this morning, had a nightmare recently, sleepwalks, etc. one of the things i stressed was that you must speak english. the questions were basically laid out for them, all they had to do was knock it out of the park. frustratingly, the only class that complained about the exam was the only class who had trouble speaking english. now that i type it there seems like there might be a correlation there.

so after the activity, i slowly lectured about how this is how you get better at speaking. if you want to do well on your oral exam, don't come to me the night of, just try to speak in class. that's it. i think i got a little fired up about halfway through and might of lost them, but hopefully the first part registered.

i guess i'll see when i get the grades. yeah, right, like they'll let me see grades.

today i had my weekly "official" chinese lesson. i call it official, because i try to study every day, and when everyone speaks the language, isn't your life a learning experience?

we were going over the days of the week. a fairly simple thing in chinese--monday translates literally to week 1, tuesday, week 2, etc. the only one that doesn't follow that pattern is sunday. sunday is written as xing qi ri, or week sun. isn't that interesting.

in my classes today, i tried a new lesson plan about fables. at the beginning of the class, we go over the definition of morals and fables, and i tell them (i think) a particularly rousing version of the tortoise and the hare. after that, i have them write fables of their own in groups. in each class, on average 2 out of 8 groups wrote the story of the boy who cried wolf. it was very interesting to me, especially after one student described it as an "ancient chinese story."

now i'm not sure when xing qi ri or the boy who cried wolf was adopted, or how it came to be that both things are intergral parts of western and eastern culture. i just think it's amazing that two cultures that are so different have some very similar historical artifacts.

tar but no feathers

sorry for the short break...censorship's got me down.

today, the improvements around my apartment continue. first they were ripping out all the grass, and now they are sealing all the cracks in the sidewalk.

this is an arduous process to say the least, especially for just one man. he started coming last week, with simply a hammer and a chisel that resembled a railroad spike. at each crack, he took the chisel to it without mercy, perhaps to make the surface even, and give space for the tar to stick. on monday, he began to fill in the cracks. he had two chunks of solid tar just sitting on the sidewalk, looking like a 3 pack a day elephant's lungs. he built a wood fire, again on the sidewalk, and stacked some bricks around it. he took one of the lungs of tar and put it in a metal bucket and set it on the bricks over the fire.

soon it was a boiling pitch black substance. he transferred it to another bucket, this one with a spout, and began to pour it liberally into the cracks he had made. while he did this, people walked around him and on the already filled cracks, paying him no mind. at the end of the day, he strapped the buckets and solidified tar to the back of his bike, and rode into the sunset...a tarman's job is never done.

Completely Blocked

now the chinese government has blocked access to blogger.com, effectively disabling me from posting completely. sweet. luckily, i have a proxy (read my ma) who is happy to post for me. now karl is an ist guy, so he may be able to help me work around it, but i guess for now, i'm going underground. darn it!

chinese mashed potatoes

what a pleasant surprise. i walk into dining hall, and begin to bother the lunchlady about lunch. everyday i point at one thing and say, "na ge," (that). she points to one bowl, and i say "bu yao" (don't want), and then she points to another and another, until she hits the bowls i want. today, i just wanted her to pick anything, and i don't know how to say, "i don't care." so i said i don't know. the lunchlady thought i was confused, and looked around for help. at that point, a chinese english teacher came up and helped. she said that that bowl was potatoes, and to avoid anymore fuss i said yao.

she plopped a spoonful on my plate, like any good lunchlady (unfortunately, it wasn't an ice-cream scoop). when i got to the table, i plunged my chopsticks in, and i could not believe it. mashed potatoes! (i think i kinda blew the surprise with the title, there.) a very smooth mashed potato with a nice addition of scallions and chives. eating mashed potatoes with chopsticks was a breeze as well. the consistency requires no chopstick skill at all, just poke and chomp. great! it was a welcome respite, and was the most homey meal to date in the cafeteria.

i love my cafeteria.