travelgirl

2009-05-10T05:20:00.000-07:00

Next in my saga of travels was a trip to Hunan. Just a few days after we got back from Hangzhou with ECNU we had our CIEE trip. The trip was divided into two halves. First we went to Zhang Jia Jie (张家界) which is one of

China

's most famous parks, and in my opinion deservedly so. For the second half of the trip we went to visit Feng Huang (凤凰) which is a combination of traditional minority culture and tourist central. All in all it was a great trip

We flew to Hunan since any alternate transportation was just going to take more time than we had to spare. The flight was fine... Except for the food... Each person was given a little snack box which upon initial inspection seemed perfectly fine, until I realized that the pack of cookies was flavored like onions and that the chips were actually apple slices... It only went downhill from there.

So, to begin: Zhang Jia Jie. If you have ever seen any of the recent famous Chinese movies (mostly the historical/fantasy ones) such as Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon there is invariably a shot where they are dashing through mountains that are kind of stony crags shooting up through the mists with trees growing out of the sides of them, that is Zhang Jia Jie. And for once, it looked exactly like it did in the movies. It really was that beautiful.

We went just before the start of true summer so we got no mist, but the effect was still absolutely stunning. Especially after living in Shanghai for eight months suddenly being somewhere naturally beautiful was a striking change.

We stayed in a hostel just outside the park and took a local bus over in the morning. One of the things that I love the most about China is the people watching, and the bus there provided a lot of good people watching. To start with there was a woman whose job was to collect bus fair. She was carrying a Louis Vuitton purse . Only in China. Our next stop was to pick up a police officer for the town. He brought his own chair, just in case the bus seats were full, and plopped it down in the middle of the bus isle. Because it is a small town the buses work a bit differently. There are no stops per say. The buses follow the same street routs every day and if you want to get on you wave as the bus passes and it stops. If you want to get off you yell at the bus driver. When we needed to get the bus the woman in charge of our hostel called up the bus driver’s cell phone and told him to be sure to hold it at the end of our street.

There was another really interesting thing that happened when we were in Hunan that made me think a lot about the foundations of our society. In Hunan they don’t trust coins. I don’t know if it was because they thought they could be faked or what, but they would only accept payment in bills. So even though we had a significant amount of money in coins it was valueless because no one would accept then. It made me think a lot about our monetary system, and that it only works because we have all decided that it should. After enough economics and history courses I intellectually knew that without people’s trust in it money is valueless, but it is different to read about money becoming valueless in a collapsing government and suddenly finding your own money worthless.

Another really interesting thing was the entrance to the park itself. The entry tickets to Zhang Jia Jie were some of the most advanced entry tickets I have ever encountered in my life. Every ticket was for two days. I got you ticket which was a credit card like item. I then proceeded to the front gate where they swiped my card. They then scanned my fingerprint so that I could not sell the second day of my card or anything. The next day when we reentered the park they scanned our thumb prints to validate our identity. It was actually a little bit creepy.

We were incredibly lucky in our timing to visit the park. We went the weekend before Labor Day (May 1^st in China) which, not surprisingly, is a big deal in China. Everybody gets a three day weekend and the entire country picks up and goes traveling. So, wince were there right before Labor Day, anyone who had thought about going to Zhang Jia Jie put it off for a week. That meant there was essentially no one there, which was awesome since it can get incredibly crowded apparently (there were 14.4 million visitors in 2005). The weather was also awesome. It was right before true summer hit (it is 95 out right now) so it was still in the 70s with a lovely breeze.

That being said, Zhang Jia Jie is a national park full of mountains… I have done my best to stay in shape since I got to Shanghai. I belong to a gym, I take spin classes or run a few times a week. I can certainly out exercise most of the Chinese women at the gym.

Zhang Jia Jie comes with two experiences for you to pick from. First there is the Chinese version of the park: you enter the park, a bus picks you up and carries you to the base of the tallest peaks. Then you purchase your ticket for the cable car which carries you to the top where if it suits you, you can take a mild hike around the top of the mountain, or just snap your photo and return down. That is the method my host mom apparently followed when she went last year. Except her group decided it was so nice that they walked down the mountain. She claims to have been unable to walk for a week afterwards (my host father and Jing Jing demonstrated for me what her walk looked like, I almost cried I was laughing so hard). There was also the option of being carried around in a sedan chair for those who wanted the nature walk minus the walk...

So that was the Chinese way… And then there was our way which consisted of the philosophy “If you didn’t hike for four hours and climb stairs from below sea level to twelve hundred plus feet then the view isn’t worth it” Yep, that “in shape” that comes from working out a few times a week at the gym, LIES LIES LIES!!! My plight was not helped by the fact that I am five inches shorter than anyone else in the program. They all thought it was perfectly comfy to take the steps two at a time. My legs did not agree.

The issue was not actually hiking. I think that I would have done better on an actual hike. However, in case any Chinese person should ever decide to actually attempt the walk up we can’t have them hiking, thus we must use STAIRS! I am not a big fan of stairs. Even in the height of my being in shape I got more tired climbing stairs than doing anything else, toss me a 10k or a distance swim any day, so taking a winding rout of straight stairs up to the top of Tian Zi Shan (天子山) or heavenly mountain just plain hurt. Though I can’t argue with the fact that it was absolutely gorgeous, and now that I can walk again without inordinate pain, I probably agree that it was worth it.

At the top of Tian Zi Shan we ran into two girls who were students at the local university. There were incredibly sweet and gave us a short history of the area and tour guided us around for while in exchange for w few pictures.

At the top of the pagoda at the top of Tian Zi Shan there is a room. In that room is a man doing calligraphy. the walls are completely covered in scrolls and unbound sheets of calligraphy. We stood and watched him for an inordinately long time, but could not figure out if we could purchase a scroll if we wanted to, forget how much a scroll cost, or weather we could get one custom made.

We finished the hike out that day along a river which was awesome. Nate and I ditched our shoes and waded across which felt sosososososo good.

That night we went for traditional food of the area. For whatever reason it is customary in that region to sit on very small chairs at very low tables. It was pretty funny. I felt a little like I was babysitting and participating in a tea party at a child sized play set. If I felt that way I can't even imagin how six foot two made of legs Nate managed it.

Another thing that Zhang Jia Jie did well was signage. I don't know who they got to write and or translate their signs, but they were completely hilarious, some of them the actualy meaning was beyond my comprehension and some of them were just funny.

Sorry I can't get this one rotated...

Megan, Lillian, and I ran out to get breakfast the next morning. We were going to settle for some noodles which were not what we were particularly in the mood for when we met a really nice local woman. She walked us down to the bao zi place that all the locals thought was the best and shich did in fact have very good breakfast. One of the things I like the most about getting out of Shanghai is the people are frankly curious and more than happy to stand and talk with you and show you around their hometown.

The next day was also spent in the park. We started out the day with a slightly more tame hike along the side of a river that cut through the mountains. Then, much to Nate's chagrin, we decided to take the cable car up to the top of the second highest peak, but don't worry, we did walk down!

On the way up we didn't want to walk next to the road with all the busses on it so we took a side trail. Unfortunately that side trail did not actually connect back with the cable car entry so we had to do some off roading. We essentially just climbed off the path and scrambled back down the path of least resistance.

A fun side quirk of Zhang Jia Jie are the monkeys. They live along the sides of the trails in the lower part of the mountains and despite the copious number of signs requesting that you do not feed the monkeys, they were clearly frequently fed as they showed absolutly no fear. On that note, on the way backdonw Lillian made a friend. We were walking by a group of mokeys and suddenly behind me I hear Lillian start to freak out. We all turned around and there was a monkey attatched to her backpack trying to get a pack of brightly colored tissues out of the mesh water bottle holder. Lillian was just standing there flapping her arms around. And what did we do? Good friends that we are? We all went for our cameras.

That day we ended up on a different side of the park so we had to take a bus back. The one bus turned into two busses. We were in the middle of a highway in the middle of no where and our bus driver informed us that this was the place to stop, and if we waved the next bus/glorified van would stop and pick us up. So we dutifully stood by the side of the road waving like lunatics at the next van that came by. A very confused young man informed us that he was going in the other direction, at which point we saw another van come by which we sprinted after until it stopped, which was in fact our "bus." Seating was a very carpe dium sort of affair. I ended up sittig on the median thing between the drivers seat and passenger seat facing backwards. This particular medium was covered with fake grass, which I have to say is not the worlds most comfortable sitting material.

We did eventually make it back to the hostel though, so I guess it was a success. After another outside dinner sitting at tiny tables we called it a night.

The next day we headed off to Feng Huang, which I will write about another day, hopefully sooner rather than later.

Talking about climbing the mountains make me think about going to the gym in China so for this blog you get a special additional feature: anecdotes from the gym in China.

MoB, Mind over Body, is an endless source of hilarity to me, as is my existence to the Chinese gym members. First let’s talk about Chinese gym goers. In the States if I am in a workout class when it gets really hard I tend to draw inspiration from the people around me “well if he/she/it can really evil sit up number 247 well then so can I” I’m pretty sure that’s what most people do and it kind of keeps the whole class going. In your standard Pilates class in Shanghai as soon as it gets hard the Chinese collapse back on their yoga mats and throw their hands back as if to say “no, it is too much, my strength has been overcome, I can do no more. Sigh.” This invariably results in me, flushed to the color of a tomato and dying, struggling along only to look around at thirty people around me lying down and chilling. Then I get the eye contact moment with the teacher who looks at me and decided that “hey, there is one person who can finish my exercise class. Lets do twenty more sets while I go over and torture her personally!” That being said, I cannot touch the Chinese for flexibility. I was sitting on my mat before class the other day sadly attempting to coax myself into something resembling flexibility when another woman walks in. She plops down next to me IN THE SPLITS and then PUTS HER FORHEAD ON THE FLOOR!!!!!!!! WITHOUT STREATCHING!!!!!!!!! WHY?

The other thing that I do at the gym a lot is take spin classes. The spin classes in the states are definitely harder and 15 minutes longer, but they have nothing on the Chinese spin classes for sheer ridiculousness. The spinning room in MoB is lit with blue lights. The walls are studded with color changing LEDs and behind the teacher (whose bike is on a stage) is a giant lit up MoB sign that also changes rainbow colors. There are street lane lines painted on the floor to complete the feeling that we are riding outdoors on road bikes… And then there is the music. The music they use is just more awesomely ridiculous that American spin teachers could ever conceive of. Oh, and the music is not in Chinese. Some of my favorite pieces include “You Are My Voodoo Child,” “We Will Rock You: The Techno Remix” and “A Bridge Over Troubled Waters,” yes, that song does exist at a tempo fast enough to spin at, it even includes sprints.

One of the best thing by far though, are the classes that the Chinese take (I’m too afraid). The number one rule for any of these classes is: If you plan to attend class you must not forget your costume! I love walking into the gym right before belly dancing class starts. What could possibly be funnier than a group of Chinese women wandering around the gym wearing full belly dancing outfits complete with jingly scarves. Oh wait, they might be beaten by what I like to refer to as “cowboy dancing class” which involves the women in skirts and vests and the men in suits and cowboy hats.

I have also been the source of more than my fair share of amusement to the rest of the gym goers. A perfect example happened about a month ago. I had finished working myself out and wanted to do some core work, but all the studios were occupied with classes. So Lillian and I grabbed yoga mats and dragged them into the spinning room. We didn’t bother turning on the lights on since there was enough coming through the windows. I guess that a few of the gym employees were giving some prospective members a tour of the gym facilities. Anyway Lillian and I were in the midst of various exercises, when the doors open and the lights come on and there are a group of Chinese people staring in trying to figure out what in the world we were doing in the dark in the spinning room with yoga mats. I think the tour got an added few lines of commentary to the effect of “and our gym comes with the occasional gratuitous foreigners, there is no accounting for them…” The rest of the group then walked out and the last gym employee sort of looked back and flipped the lights back off.

杭州 Hang Zhou

2009-05-01T17:29:00.000-07:00

So, I am going to blame this latest bout of blogging lateness on my midterms...

On April 9th and 10th I went with all the foreign students at my university to 杭州 (Hang Zhou) A city around four hours by bus from Shanghai.

We were really lucky. We went from a really ugly portion of spring with, honestly, record breaking amounts of rain (which lead to the destruction of several of my shoes) to really beautiful weather.

I am completely in awe of the organizational skills of my school. We have all been on school trips where they try to take 60 kids in two or three buses somewhere for a few hours and loading up the buses takes as long as the rest of the trip just to get everyone on the bus and accounted for.

The Hua Shi Da staff managed to load seven buses of foreign students who's only common language was broken Chinese with baggage and passports and bus us around for two days without us ever feeling the delay. We even got in and out of a hotel (of which we occupied three floors) without a hitch.

The first day we went to a beautiful set of gardens. It turns out that they were the same gardens that I stopped at with my host family when we were driving back from our travels during Spring Festival, but they couldn't have looked more different. They were in full spring bloom and it was awesome.

Though I will have to admit I was paying more attention to my classmates that they surroundings. I am in class with a bunch of goofballs from around the world and traveling with them is a complete blast. We spent the day riding around in boats, eating ice cream, trying on traditional straw hats, and generally frolicking around like idiots.

We had the evening free. First I went out to dinner with the rest of the CIEE crowd one of my classmates and his friends who are also Lillian's classmates. We went for traditional Hang Zhou style food which was all really really good. After we had sat through the meal for a good long time, chatted for a while, made sure all the plates were clean, and plaid the bill we decided to get up and leave. However as we put on our jackets and got ready to go the waiter comes running up and says "wait but don't you want your duck???" "Duck???" we thought... It turns out that Jeff had ordered a duck and forgotten about it... so there was nothing to do but go back and eat the duck ^^,

Hangzhou is famous for bordering on 西湖 (Xi Hu) or west lake. Our hotel was only a few blocks from the lake so decided to walk down to the lake and see what it was like at night. Unfortunately the lake had bats... Lillian is deathly afraid of bats... She dealt with it though so we kept strolling. It was really nice to be somewhere with some natural beauty, because although Shanghai is awesome natural beauty is not its forte.

As we were walking along the edge of the lake we started to hear music. It turned out that in the square ahead of us there were a couple hundred Chines people line dancing. Going with my newly adopted life policy "why not do it?" I managed to convince Lillian that it was necessary for us to go join in the massive Chinese line dance, which we then did. I'm not sure that anything quite that entertaining had ever happened in Hangzhou before. So we stood and watched for a few minutes to get the hang of it and then jumped in. That of course was the cue for the music to change to double time. I have to admit that after years of ballet Lillian was definitely better than I was, but I had a blast nonetheless.

After we had walked around for a while longer we sat down at a lakeside cafe and got ice cream while we sat and chatted. Then we headed back to the hotel. Megan went to sleep and I went to visit some of my Korean classmates from lass semester who I hadn't seen in a while.

