Thursday, December 02, 2010
yowsas, i can actually post something.
with my wily ways i've managed to login to blogger. sweet! so this is from a while ago....
I moved into my new apartment this week. Woo hoo! Magically, everything I touch turns to dust! I should’ve taken a picture of my feet just from walking around in my apartment. On the first day, I believe i spent at least 4 hours cleaning, all in preparation for the cleaning lady who will come on Monday. I’ve never had a person come clean my house before. The idea of it is quite strange to me. I know a lot of people in china have an ayi who comes regularly, but I can’t wrap my brain around the idea. I have the same hands and cleaning supplies that she’ll have, so why don’t I just do it? But considering how gross my hands feel even after a shower, maybe everyone else is on to something…Even weirder is that I’ll actually be here when she comes. So not only is she cleaning my apartment, but I’ll be doing lots of other things in the same space that don’t involve cleaning, subtly rubbing it in her face. Weird…. (after the fact note: i never had a cleaning lady come. for some reason that was very difficult to coordinate, and my ability to clean trumped my desire for someone else to do it for me...)
Saturday, October 30, 2010
chongqing. and stuff.
Some things I never wrote about but probably should have:
-Qingdao beer festival. Awesome. Actually started a post about it with the ever-so-appropriate title “untimely qingdao recap.” At this point it’d be silly to write down all the details when there’s so much newness to cover. I logged 1 barf. Suffered some minor cuts in the process of as I leaned out the window of the taxi. Beer for breakfast. Beer in a bag. Beer all day. Babies surrounded by beer. Beer drinking children. Tanzanian beer that had a sort of fritos aftertaste. Jules also has some quality film footage of me drunkenly wailing while rory pulls my hair. Aside from booze and general debauchery, swimming in the sea was a pretty big highlight. Wasn’t too crowded, not too much gawking. So that’s that.
-One of my last days in hangzhou i saw the strangest thing of the whole year (in the context of the bike lane): dude had the telltale orange rent-a-bike and was precariously navigating in the rain. Those two facts alone: not interesting. But what made his journey all the more treacherous was that he was attempting to steer with one hand and balance a blood pressure machine strewn across his lap with the other hand. The one that you play with at the pharmacy with the emergency sleeve release button thing. It was the height of a child and who knows how heavy…And I wondered where exactly was it going. To his home? to a pharmacy? I’ve never seen one of those in a pharmacy here. I’ll have to pay more attention in the next pharmacy I enter.
-going away shenanigans in hangzhou. The highlights were the mini-kegs and protection from the elements under the circus-like tents of the moganshan fish market. That place was just cool because it was quite easy to measure the carnage of your meal--as dictated by quantity and aesthetics—because they just left all the refuse on the tables until after you left. So if you have 20 people eating bbq chicken skewers and corn, there’s going to be a shitload of kebab sticks, wing bones and corn cobs piling up. The goodness continued with the free GINORMO bottle of champage that tim, the proprietor of maya bar, graciously donated to the cause. The cause of me! Champagne accompanied by people saying really nice, genuine things about me (or maybe they were just good liars). A dude I dated briefly was also there and said that anything I ordered was on him. so I had all manner of booze coming at me from all angles, and people still wouldn’t accept “but wait a minute, I already have 3 drinks in front of me” as “no, I don’t need another drink.” That’s what I would consider a good problem to have. I decided to call it a night when 2 of the female teachers from my school got into a shouting match at the bar. If i recall correctly, the exact cue to leave came when another rather diminutive teacher stood between the two cursing, flailing women trying to separate them. I heard later that it never quite came to blows, and I’d be lying if I said I weren’t a bit disappointed by that fact. “how was jimmy’s going away party?” “great until the two broads got into a fistfight at the bar.” It just makes for good television, if that’s what my life were.
So that was hangzhou. Which was the past. Now is the future or, more accurately, the now. huh? Yeah….I’m now in chongqing, with a vacation back home in missou-rah of nearly a month sandwiched between these two Chinese bread cities (stretching that sandwich metaphor there). And speaking of sandwiches, fuck an a was it rad to eat some good food. Not that Chinese food isn’t good. It’s actually great, but I went on a pretty substantial salad binge while I was home. I know that sounds strange, I’m supposed to want burgers and French fries and all the shit that Chinese people think makes every single American citizen morbidly obese. I heart gross generalizations. But yeah. Pulled pork sandwiches. Wendy’s fries dipped in a frosty. Bleu cheese crumbles. I just like that word. Crumbles. Copious amounts of pulled pork. and, booze, sweet booze. Wheat beers, stouts, porters. Lagavulin. Shee-it! And American commercials, particularly the home grown ones. So bad that they’re good. And it was so strange, because not a single person pointed at me saying “foreigner” as I walked down the street. Fuck.
There were some down sides too. Besides the shitty flights to actually get there (fuck you, SFO and united airlines!!!!!), I was a dolt who let my license expire, so I unintentionally rendered myself immobile, aside from the good graces of my parents. But it’s weird to be 31 years old and consider yourself to be something resembling an adult, only to come home, broke and trapped. That was a very real and very depressing aspect of the whole thing. Not that I’d let a little thing like money ruin my good time. Still came home with lots of good loot (thanks, parentals) and a 3 month Chinese tourist visa acquired in a mere day. Try getting that accomplished in china.
So yes. Chongqing. With jules and rory. Living with them now, but it’s temporary while peeps hunt for my apartment (with western toilet. Thems hard to come by round these parts). So that’s cool. It’d be nice to unpack instead of just throwing everything I own around a room the size of a….chinese bedroom? Can’t really think of any sort of tangible equivalent. I’d already designated 1 suitcase “work clothes easy access location” then it actually got chilly here and I had to dig for things with sleeves again. Blah blah blah. Not important. I’m just excited about a new place and no roommate. i should mention here that I did have 2 very very good roommates in hangzhou. Just my space issues and sharing. Don’t like to share.
Chongqing’s a whole lot different than hangzhou. Duh. And yet both places are still very very Chinese. Hangzhou’s known for being a pretty rich city in zhejiang province (perhaps the richest). And now I work in a school in a mall for uber-rich people. I don’t know where these rich people are, because everyone I see in the mall looks as poor or not-poor as the next person. It’s very much a nouveau riche scenario. I think jules described the new money here pretty well and in a more familiar cultural context. Imagine a convenient store worker in middle America winning publisher’s clearing house. Or maybe a rich relative dies. So here’s this financially naïve dude with a shitload of cash. What to do with it? Buy a monster truck? Buy all the things that a shitty job couldn’t,. because just having the option of frivolity is a luxury in itself. Finally the permission, really, to substantially take part in the consumerist culture you’ve been on the fringes of your whole life, despite it’s ubiquity in the media—clothes, gadgets, stuff! No investing or anything sensible. Right here, right now. And that’s what it’s like here, only their monster trucks are the real Gucci bags to replace the already excellent fake ones. But it’s still interesting to watch. Not the same as the [quite] pervasive materialism of korea. It was vulgar there, but not here. It’s more like it’s cute. A word I don’t use. “aw, shucks. You finally got enough money to buy shit you don’t need. That’s cute.”
Anyhoo, the drive from the airport was good. I’d visited this city twice before as a tourist, but it immediately felt new even when I took the same route I’d taken those two times prior. My first day as a resident! Woot woot. i’m not visiting, I live here. It’s cool to be aware of your mind weighing that significance as it happens. Not in some reflective, abstract way, but in the exact moment that it dawns on you in a dirty taxi, with a driver who has a different dialect. And even that is familiar but new.
Chongqing is a dirty, polluted city. I like the word “gritty” and it’s the grit that makes this city cool. And despite this grit, things are green and wet. the humidity contributes to all that. Despite the smog, life is sustained. Skies can be blue. Clouds can be delineated. these facts are amazing.
On the school end, things are a lot calmer. This is a good thing. The school is clean. The kids are polite. Everything is organized. The office is quiet and productive. There aren’t that many teachers there aren’t that many female teachersthere’s no drama. And this, this I is very like.
One last thing. h&m. holy shit. The grand opening of h&m chongqing was on Wednesday. It’s below our school in the mall. I could leave the office now and be in h&m in 30 seconds. That’s crazy. This day was crazy. We entered through the men’s section, and it was a zoo, but we were still able to get in. it wasn’t until jules and I had been in the store for a while that we thought to look out the window. There was literally a mob trying to squeeze through the bottleneck of the main entrance escalator. They had set up the metal barricades like the check-in line of the airport to corral the peeps, but it was insane. When girls finally made it to the top of the escalator, some of them were crying, some of them were fist-pumping, and all of them were elated. Truly. I’ve never seen anything like it except on tv. And that’s saying a lot for china.