We had heard that Hangzhou had a great midnight snack street so Lillian and I decided that we needed to take advantage of it. We got the hotel to write out the address and grabbed a taxi out to the street. It turned out to be more a street of tiny restaurants. They all seemed to be specializing in craw fish, and there were massive tubs of live craw fish outside the restaurants, so of course we had to give it a try. I don't know where all the people came from but despite it being around one in the morning on a Thursday/Friday all of these restaurants were full. There was a little table for two crammed between two bigger tables that was open in one of the more popular places, so we grabbed it when we could. We ended up with a massive bowl of craw fish between us and some chopsticks. We looked at the massive bowl of whole craw fish, we looked at the chopsticks, we looked at each other, then we reached over and snagged the box of tissues of the table next to us and went to town.

I don't really understand it but all the Chinese people where eating the craw fish with a very minimal amount of mess, while Lillian and I were practically bathing in them. In can deal with a whole crab with my chopsticks, I can peal a shrimp in my moth, but I have yet to figure out how to eat a craw fish without my hands... oh well... They were delicious, and I was wearing black...

We went back to the hotel and I went to Lillian's room and met a few of her classmates which was fun before heading off to bed.

Far too few hours later we headed off for day two. We drove around the lake to the official tourist visit portion of the lake and had essentially a free day to take in the lake. I hung out with Megan, Nate, and Jonas. First we saw that across from where we were dropped off there was a bike rental place that had a sign up saying bike rental for 1 kuai (about 14 cents) we thought that was a good idea. So began "mission bicycle." We went over to inquire about renting bikes and the woman in charge said that she had bicycles, but no cards that you needed to rent bikes but if we went to the next rental station up the road they might have some. So we did. Rinse and repeat... Four bike rental stations later one of the people told us that the only place with cards was the place at the front of the park. At that point we demanded to know why. Her answer: "I don't know, it doesn't make any sense to me, but the boss says so..." We finally made it to the place at the front of the park only to be informed that although we could rent the bike for one kuai we would need to pay 300 in various deposits... So ended "mission bicycle"

It turned out fine though, because from there we wandered back into the park and our small hike had taken us off of the main tourist track so we had a little breathing room to walk. We ended up renting a boat and boatman to take us around the lake which was absolutely lovely.

Finally we grabbed some lunch and hopped back on the buses to head home.

I seem to have misplaced my Hangzhou pictures so if you want to see them they are posted on my facebook. I am now going to head to the gym. When I get back if I am feeling like a really good person I will write about My trip to Hunan which I left for two days after I got back from Hangzhou.

TTFN

2009-04-03T02:15:00.000-07:00

大家好!

So after the entertaining but mildly traumatic events of my last blog life has been remarkably calm. So much so that last time I sat down to blog I realized that I had nothing to write about… But finally: An Event! Last weekend we went to Nanjing, we being Megan, Lillian, Jonas, Nick, and I.

We took the train out Saturday morning and stayed through Monday night. (yes I did play hookie, so sue me) We stayed at a Hostel that one of our fellow students suggested. It turned out to be a great spot. It was right next to Confucius’s Temple and a really cool walk street/night market area. It was also clean and nicer than I expected, especially for the oh so expensive $6 a night I was paying for it. It was also cool to be in a place with tons of other traveling kids from all over the world. I ended up having a fun Chat with a group of German kids who were studying film in Shanghai.

The first afternoon we decided to go to the Nanjing Massacre Museum since it is a “must do” from everyone who has gone to Nanjing. Since there were five of us taking a taxi was pretty much out of the question no matter what because we would always be stuck taking two, and our direction giving ability was iffy at best, so it would be particularly bad if we got separated. So… On to the Bus system!!!!

We found the right bus line and the stop nearest us and walked down. We saw quite a few brand new shiny buses go by, but our bus had yet to arrive. But the, from down the street, we saw it… The red bus, chipping paint and all, that looked like it was built in the early 70s and had yet to be remodeled with a large number 63 painted on the front. We looked at each other and asked Megan “we do really want the 63 right?” “yep” so we all headed on… Lillian described it as “it’s like the bus is in a time warp that no one else is stuck in” The windows rattled… Actually the whole bus kind of rattled. But we did get there… And in one piece too!

I still have mixed feelings about the Massacre Museum. Initially I was incredibly impressed. The architecture was amazing and the various outside courtyards were beautifully laid out. There was some quite disturbing statuary, but it really bought the emotions home in a still relatively tactful way. The whole thing was constructed in Black Marble and gray concrete which, in conjunction with the grey weather, made quite an impression.

When we got there we wandered through the outside courtyard before getting in line with a massive tour group to go inside. However, when we were only a little way into the line the guard monitoring the line announced “外国朋友请先来” Or “Will the foreign friends please come first” so we got to cut the whole line which was pretty nice. In my opinion the museum went down hill from there.

We proceeded to a recreation of the excavation of the mass grave left behind after the Nanjing massacre that, in my opinion, was done in extremely poor taste.

However, there was something extremely interesting. At various points throughout the museum there were huge chains of thousands of paper cranes. I guess that Japanese tour groups came and brought them to leave in apology. I thought that was incredibly interesting for several different reasons. On one hand it was really interesting that the Japanese were admitting that it was a mistake on their part enough to bring a symbolic offering of apology. On the other hand it was equally interesting that the Chinese were willing to leave the chains out for visitors to view, since the rest of the museum seemed essentially devoted to perpetuating the hatred between Japan and China.

After we walked through the mass grave there was an eternal flame, and then we walked out into a large open arcade. At the end was a massive statue of “Peace” portrayed as a western woman, which I thought was really interesting.

At the same time as we were there, there was also a large group of Chinese soldiers visiting. Groups of them got together in front of the statue and take pictures, with V for victory signs and all. It was really adorable.

Lillian and I were walking along and there was a man trailing us who was determined to take a picture of us using his cell phone. I am pretty used to it at this point. Some people however, are more subtle then other. The incredibly loud shutter sound that his cell phone camera made kind of ruined this particular man’s attempts at stealth. Finally Lillian and I decided to turn around and just pose for the man, however, when we did so he vehemently denied having been taking our pictures. So we turned around and kept walking and he kept trailing…

Megan had decided that she needed to go to the bathroom, so we decided to meet her at the end near the statue. About 15 minutes after she had left Lillian’s cell phone went off. The Conversation went something like this:
“Hey Megan. Where are you?”
…
“at the front gate… Why?”
…
“YOU GOT IN A FIGHT!!!!”

As it turns out Megan had gotten involved a bathroom brawl and had been escorted to the front gate by the security guards who came to break it up. She had been waiting in line for the bathroom, and had finally gotten to the front when a group of older Chinese women came in and tried to cut the line by elbowing everybody out of the way. The woman behind Megan tried to stop them by pointing out the she and Megan had been waiting in line. Megan piped up that yes, she had in fact been waiting for a long time. Elbows flew… Security guards were called…

We went back to the hostel in the evening to chill a little and then head to bed. The hostel had a resident cat that was completely adorable and I really enjoyed playing with for a while earlier that day. However before we got back something really traumatic must have happened to that cat, because we opened our room door and the cat appears out of no where and sprints into the room and takes up semi permanent residence under my bed. Now that wouldn't have been a big deal except that Megan is EXTREMELY ALLERGIC to cats.

Mission Eject Cat then commenced. I sat in the room and tried to coax it out to start with. Finally I reverted to sitting with my hand out and waiting for the cat to come to me. Fortunately I noticed the cat shift its weight somewhat oddly so I tensed up, which enabled me to throw myself out of the way when the cat came shooting out from under the bed in full battle mode and moved in under the bed across from mine. Unfortunately, at that point there was a Chinese man asleep in that bed... I finally went for help. I'm still not sure how, but Nick eventually managed to get it out of the room without it ever having gone onto Megan's bed so all was well.

The next morning we decided to head out for a traditional Chinese HOT SPRING ADVENTURE!!!! But first we needed breakfast. So while the boys woke up Megan Lillian and I went down to find some street food. Fortunately there were several food stalls right under the hostel. We grabbed a "麻球" (sesame ball) for everyone. These turned out to be filled with honey rather than the usual red bean paste and were delicious! We also bought what we call Chinese crepes. I never have actually figured out the proper name for them. They are a really thin piece of crepe like dough with an egg, some chili pepper, some really awesome brown sweet sauce, some little pickled thingys, some green veggies, and your choice of a crunch thing or a 油条 which I call a Chinese donut all wrapped together. They are Excellent. (I was really upset when I actually learned the Chinese name for Chinese donuts and realized that they translate to "oil stick")

We were without a doubt the most interesting thing to have ordered food in a long time and by the time we were done there was quite a group who had come to watch us chat with the ladies who ran the food carts. Always glad to be of entertainment!

After breakfast we headed out. There are some famous hot springs in the mountains outside Nanjing which we decided we couldn’t miss. We were planning on taking a bus out, but when we got to the bus station this guy came up to us and was like “I have a van 15 kuai per person and I will take you “ and we were like “sketchy van man… perhaps not…”

But then the bus pulled up and it was absolutely full of people. Sooooo… standing for an hour and a half??? Sketchy van??? standing for an hour and a half??? Sketchy… Ohhhh look those Chinese people are taking the sketchy van… WAIT FOR USSSSSSSS!!!!!!!!!

So we took the van and the driver, after making some fun of our Chinese took us straight to the door of the hot spring complex. The hot springs were AMAZING!!!! Seriously who doesn’t love a spa day? It was practically a hot spring resort with a $20 or so entrance fee you got to spend the day playing in their 42 different hot springs. What are in the 42 different hot springs? you might ask…

Well, to start with : flesh eating fish! Not kidding, I promise.

Apparently it is an ancient Chinese exfoliating technique. You sit in a warm pool and fish come and “吃” (eat) you. I had heard about them before, but I never really expected to do it. But hey, why not right? I also expected the fish to be tiny and tadpole like, but no, they were about three inches or so. All the Chinese were sitting there completely calmly, not twitching at all, so we settled in to wait.

And then all of us at one felt the fish “吃” us. We pretty much flipped out. There was jumping and giggling and flailing of all sorts, much to the amusement of the 50 or so Chinese people chilling in there with us. We eventually adjusted to it and stopped flailing and got be amused in our turn when a group of Chinese girls flipped out too.

There was drink and snack service included in our package, so when we were sitting in one of the hot springs a waitress came around with a tray of drinks. I was kind of expecting something zen and soothing such as unsweetened green tea, but no, she comes by with a tray of orange, green, and clear soda. I of course had to get the toxic waste green bubbling liquid, who wouldn’t? Which turned out to be some pretty awesome green apple soda.

We kept hot springing until about 2 in the afternoon. Some of my favorites were, besides the fish pool of course, the waterfall hot spring where you could chill under a waterfall, and the small baths each of which had a different flower scent. The wine hot spring, disappointingly, was not filled with wine. We wrapped up by sitting in the sauna and then grabbed a car back into town.

Than night we hopped on another bus and headed out to see the city walls. Nanjing is famous for having some of the oldest in tact city walls in the world. There was great view and a bunch of people up on the top flying kites which was really fun. There was also a wonderful sort of quiet tranquility to the place which I rarely come across even in the parks of bustling Shanghai. The authentic awesomeness of the place was a little broken by the massive inflated car on top of the ramparts though. Well... Who didn't want to know about the newest Kia when visiting ancient city walls?

We headed back towards the Hostel and stopped by the Confucius temple. It turns out that the temple was in the middle of the annual lantern festival. That meant that the whole place was filled with ridiculously complicated and completely awesome lanterns. We aren't talking lanterns that hang from the rafters or anything though. These were practically parade floats.

We had grabbed a late lunch that day so when dinner came around we weren't really hungry. We went and walked around the night markets for a while, but the city, like most of China shut down at 10 pm. The boys went back to the hostel, but Megan, Lillian, and I went on Dumpling Quest. We had seen people order in Dumplings the night before and had been wanting some ever since. All the street vendors were closing but finally we found a dumpling chain restaurant. We ran in and ordered just in time. A few people came in right after us and got turned away. I think that we got served only because the lady at the counter was incredibly amused by our existence and our need for dumplings at a few minutes to ten. So we got our dumplings, and then were compelled to stop for fruit on a stick on the way back to the hostel. Who doesn't want about a quarter of a watermelon on a stick for 20 cents?

The next morning was our last day so we started by checking out. We then grabbed some 包子 (steamed buns) for breakfast and headed down to the train station to see if we could check our bags for the day. Fortunately we could, so we dropped our stuff and hopped on the bus. We decided to go out to Purple mountain which is the major scenic spot in Nanjing and also the site of Sun Yat Sen's tomb.

I am going to go on a a quick tangent on the names of major Chinese political figures in Chinese and English. THEY ARE COMPLETELY NOT THE SAME AT AAAAALLLLLLLLLLL!!!!!!! It makes it really hard to talk to Chinese people. for example earlier this year I went to the tomb of Chang Kai Shek. It took me about half an hour to communicate where I had gone since in Chinese his name is Jian Jie Shi. Now tell me where we got Chang Kai Shek from. Now Sun Yat Sen is closer. I mean, we got the first word right at least. His name in Chinese is Sun Zhong Shan. If we were going to change the names that mich why didn't we just pick something like John or Fred for the English names?

Anywho... I think my new goal in life is to become important enough to get a tomb like Sun Yat Sen's. It is insanely gorgeous. It is up a huge mountain with a view that goes on forever over a massive nature park and then the city sky line.

We were climbing up to the top, but about half way up we stopped to take pictures with some massive bronze urns. Of course, since we had stopped at a tourist attraction that made us a part of the attraction. Five different Chinese family's immediately mobbed up grabbed Megan Lilian and I and started taking pictures. The then started trading us around. I swear there was bargaining, something along the lines of "I'll give your family Lillian if we can have Megan and Zoe for a group shot" "Done." The crowed cleared after about ten minutes and we made a run for it.

At the top was Sun Yat Sen's actual Mausoleum. I guess when they were building the site the Chinese government held a competition. The layout design for the layout of the grounds was won by a Chinese architect, but the actual mausoleum and the statue of Sun Yat Sen went to an Italian architect and a Czech sculpture, which ended up creating a distinctly western looking Sun Yat Sen.

After the Memorial we went through some of the other stuff at the park. They had a massive pagoda in memory of Chinese patriots. It was really awesome becasue you could climb up to each of ten levels and look out. I have taken a bunch of classes where teacher make students do something to try to "change there perspective" usually involving standing on desks or the like. Nothing has ever worked as well as climbing the pagoda. The forst few floors you were looking at individual trees and would clearly see that there were two layers of different types of trees. By the time I got to the top floor the trees looked like a rolling blanket that I almost believed I could walk across.

Next up we went to see a special outdoor music amphitheater. At the amphitheater they cultivated special whit pigeons. There were TONS of them. What I didn't know is that Lillian is terrified of/hates all birds and things that make flapping noises.

There were people who were feeding the pigeons and letting them stand on them. Lillian looked at them start to feed the birds and as a huge flock of hundred of bird lifted off to fly onto the people she kind of yelled out "Why would you feed them? Why? Oh No! SAVE YOURSELVES!!!!" Megan and I almost keeled over cracking up.