I could ramble some more, but I’ll save some typing for another time. Hot pot is good. I had a welcome dinner that was also good. And there was no near-catfight. Generally speaking, things are good.
-Qingdao beer festival. Awesome. Actually started a post about it with the ever-so-appropriate title “untimely qingdao recap.” At this point it’d be silly to write down all the details when there’s so much newness to cover. I logged 1 barf. Suffered some minor cuts in the process of as I leaned out the window of the taxi. Beer for breakfast. Beer in a bag. Beer all day. Babies surrounded by beer. Beer drinking children. Tanzanian beer that had a sort of fritos aftertaste. Jules also has some quality film footage of me drunkenly wailing while rory pulls my hair. Aside from booze and general debauchery, swimming in the sea was a pretty big highlight. Wasn’t too crowded, not too much gawking. So that’s that.
-One of my last days in hangzhou i saw the strangest thing of the whole year (in the context of the bike lane): dude had the telltale orange rent-a-bike and was precariously navigating in the rain. Those two facts alone: not interesting. But what made his journey all the more treacherous was that he was attempting to steer with one hand and balance a blood pressure machine strewn across his lap with the other hand. The one that you play with at the pharmacy with the emergency sleeve release button thing. It was the height of a child and who knows how heavy…And I wondered where exactly was it going. To his home? to a pharmacy? I’ve never seen one of those in a pharmacy here. I’ll have to pay more attention in the next pharmacy I enter.
-going away shenanigans in hangzhou. The highlights were the mini-kegs and protection from the elements under the circus-like tents of the moganshan fish market. That place was just cool because it was quite easy to measure the carnage of your meal--as dictated by quantity and aesthetics—because they just left all the refuse on the tables until after you left. So if you have 20 people eating bbq chicken skewers and corn, there’s going to be a shitload of kebab sticks, wing bones and corn cobs piling up. The goodness continued with the free GINORMO bottle of champage that tim, the proprietor of maya bar, graciously donated to the cause. The cause of me! Champagne accompanied by people saying really nice, genuine things about me (or maybe they were just good liars). A dude I dated briefly was also there and said that anything I ordered was on him. so I had all manner of booze coming at me from all angles, and people still wouldn’t accept “but wait a minute, I already have 3 drinks in front of me” as “no, I don’t need another drink.” That’s what I would consider a good problem to have. I decided to call it a night when 2 of the female teachers from my school got into a shouting match at the bar. If i recall correctly, the exact cue to leave came when another rather diminutive teacher stood between the two cursing, flailing women trying to separate them. I heard later that it never quite came to blows, and I’d be lying if I said I weren’t a bit disappointed by that fact. “how was jimmy’s going away party?” “great until the two broads got into a fistfight at the bar.” It just makes for good television, if that’s what my life were.
So that was hangzhou. Which was the past. Now is the future or, more accurately, the now. huh? Yeah….I’m now in chongqing, with a vacation back home in missou-rah of nearly a month sandwiched between these two Chinese bread cities (stretching that sandwich metaphor there). And speaking of sandwiches, fuck an a was it rad to eat some good food. Not that Chinese food isn’t good. It’s actually great, but I went on a pretty substantial salad binge while I was home. I know that sounds strange, I’m supposed to want burgers and French fries and all the shit that Chinese people think makes every single American citizen morbidly obese. I heart gross generalizations. But yeah. Pulled pork sandwiches. Wendy’s fries dipped in a frosty. Bleu cheese crumbles. I just like that word. Crumbles. Copious amounts of pulled pork. and, booze, sweet booze. Wheat beers, stouts, porters. Lagavulin. Shee-it! And American commercials, particularly the home grown ones. So bad that they’re good. And it was so strange, because not a single person pointed at me saying “foreigner” as I walked down the street. Fuck.
There were some down sides too. Besides the shitty flights to actually get there (fuck you, SFO and united airlines!!!!!), I was a dolt who let my license expire, so I unintentionally rendered myself immobile, aside from the good graces of my parents. But it’s weird to be 31 years old and consider yourself to be something resembling an adult, only to come home, broke and trapped. That was a very real and very depressing aspect of the whole thing. Not that I’d let a little thing like money ruin my good time. Still came home with lots of good loot (thanks, parentals) and a 3 month Chinese tourist visa acquired in a mere day. Try getting that accomplished in china.
So yes. Chongqing. With jules and rory. Living with them now, but it’s temporary while peeps hunt for my apartment (with western toilet. Thems hard to come by round these parts). So that’s cool. It’d be nice to unpack instead of just throwing everything I own around a room the size of a….chinese bedroom? Can’t really think of any sort of tangible equivalent. I’d already designated 1 suitcase “work clothes easy access location” then it actually got chilly here and I had to dig for things with sleeves again. Blah blah blah. Not important. I’m just excited about a new place and no roommate. i should mention here that I did have 2 very very good roommates in hangzhou. Just my space issues and sharing. Don’t like to share.
Chongqing’s a whole lot different than hangzhou. Duh. And yet both places are still very very Chinese. Hangzhou’s known for being a pretty rich city in zhejiang province (perhaps the richest). And now I work in a school in a mall for uber-rich people. I don’t know where these rich people are, because everyone I see in the mall looks as poor or not-poor as the next person. It’s very much a nouveau riche scenario. I think jules described the new money here pretty well and in a more familiar cultural context. Imagine a convenient store worker in middle America winning publisher’s clearing house. Or maybe a rich relative dies. So here’s this financially naïve dude with a shitload of cash. What to do with it? Buy a monster truck? Buy all the things that a shitty job couldn’t,. because just having the option of frivolity is a luxury in itself. Finally the permission, really, to substantially take part in the consumerist culture you’ve been on the fringes of your whole life, despite it’s ubiquity in the media—clothes, gadgets, stuff! No investing or anything sensible. Right here, right now. And that’s what it’s like here, only their monster trucks are the real Gucci bags to replace the already excellent fake ones. But it’s still interesting to watch. Not the same as the [quite] pervasive materialism of korea. It was vulgar there, but not here. It’s more like it’s cute. A word I don’t use. “aw, shucks. You finally got enough money to buy shit you don’t need. That’s cute.”
Anyhoo, the drive from the airport was good. I’d visited this city twice before as a tourist, but it immediately felt new even when I took the same route I’d taken those two times prior. My first day as a resident! Woot woot. i’m not visiting, I live here. It’s cool to be aware of your mind weighing that significance as it happens. Not in some reflective, abstract way, but in the exact moment that it dawns on you in a dirty taxi, with a driver who has a different dialect. And even that is familiar but new.
Chongqing is a dirty, polluted city. I like the word “gritty” and it’s the grit that makes this city cool. And despite this grit, things are green and wet. the humidity contributes to all that. Despite the smog, life is sustained. Skies can be blue. Clouds can be delineated. these facts are amazing.
On the school end, things are a lot calmer. This is a good thing. The school is clean. The kids are polite. Everything is organized. The office is quiet and productive. There aren’t that many teachers there aren’t that many female teachersthere’s no drama. And this, this I is very like.
One last thing. h&m. holy shit. The grand opening of h&m chongqing was on Wednesday. It’s below our school in the mall. I could leave the office now and be in h&m in 30 seconds. That’s crazy. This day was crazy. We entered through the men’s section, and it was a zoo, but we were still able to get in. it wasn’t until jules and I had been in the store for a while that we thought to look out the window. There was literally a mob trying to squeeze through the bottleneck of the main entrance escalator. They had set up the metal barricades like the check-in line of the airport to corral the peeps, but it was insane. When girls finally made it to the top of the escalator, some of them were crying, some of them were fist-pumping, and all of them were elated. Truly. I’ve never seen anything like it except on tv. And that’s saying a lot for china.
I could ramble some more, but I’ll save some typing for another time. Hot pot is good. I had a welcome dinner that was also good. And there was no near-catfight. Generally speaking, things are good.
Tuesday, September 14, 2010
new ink
been feeling kind of homesick lately, so in honor of my midwestern roots (that feel very distant here in the asia), i decided to commemorate missour-ah by committing it to my wrist. yup. i'm now the proud owner of a sweet new wrist tat.
some other peeps at my school had gone and gotten some shit done, and i liked the idea of getting a tattoo in china of my home in america. so a group of us went by the "parlor" after a late meal one night, only to find that the place had just closed. shee-it. so we made some tentative plans to come back the next day.
when i got up in the morning the next day i was in a weird, anti-social mood. which, at this point and with such frequency, isn't actually weird at all. i guess i just think it should feel weirder. anyhoo, i didn't call anyone, i just went by myself. so i navigated the bike lane of my busy main street and headed down to the shawnky chinese tattoo parlor.
speaking no english, i just showed the dude with an asymmetrical haircut, odd dress shoes and a koi fish tattooed on his left shoulder the outline of my state. he asked what it was in chinese. i responded in chinese and he smiled. then he tried to put it on upside down, unfamiliar with what's north, south, east and west on my blob of unfamiliar geography.