Finally we grabbed the bus back to the train station to catch our train home. We had bought bowls of Ramen for dinner on the train. Now I thought that it was physically impossible not to cook ramen correctly. Lillian however, thought otherwise.

Megan, Lillian, and I all had the ramen that you pour the liquid out of and end up with not soupy noodles. So we all added water from the trains hot water dispenser. I guess Lillian went last so the water wasn't as hot or something, because when we all went to pour out the water Lillian said "ummm, guys, my noodles are still hard..." So we decided that she should pour the water out and add new hot water. We could do that because for that kind of ramen we had only added vegetables, not sauce with the water. But when she started pouring the water out she began to "hemorrhage vegetables" They were kind of spraying out with the water into the water machine's filter. At that point we were cracking up so hard we all almost dropped our ramen. She re-added hot water but when the time came and her noodles were finally done she had already poured the water once so the lid was kind of ripped and she hemorrhaged even more vegetables.

We were completely incapacitated with laughter and there was an entire car of Chinese train passengers who just couldn't understand what in the world could be that hilarious about the water dispenser... Which of course only made us laugh harder...

till next time!

There and Back Again: A Bag's Tale

2009-03-12T05:34:00.001-07:00

I was aware of theft in Shanghai, mostly in that vague "not going to happen to me" kind of way. I fact I kind of expected one of us to get our pockets picked at some point on the trip. There is simply to much pick pocketing for me to think we would all get away without a problem. What I didn't expect was what happened to me Saturday as I was walking down Nanjing Lu with Lillian.

This week and last week is the Shanghai International Literature Festival. I was supposed to go see James Fallows speak on Saturday afternoon. Lillian and I wanted to go to another presentation on Sunday so we decided to go early to buy tickets. We took the metro to the Nanjing Dong Lu exit and decided to walk the rest of the way to the venue which was on the Bund. We were walking and talking. I honestly cant remember about what when my bag got yanked out of my hand. At first I thought it had caught on one of the way too many people we were walking with and had just been tugged out of my grip, but then I turned around and saw a man sprinting away holding my bag...

I shouted at the top of my lungs. Unfortunately I used English. Shock tends to snap you back into the language you know the best. But I got peoples attention anyway. There was a lot of pointing and honking but he managed to dodge around the corner without anyone stopping him. I made a rather feeble attempt to run after him, but high heeled boots are just not conducive to effective pursuit of robbery suspects.

I have heard tons of stories about how the Chinese love to stand by and watch a disaster occur, but never go out of their way to do anything. This didn't happen to me at all. I was actually shocked by how helpful pretty much everyone within a square block was. Immediately a younger couple came up and asked if I needed to use their phone to call the police. I ended up using Lillian's cell, but the couple stayed to make sure that I knew the right emergency numbers and that I could communicate what I needed to. And when the police arrived a huge group of people stayed to tell what they had seen and see if I needed any help.

So speaking of the police I am incredibly repressed with their response time. Almost immediately after I called there were four police cars, two motorcycles, and, no joke,a troop of the national guard in full uniform running around.

On the down side my attempt at calling 110 (think 911 but only for police, there are different numbers for fire or paramedics) was, frankly, a disaster. I started off by asking for English. HUGE MISTAKE! I thought that if they had an English speaker everything would be communicated far more clearly and quickly then if I tried to use my pretty-fluent-but-still-kind-of-sketchy Chinese. WRONG! What did asking for English get me. It got me two Chinese cops and an English translator on speaker phone. Did I mention that my pretty-fluent-but-still-kind-of-sketchy Chinese was WAY better than the translators English, but she had been requested, so...

Finally I pretty much got the major events across and by then the police were there, so I gave up on the phone and went for the face to face communication. After the police men had seen that the rather large amount of human resources had been correctly allocated they asked if they could take me back to the police station for a full report.

BUREAUCRACY HHHHHHOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

But let's start with how we got to the police station. They offered to give us a ride in the back of the police van. Note to self: NEVERNEVERNEVERNEVER get arrested in China. Did I say Never? There was a bench back there for Lillian and I directly facing the CAGE where the criminals went. Not kidding. There was a cage in the back of the van. We eventually got to the police station.

Life Goals:

1. graduate high school (check)
2. move to another country (check)
3. learn a new language (check)
4. make new friends (check)
5. give a police report in Chinese (check) Four times (check)

We got to the police station (Lillian was still with me) Only to find that a man from the street had come to make sure that we told the police everything that needed to be told. He was the only thing in the whole situation that nearly made me lose it. At first I was grateful, but then I changed my mind. He ended up alternating between telling the police what happened and shaking his finger at me while informing me, in mandarin with an incredibly thick shanghai accent, that this was my fault because I didn't scream loud enough. Apparently if I had screamed loud enough people like him who were standing across the street would have heard and leaped to the rescue, thus detaining the robber. That really didn't make sense to me at the time, because clearly he had to have heard me, since he turned and saw the whole thing... Oh well. I probably shouldn't have confronted him, but the fourth time he told me this I switched from quietly saying I understand to in forming him that I had indeed called out quited loudly seeing as the entire street had stopped what it was doing. That didn't really make an impression on him, so he just went to tell the guy behind us in line that I had been robbed and that it was my fault because I didn't yell... It was what the Chinese call a 没有办法 (mei you ban fa) moment. Meaning essentially there is no help for it.

Then it was my turn to give my police report. Despite this being one of the police stations of the largest tourist area in Shanghai there were no English speakers to be found in the station so I was left to my own devices. I guess the good that came out of this is a new found confidence in my Chinese. Before this I thought that my Chinese had improved a lot, and that it might even be getting good. After the three and a half hours I spent explaining myself to four different police officers I know that my Chinese is now, in fact, quite good if not beautiful or fluent.

First one cop asked to write out my statement. The whole thing was a bit comical, because when I handed them my statement, written in English of course, they all kind of gathered around and stared at it before photocopying it 8 or 10 times and then dismissing it as useless.

Next came the second cop. He was a younger cop and clearly wanted to be doing bigger and better things. I almost kicked him before deciding that I did not want to commit a felony in China and pasting a smile on my face. I figured that because I understood and answered 9 out of 10 of the questions in he asked in extremely rapid Chinese using a language that I had studied for 6 months that I was doing pretty well and that I probably deserved some mild respect if not a little praise. He disagreed. He found the fact that I did not immediately recognize the word sidewalk to be a particularly egregious offense. At one point Lillian and I ended up acting out the robbery in the middle of the police station, much to the amusement of the other man waiting. (as a side note, I feel terrible for the man waiting. Whatever he needed done, it wasn't his day.)

He then proceeded to ask me about the contents of my bag. First he asked about the bag and how much it cost. I told him that it was red leather and that I had bought it for a hundred. He asked American dollars or RMB. I told him RMB and he looked at me then shook his had and grumbled "fake" I almost cracked up. My bag had been ripped off my shoulder in the middle of the most famous street in Shanghai and the cop was worried that it wasn't legitimate.

We then went painstakingly through all the contents of my bag. At the time I thought that the thief was pretty much the least lucky thief of all time. I had never left the house with fewer valuables. I was actually on the way to the bank when he ripped off my bag. I had 100 RMB or roughly 15 dollars, my pone, and my keys. It was the keys I was most upset about because I knew that my host family would need to change the locks.

I was incredibly lucky that Lillian was there. We have the same phone and essentially the same thing in our wallets, down to the same bank's ATM card. It was incredibly useful to be able to show the police everything that I was talking about.

That officer finally went off to do whatever he was going to do and was replaced by another cop who typed the police report in Chinese into the computer while asking me periodic questions.

They then realized that computer A was not hooked up to the printer today... Neither was there a USB key to be found.

I was then handed over to officer number 4 who typed my report again. This time into computer B from which it was printed, photocopied ten more times, and presented to me to sign. I signed my statement, and then they handed me all the Chinese documentation. I know you aren't supposed to sign documents that you can't read. I could read most of the police reports and they had given up on my English name and typed them all under my Chinese name which isn't legal anyway. So I printed my name and hoped that if it ever became an issue someone would differentiate between printing and cursive.

3 1/2 hours later we were finally set free. Our first step: Go get some ice cream.

I feel pretty bad. I didn't have a phone anymore so we gave the police Lillian's number in case they needed to contact me. Lillian speaks no Chinese. They wanted to contact me. Frequently.

My host family did change all the locks (we have two front doors) but there was a problem with one of the locks so my host dad locked me in Sunday morning and went to get a new one. The doorbell rang, and who was it but Lillian? So we got to talk through the door as she explained that the police wanted to talk to me and I explained that I couldn't get out of the house...

Things proceeded in that vein. In the middle of class on Monday the girl behind me tapped me on the back. I looked behind me and she pointed at the girl next to her who pointed to the next person who pointed forming a line to the girl next to the window. Lillian was waving through the window pointing at her phone. (the police wanted to know how much money was on my sim card...)

The biggest problem was my host family, which I saw coming the minute I got robbed. I guess nothing like that has happened before... They expect pickpockets but the whole purse snatching in the middle of the day on a busy street is new... Thus: MAJOR PARANOIA!!!!!!! They tried to impose a curfew which they blamed on the economic crisis because poor people are coming to the city and stealing. For a while I was close to coming unglued because every time I saw my host dad I got a new safety lecture: "if you leave the house and one of us is home don't bring your keys... Never bring anything important out of the house... Never walk to MOB (the gym) alone... Do not carry money... there are evil people here from the country due to the economic crisis, they have weapons... You are a girl thus you will die... Don't put your computer on the bed, the house will burn down!!!!!!!!!!!!!"

We are pretty much over it at this point. I promised my host dad that whenever I leave the house I will give him the address of my destination and that if I get in a taxi I will text him the company and the taxi number... A little over the top perhaps, but better than the curfew.

On Tuesday one of my host mom's work mates got her backpack ripped off in the middle of a train station in the afternoon. I have to say that my first thought on hearing that was not "oh the poor woman, I know what that feels like." but "Couldn't she have waited?"

However, I did title this blog There and Back Again. So to finish the story.

Wednesday night I open my email. In my inbox is an email from a guy I met once at a party a long time ago. The email read as follows:

Hi Zoe,

Long time no see u , I wander if you can remember who I am, we met each other four months ago on the party arranged by TOP MANDARIN at kouler center Nanjing road, and I have given you my name card then.

The day before yesterday, someone called me that they have found your stolen bag with all your identity cards, I have been tried several times to contact you by your mobilephone number but failed, I think you must be worried about them and anxious to look for them.

If you see this letter, pls call me anytime without hesitation.

Yep. I quite litterally fell off my chair. I then ran to ask my host parents for the phone. They flipped. My host father decided that he was a part of a murderous scheme to get our adress and refused to let me use the house phone. He then called the guy using his cell phone and put his through his very best lawyer complete interrigation at full yell, during which he frequently told the guy that he did not trust him and that he was a lawyer.

If I was the man I would never do anyone a good service ever again. I would be way too afraid. Finally my Host Dad figured out that this poor guy was just trying to help and did not want to kill us all and appologized once or twice then hung up.

It turns out that the theif had ditched my bag in the bathroom of a restaurant just off Nanjing Lu. We wen't to the restaurant to pick up my bag. I had put the guy's card in my wallet all those months ago and forgotten about along with about a dozen other cards along with my host Dad's and CIEEs, but the restaurant saw fit to just call him.

This was officially the wierdest robbery conducted by the wierdest/nicest? robber EVER! My bag was essentially intact. All the cards in my wallet had been taken out and then replaced in my wallet in a different order. The 100 RMB was still in my wallet. My keys were still there (which I was highly appreciative of since the key to my bike lock was attatched and I was trying to figure out how to get someone to take the lock off without thinking I was stealing a bike) as was the ticket to the James Fallows talk that I had never quite made it to.

The only thing missing was my cell phone. However when I looked through all the pockets in my bag it turns out that the thief had taken my sim card out of my phone and put that back in the special sipped pocket. So although I have to get a new phone, I even get to keep my number. I was quite upset about loosing that because that would mean loosing quite a few chinese friends. I don't have their numbers anymore, but they will eventually call me.

So I have everything back but my phone. And frankly:

I AM CONFUSED

Until next time.

2009-02-22T04:57:00.000-08:00

So despite my promises to update more frequently here we are again a month after my last update… Well I am yet again going to plead being ridiculously busy. Sorry about that.

As a side note before we Begin I am writing this from the Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf near my house because I didn’t want to spend the day entirely at home. I can’t help but find it ironic that although Coffee Bean has yet to reach the east coast there are plenty in the eastern hemisphere… Well there you go.

I just finished up with the main Chinese School break which centers around Chinese New Years or Spring Festival （春节）as the Chinese call it. It was very carefully explained to me that Spring Festival does not actually occur during spring but that after spring festival spring can arrive. This was a point that needed clarification as we all spent spring festival in ski jackets… Thus this will be the Spring Festival edition of the blog:

Spring Festival is the big family holiday in China. Think Christmas, Thanksgiving, 4th of July, and New Years all rolled into one huge holiday for which the entire country is given a week of mandatory vacation. Every one returns to their ancestral home town, which creates a really interesting phenomenon. I knew that a lot of the people in Shanghai had moved to the city for work from other places, but suddenly for a week anyone with a family that hasn’t been in Shanghai for two generations or so just up and leaves. The city was EMPTY. It was actually somewhat creepy. I am used to going out bumping into six or eight people before I go two blocks and almost getting run down at least once. Suddenly I went out and there was no one on the sidewalk and the streets were empty. Shanghai practically became a ghost town.

A side point on the home town thing. The Chinese think your roots are really important. When you speak to Chinese people they will often ask where you are from. Not only of me, but of other Chinese, and they will answer not with where they live, but with where their family is from. Sometimes even people who are born in one place will answer with where there parents were born. They have two different words for hometown, one meaning where you were born, the other with meaning of your ancestral home. Chinese grammar emphasizes this as well. When asked where you are from the answer isn’t the place name, it is directly translated “I am (place name) person” making it part of your identity.

This makes Americans very confusing to the Chinese. I have talked with my host family several times about my heritage. I am definitely American, but I have European heritage, German on my mom’s side and French on my dad’s. My host dad informed me that because of this according to the Chinese I am French or maybe German, but not American. However, almost all of the American’s I know have a relatively recent ancestor who moved from another country. American is made up of many different Heritages, but the people largely consider themselves American. The Chinese find this beyond confusing. They believe that a person of Chinese heritage living anywhere in the world is still Chinese. They even have a phrase for it “all under the Yellow Emperor.” They have a particularly hard time understanding Chinese Americans, who look just like they do, but have an American thought process. They refer to them as “Bananas” because they are “yellow on the outside, but white on the inside” I promise that I’m not joking.

Now that tangent aside back to Spring Festival. What I planned on saying about it being a family holiday was that I split my time between my host mother and Father’s relatives. Historically the holidays were spent with the husbands family, but now they most families alternate years spending the first night of the holidays with one family and then the next year with the other.