15 minutes later i walked out with a new tattoo. it was funny though, he was just starting to put together his "portfolio" so even my little crappy outline was photographed to be added to his book. also of note, the bottle of ink that just said "tattoo ink."
anyhoo, i like the idea of geography and of place and what that means physically/mentally/emotionally/blah blah blah. and to be reminded of where you come from. that in this whole planet of abstract shapes on skewed maps there is 1 little dot that you actually came from (aside from the 2 little dots who are your parents). but if people ask me about it, i just like to say "it's just my state." or as i've been saying in broken chinese "it's my place in america." which also sounds kind of poetic.
some other peeps at my school had gone and gotten some shit done, and i liked the idea of getting a tattoo in china of my home in america. so a group of us went by the "parlor" after a late meal one night, only to find that the place had just closed. shee-it. so we made some tentative plans to come back the next day.
when i got up in the morning the next day i was in a weird, anti-social mood. which, at this point and with such frequency, isn't actually weird at all. i guess i just think it should feel weirder. anyhoo, i didn't call anyone, i just went by myself. so i navigated the bike lane of my busy main street and headed down to the shawnky chinese tattoo parlor.
speaking no english, i just showed the dude with an asymmetrical haircut, odd dress shoes and a koi fish tattooed on his left shoulder the outline of my state. he asked what it was in chinese. i responded in chinese and he smiled. then he tried to put it on upside down, unfamiliar with what's north, south, east and west on my blob of unfamiliar geography.
15 minutes later i walked out with a new tattoo. it was funny though, he was just starting to put together his "portfolio" so even my little crappy outline was photographed to be added to his book. also of note, the bottle of ink that just said "tattoo ink."
anyhoo, i like the idea of geography and of place and what that means physically/mentally/emotionally/blah blah blah. and to be reminded of where you come from. that in this whole planet of abstract shapes on skewed maps there is 1 little dot that you actually came from (aside from the 2 little dots who are your parents). but if people ask me about it, i just like to say "it's just my state." or as i've been saying in broken chinese "it's my place in america." which also sounds kind of poetic.
Monday, July 26, 2010
cicadas
shit. The cicadas are here.
I wake up every morning to the deafening sound of millions of them, the collective chirping of the masses somehow worming its way through the screen, glass and curtains of my windows, through my room, under and around the ear plugs [and residual wax] and into my fucking brain. and of course this on a regular basis for the past few weeks is bound to stir up at least one anecdote of yore.
Insert random fact that I just learned: “cicada” comes from latin and means buzzer. So there you go. I learned that from wikipedia. Where, if the sound of the mass of them waking a person up every morning isn’t real enough, you can also find a sound clip. And the sped up molting of a “dog day” cicada in ohio.
So yes, I was reminded of another time when cicadas were taking over the world. the last time I recall them appearing in such startling numbers was in columbia, mo. I was then working my second ice cream/frozen yogurt job, at the tcby on 9th and cherry. I was just thinking how appropriate it would have been had the intersection been at 9th and locust, since people commonly [and mistakenly, I might add] refer to cicadas as locusts, which are actually more closely related to grasshoppers (again with the wikipedia), but I suppose that’s someone else’s pretty boring anecdote. Seems like there were a lot of them then, but they were much bolder than this year’s batch. So much so that you found them in your clothes and hair, swarming you when you left the relative safety of a building. On several occassions people managed to carry them into the yogurt shop in their clothes, unawares. And on fewer than several occassions, these creatures made their way into people’s ice cream. So that’s always fun.
But they were too big for anyone to actually ingest them. Not that that wasn’t possible, it just was impossible not to see something that large and alive moving in your food.
Nothing much more on that subject. It just reminded me of white chocolate mousse and watermelon sorbet mixed together, sans insects. Oh, and sucking the gas out of the whipped cream in the walk-in cooler. That was a lot of ruined cream.
In the vein of random, i’m going to take this space to share another anecdote. Completely unrelated to cicadas, but relating to china, so that’s enough. About 5 months ago another teacher and I helped the school district with some recordings for middle school tests in the province. So we went to this expensive studio and wore headphones and read very slowly from a script into fancy microphones.
But before any of that happened there was a commotion. We were waiting for our escort to the studio at some big warehousey type place. So while we were waiting we wandered. on the 3rd floor there were lots of road cases, the kind that touring bands use to lug all their shit around, and men moving them.
We went downstairs and waited some more. While we were waiting a man ran down the stairs and out the doors, clutching his hand to his chest while blood ran through his fingers and down his shirt.
A few minutes later another man came down the stairs. He wasn’t running and showed no outward signs of being in a hurry. He was holding essentially a woman’s handkerchief. And in the handkerchief was a man’s finger. Presumably belonging to the man who had run down the stairs a moment prior.
Finally another group of people made their way down the stairs. Then everyone squeezed into a car, clown style, and drove away. So it was an interesting scene before we got to the actual recording. We figured it had been one of the men moving the road cases around, with the top of the case shutting on his finger and severing it.
And finally, from bad to worse….another pretty gruesome nugglet that affected me secondhand. I have a roommate now. not a british dude, but an american chick. Pretty chill. From colorado. Anyhoo, she’s been here for about a month give or take a few days. I found her on Sunday in the bathroom sobbing. Sobbing and shaking. So I hugged her awkwardly—I’m not necessarily very good at comcforting people. Sat her down on the couch to get to the bottom of all this shock.
She started by saying “I just saw the most fucked-up thing.” She had been biking home on our street when she heard a loud “thud.” a guy, maybe in his mid-20s, had just fallen or jumped out of his high rise apartment building and landed on the sidewalk next to her. She was the first person to see it, besides the hairdresser whose shop he landed in front of.
She got off her bike. Walked over to the guy, whose limbs were all contorted and bloody. There were bits of blood and viscera scattered around him. a crowd started to gather and no one appeared to be doing anything. Her sister’s a nurse back in colorado, so she’d actually been cpr trained. So she took his pulse but there was nothing. Then she left him to the curiousity of the chinese crowd as the ambulance approached.
I didn’t really know how to comfort her so I opted to open a beer.
I wake up every morning to the deafening sound of millions of them, the collective chirping of the masses somehow worming its way through the screen, glass and curtains of my windows, through my room, under and around the ear plugs [and residual wax] and into my fucking brain. and of course this on a regular basis for the past few weeks is bound to stir up at least one anecdote of yore.
Insert random fact that I just learned: “cicada” comes from latin and means buzzer. So there you go. I learned that from wikipedia. Where, if the sound of the mass of them waking a person up every morning isn’t real enough, you can also find a sound clip. And the sped up molting of a “dog day” cicada in ohio.
So yes, I was reminded of another time when cicadas were taking over the world. the last time I recall them appearing in such startling numbers was in columbia, mo. I was then working my second ice cream/frozen yogurt job, at the tcby on 9th and cherry. I was just thinking how appropriate it would have been had the intersection been at 9th and locust, since people commonly [and mistakenly, I might add] refer to cicadas as locusts, which are actually more closely related to grasshoppers (again with the wikipedia), but I suppose that’s someone else’s pretty boring anecdote. Seems like there were a lot of them then, but they were much bolder than this year’s batch. So much so that you found them in your clothes and hair, swarming you when you left the relative safety of a building. On several occassions people managed to carry them into the yogurt shop in their clothes, unawares. And on fewer than several occassions, these creatures made their way into people’s ice cream. So that’s always fun.
But they were too big for anyone to actually ingest them. Not that that wasn’t possible, it just was impossible not to see something that large and alive moving in your food.
Nothing much more on that subject. It just reminded me of white chocolate mousse and watermelon sorbet mixed together, sans insects. Oh, and sucking the gas out of the whipped cream in the walk-in cooler. That was a lot of ruined cream.
In the vein of random, i’m going to take this space to share another anecdote. Completely unrelated to cicadas, but relating to china, so that’s enough. About 5 months ago another teacher and I helped the school district with some recordings for middle school tests in the province. So we went to this expensive studio and wore headphones and read very slowly from a script into fancy microphones.
But before any of that happened there was a commotion. We were waiting for our escort to the studio at some big warehousey type place. So while we were waiting we wandered. on the 3rd floor there were lots of road cases, the kind that touring bands use to lug all their shit around, and men moving them.
We went downstairs and waited some more. While we were waiting a man ran down the stairs and out the doors, clutching his hand to his chest while blood ran through his fingers and down his shirt.
A few minutes later another man came down the stairs. He wasn’t running and showed no outward signs of being in a hurry. He was holding essentially a woman’s handkerchief. And in the handkerchief was a man’s finger. Presumably belonging to the man who had run down the stairs a moment prior.
Finally another group of people made their way down the stairs. Then everyone squeezed into a car, clown style, and drove away. So it was an interesting scene before we got to the actual recording. We figured it had been one of the men moving the road cases around, with the top of the case shutting on his finger and severing it.
And finally, from bad to worse….another pretty gruesome nugglet that affected me secondhand. I have a roommate now. not a british dude, but an american chick. Pretty chill. From colorado. Anyhoo, she’s been here for about a month give or take a few days. I found her on Sunday in the bathroom sobbing. Sobbing and shaking. So I hugged her awkwardly—I’m not necessarily very good at comcforting people. Sat her down on the couch to get to the bottom of all this shock.
She started by saying “I just saw the most fucked-up thing.” She had been biking home on our street when she heard a loud “thud.” a guy, maybe in his mid-20s, had just fallen or jumped out of his high rise apartment building and landed on the sidewalk next to her. She was the first person to see it, besides the hairdresser whose shop he landed in front of.
She got off her bike. Walked over to the guy, whose limbs were all contorted and bloody. There were bits of blood and viscera scattered around him. a crowd started to gather and no one appeared to be doing anything. Her sister’s a nurse back in colorado, so she’d actually been cpr trained. So she took his pulse but there was nothing. Then she left him to the curiousity of the chinese crowd as the ambulance approached.
I didn’t really know how to comfort her so I opted to open a beer.
Friday, May 14, 2010
effigy...there's a word i don't use very often
been hitting the sauce pretty hard this past week or so. and i mean that with regards to both booze and actual sauce--delicious korean red pepper sauce, to be precise. i'm dipping a very large vegetable in it right now! heh heh. anyhoo, the weather has been nice, besides today's showers, which means there are outdoor places to drink, which means i spent 3 days in a row at maya, which i was actually okay with. the last visit included a shot of the top shelf baijiu with a snake in it. i'm not sure if what i drank came from the large snake vat or the medium snake vat. i guess at that point, snake size really doesn't matter. i've also eaten at a particular korean restaurant near my house 3 times in the past week and a half. the wait staff seems as excited as i am about that figure. got some free soju during one visit and have consumed a lot on subsequent trips. i think my 3 day headache reflects this.
in an effort to counteract the mini-binge, i decided to venture out and do something touristy on my pseudo-weekend. the outcome of this has always been 1 of 2 things: 1) foreigner in a tourist attraction becomes the tourist attraction and ultimately regrets the fact that he or she decided to venture out in the first place or 2) foreigner in a tourist attraction is so engrossed in the beauty of said tourist attraction that he/she is able to tune out the claustrophobia that accompanies being in an "open" space in china (i know, sounds like an oxymoron, but it ain't) with people pointing and staring at you.
my destination: lingyin temple. my mode of transportation: bike. my technology that would have been nice to have but that i forgot to bring: camera.
got a bike tune up (an anecdote in itself…later), headed out. when i got there, it was definitely a case of "hey, look at the foreigner." this usually only makes me feel uncomfortable if i'm already uncomfortable or unfamiliar with my surroundings. and then it feels like everyone's laughing at me. It’s fair to say i have some mild social anxiety issues. since i had only managed to purchase an ice cream cone and not a ticket, i was still feeling vulnerable and irritable. on my way to buy a ticket, i felt a hand on my arm (big fucking no no in my book). a woman was gesturing to me that she wanted to take my picture. i guess because i was the only foreigner on my own (not the only foreigner, saw several large tour groups of old[ish] europeans) she felt like it was fair game to accost me. so i saw what she wanted, shook my head and flipped her off. which might mean something to a chinese person, or it might not. but she didn't get her picture. and i felt vindicated.
note to people who feel like harassing foreigners (tourists or otherwise): it's all about the approach. i, for one, appreciate subtlety. If one doesn’t adopt a look-at-the-foreign-monkey manner or an i-wonder-what-happens-if-i-poke-it-or-touch-it manner, then maybe i'll oblige a photo. but there seems to be so much aggression and mockery that accompany what could otherwise be an easily granted request. or if people are taking pictures of you out of some sense of appreciation--tattoos, for example--i'm okay with that. whatever, i eventually was able to procure a ticket, relatively unscathed. woot woot.
a few years ago i went to tibet and saw a crapload of temples. Perhaps using “crapload” “tibet” and “temples” in the same sentence could be construed as sacrilige. But I guess I’ve never been very religious. Anyhoo, all of said crapload of temples were beautiful and awesome and, yes, mystical. i've been sort of underwhelmed by temples ever since then. korea had some. eh. china has lots. eh. but lingyin temple is the first temple since tibet that has actually managed to inspire any sense of calm or reverie or calm reverie. it was unexpected, and much needed. massive. teeming with people. but i was able to tune everything out. greeted by the big incense pits--fire and grime and red wrappers--these microcosms of activity, piety refined by flames.
i traded in my judgement of people for wonder instead. after tibet i wanted everyone at a temple to look like a scruffy, devout pilgrim, prostrating him/herself, bundled up in colorful rags, ruddy-faced and windburned. this time i was able to marvel at the mix of people, tourists and religious types together. women (okay, just the 1...) in stiletto heels and latex dresses kneeling next to old men sporting baseball caps. and toddlers being gently prodded to model the actions of those around them, oblivious to content or context.
went to a few other smaller temples around the area. didn't manage to make it to the cable car/peak, but it definitely warrants another trip.
'twas a good day.
the day before my excursion i ate at a new thai restaurant in town. capped it off with maya. I’m so predictable. when i got home later that night--maybe midnight—I was greeted by a vehicle blocking the only path in the parking lot. Curiosity trumped annoyance, which I thoroughly appreciated in retrospect. i could just make out people shuffling along the side of the van, pushing something. Then the back of the ambulance opened, establishing a small perimeter of light. Enough for me to see the paramedics and a gurney. They shoved the loaded gurney in, where a calm, masked woman was waiting to pin the pulse clip thing onto a motionless older man’s finger. He was still, but i thought that if he was wearing his glasses, there couldn’t really be anything too wrong with him. I was struck by the fact that he was surrounded by medical personnel, but there was no sense of urgency guiding their movements and no family members buzzing nervously/chaotically around him. it was odd and calm.
the next day, again, after maya, I biked home. there wasn’t a vehicle in the parking lot blocking my way, but there was a fire and a crowd of people. I hopped down off my bike to push it through the crowd. And as I wove my way through these people whose solemnity was becoming apparent, I got a clear view of the fire’s source: it was an effigy of a man who had died. a chair was rather stably erected on top of a pyre of broken and/or disassembled furniture. The chair had a man’s casual button-down shirt stretched over it and a hat placed on top. I could only assume that it was in remembrance of the very man I’d seen the night before. Unfortunately, I didn’t make this assumption until I’d already disturbed the peace somewhat. But to say anything (particularly when I wasn’t sure how) would have just drawn more attention to me. So I tried to shuffle through as inconspicuously as possible. And I felt sad. but I also had some highly insensitive questions running through my head, the biggest being: “was he already dead when I saw him yesterday?” I’m not sure how either answer to that question would have made me feel. Maybe something. Maybe nothing.
I do wonder how death is different here. Not in any sort of afterlife context (not a subject I want to creep into my blog. Yikes.), but just in the context of culture and mourning. Is the sadness the same as it is in western culture? what does a cline of sadness/mourning look like? yes, a horrible idea, but valid if you’re one who makes a distinction between the death of a pet and the death of a family member. if a young person dies, is it more tragic because chinese families usually only get one child? All the emotion funneled into one source that is then taken away. Or in a country with so many people in it, does sheer volume of humanity minimize the emotional trauma of one person’s death? i know these are stupid questions, but they exist[ed] anyway.
Moving away from death, and on to my most recent mini-vacation, yay! I went to chongqing for the may holiday. My school actually closed down for a month, so all the east school teachers had to move to the north school (still here now). Which means a lot of cancelled classes and a lot more arguably free time (hence this blog, typed on a very official and imposing desk in the north school teacher’s office. Somehow sitting behind a computer screen—however “compact”—translates to diligence.). part of that meant a few extra days off that some teachers were owed anyway around may day. So I had 5 days to spend in chongqing. Of course I like hangzhou (or at least most aspects of it), but it’s still nice to get to eat good food and to see people who I don’t feel I need to explain myself to or feel guilty about hanging out with. These things are viable in hangzhou, just not as viable. And that was chongqing last time too—respite from hangzhou. I know it’s not challenging to be with people who agree with you all the time, but it’s also nice to be with people who don’t turn everything into a point of contention. that seems to characterize a lot of my current relationships, work or otherwise. And it’s exhausting.