This year the first night (think New Year’s Eve) was spent with my host father’s family in Suzhou. We drove out in the morning and then went dinner with the family in Suzhou. My name has now evolved from Mei Guo Jie Jie (American older sister) to Mei Jie which as with most things in the Chinese language is a play on words, and one that my extended host family is quite proud of themselves for. In this case I like the pun. Mei can stand for one of two compound words Mei Guo (美国) meaning America or Mei Li (美丽) meaning beautiful (the direct translation for America into Chinese is beautiful country).

Here is a slight tangent on puns in Chinese. You can’t have a language where every word has four or more meanings depending on tone without getting a culture based on puns. Many of the things that are considered lucky or unlucky are based on puns as well. For example the number four is considered unlucky. Some buildings in fact dons have fourth floors this is because in Chinese four is said “si” (四) however the verb to die is also “si” (死). Another example is that a couple is never supposed to share a pear. This is because a pear in Mandarin is “li” and so is the verb to separate…

The first night of Chinese New Year there is a TV program that the entire country witches put on by CCTV. When I got here I didn’t know what CCTV stood for so in my mind I nicknamed it Communist Chinese Television. It turns out it actually stands for Central Chinese Television… same same… although China is now officially no longer Communist… They now practice “Socialism with Chinese Characteristics” Don’t ask me what that means. Anywho it was a pretty cool program, although my Chinese wasn’t really good enough to get most of the stand up comedy. I tried though.

A few months ago I read the book River Town: Two Years on the Yangtze By Peter Hessler, a man who came as one of the first peace corp volunteers in the early 90s to teach English in China. I really enjoyed it and strongly suggest reading it if you have some free time. Anyway he talked about a Canadian comedian called Da Shan in China who had learned flawless Mandarin and often appeared on TV. In the book Hessler complains about people telling him how good Da Shan’s Chinese was all the time. I remember reading it and thinking “thank goodness he isn’t around anymore, that would drive me crazy!” Well About halfway through the New Years Program who should appear but Da Shan himself. I consequently spent the next week hearing about how good Da Shan’s Chinese is compared to mine. I almost started cracking up the first time I heard it. After that it wasn’t so funny anymore, and then it was really irritating. After the fifth time I heard it I was quite tempted to yell “if I had been living here for 25 years, I too would have flawless tones, however, seeing as I have now been here for five months, I am not surprised that I am not perfectly fluent yet, are you?”

The next day, on a solid four hours sleep we headed back to Shanghai. I think my host family might think that I am narcoleptic since every time they put me in a car I am almost instantly asleep… But lets face it whenever I am in a car with them I am usually massively sleep deprived and then they put me in a nice warm rocking environment. What am I supposed to do? That night we had dinner at my host Grandparents house which was fun as usual, although I was again stuffed to an almost unimaginable level of fullness, and that is a difficult thing to do now. Due to being continually overfed my stomach capacity has enlarged considerably and it is pretty hard to get me to the point where I can’t eat another bite. The problem is that they keep offering my delicious little snacks and new year’s candies…

The next day I went to Karaoke with my host family which was a complete blast. The Chinese love Karaoke, but I had never gone with my host family before. It was hilarious. My host father is probably the most enthusiastic and at the same time one of the worst singers I have ever heard. He was constantly asking Angel to crank up the background music. My host mother very decorously and yet adorably sang her songs, but the best thing was when my host mom and dad sang duets. It was precious beyond words. I took videos, and I will see if I can post them on the blog, I don’t know if it is possible. I sang Mamma Mia by ABBA somewhere towards the end and my host dad thought it was amazing. He spent the next week spontaneously shouting MAMMA MIA. I spent the next week spontaneously cracking up. That night we had dinner with my host uncle, his wife, and daughter.

For the third day of Chinese New Year I went on a trip to the countryside with my hot mom’s family. We got up at 4:30 in the morning so that we could be on our way by 5:30. We drove by my host grandparents to pick up the gang. It ended up with me and my host family as well as my host aunt and her son in the our car (which made four of us in the back seat of my host family’s tiny Volkswagen) while my host grandparents rode with my other host aunt and uncle and there son. We were lucky because the host cousin that rode in the car with us is incredibly sweet and fun to play with. My other host cousin is a little demon child.

We went and saw quite a bit of pretty scenery which I will spare you the description of. However, we hadn’t pre booked a hotel so we drove through three different towns and visited seven different hotels before my host dad and uncle found one that was deemed good enough for us. I was supposed to share a room with my host aunt and cousin while angel stayed with her parents, but she decided that our room was going to be the “fun room” and wanted to stay with us so we crammed the two twin beds together and slept four in them. It did end up being a blast. The rooms were slightly oddly set up, mainly in the fact that the shower was a large window to the rest of the room so if you didn’t want to engage in massive over-share you had draw a two shower curtains, one to block the window, and one to contain the water…

There is a clear divided in China between city and country people, but this trip with my host family was one of the more dramatic demonstrations I have seen of it. In Shanghai you see a lot of scorn for the country side (农村). For one the one child policy has been relaxed in the country side. I was talking to the woman who comes a few times a week to do the house work for my host family. She has two children and said that people think that she is stupid for having to children and that her children are by definition stupid. This has created a huge issue for China. The population statistics show that when the current generation of children become adults that the population, especially in the cities, is going to become dangerously unbalanced it is going to have in fact almost halved leaving each Chinese couple responsible for supporting five others (both sets of parents and a child) So the government has relaxed the one child policy. In the city if you are an only child and marry another only child you can have two children, and in the country if you want a son and have a daughter, you can try one more time for a son. However the city people think that having a second child makes you a stupid country person, so although they have the opportunity, very very few people are taking advantage of the new laws.

Back to my observations on the trip about city vs. country tensions on my trip: we went to lunch the first day and everyone started treating everyone else badly almost from the minute we walked through the door. We sat down and the restaurant owner brought us plates. My host family automatically assumed they were dirty and requested that a pitcher of boiling water be brought to the table so that they could wash the dished themselves. They even washed the wooden chopsticks which came in hermetically sealed plastic so, as far as I could tell, could not possibly have been dirty. The owner being understandably insulted brought the local people who came in after us their food first, which then caused my host dad and uncle to get up and go demand where our food was. It was a downward spiral.

That night we were driving through the city where we had finally found our hotel looking for dinner. Since it was Spring Festival most of the restaurants were closed my host family then started to go on about how because this was the country there were no restaurants open. They then went on to say there were probably no stores open either and that these country people probably went the whole week without food due to general stupidity. Now keep in mind this was a decent sized city. Maybe the size of the combined beach cities… However, it had the misfortune to be surrounded by countryside and not a major government center, thus it must be filled with poor, uneducated, and inept residents… I think that this attitude is going to be one of China’s greatest issues as it becomes a more developed nation. My host family has asked me how the US “deals with it’s country people” and I simply did not have an answer.

The fourth day we got up in the morning and grabbed enough breakfast to hold me for the entire day, then we walked out of the breakfast restaurant and walked two blocks where passed a bakery and went in to get some bread to prevent our imminent starvation. We then continued on to a famous set of Chinese wetlands, where we met a friend of my host aunt. He took us to lunch when we arrived, which we ate roughly two hours after breakfast. I thought I would explode. Then we walked around the wetlands which were beautiful. We took a boat from sight to sight and then walked around on foot. The wetlands where also a sight were a recent and very popular Chinese movie Fei Chang Wu Rao was filmed. I had just seen it with Angel and she really enjoyed seeing the different sights from the movie.

On the drive home we stopped at a rest stop for dinner, where my hot family settled in to get a bunch of zong zi (stocky rice) and other goodies. They asked me how many I wanted, and I was just not hungry at all, plus the rest stop smelled like chiou do fu, a type of Chinese preserved fried tofu that almost all westerners and some Chinese think smells absolutely repellant. So I told my host family that I wasn’t hungry and that freaked them out to no end. Although I had already had four meals that day, they were utterly convinced that my starvation was imminent. As a result I ended up eating quite a satisfactory dinner made up of the portion of everybody else’s food that they fed me without taking no for an answer.

I got up the next morning, and since we didn’t have any plans for the morning I told my host family that I was going to the gym. They tried to convince me that I was far too tired to go to the gym, but I went anyway, and spent a blissful four hours there working out without a morsel of food in sight. There was a Pilates class that started while I was there so I took that which ended up being a very good choice for me. There were only three other women there since it was Chinese new year, so at the end of the class they all sat down in a circle and talked with me which ended up being an excellent chance to practice my Chinese and learn about the other people in my class.

That night we went to my host mom’s side of the family at a Hunan style restaurant in the mall near our house. The same place we had gone with my host uncle and also with some friends of the family. Thus making it the third time I had been in a week. It is a good restaurant and makes excellent food, however, three times in a week and any restaurant starts to loose its appeal. Although this will probably get me weird looks from all of you that restaurant makes amazing fish head. Seriously, it is really really good. The time that we went with my host father’s friend made me feel really bad though. My host father’s friend brought his wife and son, and I was like a torture device used on the poor son.

First of all the boy was fourteen, and no fourteen year old boy wants to talk to an eighteen year old girl. It is practically a law of nature. Second he was studying English in school. So I was a double threat: older person of the opposite gender and representing foreign language studies. My host father of course starts right in talking about what a great thing I have been for Angel and how amazing it is for her to have me around to practice her English, and how much better her English has become. Then he looks over at this boy and says “why don’t you take advantage of Zoe and practice your English? What is your English name?” The poor boy gives me the most terrified look I have ever seen. He can’t even get his English name out, forget a coherent sentence. Seeing this my host dad, you would think, would give the boy a break, but oh no no no. He then looks at the boys father and says “why don’t you bring your son over tomorrow morning and he can spend the day speaking English with Zoe!” I thought the kid was actually going to break and run for the hills. I think he probably spent the night begging his parents for mercy, because he did not come the next morning. Although it was somewhat hilarious I felt pretty bad because I had been in the kids place so many times it isn’t even funny (picture a dinner party of forty people: “Zoe, speak Chinese.” speak Chinese, SPEAK WHAT!?!?!?!?!? I’ve only been here for two months! WHAT DO YOU WANT ME TO SAY!?!?!?! *Every one looks over* “ummmmm, Ni Hao”)

Anyway, That night was the fifth night of Chinese New Year. There are two days of Chinese New Year that are the big fire works days, day one and day five. For the night of day one I was in Suzhou so I didn’t experience the full firework joy of Shanghai, but the night of the fifth I was there. At the time I was reading a book about a Vietnam veteran who was talking about how they would hear machine gun fire all night. I distinctly remember thinking that I could sympathize.

I like the Chinese theory of fireworks a lot better than the American theory. The American theory is that you could hurt yourself with fireworks thus they should be outlawed within the town limits for the protection of you and your neighbors. The Chinese theory is that if you kill yourself with a firework you were too stupid to live anyway, so you can get whatever kinds of fireworks you want, and set them off wherever you want. The result of this is that they Chinese buy full 4th of July level firework shows in a box and set them off in the spaces between the apartment buildings. Now there is not really enough room between the buildings for a full fireworks show, so they kind of just bounce off the buildings and windows of the higher apartments. Not for love nor money could you get me to open my windows during Spring Festival.

The night of the fifth day of Spring Festival was a night to remember. I got home from dinner around 10 and the fireworks were going strong. We went out and lit some of our own, which was SOSOSOSOSOSO MUCH FUN!!!! My host dad found, in my opinion, the one really useful use of a cigarette. No one in my host family smokes, but people give out packs of cigarettes at a lot of Chinese New Year dinners so my host dad had acquired a few packs. Thus we used them to light fireworks. They burn slower than matches, but work just as well to light a fuse. There is a unique adrenaline rush that you get from lighting an exploding thing on fire and then running for your life. It was GREAT!!!

The thing that I don’t understand about fireworks and Spring Festival is where people get the energy. I sat in my window watching the show from midnight until about three in the morning when I went to bed out of sheer exhaustion, but the Chinese were still going strong on the fireworks. Who has the energy to light fireworks after 3 a.m. anyway?

I went out the next morning and the streets of Shanghai were quite literally coated in remnants of red paper, gunpowder residue, and sawdust. Every surface was a few centimeters thik with it. One of the most massive work crews I have ever seen appeared that morning and quite literally hosed down the entire city.

Then we went back to KTV (they call karaoke KTV here, who knows why) which was every bit as fun as the first time, except that angel had tried to teach me a few songs in Chinese which I attempted to sing, and succeeded remarkably poorly. Singing karaoke in Chinese is unlike singing in most other foreign languages. For example singing in French is pretty easy, even if there is a word or ten I don’t know I can still probably sing them largely correctly because I know how to read French and how the different letter combinations are pronounce. In Chinese karaoke you get characters: YAY CHARACTERS!!!!!!!! Because I can totally read the characters scrolling by quickly enough to sing them, NOT!!!! Oh, and in case that wasn’t fun enough since almost nothing in China is imported legally, neither are the videos in karaoke. They are largely stolen from Taiwan since they are Taiwanese artists. Taiwan, yep that means traditional characters: YAY TRADITIONAL!!!!!!!!!!!! Because I can totally read traditional characters especially scrolling by quickly enough to sing them, NOT!!!! Yep, I am super good at doing karaoke in Chinese, Really I am. But it is really fun anyway.

That night I had dinner at my host grandparent’s house before leaving for Vietnam…

Since I am now shaking from caffeine intake due to the second coffee I ordered so I could continue to sit here, I will write Vietnam, either later tonight or some time soon.

新年快乐 Happy New Year (belatedly)

Bye bye

Zoe

2009-01-21T21:52:00.000-08:00

Alright, I am back... Since Sarah Verity yelled at me this morning on skype for allowing my blog to "stagnate" I will actually make an attempt to update it now.

I am now officially on Spring Festival Break, which is the Chinese equivalent of Christmas Break and Easter Break combined. We have a little more than a month off.

For the first week of break I went to Hainan Island (海南) with my host family and Jonas. Hainan is the most southern point in China, and it is LOVELY and WARM!!!!!!!!!

Shanghai at this point is pretty cold, we are expecting negative five tomorrow, so I was really ready to go some place warm. My host family also has a strange habit: They believe that every so often we need to "change the air."

Changing the air entails opening every window in the house and leaving them open for an hour or so. Now in my humble Californian opinion there is NO REASON in the whole wide world that in zero degree weather the air would EVER need to be changed. Seriously, no amount of stuffiness short of someone or something dying in the house could possibly justify lowering the indoor temperature into the 30s or 40s. And, for the record, the house is not stuffy so far as I can tell. However, as I sit and write, the windows of my room have again been opened to allow the glorious outdoors entrance. Oh, and we are on the seventh floor, so we get cold wind up here.

The point of that being to illustrate how ready I really was for an island vacation.

We left home at 3:30 in the afternoon and to make a long story short we traveled for a REALLY LONG TIME.

(Hianan is a 2 1/2 hour flight from Shanghai)

At 2 a.m. the next morning we got to our hotel in Hainan... Don't ask me where the time went...