I could spend time writing about a very cute 5-year old at a bike shop. But one could probably gather from those minute details that I had a fun time with her and her few english words while I waited to get my bike fixed. Yup, that’s pretty much it, but it made my day memorable, the first in monday’s chain of events.
And now back to cleaning up all the music files on my external hard drive. Tedious, but space-freeing. I have entire discographies of people I’ve never heard of…
in an effort to counteract the mini-binge, i decided to venture out and do something touristy on my pseudo-weekend. the outcome of this has always been 1 of 2 things: 1) foreigner in a tourist attraction becomes the tourist attraction and ultimately regrets the fact that he or she decided to venture out in the first place or 2) foreigner in a tourist attraction is so engrossed in the beauty of said tourist attraction that he/she is able to tune out the claustrophobia that accompanies being in an "open" space in china (i know, sounds like an oxymoron, but it ain't) with people pointing and staring at you.
my destination: lingyin temple. my mode of transportation: bike. my technology that would have been nice to have but that i forgot to bring: camera.
got a bike tune up (an anecdote in itself…later), headed out. when i got there, it was definitely a case of "hey, look at the foreigner." this usually only makes me feel uncomfortable if i'm already uncomfortable or unfamiliar with my surroundings. and then it feels like everyone's laughing at me. It’s fair to say i have some mild social anxiety issues. since i had only managed to purchase an ice cream cone and not a ticket, i was still feeling vulnerable and irritable. on my way to buy a ticket, i felt a hand on my arm (big fucking no no in my book). a woman was gesturing to me that she wanted to take my picture. i guess because i was the only foreigner on my own (not the only foreigner, saw several large tour groups of old[ish] europeans) she felt like it was fair game to accost me. so i saw what she wanted, shook my head and flipped her off. which might mean something to a chinese person, or it might not. but she didn't get her picture. and i felt vindicated.
note to people who feel like harassing foreigners (tourists or otherwise): it's all about the approach. i, for one, appreciate subtlety. If one doesn’t adopt a look-at-the-foreign-monkey manner or an i-wonder-what-happens-if-i-poke-it-or-touch-it manner, then maybe i'll oblige a photo. but there seems to be so much aggression and mockery that accompany what could otherwise be an easily granted request. or if people are taking pictures of you out of some sense of appreciation--tattoos, for example--i'm okay with that. whatever, i eventually was able to procure a ticket, relatively unscathed. woot woot.
a few years ago i went to tibet and saw a crapload of temples. Perhaps using “crapload” “tibet” and “temples” in the same sentence could be construed as sacrilige. But I guess I’ve never been very religious. Anyhoo, all of said crapload of temples were beautiful and awesome and, yes, mystical. i've been sort of underwhelmed by temples ever since then. korea had some. eh. china has lots. eh. but lingyin temple is the first temple since tibet that has actually managed to inspire any sense of calm or reverie or calm reverie. it was unexpected, and much needed. massive. teeming with people. but i was able to tune everything out. greeted by the big incense pits--fire and grime and red wrappers--these microcosms of activity, piety refined by flames.
i traded in my judgement of people for wonder instead. after tibet i wanted everyone at a temple to look like a scruffy, devout pilgrim, prostrating him/herself, bundled up in colorful rags, ruddy-faced and windburned. this time i was able to marvel at the mix of people, tourists and religious types together. women (okay, just the 1...) in stiletto heels and latex dresses kneeling next to old men sporting baseball caps. and toddlers being gently prodded to model the actions of those around them, oblivious to content or context.
went to a few other smaller temples around the area. didn't manage to make it to the cable car/peak, but it definitely warrants another trip.
'twas a good day.
the day before my excursion i ate at a new thai restaurant in town. capped it off with maya. I’m so predictable. when i got home later that night--maybe midnight—I was greeted by a vehicle blocking the only path in the parking lot. Curiosity trumped annoyance, which I thoroughly appreciated in retrospect. i could just make out people shuffling along the side of the van, pushing something. Then the back of the ambulance opened, establishing a small perimeter of light. Enough for me to see the paramedics and a gurney. They shoved the loaded gurney in, where a calm, masked woman was waiting to pin the pulse clip thing onto a motionless older man’s finger. He was still, but i thought that if he was wearing his glasses, there couldn’t really be anything too wrong with him. I was struck by the fact that he was surrounded by medical personnel, but there was no sense of urgency guiding their movements and no family members buzzing nervously/chaotically around him. it was odd and calm.
the next day, again, after maya, I biked home. there wasn’t a vehicle in the parking lot blocking my way, but there was a fire and a crowd of people. I hopped down off my bike to push it through the crowd. And as I wove my way through these people whose solemnity was becoming apparent, I got a clear view of the fire’s source: it was an effigy of a man who had died. a chair was rather stably erected on top of a pyre of broken and/or disassembled furniture. The chair had a man’s casual button-down shirt stretched over it and a hat placed on top. I could only assume that it was in remembrance of the very man I’d seen the night before. Unfortunately, I didn’t make this assumption until I’d already disturbed the peace somewhat. But to say anything (particularly when I wasn’t sure how) would have just drawn more attention to me. So I tried to shuffle through as inconspicuously as possible. And I felt sad. but I also had some highly insensitive questions running through my head, the biggest being: “was he already dead when I saw him yesterday?” I’m not sure how either answer to that question would have made me feel. Maybe something. Maybe nothing.
I do wonder how death is different here. Not in any sort of afterlife context (not a subject I want to creep into my blog. Yikes.), but just in the context of culture and mourning. Is the sadness the same as it is in western culture? what does a cline of sadness/mourning look like? yes, a horrible idea, but valid if you’re one who makes a distinction between the death of a pet and the death of a family member. if a young person dies, is it more tragic because chinese families usually only get one child? All the emotion funneled into one source that is then taken away. Or in a country with so many people in it, does sheer volume of humanity minimize the emotional trauma of one person’s death? i know these are stupid questions, but they exist[ed] anyway.
Moving away from death, and on to my most recent mini-vacation, yay! I went to chongqing for the may holiday. My school actually closed down for a month, so all the east school teachers had to move to the north school (still here now). Which means a lot of cancelled classes and a lot more arguably free time (hence this blog, typed on a very official and imposing desk in the north school teacher’s office. Somehow sitting behind a computer screen—however “compact”—translates to diligence.). part of that meant a few extra days off that some teachers were owed anyway around may day. So I had 5 days to spend in chongqing. Of course I like hangzhou (or at least most aspects of it), but it’s still nice to get to eat good food and to see people who I don’t feel I need to explain myself to or feel guilty about hanging out with. These things are viable in hangzhou, just not as viable. And that was chongqing last time too—respite from hangzhou. I know it’s not challenging to be with people who agree with you all the time, but it’s also nice to be with people who don’t turn everything into a point of contention. that seems to characterize a lot of my current relationships, work or otherwise. And it’s exhausting.
I could spend time writing about a very cute 5-year old at a bike shop. But one could probably gather from those minute details that I had a fun time with her and her few english words while I waited to get my bike fixed. Yup, that’s pretty much it, but it made my day memorable, the first in monday’s chain of events.
And now back to cleaning up all the music files on my external hard drive. Tedious, but space-freeing. I have entire discographies of people I’ve never heard of…
Friday, April 23, 2010
recent
I had a very chinese day on wednesday (she says, eyeing her bowl of spaghetti with chopsticks jammed in it). Hmmm…I live in china, so what could have made this day even more chinese than usual? Well, I decided it was the most opportune time to lug 5 couch cushions home on my bike. In the rain. I guess I didn’t have to, but I went for it. I tend to do things more out of novelty these days than out of any overriding practicality. So yes, I needed the couch cushions, but the idea of affixing them to my bike and how difficult it would probably prove to be was ultimately what motivated me into action. It seems to always rain ‘round these parts, so I figured that one rainy day was as good as any to strap a bunch of subtle, orange couch cushions onto the back rack of my bike, with an inappropriately/inconveniently stretchy piece of elasticized rope. Seems like that would be a tough sentence to say if I were going to read it out loud. guess that’s why this is written.
and to top it all off—quite literally—was an oversized blue rain poncho. Making the whole endeavor look dodgy as shit. Maybe that’s why it seemed so distinctly chinese! I should have been smoking and talking on my cell phone too. With my surplus of arms…anyhoo, me pushing my bike in the road, one hand awkwardly twisted behind me, clutching this looming wet blue mass of plastic with bits of orange poking through. This was after I had attempted to actually ride my bike, with said jury-rigged rope fastened around my waist. Perhaps you can imagine how well that worked out. Hence the pushing of the bike. I could only think of my dad as I was attempting all of this. And goddamnit, somehow he would have made it work. He would have been able to ride the bike home, and probably done something else amazing while he was at it. Like rescue someone from a burning building or administer cpr to a random, dying stranger. Because those are things he does on a regular basis…
My apartment is an aged (pronounced a-jed) piece o’ shit. the couch I currently have (that isn’t broken) was one that was brought home from school a while ago. So it had old, gnarly cushions—the color of a heavy smoker’s teeth—with no covers. But a former occupant’s parents were kind enough to steal some airline blankets on their way across the globe, and those had been attempting to serve as bona fide cushion covers. What the fuck? I’ve never really had nice stuff, furniture-wise, and I know I shouldn’t expect new things, but as a 31-year old professional teacher, it was a mite insulting to be awarded this decrepit thing as an excuse for a sofa. College life and the shitty accomodation that accompanied it were things I've tried to put in my past, having picked up this little thing called a career. But this argument seems to fall continually on deaf and/or overly beaurocratic ears.
Not too much other news. It’s a sad day when the most noteworthy life nugget is in reference to couch cushions. sigh. Long day.
Oh yeah! i went to a show on Sunday. Neil halstead played at the traveller bar. I had a very distinct association with him prior to seeing him play. And it had nothing to do with his beard or his music (the latter being exactly what any serious musician wants to hear, I’m sure…) Jules used to work at streetside records back in columbia, mo. So every once in a while she would bring home posters of new albums/artists and whatnot from work. So the sleeping on roads album cover is what I think of when I think of neil halstead. Swishy waves and the bursts of orange. I seem to have found the theme of this post: orange!
It was my friend’s birthday, so we thought we’d have a chillaxed evening with some nice acoustic music. Hangzhou is a pretty foreigner-friendly town, and I assumed that other western peeps would be as eager to see/hear someone real (I seem to lack the words to adequately express my actual sentiment here…) playing as I was. I guess I was wrong. We got to the venue and were the only foreigners there. And I couldn’t imagine how that must have felt. To look out into a crowd of people who all looked the same, in a country where you can’t speak the language. I guess maybe it’s a very concrete, tangible reminder that you’re on the road or something that plants you firmly in a unique, arguably life-affirming time and place. I seem to recall maybe feeling that way when I first got here. And I’d like to think that he felt something comparably positive when he looked down from the stage. But I think it would be different playing in south america or in some non english-speaking european countries. Just because china is so homogenous and closed-off. Somehow only obnoxious pop music has been able to permeate the thick membrane of the country. I just had to say “membrane.” I have a plant cell diagram [planted, ha!] in my head right now. Mitochondrion and cytoplasm and whatnot.
Anyhoo, I had a very acute pang of nostalgia while I was watching this man play a guitar on a stage. There was a part where he forgot the lyrics to one of his songs. And we’re sitting in this bar with lots of wood and it’s quiet and it’s just him up there in front of everyone. And it reminded me of so many times in austin at the hole in the wall with chris playing and forgetting his lyrics. So it was weird to have this very specific time and place in a seemingly long gone past life summoned up by this bearded english man (what can i say, i like beards...)playing an acoustic show in my current chinese hometown. Afterwards we had some drinks with him and the most random thing happened. Someone from the second floor of a now nearly empty bar threw a stool over the railing, hitting neil halstead’s “handler” in the head. So that was…strange. There was a rush to get her some ice. And the dude who pitched the chair was promptly balled out by the bar owner. Bizarre shit. I heard talk of some money exchanging hands too. And I was again reminded of an incident in my past. A pitcher of water smashing on my face at the blue note. The drummer had been waving it around and the handle broke off, sending it in my very precise location. i was bloody and soaked. that’s rock ‘n’ roll.
It was a cool show. A bittersweet reminder of what used to be a big part of my american life.
my friend's birthday last night, but i'm incredibly broke right now. still wanted to see her, but the bar was uber-expensive. i opted for the smuggled beer/whiskey-in-purse option. so i said happy birthday then spent the majority of my time sitting at a nearby bus stop drinking lukewarm cans of beer retrieved from my purse. which actually wasn't nearly as depressing as it sounds...
My school is getting ready to shut down for a month. Taking another sabbatical to chongqing to visit the fam. Then I come back and begin the sweaty, sticky hangzhou summer. I think I’ve got about 3 or 4 more weeks of make-up and arguably straight hair before the humidity begins to sabotage my attempts at beauty. aah, summer.
and to top it all off—quite literally—was an oversized blue rain poncho. Making the whole endeavor look dodgy as shit. Maybe that’s why it seemed so distinctly chinese! I should have been smoking and talking on my cell phone too. With my surplus of arms…anyhoo, me pushing my bike in the road, one hand awkwardly twisted behind me, clutching this looming wet blue mass of plastic with bits of orange poking through. This was after I had attempted to actually ride my bike, with said jury-rigged rope fastened around my waist. Perhaps you can imagine how well that worked out. Hence the pushing of the bike. I could only think of my dad as I was attempting all of this. And goddamnit, somehow he would have made it work. He would have been able to ride the bike home, and probably done something else amazing while he was at it. Like rescue someone from a burning building or administer cpr to a random, dying stranger. Because those are things he does on a regular basis…
My apartment is an aged (pronounced a-jed) piece o’ shit. the couch I currently have (that isn’t broken) was one that was brought home from school a while ago. So it had old, gnarly cushions—the color of a heavy smoker’s teeth—with no covers. But a former occupant’s parents were kind enough to steal some airline blankets on their way across the globe, and those had been attempting to serve as bona fide cushion covers. What the fuck? I’ve never really had nice stuff, furniture-wise, and I know I shouldn’t expect new things, but as a 31-year old professional teacher, it was a mite insulting to be awarded this decrepit thing as an excuse for a sofa. College life and the shitty accomodation that accompanied it were things I've tried to put in my past, having picked up this little thing called a career. But this argument seems to fall continually on deaf and/or overly beaurocratic ears.
Not too much other news. It’s a sad day when the most noteworthy life nugget is in reference to couch cushions. sigh. Long day.
Oh yeah! i went to a show on Sunday. Neil halstead played at the traveller bar. I had a very distinct association with him prior to seeing him play. And it had nothing to do with his beard or his music (the latter being exactly what any serious musician wants to hear, I’m sure…) Jules used to work at streetside records back in columbia, mo. So every once in a while she would bring home posters of new albums/artists and whatnot from work. So the sleeping on roads album cover is what I think of when I think of neil halstead. Swishy waves and the bursts of orange. I seem to have found the theme of this post: orange!
It was my friend’s birthday, so we thought we’d have a chillaxed evening with some nice acoustic music. Hangzhou is a pretty foreigner-friendly town, and I assumed that other western peeps would be as eager to see/hear someone real (I seem to lack the words to adequately express my actual sentiment here…) playing as I was. I guess I was wrong. We got to the venue and were the only foreigners there. And I couldn’t imagine how that must have felt. To look out into a crowd of people who all looked the same, in a country where you can’t speak the language. I guess maybe it’s a very concrete, tangible reminder that you’re on the road or something that plants you firmly in a unique, arguably life-affirming time and place. I seem to recall maybe feeling that way when I first got here. And I’d like to think that he felt something comparably positive when he looked down from the stage. But I think it would be different playing in south america or in some non english-speaking european countries. Just because china is so homogenous and closed-off. Somehow only obnoxious pop music has been able to permeate the thick membrane of the country. I just had to say “membrane.” I have a plant cell diagram [planted, ha!] in my head right now. Mitochondrion and cytoplasm and whatnot.
Anyhoo, I had a very acute pang of nostalgia while I was watching this man play a guitar on a stage. There was a part where he forgot the lyrics to one of his songs. And we’re sitting in this bar with lots of wood and it’s quiet and it’s just him up there in front of everyone. And it reminded me of so many times in austin at the hole in the wall with chris playing and forgetting his lyrics. So it was weird to have this very specific time and place in a seemingly long gone past life summoned up by this bearded english man (what can i say, i like beards...)playing an acoustic show in my current chinese hometown. Afterwards we had some drinks with him and the most random thing happened. Someone from the second floor of a now nearly empty bar threw a stool over the railing, hitting neil halstead’s “handler” in the head. So that was…strange. There was a rush to get her some ice. And the dude who pitched the chair was promptly balled out by the bar owner. Bizarre shit. I heard talk of some money exchanging hands too. And I was again reminded of an incident in my past. A pitcher of water smashing on my face at the blue note. The drummer had been waving it around and the handle broke off, sending it in my very precise location. i was bloody and soaked. that’s rock ‘n’ roll.