I knew that we were going on an organized tour of Hainan, but I was still picturing most of my time spent reclining on a beach, attempting to avoid sunburn, and swimming a lot. That was not quite what ended up happening...

It turns out that we were part of on of those frightening tour buses of Asian people that you see all over the world. You know, they pour out of a bus and follow around a guy with a flag and a microphone... And they all have matching hats... Yep, that was me. I even have the hat... Really, it is khaki and says Aristocracy Tours on it...

The Chinese have been trained from a young age that being first matters... A LOT. So when the time came to get on the bus there was a minor brawl over who got on first. Of course, my host mom and dad won.

We were really lucky in our tour guide. Not only was he nice,but he spoke relatively slowly and enunciated very clearly, so I had a fighting chance to understand him.

We had landed in Haiko (海口) but we didn't spend much time there. Our first stop was at the center built for the Boao Forum for Asia. This apparently is an annual economic meeting that takes place in Hainan. And lets face it, if you were an Asian economic leader who had to have a lengthy meeting every year to talk about finance, wouldn't you want to do it in a beautiful island location?

It was built at a location with great feng shui (风水) Because it is at the junction of three different types of water: a river, a lake, and the ocean. So we took a boat out to a really awesome beach where one side of it was the beach of a river and the other was the ocean.

(in front of the river part of the beach)

That afternoon we went to the Botanical Gardens of Hainan, which were wonderful. Besides having a lot of different tropical plants I hadn't seen before, but which were invariably very pretty, they grew several crops. They were famous for several types of tea, coffee, and coco. They also grow some of the Vanilla that Häagen-Dazs ice cream uses. So at the end of our tour we got to taste a bunch of the different teas and coffees that they made in the (successful) hope that we would buy some afterwards. They made a really good coco from their coco and coconut milk. They also made a really good mixture of coco and coffee.

(at the tea/coffee tasting in the Botanical Gardens)

Hainan is coconut central. I have never drank so many coconuts in my life, but why drink water when you could drink a coconut? Right? Except for one tiny issue. Coconuts have a ton of liquid inside them, and we kept drinking them and then getting on 2 hour bus rides... bad idea...

We ended up eating at an assigned table with the same people every meal. One of them was a young Chinese boy. You hear people joke about "The Little Emperor Syndrome" This is a joke based on the one Child policy: because the Chinese can only have one child some people respond by giving their kid absolutely anything and everything that they show the slightest inclination to want, thus creating children who think that they are emperors. This Chinese boy was the greatest example of it that I have ever seen. It was really interesting to watch. the entire table of 11 people fed into it. They all made sure that the kid got the best of everything. One night we had an incredible seafood dinner, but the little emperor did not want to eat seafood so the adults convinced the wait staff to make a plate of meat especially for him.

That night after dinner we had dinner two, which was a bunch of fun. Hainan is famous for having little stands where you pick the fish (or other item) of your choice and they will put it on a skewer and grill it for you. We got several fish between us and went to town.

Unfortunately Jonas gets slightly bus sick and we were spending a lot of time on the bus the first day, so he did not have as much fun as he might have.

Aside from coconuts Hainan is fruit central, and all of it is AMAZING. I could happily have lived entirely on fruit without ever eating anything else. It was all sosososososo good.

The second day was official beach day. In the morning we drove to a beach and took a boat out to an island. It was absolutely gorgeous. Covered in palm trees and with the insane green colored water and everything. I was in heaven.

(on the island)

On that island you could go scuba diving if you wanted to. It was a little chilly before the sun came out and we didn't have much time to go so we decided not to, but there were mannequins in wetsuits meant to illustrate the scuba diving fun. I have yet to decide if they were some of the funniest or most frightening things I have ever seen.

That afternoon we went to what was supposed to be a candidate for most beautiful beach in Hainan. It was gorgeous. I am also in love with it because I finally got to go swimming. I really am a complete beach girl, I am pretty much at my happiest swimming around in the ocean, and i made the most of my opportunity.

My host family was incredibly impressed. I guess my host dad can keep himself afloat in the water, angel has done the equivalent of swim p.e. so she is proficient, and my host mom can't swim at all. So now they think that I am incredibly graceful and super skilled which is kind of nice. They were very entertained by me diving around in the water and started to gesture for what they wanted me to do. I had a bunch of fun.

Unfortunately it was really windy, so when Jonas and I got out of the water lying on the beach was somewhat equivalent to getting sand blasted... So we buried each other, which was I think that most entertaining thing that the population of China had ever seen, no joke.

The Chinese have a very different philosophy of beach going to Americans, and pretty much everyone else for that matter. If you take away the black hair and all other Chinese characteristics you can still look at the beach and tell exactly who the Chinese are. There are the Russians, Jonas, and I in bathing suits, and the Chinese in Long pants and jackets. Keep in mind that it is roughly 80 in the sun...

The next day in the morning we went to a major religious center. Hainan has the 3rd tallest statue in the world. It is a 108 meter tall statue of Guan Yin (觀音) The goddess of Mercy. It was an insanely beautiful statue. It is all of white stone with a gold top.

This was also one of the first times that I have seen my host family do anything religious. They bought incense and lit it at the smaller temples to the individual budahs. They really went all out for angel though. There was one budah that was supposed to help people succeed in their studies. Angel lit incense, kow towed, and donated money so she could write her name in a book to be remembered in the monks prayers to that Budah.

That afternoon we went to another beach. That beach was apparently famous for its rocks. One major feature of Chinese tourism is not so much going to the place itself, but getting the right pictures while you are there. This beach was a madhouse as far as pictures went. There was one specific rock... I think we waited half and hour and almost got into a fistfight to get pictures in front of it... It isn't something that I really understand.

Our last day we went to a beach in the morning. My host family decided to go for a walk up and down the beach,but Jonas and I relaxed on chairs in the sun. we put some stuff on the chairs and then went to get a coconut. When we came back there was a Russian woman on my chair. We tried to explain to her that it was my chair but that turned out to be surprisingly difficult. She only spoke Russian. We know this because we tried all the languages at our disposal, and between Jonas and I that is a fair number. We ran through Chinese, English, French, Spanish, and German, none of which got us anywhere. We finally had to fall back on good old fashion sign language to get the message across.

We spent the rest of that afternoon bussing it back to Haiko to catch our plane. We got to the airport at 7 p.m. for an 11:30 plane, and as soon as wee got through the airport doors peple started a full out sprint to be the first to get to the checkout counter. I've never seen anything like it for a plane leavinin more than 3 hours from an airport with, in total, 16 gates in one terminal. However, my host faily again "won" and were the second people in line. It turns out that the point of this was so that we could get seats at the very front of the plane so we could get off first... That makes sense in theory, but... First we were all going to have to get our baggage from the same place, and it wasn't going to get there faster becasue we sprinted for it. Second, we were all going back to Shanghai on the same bus... Oh well.

Now I am back in Shanghai and it is cold. It is going to get below freezing for most of next week and I am not pleased. I WANT MY BEACH BACK!!!!! One thing that Jonas and I were talking about was that Shanghai doesn't seem to have a beach... I mean why not? The name of the city is "on the sea" so where is the beach??? I guess it is just one of the questions for the ages.

Next week is spring festival and then I am going to meet my parents in Vietnam, so I will try to get another post in soon.

See ya!

2008-12-12T22:14:00.000-08:00

IN addition to the really really long written post I added today I have decided to add a gift: PICUTRES!!!

So this is going to be the photo edition of the blog. I have finally given up on Facebook, which won't let me upload anything so here we go:

These are from the CIEE trip to Huang Shan

2008-12-12T22:10:00.000-08:00

These are pictures of us from The Forbidden City in Beijing

2008-12-12T22:08:00.000-08:00

These are all of us and our host siblings on the Halloween cruise.

2008-12-12T21:55:00.000-08:00

This is Kate and I dressed up as pirates for Halloween

2008-12-12T18:10:00.000-08:00

Hey again, this is Zoe, back with your extremely rare and usually excessively long update on my life...

Last weekend I went back to Suzhou with my host family, this time for Angel's great-grandfather's 90th birthday. In China, like the US, ages with 0's on the end are a big deal, so they went all out. The family owns a hotel and the entire ground floor was filled with tables for the banquets (yes plural). The guest list was 200 give or take.

We got there in the evening had dinner and went to visit with the family before heading to bed. They have a two year old daughter who is absolutely adorable and sosososo much fun to play with. She also thinks that my existence is really fascinating which is also fun. She calls me "美国姐姐" "Měi guó jiě jie" which roughly translates to America older sister.

I don't think any of the rest of the family remembered my name from the last time I came to Suzhou, so they decided to go with the flow, and use the name the two year old picked. So now all of my host family's Suzhou relatives call me America older sister, no matter there age. I had to work not to laugh when I was talking to Angel's 70 year old great aunt, and she called me big sister.

The food was amazing, but I thought that I might explode I ate so much. We got up the morning of the birthday party and went out to breakfast. About halfway through a pretty hearty breakfast my host father looks down at his watch then looks up and announces "two hours until the lunch banquet" I think I choked on my soy milk.

Two hours later, as promised we went down to the hotel dining room. There was a huge table set up in front with massive heaped plates full of different things, each of which had a symbolic meaning at birthdays. I think I caught the meaning of about half of them. There was a massive amount of mien, or noodles. They make special noodles for birthdays that are extremely long. You are supposed to eat them without biting the noodle. The longer the unbitten noodle is the longer the life. There were also peaches, which also symbolize long life. There were also fish, ham, tangerines, rice cakes, candy, nuts, and a statue.

We sat down to lunch at 11:30 and we ate until 1:30. It was absolutely delicious, but I could probably have not eaten for another month and been just fine.

We then went back to our rooms until 5 when we reported back to the dining room for dinner. When we got down they had rearranged the room and instead of the table filled with birthday foods there was a small table set up with incense and a statue on it. In front there was a large cushion on the ground. Every single person who came did a 叩头 "Kòu tóu" (traditional Chinese bow) before the table. That was the only overt sign of religion that I have seen from my host parents since I came to China. And, in fact, one of the first signs of religion period, that I have seen outside of a temple.

Next they took a family photo. The photo only included people who were directly related to Angel's great grandfather, but by the time there were done there was a wall of probably 40 people smiling for the camera. This just brought home again the idea of how important family is in China.

Finally we sat down to dinner, which was another 3 hour mean. Although again, it was insanely delicious. Suzhou has great seafood, although I guess it is lake food, but I don't think there is a good word for that. We had individual crabs, lobsters, and assorted shellfish, all of which were amazing.

We were sitting at the main table because with Angel there it made for generations of the family at the table. Every dish that they brought to the main table had a beautifully carved fruit/vegetable sculpture on it. I know that sounds odd but the were incredible. The soup was served in a hollowed out watermelon peal with Chinese poetry carved into the outside. There was the traditional Chinese god of old age carved out of what I can only assume was the biggest sweet potato to ever be seen on this earth. there was also a peach tree, and fish swimming around a rock, all carved from vegetables.

After dinner there were a bunch of balloons left over, so I ended up playing a huge game of balloon volleyball with all the kids in the immediate family, which was really really really fun. And, this being China, about halfway through our game they set off a ton of fireworks and we ran outside to see them.

The next day we headed back for Shanghai. First we went out to lunch with the family. We went to the "Eastern Lamb Restaurant" which made me really happy, because I love lamb. However, eating with people outside of my host family broke my usual law of food in China: don't ask, don't tell. I don't ask what I am eating, and you don't tell me what it is. It is a really good policy, since I promised myself that I would try everything while I was here.

So I was eating along, and a new dish came out. It looked like flan, so I decided to think of it a s flan. When I tasted it, it even tasted like flan. Then my host uncle leans over and asks "would you like more of the lamb brain and eggs?" I was NOT happy. I was already well into eating it, and I finished because, well, it was good, but some things I really just DO NOT NEED TO KNOW.

The great grandfather had grown up and lived his entire life in Suzhou, so he spoke 苏州話, Sūzhōu Huà, the Suzhou dialect. It is only since the Communist party began to push for it in the 50's that Mandarin became the official language in China, and although most people in major cities and a growing number in the countryside can understand when they hear mandarin and speak fluently it is still no where near what English is to the US or French to France. Most people still know their home dialect and speak it frequently.

If someone tells you they are learning Chinese, my current opinion is that that is pretty much a lie. You can learn Mandarin, which will allow you to get around China, but there is nothing you can learn that will allow you to communicate with everyone in China.

At this point I can pretty much make myself understood in Mandarin, although pretty much without tones. I can recognize 上海話 the Shanghai dialect when I hear it spoken, but can't say anything besides good bye. So when you throw me into a room full of people speaking suzhou hua I am absolutely hopeless. You mind as well send me to Tanzania and ask me to converse in Swahili.

I am actually very interested in Shanghai hua. I have heard it described as the strange child of Japanese and Cantonese. It has pronunciation similar to Both Cantonese and Japanese, but no tones, as in the case of Japanese.

As I try to learn Chinese I, like the other students, have come up against not only language differences, but basic cultural differences. At one point there was a fill in the blank question in class that said "the two men could not lift the sofa because________"

We answered "the sofa was too heavy" Which was incorrect. The right answer was "they were not strong enough" Which I thought displayed a very interesting difference in mind set.

In the United States we tend to assume the cause of something hinges on factors out of our control, while in China they have a very deep belief in individual responsibility. I think that it stems largely from the sheer amount of competition there is for everything. If you can't get a job it is your fault for not being able to beat out all of the competition.

Another example of this happened just a few days ago. One of my classmates mentioned in the teachers hearing that a test had been "hard" My teacher turned around and told him that "no test is hard, one is only unprepared for it."

During the course of a small group discussion Megan and I found out that one of our classmates, another American from Indiana, lived in the complex across the street from us with his wife and two sons. So on Thursday he invited us over for dinner.

It was absolutely amazing. It felt a little odd the be in an American household again though. First of all their house was HEATED!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Energy is extremely expensive here so one of the things that people do to conserve energy is not heating their houses. My room for example is currently 52 degrees according to my bedside alarm clock. Their house on the other hand was nice and toasty.

Then we had dinner. We started with Salad with vinaigrette, bread and cheese. Then there was oven baked chicken breast fillets (with spices I could name), and sauteed potatoes and bell peppers. That might not sound that impressive, but after three months of straight Chinese food (which I love don't get me wrong) it was MIRACULOUS!!!!!!!!!

After dinner there were BROWNIES!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Real live, baked in an oven, warm and fudgy, brownies. Our home stay houses don't have ovens because the Chinese don't use them, so baked stuff was amazing.

Afterward we played Scrabble, which was also a blast. Though it did bring home to me the fact that my English is getting a little bit rusty. It took me a while to think of words.

They have two sons one is two years old, one is two months. They are both incredibly adorable, and I had a lot of fun playing with them.

Overall it was a lovely break from my usual routine.