It was a cool show. A bittersweet reminder of what used to be a big part of my american life.
my friend's birthday last night, but i'm incredibly broke right now. still wanted to see her, but the bar was uber-expensive. i opted for the smuggled beer/whiskey-in-purse option. so i said happy birthday then spent the majority of my time sitting at a nearby bus stop drinking lukewarm cans of beer retrieved from my purse. which actually wasn't nearly as depressing as it sounds...
My school is getting ready to shut down for a month. Taking another sabbatical to chongqing to visit the fam. Then I come back and begin the sweaty, sticky hangzhou summer. I think I’ve got about 3 or 4 more weeks of make-up and arguably straight hair before the humidity begins to sabotage my attempts at beauty. aah, summer.
Thursday, March 25, 2010
well hell's bells...
it’s been a while. no harm in starting with a statement of the obvious.
these are the points I’ll touch upon in this post (copied verbatim from an ef-emblazoned post-it from about a month ago:
-bike
-english tea
-beer games
-stuck in the rain
-electronics market
so that’s what the list has, but there are some other things I should probably touch upon, like my tb3a student who drew a cock with wings and a cd player in the base of it. they were supposed to draw and describe their invention. and his was this butterfly cock that could “make your emotions good” that shot water out the top when it was happy. perhaps I’ll even attach a photo of said rendering. perhaps not.
my bike was stolen. I came home from a Korean restaurant in the afternoon some months ago and my bike was nowhere to be found. so I tried to convey to the security dude who sits right there that my bike wasn’t there. I think I failed.
I went up to my apartment. stewed for a while. then went back downstairs to just see if I was an idiot who had simply overlooked my rather large/cumbersome material possession. no such luck. nowhere to be found.
I didn’t have any money to buy a new bike and wasn’t really looking forward to hoofing it around town for the week or so until payday.
woke up in the morning and my roommate at the time’s girlfriend said she had good news. the security guard had my bike. huh? I’ve been strangely lucky in having stolen shit returned to me. so I have good enough karma to have shit returned to me, but not quite good enough karma to not have it stolen in the first place. hmmm.
apparently the security guard had caught the dude in the act of stealing my bike. bad man was punished somehow. the deets were sketchy there. my bike was confiscated and waiting in the office of the adjacent apartment complex. so I was missing my bike for approximately 15 or so hours, depending on the exact time its theft was attempted. the kickstand was gone, but I replaced it for 7rmb. sweet ass.
so that’s the first bullet point. I guess it’s not technically a bullet. I’m not sure how to make an actual bullet point. the first dash.
second. English tea is good. here I’ve been drinking it bitter and unadorned the whole time, never knowing there was this other realm involving the magical fairy-like ingredients of sugar and powdered milk that smells like babies. the office brits commented on my stereotype that the English are quite particular when it comes to their tea. and yet no one has disproven the stereotype…
at the 7 club a few months ago they hosted a beer games night. I went to said beer games. it was 100 rmb all you can drink to play beer pong, flip cup and some other stuff that I ultimately got too drunk to realize were viable drinking game options. that said, I actually fell down once in the bar, then barfed in/around my toilet as soon as I got home. I haven’t yakked the night of drinking in a very long time. and I have absolutely no shame in having ended my streak of not barfing on the same night. or in relaying this information to the general public.
I went to the electronics market for the first time 2 months ago. my homie serina wanted to buy a camera for vacation. I was in pursuit of a remarkably elusive mp3 player cable for my phone. it was raining. a lot. we ate lunch at a noodle shop to dry off. then came the horrible time of 3 pm. Hangzhou is very very strange with taxis. they have this weird shift changeover time, and never thought to make 2 shifts overlap. so between 3:30 and 4:30 every fucking day, it’s impossible to get a taxi, unless you happen to be going in the direction of the taxi driver’s house. and if it’s raining, this changeover time starts at 3, or basically any time you need to get a taxi. it’s just bizarre, and something you can only find out by getting screwed over consistently. a man at a milk tea stand filled me in on this phenomenon when I first got to Hangzhou.
anyhoo, serina and I were stuck in the rain. but this woman from the noodle shop ran out to try to help us find a taxi. she had originally lent us an umbrella, but then saw we were having no luck with taxis, so we waited with us and risked life and limb, throwing herself upon oncoming taxis that might take us somewhere. no luck. so then she started trying to flag down random cars to convince them to shuttle two strange white women to their respective homes. no luck. but there was something poetic in this tiny asian woman, in full tea-shop regalia, hair pinned up, running in the rain, her uniform and stockings soaked and sticking to her. it could very well have happened in slow motion. and she did this all for 2 women that she’ll probably never see again. it was a surprisingly profound moment in an otherwise dreary day.
in other news not alluded to in the list, I’m now the senior teacher at the east Hangzhou school. so that’s pretty cool. I realized today just how much paperwork that entails. let’s hope that somehow translates to a focus on academic standards in some way. whatever academic standards are.
I went on a mini-vacation a month ago to celebrate the lunar new year. me jules and rory had initially planned to meet up in yunnan province to soak up some near-tropical scenery. turns out that those flights were nearly as expensive as a trip to bali at that time, and equally unaffordable. so we opted instead to go to Guiyang, the capital city of the poorest province in china. so there was inherently going to be something cultural and interesting there by virtue of that fact.
what I noticed immediately was that everyone was trying to rip me off. of course it’s to be expected with taxis and shops and most things chinese. I think anyone who comes to china should probably be informed that airport taxis are a rip off. that’s why I took the bus! so that’s interesting. to take the airport shuttle bus with absolutely no idea where the fuck it was going to drop me off in a city I’d never been to. but it all worked out.
I spent the majority of that day sleeping. or trying to sleep. sometimes it feels like you can never get a good night’s rest unless you leave your city and bed to do it. some of the best sleep I’ve ever had has been in hotels. but perhaps that’s giving too much credit to sleep at any point during lunar new year/fireworks season. I brought ear plugs.
met up with jules and rory later that night. I’d forgotten my lonely planet and had absolutely no idea what Guiyang might be known for, besides a waterfall a few hours away. but they came armed with a list of restaurants. Guiyang was famous for a fish soup. so we went on a quest for this soup that night. we ended up seated in an outdoor restaurant place where you sit around the stove, gloves on, while your food cooks in front of you. there was a bombed out and depleted tent over our heads and it was fucking cold. but charming and Chinese as fuck. which is what we were going for. so rory asked how much the fish was, and they said it was free because of the lunar new year. woo hoo! so we ordered a bunch of other crappy dishes to complement our fish soup. to kill the fish, they just threw it on the ground. I don’t think there was much force involved, so it wasn’t the throwing that was intended to kill it. which seemed weird for china. now that I think about it, it’s probably more humane to just smash something on the ground than it is for it to just slowly choke and die after a bunch of exertion. but what do I know about killing things besides frogs (and that one was in a quick, violent burst).
so the soup came. beers were consumed. general merriment was had by all. then it was time for the bill. keep in mind that homie had actually told rory (he and jules speak quite a bit of Chinese) that the fish was free and that we were eating around a stove with a ratty tent over our heads. but he said the bill was 600 rmb. there are only 2 places in china that we’ve eaten where it cost that much, and they were both western restaurants with Boddingtons and other nice beers.
So we sort of flipped on the dude. Played the “racist” card. That’s actually a new one for me. Which is really surprising since there seems to be so much blatant xenophobia. The “ignorant” excuse can only go so far before it just gets really fucking old. There are days when it’s very difficult to leave the house, because so much of it involves endurance and perseverance in the wake of remarkably mundane events. But said minutiae is exhausting, because I’m not Chinese. And everyone else in the entire world is. Or at least that’s what they make you feel like. But, as I’ve said before, it’s the same things I hate about china that make it life-affirming on a near-daily basis.
Some guy who thought he spoke English better than he did took it upon himself to “help” us, by condescendingly informing us that there seemed to be something “lost in translation.” But that’ s only if you don’t understand what the person is saying to you. And we did. There was no lost in translation. It was lost in rip-off-the-foreigners-tion. But that’s the story of our collective lives here. So first day in guiyang left a bitter (and expensive, and yes, deliciously sour and spicy) taste in our moufs.