I just took a break to go to lunch with my host father and had one of those priceless moments that just need to be recorded. I am living in China, so for lunch we went to get Japanese food, where the waitstaff were all wearing Santa hats, and Britney Spears singing "Hit Me Baby One More Time" was playing on loop. It was just to priceless.

We had our usual weekend party at Nate's house last week. Him host family is friends with the man who is the head of the Shanghai paper cutting guild and "The Master of Shanghai Arts and Crafts" according to his business card.

He deserved the title. The sat down with a piece of paper without any markings and a pair of scissors. He then proceeded to cut one of the most intricate paper horses I have ever seen without ever once lifting his scissors. It was incredibly impressive. He told us that to learn to cut paper he would practice for 6 hours a day.

Tuesday we had an early morning culture class and went to Jing'an Park to learn Taiji. It was incredibly interesting and fun. One of Eric's (our teacher's) friends has studied Taiji for 9 years and he took round to meet some of his teachers. Watching them practice was amazing. If I had as much control over one muscle as they have over every muscle in their bodies I would be happy. Their movements were incredibly beautiful, but at the same time so strong and controlled.

I had never really thought of Taiji as a combat art, although I knew it was, until I saw one group of people practicing Chen Style and one of the teachers came over and talked to us. She showed us what a few of the motions meant, and after that I could see that every motion served a purpose either as a blow or a block.

Friday we had our last culture class of the semester. Our teacher had a friend in town who is a Muslim Chinese or Hui. He is also a photographer and he came to do a presentation for us. The dynamics between the largely atheist Chinese population and the Muslim Chinese that he discussed were fascinating. I would really like to go out to the very far west of China and see for myself, but it is so far from Shanghai and so difficult to get to, that I don't think I will be able to.

We took a class picture last week and I will try to post that picture and a few others soon.

再见！ Bye!

2008-11-21T19:59:00.000-08:00

Hello again, This post goes out to Chase Gregory who apparently told my mother that I haven't been posting enough. Thus, properly guilt tripped, I am back to writing. I will attempt to make this my extra-long-catch-up-post and then update more frequently. That probably won't happen, but it's the thought that counts... Right?

I have been pretty busy lately, Two weeks ago my parents came into town so I spent all of my time with them. It was great to see them again in person rather than on skype, and it was a blast to show them around Shanghai, as I have come to know it, and get to spend some quality time.

Last week were my midterms for my Chinese classes. Since my parents came the week before, I pretty much did not study anywhere near as much as I should have... But I did fine anyway, and I remembered why I used to actually enjoy finals week in high school: You go in for two hours in the morning and then essentially have a free day.

Megan and I decided to put our free day to good use and go see some part of Shanghai that we would never go to otherwise. Megan remembered looking out the side of a metro and seeing a cool looking area, so we went to the metro, looked at the map, and picked a stop that we thought was somewhere near that area, and just got off.

Shanghai did not develop like a normal city would. Usually cities develop from the center outwards, with the new replacing the old, and so on. However, Shanghai didn't work that way. One of the results of having the Chinese government structured the way it is, is that the government can pretty much point and say" I would like a huge, modern, beautiful, apartment complex right there." "Make it so." And a portion of old shanghai is then removed to make way for said complex. One of the side effects is that there are random pockets of old Shanghai that are left untouched.

The are that Megan and I ended up in was one such area. We wandered into a tiny winding road that ran between really tiny little one or two room homes that were kind of attached. I did not have my camera at the time, but I would like to go back and take pictures to post. We realized that the road we were on was not really a road so much as it was the hallway of an apartment complex. It really was fascinating to me how the people were living. From their homes you could look up and see the Oriental Pearl TV Tower, but yet they did not have running water... I am pretty sure we were the first westerners to wander through that are, if not the first foreigners some of the people there had ever seen. The fact that the people who lived in the are were staring at us made me feel better about staring into their homes.

We had all been kind of avoiding eating too much of the street food in Shanghai, if only because so many people we know (mostly in the states) keep telling us that eating it was tantamount to death, but we decided that since the majority of the population of Shanghai actually lives on the stuff, it really can't be deadly if you choose carefully and avoid meat that has been sitting out etc. So when we turned a corner and were in the middle of a massive street devoted entirely to street food we decided that since we were exploring the "real" shanghai we would eat accordingly, and munched our way from one end to the other.

The food was completely amazing (for the record, I didn't get sick) and I really enjoyed trying all the different flavors. We started with buns, and then we say a man with a massive wok of boiling oil who was pulling dough into super thin strands and cooking them. We pretty much had to buy some, if only out of respect for the man's dough pulling skills. If you have ever been to a Chinese restaurant in the states and gotten little crunchy fried noodle things, these were everything that those were supposed to be... and so much more. They were hot and fresh and delicious.

We finished up our walk with some dumplings. Megan and I each picked one up, started walking, and bit into them... Just in time to realize that they had exploded broth/juice out of the other end. Fortunately, since China is a country that never has paper goods when you need them, both Megan and I had, by that point, learned the important lesson that: no good Chinese girl ever leaves the house without her pocket sized pack of tissues, and were prepared.

Saturday the five of us and our host families went to Wu Zhen. Wu Zhen is an ancient Chinese town built on canals. They call it the Venice of the East. I wouldn't go quite that far, but it was definitely a great trip. It was fun to travel with all of the host parents and siblings as well.

We took a bus there in the morning and then went straight to lunch. Lunch was a massive affair. We ate and ate and ate and ate, and then we ate. And then desert came, and it was sugar cane which was delicious, and we were really happy because, a) we really liked the sugar cane, and b) it meant that lunch was over. Or so we thought... then the rest of the main courses came...

My favorite parts of the town were the boat ride and the bamboo forest. After lunch we got onto a little boat (think Chinese style gondola) and went down the canals of the city. It was a beautiful ride, and fascinating as well. One of the things that I find the most interesting about China is that people live in all of their preserved ancient towns. They may convert half the city to museums, and channel bus loads of tourists through everyday, but that doesn't change the fact that there are parts of the tourist attractions that are still viable living quarters, and in a country with a population as large as China, that means that they will be inhabited.

The second thing that I enjoyed a lot was the tiny little piece of bamboo forest preserved in the center of the town. When I wandered into even that little patch of bamboo I could understand the inspiration for movies like Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon.

A lot of the homes in Wu Zhen had been converted into Museums which were a lot of fun to walk around. They had a wood carving museum, an ancient bed museum, and a museum of old currency, local and foreign, on top of the restored library and firehouse.

After that trip, I will never in my life question what my host mother can contain in her bag. She got on the bus in the morning with a slightly larger than middle sized tote bag. She proceeded to pull out breakfast 2: Juice boxes of coffee for all of us, two boxes of poky, a large bag of chips, and a large bag of tangerines. I thought that that meant that the tote was empty except for the usual stuff one would carry: wallet, keys, phone... How wrong I was. Throughout the day she pulled probably a weeks worth of food from that bag including everything from a chocolate bar that my French teacher had introduced me to in France (yay Bueno Bars) to individual hermetically sealed packs of beef jerky and duck.

My Host dad just called me for lunch, so:

To Be Continued

2008-11-02T00:01:00.000-07:00

Wow, I managed to let the time get away from me again. Quite a bit has happened since the last time I got around to updating.

Last weekend CIEE took the gap year kids to Huangshan (yellow mountain) in Anhui province. It is supposed to be the most beautiful set of mountains in China, and it lived up to its reputation. The five of us were accompanied by the CIEE director of student activities, Maggie. She is incredibly nice. I really enjoyed talking with her. She was also an international relations major. She is working at CIEE because she is interested in eventually working at an education NGO.

We took a train to get there which was really fun. We traveled "hard sleeper" class, which means that you have a bunk bed in a large car full of beds. They are stacked three high and kind of in compartments but not really. There are two sets of three bunks divided by a wall but they are open ended to the corridor down the car is open. I had the very top bunk, and I had to climb a ladder to get up to it. There wasn't enough room for me to fully sit up, so I felt really bad for Nate, who is 6'2''. The pricing on train tickets is actually quite interesting, with bunks getting more expensive the closer they are to the ground.

After that trip I have now ridden in every class available on Chinese trains except for hard seat, which is apparently essentially just benches, and I am more than happy to avoid.

Chinese trains have a great feature. At the end of each car they have a large tank that dispenses nuclear temperature boiling water. So everyone can bring ramen and tea and use the hot water to have a continuous supply of hot food and drinks.

When we arrived we were met by our tour guide and driver and took the hour drive up to the base of the mountain. From the base we took a special Huangshan taxi up to the station a little way up the mountain. From there we took a cable car to get onto the mountain itself. The view from the cable car was amazingly beautiful. There was one point where we transitioned from being in the clear air going up the mountain to being in the clouds themselves which was amazing.

Huangshan is known for its contrasts: between beautiful trees and bare rock formations, and between the sky and the clouds. At first when we got up to the part of the mountain we would be walking I was really disappointed because we were in the clouds and I couldn't see very far from the mountain. But it turned out that that was the magical part. Every so often the clouds would break, a shaft of sunlight would bunch through and we would suddenly be able to see another mountain across from us, or a new rock formation. It was almost magical. The one part of it that was really sad was that no matter how much I love the new camera my parents got for me before I came to China, absolutely nothing could capture the amazing quality of the light breaking through the clouds.

Another contrast that they don't mention when they tell you about Huangshan is the contrast between the natural beauty of the place and the incredibly number of people who come to see it. Everything is pretty contained, built, and organized to deal with the massive amount of tourists on the mountain. These aren't western tourists. There were a few others that we saw, but by and large these were Chinese people from all over the country coming to see a natural. Much like Americans would go to see Yosemite or the Grand Canyon.

As we got up to the top of the peaks and through some of the longer harder climbs the tourists thinned out and we were able to see more and do a little more interacting with the mountain and climbing around. However, for the tourists who really wanted to get to the top, but didn't feel that they could do it under their own steam, there were men with sedan chairs willing to carry you around the mountain. I personally would not want to take one, because I feel like I might say something slightly offensive and the two men carrying the chair would only have to "accidentally" tip it ever so slightly to dump me over the side of the mountain.

That night we went back to a hotel in Huangshan City and had a wonderful dinner.

The next day we went to visit a very famous preserved traditional Chinese town, Hongcun. If any of you have seen Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon, this city is where some of the scenes were filmed. Specifically it is famous for the bridge in front of the village.

The whole town is supposed to be shaped like an ox. It has two massive trees for horns, a pond as it's stomach, and four bridges for feet. It was really interesting to see the different preserved houses in the village. There were certain decorations and house designs that were reserved for people of different social standing.

After finishing up at the village we went for lunch at a really awesome restaurant. When we got there we were escorted down some stairs to the kitchen area. They had all of the available dishes on display, and we got to point at what we wanted. The chefs would then cook it and have it delivered to our table it. It was like dim sum without the carts.

We took a bus back to Shanghai. Ironically due to some strange layout of train tracks, it took up 10 hours on the train to get to Huangshan, and 5 hours by bus to get back... yeah...

I can't even begin to describe the bus. Suffice it to say that I really thought that I was going to shoot the driver before we reached Shanghai. First, I usually don't wear a seatbelt on buses mostly because they usually aren't available. After 10 minutes on that bus I went on a mission to find the seatbelt on my seat before the bus tried to stop again, and rocketed me down the aisle and through the windshield. Fortunately there was a seatbelt, which I did wear throughout the rest of the ride, despite the weird looks. Second, the driver and the horn were BEST FRIENDS FOREVER. I'm not joking. He leaned on the thing the entire way out of the city. We would be coming towards a car we wanted to pass with enough space for two other cars to drive figure eights around us and the driver would just lean on the horn like "HELLO, WE ARE THINKING OF PASSING YOU SOMETIME IN THE NEXT TEN MINUTES SO BE AWARE OF OUR APPROACH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!" We finally got out of the city and onto a completely deserted mountain road and I was ready to breath a huge sigh of relief because there were no cars to honk at. Oh how wrong I was. Every time we approached a curve, and keep in mind that this was a twisty mountain road, so there were a lot of curves, the driver would lean on the horn as if to say "HEY YOU, ANY CARS THAT COULD POSSIBLY BE ON THE OTHER SIDE OF THAT CAR, A BUS IS GOING TO BE COMING AROUND THE CURVE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!" I thought I might cry. I don't even hear honking in Shanghai any more, I have got it almost completely blocked out, but I just could not block this out, because it kept me from sleeping. However after a while I stopped worrying about myself and started worrying about whether I was going to have to physically restrain Kate.

Since sleep was out of the question we ended up playing gin rummy across the aisle of the bus. Rummy really is more fun when it is dark out so you can't see any of the cards and have to call out your discards so the other players know what is going on.

We had two brief rest stops to buy food and use the bathrooms. I had another huge I love China moment when we came back from the second rest stop. Most of us had bought, Oreos, gummies, crackers, and the like, but Jonas came back with this bag with something spicy looking inside. When I asked him what it was he grinned and informed me that it was duck neck. Only in China...

2008-10-15T03:21:00.000-07:00

Again, apologies for the extremely long wait. I can't even give a proper excuse for why it has taken so long, but everything has been really busy.

I'll start with my trip to Suzhou with my host family two weekends ago (wow I really am behind aren't I). Suzhou is about 2 hours outside of Shanghai. It is also my host father's father's hometown, and they still have a lot of family there.

We woke up ridiculously early in the morning, and drove out to the huge lake in Suzhou. There we met up with my Host father's younger sister, her daughters, her husband, and unidentified other woman. The two daughters were 8 and 2, and the 2 year old was completely adorable.

We drove up the mountain behind the lake. The streets up were lined with locals selling different fruits, but especially tangerines and persimmons. About halfway up we stopped at one of the fruit vendors and bought a basket of persimmons. We then stood along the edge of the road and ate the persimmons. The Chinese have amazing persimmon eating technique. the peeled the top part of the skin and then sucked out the inside. They were left with only and empty skin, which they tossed over the side of the road after the seeds which they spit out. My persimmon peeling/sucking/de-seeding skills are clearly not up to scratch. However, they have some of the sweetest and best fruit that I have ever tasted and stopping on the road for a fruit break was a blast.

We reached the edge of the lake and there was a restaurant that was partially on the docks and partially on a boat where we had lunch. The food was great and they brought us these little deep fried fish that were actually from the lake. I had another round of food failure with some snails. The Chinese can magically put there mouths against the snail and suck out just the right amount. I can't get a thing to happen. They finally took pity on me and found me a toothpick, for which I was profoundly greatful. Another really entertaining part of that meal was our drinks. there were no glasses to speak of so we all ended up drinking coke from our rice bowls which they did not find in the least odd but I had to work hard not to laugh every time I took a sip.

After that we went for a boat ride on the lake. We had been seeing speed boats go by all afternoon, so I assumed that we would be taking one of those. However, my host father's brother in law went into deep negotiations with the man in charge of boats and then we waited for half an hour. At that point this really sketchy looking boat pulled up. It did have an engine, but there were also long poles for it to be pushed around with. It also looked like at some point it might have been made from oil drums. We got in and it didn't sink or anything which made me happy.

It turns out that we requested that boat for a very good reason: large parts of the lake are restricted to speedboats because of the aquatic life. We were able to go into those areas. My host family seemed to know that certain plants were special and started to pull them out. Under the water lily type leaves of certain plants there were special little green prickly looking things that were apparently edible. They picked out the plants each of which had one of these items. They peeled the green part off and gave me one. Inside was this amazingly sweet little white nut thing which was really good.

It turns out that My host father's family owns a restaurant and hotel in Suzhou so we went there after our tour of the lake. That night we had dinner at the restaurant. That was one of the most challenging thing I have done in China, including negotiating with the authorities about my passport.

Suzhou is famous for crabs. The Chinese are trained from childhood to eat them. I was not. So after maybe 10 courses this massive platter of crabs arrives at the table. They are relatively small crabs, a bit larger than a softball or something like that. One was a bit bigger than both my hands holding it. Each crab is also wrapped up in string. My host dad proceeds to lift two crabs off the platter and place one on my plate and one in my rice bowl. My protests that one crab would be fine were useless as usual.

I then sat starring at my plate, my chopsticks, and my tied up crab waiting for something to happen. I don't really know what, I was kind of hoping that a crab cracker, a hammer, or even a pair of scissors would fall from the sky and save me. Needless to say, no such luck.

My host dad looked over at me and ordered "chi" "eat." I looked at the crab and was pretty much dumbfounded. I mean, really, would you know what to do with a crab and a pair of chopsticks?

I finally looked at my host mother, and to my credit, I asked for help in Chinese. She showed me what to do, but I still had to do it myself. It took me an incredibly long time to eat the crab. I had to deconstruct the thing with hands and chopsticks and then get the meat out. Again the Chinese can just put a crab leg to their lips and suck and all the meat comes out. Me on the other hand, I have to cram my chopstick through the leg and push it out. I finally finished to first crab and I was so relieved. My hands hurt, and had been stabbed repeatedly by the crab spines. But I had successfully consumed a crab. It was messy, I did it badly, but I had done it.

AND THEN MY HOST DAD DROPPED THE SECOND ONE ON MY PLATE. I seriously considered throwing it at him. My host sister Angel completely abandoned me and went to play with the two year old, and I had to eat another crab. On the bright side, by the time I was done with the second crab I knew what was up with eating crab, and I am absolutely positive that I burned more calories eating the crab than could possibly be gained from its consumption.

After I finished my second crab, my host father leaned over and said "today we learn crab, tomorrow we practice" Again I had to restrain the urge to pick up my plate and smack him with it.

We stayed the night at the hotel, and then went and had breakfast in the relatives apartment, which was the top floor of the hotel, and really really cool.

As promised at lunch the next day the crabs arrived. However, this time I was ready. I can safely say that I am now a master of crab. I can clean and eat a whole crab with a pair of chopsticks and my hands. That has to come in handy at some point right? Also, if anyone is taking marine biology and has any questions about crab anatomy I now consider myself an expert.

Afterward we went to a beautiful Chinese rose garden by the lake for a walk.

I met a lot of my host fathers relatives, but I am not completely sure of their exact relationship. There are some interesting results from the mixture of traditional Chinese values of family and the one child policy. The Chinese really large family, which the one child policy has removed somewhat, so they call everyone closer than a second cousin sister or brother. However, they also really value familial responsibility especially of children to take care of parents and each other. That is largely based upon the age of the children for example oldest brother has most responsibility to take care of parents and younger children etc. So while I don't really have any idea who are actually sisters and who are brothers, I do know everyones age in relation to everyone else's. There are two words for brother and two for sister; one meaning younger and one meaning older. They meticulously adhere to the correct age reference. It makes for interesting introductions.

One thing that is really wonderful about the Chinese families is that they are incredibly willing to accept another member (me) which I think is another side effect of the one child policy. Whenever I am introduced to relatives of my host family they immediately tell their younger children to refer to me as some variation of jie jie (older sister). To my host mom's two sister's sons I am "wai guo jie jie" which translated directly makes me outside country sister meaning foreign sister. To my host dad's side of the family I am "mei guo jie jie" or america sister.

The differences in the generations of the families are incredibly interesting. My parents generation was born during the beginning of the communist era. The political theory on the population was at the time "one more head two more hands" and all Chinese were instructed to have as many children as possible so that China could grow strong. At this point I have met two of my host mom's sisters, I think there might be one more, and on my host father's side I have met one brother and two sisters. However each of them has only one child. It makes for an odd dynamic, because they are used to being members of large families which are now being cut back.

Just some observations...

2008-10-04T20:36:00.000-07:00

Hey, Sorry it took me so long to get another update going.

Last week was China's national holiday (think fourth of July) and the entire country got a week off to celebrate and such. The gap year kids and I decided to take the opportunity to travel around and see a little more of China. We decided to head out to Beijing for five days. however, this precipitated a whole new visa disaster, as we were officially supposed to go pick up our visas in Shanghai two days after we arrived in Beijing.

I won't go into the details of the hoops we jumped through trying to make it happen. Suffice it to say that here in China it really is ALL about who you know. Jonas's host dad has friends in the visa office who were able to get us official receipts that we could travel with, and when our hotel decided to fuss Jonas's host dad had a friend in the Beijing police and our hotel just happened to be "under his jurisdiction." The fussing stopped.

We took a train from Shanghai. It was a 10 hour trip but it didn't feel bad. We were sitting in two sets of two seats one behind the other and then we realized that the front seats turned around, so we could all sit facing each other and we kind of had a party. We certainly played a lot of cards. There was a Chinese college student sitting across from us who had been studying English and wanted to chat. That was a lot of fun. I have met a bunch of Chinese people in both Shanghai and Beijing who want to make "foreign friends" (it is a phrase they all use) and just want to sit and talk with you. I have really enjoyed that and learned a lot about Chinese culture from doing it.

We got into Beijing around nine in the evening and our first night we grabbed dinner, went for a short walk, and went to bed.

Our second day we decided to go to the summer palace. It is outside of central Beijing so it took us some time to get there. We opted for bus rather than taxi, since taking the bus cost us 10 cents and taking a taxi would cost 20 dollars. Plus it made us feel local and capable. The summer place was amazing. It was a massive area of beautiful gardens and buildings, with some canals all overlooking a massive lake with an island in the middle.

Megan and I, being the blondies, again had fun with tourist pictures. Usually people on the streets of the cities just stare at us, and I don't even notice it at this point. However, when we are at a tourist attraction of any kind we are considered a legitimate part of the attraction and fair game for picture taking. Usually when we stand next to something to have a friend take a picture of us about ten nearby photographers jump in. Sometimes enterprising souls stop and ask us to take photos posing with them. By the end of the day, we were considering the large profit we could make standing near attractions and charging a fee.

The next day we decided to hit the Forbidden city and Tiananmen square. The forbidden city was amazing as expected, but because it was a national holiday there was a truly ridiculous amount of people there, and we eventually settled on the philosophy of "whatever throne or tapestry is in that room that requires us to push through a crowed twenty people deep to look into a tiny window cannot possible be worth life and limb" It worked pretty well for us.

The architecture is insanely beautiful and impressive, especially considering that it was built in 1406. IT is hard to imagine how it must have looked when it was first completed, especially compared to what would have surrounded it at the time. Needless to say, we all decided that we were ready to become emperors whenever the demand arose.

Next we went over to Tiananmen Square. It is incredibly impressive in its scope. Though frankly it is an intimidating place. It is filled with poles with street lights on them, but when you look closer you realize that they also have attached loud speakers and cameras. It's incredible size impressed itself on me for another reason. I have learned a little bit about the Tiananmen square riots in various history classes, and I remember pictures and different lectures saying that the square was full of student protesters. Standing in the middle of Tiananmen square I realized the truly awesome number of people that was implied in Tiananmen square being "full." There were easily a thousand people in the square with me that day, and it didn't even feel slightly crowded.

Since we were in Beijing it was, of course, absolutely necessary to eat some Beijing Duck while we were there. Since we were probably only going to get there once during our time in China, we decided to do it right, and went to the the most famous Beijing Duck Restaurant that had been specializing in the dish since 1864. When you ordered your duck, the brought you a card with some information about your specific duck and what number duck it was in the restaurant's history. It was one of the best meals I have ever had.

A brief aside, as my host sister just brought me a tangerine: China has the BEST FRUIT EVER. Kay, back to the show.

The next day we scheduled a tour of the Great wall. There are five wall sites that you can visit near Beijing, we opted to go to Mu Tian Yu. It is one of the two more restored sites, but it has less direct access than Ba Da Ling, and thus, significantly less tourists.

Our tour ended up taking in significantly more than the Great Wall. Our guide was incredibly nice and spoke very good English. His name was James Bond. I promise, I'm not joking. We decided that he strongly resembled the main guide character from a video game. He popped up from apparently nowhere at random times and offered words of wisdom before disappearing again. It was pretty awesome.

We started out the day with trip to a workshop where the famous Chinese enamel-ware is made. It was clearly in hopes that we would buy something from the shop but it was very interesting nonetheless.

Our next stop was The Ming Tombs. Which is a collection of the graves of the 13 Ming Emperors. All in all it was terribly impressive, even though we just went along the main walk and did not hike up to any of the tombs themselves.

Next was a visit to a Jade carving shop where we learned about different types of Jade and the meanings of traditional carving shapes. We also ate our lunch there and a little shopping time was provided.

After lunch it was time for our actual visit to the Great Wall. We opted to hike up the stairs after our guide informed us that Chairman Mao said that "to be a true hero you must climb up to the great wall." It was quite the walk. The Great Wall is built along the top of a series of mountains and we climbed the stairs up from the bottom. It was actually an incredibly satisfying experience and I had a real sense of accomplishment when I finally reached out and touched the wall.

I'm not sure I can actually express what the great wall is like. Suffice it to say that it is awe inspiring. The scope of it all is almost beyond my comprehension, and I cannot begin to fathom the people who first conceived it was possible to build such a thing and set out to do it. Especially on the very top of the mountains and without technology to pull the massive stones up. It also made me wonder at the scope of the threat that would lead a nation to devote that much of its efforts and resources to such a tremendous project to keep it out.

We were satisfied with our accomplishments of climbing up, and we opted to take the rope-way gondola system to get down. The view was absolutely spectacular.

While we were in Beijing we managed to stumble upon a little tea shop. We hadn't really planned on stopping and just decided to go in on a whim. I think it was one of the best decisions we made since coming to China. The shop was owned by a woman who lived upstairs and owned a teashop because she loved tea, and wanted to meet people. She also spoke excellent English and we ended up sitting and talking and drinking tea for almost three hours. We got a pot of rose black tea which was some of the best tea I have ever had, and Bought some to take home with me.

We thought that we had just wandered into a cute little tea shop that no one really knew about, but as it turned out we had wandered into the shop of the tea master. When China needed someone to serve tea to the Olympic athletes they went to the owner of this tea shop. I have to say I was pretty jealous of her picture between Micheal Phelps and Ryan Lochte.

She spent the afternoon teaching us about the different types of Chinese tea, and then read our palms. It was all in all a great experience. I only wish the shop was in Shanghai, because I would happily spend a free afternoon there.

The next day was the first day that the Olympic stadiums were open for public viewing, so of course we had to go. The one thing that we did not realize was that you needed to buy tickets in advance in order to go in, so we ended up just viewing from the perimeter. It was pretty awesome anyway. The Birds Nest still looks CG even when you are only a few hundred yards away. The water cube was huge. It always looked fairly small next to the Bird's Nest on TV
but it is pretty massive, which I guess makes sense since it houses three pools and diving equipment... But it was still a surprise, and very impressive.

We also stopped to look at the "7 star" hotel next to the stadiums, and debated whether or not we could get away with walking in a and looking around. Then we realized that we had been standing on the sidewalk next to it for three or four minutes thinking about it and the roughly 10 door attendants and bell men had probably noticed us at that point, so we stuck to the outside.

We planned to go for one more night of Beijing duck, but we failed to take into account that it was the eve of China's national holiday... And apparently that means Beijing Duck. When we got to the restaurant what had once been a parking lot was instead a small ocean of people. We decided to ask about how long the wait was and upon inquiry were informed that there were no more tables that would become available that nigh. So that was it for Beijing duck. Even the other less famous restaurants in the area had hour waits or more.

We took a night train back to Shanghai which was a blast. We had a little compartment for the four of us with two sets of bunk beds and a table. We had too much fun playing cards, and I tried what I think is now the top of my "weird foods I have eaten in China" list: lychee flavored Lays potato chips. They were... interesting...

Getting back to Shanghai felt oddly like a homecoming and I realized how used to the city I have gotten. I also realized that I have picked up some other Chinese habits without even realizing it.

I guess at this point I fully eat like a Chinese person without even thinking about it. There was another couple on our tour of the great wall and we all had lunch together. There were several communal serving dishes, as most food here is served family style. I am very used to the fact that my plate, when I have one, is where you put the stuff you can't eat, bones, shells, etc. What you use to eat is your rice bowl. You lift stuff from the communal platters with your chopsticks and put it on the rice. You then lift up your rice bowl and eat from that. The other couple used the supplied serving spoons to fill their plates with food and then ate that, as well as just eating the plain white rice without all the sauce from the food on it. It was kind of weird to see. I guess that's eighteen years of good manners out the window.

When I got back from Beijing my host family took me Suzhou for two days to see some of their relatives, but seeing as this is already and excessively long post that has taken me an excessively long time to write, I think I will put the stuff from that trip up either tomorrow or later today

2008-09-19T07:12:00.001-07:00

I have become one with the MADNESS that is the Chinese bureaucratic system.

We all applied for a visa in America, but apparently that visa does not actually allow us to live in China for a year. It is essentially temporary permission to enter the country. So now that we are here we have to completely reapply for permission to actually stay if we want to avoid deportation. I have spent most of the last week and a half trying to make that happen.

It started with a trip with my host family and all the other kids and families to the police station to apply for temporary residence permits and register our location with the authorities. That wasn't to bad we just had to fill out the paperwork and our families were there to speak the necessary Chinese.

But that was only the beginning...

Next came the health exam. I did go to the doctor three different times in the US to fill out all the paperwork for the exact health exam. However, that for some apparent reason didn't count. I think all the stuff I did to get to China was essentially a practice run.

They were accommodating and rather than making us all go to the hospital to get the exam the hospital came to ECNU (my school). They were there for two days. We were told not to eat breakfast because of the blood tests and then go to class and wait to be called out. So passed the first day and a half. Right before we got out of class at 11:45 on the second day someone came into my class and asked who needed a health exam. We raised our hands and were given numbers on little slips of paper with somewhat official looking red stamps. We were told to report back and get in line at 1:15 and that we would be taken by number.

Megan and I were in this group. The boys had gone after school the day before, and Kate is only stying for a semester so she doesn't have to go through any of this. Megan was somewhat convinced that the numbers actually meant something but I was still in doubt. So we decided that since we couldn't eat lunch anyway to just sit and wait. I remembered seeing that all the people went into room 101 first for their health test and then into this strange medical bus parked outside. There were two chairs outside room 101 so we sat down to wait.

While we were waiting we talked with two boys next to us. They had apparently gotten there at nine that morning and had not been tested before lunch. They were then given number 82 and 83. Megan and I were 61 and 62. We puzzled over this for a while and then gave up as to how it could have happened. Then we decided to get some homework done. There was a desk across the hall so we dragged it over to our chairs and got some flashcards done.

The door to room 101 opened at 1:30 and a man stepped out. He looked down at Megan and I, and barked "numbers!" We handed them to him, he looked at them and had a woman hand us some more forms. The desk definitely came in handy then. we filled them out signed them and gave them back to the woman. She looked at them and then sent us into room 101. Meanwhile a large mob had formed around the man and the woman with the forms and the man was shouting out numbers sequentially while people waved their arms and shouted.

In the room we went through various paper processing and had our blood drawn. We were then handed a cotton ball and sent outside. They had us sit for 3 minutes and the sent us onto the bus for the rest of our exam.

We were pretty lucky on that front, because we were talking to kids in our class who didn't get to go at all and were told to go to the hospital at some other time.

Next came our attempts to get the new visa itself. That started on Wednesday. We had to go to the foreign student office of ECNU to try to get the originals of our JW202 visa application form. When we got to the office we were told that we had gone to the wrong place. We kept asking them though until we found someone who told us that we were in fact in the right place and gave us our JW202s, a new visa application, and a letter from the university saying that we were attending and would be allowed to continue.

Thursday afternoon we had to go get our medical results, which was surprisingly painless. We were then told to report back on Friday because the police would be coming at 9:30 to process our visa applications.

We came at 8:15 and got in line. We were maybe the 15th people there. by 9 there were probably 100 students in s a somewhat orderly line. 9:30 came and went with no apparent change except for the growing line/mob. At 10 an office worker came to inform us that the police were "on the road."

At 11 someone finally came and sat at the desk at the front of the line. She was apparently there to check our paperwork, of which we had quite a bit. That instantly erased the last semblance of a line and the students became a full fledged mob pushing to hand their paperwork in.

Before we got there we were given a list of the things that we needed; passport, photo, copy of passport, and originals of our JW202, medical form, school forms and residence permit. We had all of these things, however they started yelling over the crowd that we also needed to have a copy of our residence permit. Fortunately I was part of the group of gap year students and we were willing to help each other. We all gave our residence permits to Nate who is a 6'2'' cross country runner who could elbow his way out of the mob and sprint for the copy machines at the CIEE offices and then elbow his way back in.

Finally at 11:15 the police arrived. They all filed into the building and closed the door. Five minutes later someone came out and started handing out numbers. Both Nate and I were 19... At 11:25 the police went to the cafe across the street for lunch. The entire crowd pretty much started laughing at that point. We found out later that the officer in charge of writing receipts had not arrived and thus they were unable to proceed.

Meanwhile, Megan had been pushed to the front, about five people ahead of Nate and I and Jonas was somewhere about five people behind us. I ended up sandwiched between Nate, and another guy who must have been 6'4'' since he was taller than Nate, who turned out to be from Glendale and was really nice.

At 12:15 or so that police returned from lunch and the process actually started. It took me about half an hour to get the 15 feet to the door so I could get my visa. But in the end I did succeed ans did the others...

We get our passports back on Friday, which is the day Megan, Kate, Jonas, and I are leaving for Beijing. So we now get to see if we can go to the visa office in Pudong to pick them up early... The guy in front of Megan set it up that way, but we couldn't quite communicate it.

I am now one with the Chinese bureaucracy in so many more ways than I ever wanted to be.

Yesterday after the Visa fiasco Fung You Ming a.k.a. Bryan one of the CIEE interns took us to a street off of people's square that is famous for stationary, bookstores, and calligraphy. We went to buy calligraphy brushes since we are going to have a lesson from a calligraphy master at some point in the near future.

We also went to Shanghai's largest book store. I bought three children's books with character and pinyin so I can try to read.

I am currently attempting to read a illustrated version of snow white and the 7 dwarfs... IT IS WAY ABOVE MY READING LEVEL!!!!!!!! It is really strange being illiterate.

My tutor was trying to teach me the many grammatical uses of the particle "de" in the Chinese language. She then suggested that I listen to this one song that makes extreme use of de... It is pretty epic how many times she says de in about 30 seconds. Here is the link to the music video if you want to hear it. The song is by 許哲珮 and it is called 汽球.

This afternoon the rest of the gap year kids are coming over to make dumplings... So I have to go help set up. I'll try to post again before I leave for Beijing.

2008-09-15T03:29:00.000-07:00

Hey everyone. I've been here for a little more than two weeks so it is about time for another update:

I started class on Friday September 5th. I am enrolled in Chinese 1-2A. It is essentially a Chinese class for foreigners who know a little bit of Chinese but not really enough to do anything. I have two different teachers: Wang laoshi for writing on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, and Li laoshi for speaking on Mondays and Thursdays. The classes aren't really separate and I learn both speaking and writing in both classes, but I having two different teaching styles is interesting.

What I love best about my class is the students. There are twenty of us in total after all of the class switching that went on last week when everyone was trying to figure out the right level for themselves. It is by far the most diverse class that I have ever been in . Of the top of my head there are kids from the US, Mongolia, France, Italy, Vietnam, Russia, Australia, Scotland, Saudi Arabia and Israel. I love meeting all of the different people.

Megan is also in my class and we are by far the youngest there, but everyone has been incredibly nice. We are learning fast, but I am glad that I am in the harder class becasue I Want to learn as much Chinese as I possibly can.

Foreign student's aren't aloud to use the school gym facilities so the five of us joined a gym near our apartments so that we could work out (running on the streets is simply not an option... we WILL get run down). It is called Mind Over Body Fitness, MOB for short. We have been putting it to very good use. Trying to tell our host families that we are going to the gym has been an excercize in in its own right and with entertaining results. I "go MOB," Kate "goes sport," and Megan "goes" followed by a running pantomime.

Trying to take exercise classes in a different language is a mix of hilarity and mistakes, but it is surprisingly easy to communicate. I just don't plan on taking any classes without an instructor in front demonstrating what it is that they want me to do. I think my favorite class thus far has been what we dubbed "stretchy ball class" I think the actual name is slimming ball workout. We essentially grabbed massive blue bouncy balls and worked out on them it was really fun, though I wont lie, it half the fun was watching everyone fall off while trying to stretch. The spin teacher now calls Megan "States" since she told him she was from the US which is also pretty entertaining.

In that vein one of the funniest things about my stay has been hearing our host families' names for us. My host family has a pretty good grasp on Zoe though the pronunciation is definitely a little bit off. Kat lives on the second floor of my building so when they want to talk about Kate they usually point at the floor. Megan gets a pointed finger across the street or something along the lines of meggie... Jonas is called alternately Janice and Jonessen. Nate who is 6'2'' is either "tall boy" or a gesture with a hand way above the speaker's head.

I was a little bit worried when I was planning to go that any kids who were going to China would be incredibly worldly and sophisticated and essentially not as dorky as I am. Thankfully I was proved wrong on that point. Last Wednesday it was raining and the five of us were walking back through the ECNU campus after lunch. We somehow got to a discussion of our favorite Disney movies and came to the conclusion that we all loved Mulan. We then proceeded to dance down the middle of the main road on campus sing "I'll Make a Man Out of You" much to the amusement of hundreds of Chinese college students. It was great.

We are apparently a musically inclined group because we had another great singing incident. Today Megan, Kate, and I walked into a coffee shop to take a break. AS soon as we stepped through the door we hear that they are playing backstreet boys... So of course there is no choice but to sing along. I'm pretty sure that we were the most entertaining thing that had happened to the staff in years. About half way through "Larger Than Life" They cranked up the stereo, which of course meant we had to start lip-syncing at the table and things escalated accordingly. Lets just say that the CD ended and a new one started and suddenly stopped in the middle so they could restart the backstreet boys CD. The waiter danced to bring us the check.

I am having a lot of fun learning different Chinese games. My host mother is trying to teach me computer mahjong. I am having a lot of fun, but I have no idea what I am doing. The computer keeps offering me options, but they are all in Chinese. I am also learning a little bit of Chinese chess which is like normal chess but harder in my opinion. It is set up like a battle field and there is a river in the middle. The pieces have a lot more restriction and aren't carved shapes. They look like checker pieces with characters on them and the characters are different for the red and the black side. I often forget which piece is which... which can be a problem.

Friday one of the CIEE interns took us to a Kong Fu master he knows for a lesson. It was really fun, but we one again got a chance to be a of entertainment value to the locals. We were in a neighborhood park in the middle of a field with the master teaching us, and we gathered quite the audience.

This weekend is the weekend of Mid-Autumn- Festival, which is a big family holiday. The best thing I can equate it to is Thanksgiving. My host family was planing to go out to the countryside in the morning, but we had to cancel due to the typhoon. I am still Californian enough to think that canceling due to typhoon is kind of cool.

I had a really interesting Sunday, but I am positive that I ate enough for three large men, forget one teenage girl.

We started out with a breakfast of moon-cakes which are special to this holiday. At 10:30 we got in the car to go to lunch. We got to the restaurant a little after eleven and waited while our party gathered. In the end there were twelve of us. My host family, me, my host dad's brother, his wife and daughter, my host dad's parents, and my host dad's brother's wife's parents. I did eventually actually figure out who everyone was. We has an amazing lunch of Beijing duck which went on for two hours of straight eating, but was SO GOOD. We left and went to my host dad's brother's house. We there had Hagen Daas Ice Cream Cake.

Then we went to My Host mother's parent's house. We then had dinner with my host family, my host mom's two sister, their husbands, and five year old sons. Dinner was amazing, but I was not hungry yet since I had just eaten for at least two people. The table started out covered in serving dishes when we sat down, but my host grandmother kept getting up and making or bringing more food so by the time we were done the table was two layers deep in serving dishes.

As part of our orientation activities last week we went on a scavenger hunt. CIEE gave us a lit of around 30 locations and things that we had to find in Shanghai by four in the afternoon using any kind of public transportation except for taxi. They decided that it would just make everything better if it were a race, so they told us to break up into two teams. The boys wanted to do boys v girls, so we split up. We actually had a blast doing it and I now feel like no matter where I am dropped in Shanghai that I can find my way back. Maybe not quickly but I can do it. It was also a great opportunity to preview a lot of different places that we want to go back and visit.

Perhaps the best part of the whole situation is that the girls won. Our prizes were one hour traditional Chinese massages at the Dragonfly Spa. We claimed them this morning and they were absolutely amazing.

I think that is it for now... I will try to update a little more frequently in the future, but no guarantees. My plan is to try to write once a week.

I will wrap up with:

You know you are in China when you think that the Chairmen Mao statue is a completely legitimate on campus meeting spot.

So it begins...

2008-09-02T03:00:00.001-07:00

So, here we go. This blog is going to be essentially a record of my various exploits during my gap year in China.

I left California August 27th at 10 in the morning and after two flight and a ridiculous time change reached Shanghai at 6 in the evening August 28th. I had planned to spend my layover in San Francisco hanging out and drinking coffee thus using up the remainder of my star bucks card before I left... But I managed to end up in the only two airport terminals in the contiguous United States without a single star bucks... So it goes... I have to say that the flight I took may have been the single coolest flight ever. Why? Because for the meal they served ramen. They gave us each a bowl and then came around with boiling water to fill them.

When we reached Shanghai we were picked up by some of the CIEE staff. There were three of us on the flight from San Francisco. Me, Megan, who is from Boise, and Jonas, who is from San Francisco.

Driving in to the city was surreal. We were all giggling and jet lagged and none of us could believe we were really here. Shanghai is an amazing city, especially lit up at night.

At the end of the bus ride we were met by our Host Families. I love my host family. They are wonderful. My new little sister Angel is incredibly nice and very accommodating about translating for me, though it is yet another motivation for me to learn Chinese fast, so that I do not need to depend on a 14 year old to communicate. My host family also has a talking pet bird which currently speaks more Chinese than I do. We have to set language goals, and one of mine currently is to learn more Chinese than Fifi (the bird).

There are five kids total in the program. Besides Megan, Jonas, and I there is Kate who is from Wisconsin, and Nate, from Kentucky. We all get along well and they are a really cool group. It is a relief sometimes to be able to just talk in English.

So far we have been getting a lot of the administrative work done such as registration at the school and residency permits from the police. The rest of the time we have been touring the city.

I went with my host family to visit the Yu Gardens or Chén huáng miào. It is old town shanghai, which has been recreated into a tourist destination. I am usually not a big fan of touristy stuff, but this was really cool with a bunch of different shops and traditional Chinese goodies. We went out to a traditional Chinese breakfast and had shen long which are amazing pork and crab dumplings.

The next day the five of us took the metro down to the huge "fake market" which is where they sell all the knock off products. It was a blast wandering around and we made a couple of new best friends who really wanted to sell us stuff. We finally escaped our most persistent friend by ducking into what turned out to be a massive underground mall that probably ran for miles, I don't know, we turned back after a while.

For all you shoppers I think I found the Mall To End All Malls. My host family took me there to look around and have dinner. It is called Cloud Nine Mall in Zhongshan Park also known as the Shanghai Summit Shopping City. Shopping city is about accurate. It has eight stories not counting the Giant Carrefour (French grocery store) downstairs. You could get lost in there for days easily I am sure.

On the end of my tourist destination litany, today we went to the Oriental Pearl Tower which was INSANE. The architecture was amazing and the weather cooperated so we could see for miles from the top. You could really believe that this city has 20 million people in this city looking out at that view. For as far as they eye could see there were sky scrappers, it was mind boggling the number of people that they could encompass. We had more tourist fun while we were there. The five of us lined up to take a group picture, and the Chinese decided to take advantage of the addition to the usual tourist attractions and lined up so that they could get their picture of the blondness too.

Since it is me we are talking about I have been learning about Chinese food and culture from my host family. Yesterday my host father taught me how to do a traditional Chinese tea ceremony which was pretty awesome. We also made dumplings and I now have some masterful dumpling folding skills.

I have been going to orientation events at my school (East China Normal University) and the campus is amazingly beautiful. There is a river running through the middle and all of these trees. There are also some really fun caves that you can walk through to get to this little pond/grotto thing. It is awesome.

I finished registration this morning, and I will be starting my class: Chinese 1-2, on Friday morning at 8:30. I am really looking forward to knowing enough to at least understand the bird when it speaks Chinese.

I will be putting up some pictures over the next few days, either on this blog or maybe on facebook, it depends on how the uploading works for this blog and such.

So that is pretty much how my first 5 days have gone feel free to email me or skype me or yahoo messenger me or whatever.

On a final entertaining note:

you know you are in China when the shampoo bottle in the bathroom has Chairman Mao on it.

See you all later.