The rest of the vacation was spent drinking, eating pizza that was delivered to whatever ktv we decided to frequent on that particular day, and marveling at how dirty and backwards everything was in guiyang. Again, these were still valuable observations, and I wouldn’t have changed my vacation. I came back to hangzhou extremely well-rested and grateful for my position in the cycle of Chinese life, both physically and metaphorically.
I’m sure there’s other crap to report, but this is already far more longwinded than the content actually deserves.
One last note. I bought a sit-up bench. It reminds me of home. I’m hopefully buying a laptop in the next few days. I will then [officially] be an adult. But let’s not jump the gun….
these are the points I’ll touch upon in this post (copied verbatim from an ef-emblazoned post-it from about a month ago:
-bike
-english tea
-beer games
-stuck in the rain
-electronics market
so that’s what the list has, but there are some other things I should probably touch upon, like my tb3a student who drew a cock with wings and a cd player in the base of it. they were supposed to draw and describe their invention. and his was this butterfly cock that could “make your emotions good” that shot water out the top when it was happy. perhaps I’ll even attach a photo of said rendering. perhaps not.
my bike was stolen. I came home from a Korean restaurant in the afternoon some months ago and my bike was nowhere to be found. so I tried to convey to the security dude who sits right there that my bike wasn’t there. I think I failed.
I went up to my apartment. stewed for a while. then went back downstairs to just see if I was an idiot who had simply overlooked my rather large/cumbersome material possession. no such luck. nowhere to be found.
I didn’t have any money to buy a new bike and wasn’t really looking forward to hoofing it around town for the week or so until payday.
woke up in the morning and my roommate at the time’s girlfriend said she had good news. the security guard had my bike. huh? I’ve been strangely lucky in having stolen shit returned to me. so I have good enough karma to have shit returned to me, but not quite good enough karma to not have it stolen in the first place. hmmm.
apparently the security guard had caught the dude in the act of stealing my bike. bad man was punished somehow. the deets were sketchy there. my bike was confiscated and waiting in the office of the adjacent apartment complex. so I was missing my bike for approximately 15 or so hours, depending on the exact time its theft was attempted. the kickstand was gone, but I replaced it for 7rmb. sweet ass.
so that’s the first bullet point. I guess it’s not technically a bullet. I’m not sure how to make an actual bullet point. the first dash.
second. English tea is good. here I’ve been drinking it bitter and unadorned the whole time, never knowing there was this other realm involving the magical fairy-like ingredients of sugar and powdered milk that smells like babies. the office brits commented on my stereotype that the English are quite particular when it comes to their tea. and yet no one has disproven the stereotype…
at the 7 club a few months ago they hosted a beer games night. I went to said beer games. it was 100 rmb all you can drink to play beer pong, flip cup and some other stuff that I ultimately got too drunk to realize were viable drinking game options. that said, I actually fell down once in the bar, then barfed in/around my toilet as soon as I got home. I haven’t yakked the night of drinking in a very long time. and I have absolutely no shame in having ended my streak of not barfing on the same night. or in relaying this information to the general public.
I went to the electronics market for the first time 2 months ago. my homie serina wanted to buy a camera for vacation. I was in pursuit of a remarkably elusive mp3 player cable for my phone. it was raining. a lot. we ate lunch at a noodle shop to dry off. then came the horrible time of 3 pm. Hangzhou is very very strange with taxis. they have this weird shift changeover time, and never thought to make 2 shifts overlap. so between 3:30 and 4:30 every fucking day, it’s impossible to get a taxi, unless you happen to be going in the direction of the taxi driver’s house. and if it’s raining, this changeover time starts at 3, or basically any time you need to get a taxi. it’s just bizarre, and something you can only find out by getting screwed over consistently. a man at a milk tea stand filled me in on this phenomenon when I first got to Hangzhou.
anyhoo, serina and I were stuck in the rain. but this woman from the noodle shop ran out to try to help us find a taxi. she had originally lent us an umbrella, but then saw we were having no luck with taxis, so we waited with us and risked life and limb, throwing herself upon oncoming taxis that might take us somewhere. no luck. so then she started trying to flag down random cars to convince them to shuttle two strange white women to their respective homes. no luck. but there was something poetic in this tiny asian woman, in full tea-shop regalia, hair pinned up, running in the rain, her uniform and stockings soaked and sticking to her. it could very well have happened in slow motion. and she did this all for 2 women that she’ll probably never see again. it was a surprisingly profound moment in an otherwise dreary day.
in other news not alluded to in the list, I’m now the senior teacher at the east Hangzhou school. so that’s pretty cool. I realized today just how much paperwork that entails. let’s hope that somehow translates to a focus on academic standards in some way. whatever academic standards are.
I went on a mini-vacation a month ago to celebrate the lunar new year. me jules and rory had initially planned to meet up in yunnan province to soak up some near-tropical scenery. turns out that those flights were nearly as expensive as a trip to bali at that time, and equally unaffordable. so we opted instead to go to Guiyang, the capital city of the poorest province in china. so there was inherently going to be something cultural and interesting there by virtue of that fact.
what I noticed immediately was that everyone was trying to rip me off. of course it’s to be expected with taxis and shops and most things chinese. I think anyone who comes to china should probably be informed that airport taxis are a rip off. that’s why I took the bus! so that’s interesting. to take the airport shuttle bus with absolutely no idea where the fuck it was going to drop me off in a city I’d never been to. but it all worked out.
I spent the majority of that day sleeping. or trying to sleep. sometimes it feels like you can never get a good night’s rest unless you leave your city and bed to do it. some of the best sleep I’ve ever had has been in hotels. but perhaps that’s giving too much credit to sleep at any point during lunar new year/fireworks season. I brought ear plugs.
met up with jules and rory later that night. I’d forgotten my lonely planet and had absolutely no idea what Guiyang might be known for, besides a waterfall a few hours away. but they came armed with a list of restaurants. Guiyang was famous for a fish soup. so we went on a quest for this soup that night. we ended up seated in an outdoor restaurant place where you sit around the stove, gloves on, while your food cooks in front of you. there was a bombed out and depleted tent over our heads and it was fucking cold. but charming and Chinese as fuck. which is what we were going for. so rory asked how much the fish was, and they said it was free because of the lunar new year. woo hoo! so we ordered a bunch of other crappy dishes to complement our fish soup. to kill the fish, they just threw it on the ground. I don’t think there was much force involved, so it wasn’t the throwing that was intended to kill it. which seemed weird for china. now that I think about it, it’s probably more humane to just smash something on the ground than it is for it to just slowly choke and die after a bunch of exertion. but what do I know about killing things besides frogs (and that one was in a quick, violent burst).
so the soup came. beers were consumed. general merriment was had by all. then it was time for the bill. keep in mind that homie had actually told rory (he and jules speak quite a bit of Chinese) that the fish was free and that we were eating around a stove with a ratty tent over our heads. but he said the bill was 600 rmb. there are only 2 places in china that we’ve eaten where it cost that much, and they were both western restaurants with Boddingtons and other nice beers.
So we sort of flipped on the dude. Played the “racist” card. That’s actually a new one for me. Which is really surprising since there seems to be so much blatant xenophobia. The “ignorant” excuse can only go so far before it just gets really fucking old. There are days when it’s very difficult to leave the house, because so much of it involves endurance and perseverance in the wake of remarkably mundane events. But said minutiae is exhausting, because I’m not Chinese. And everyone else in the entire world is. Or at least that’s what they make you feel like. But, as I’ve said before, it’s the same things I hate about china that make it life-affirming on a near-daily basis.
Some guy who thought he spoke English better than he did took it upon himself to “help” us, by condescendingly informing us that there seemed to be something “lost in translation.” But that’ s only if you don’t understand what the person is saying to you. And we did. There was no lost in translation. It was lost in rip-off-the-foreigners-tion. But that’s the story of our collective lives here. So first day in guiyang left a bitter (and expensive, and yes, deliciously sour and spicy) taste in our moufs.
The rest of the vacation was spent drinking, eating pizza that was delivered to whatever ktv we decided to frequent on that particular day, and marveling at how dirty and backwards everything was in guiyang. Again, these were still valuable observations, and I wouldn’t have changed my vacation. I came back to hangzhou extremely well-rested and grateful for my position in the cycle of Chinese life, both physically and metaphorically.
I’m sure there’s other crap to report, but this is already far more longwinded than the content actually deserves.
One last note. I bought a sit-up bench. It reminds me of home. I’m hopefully buying a laptop in the next few days. I will then [officially] be an adult. But let’s not jump the gun….
Monday, January 04, 2010
ease on down the road
I moved into a new apartment. this happened a few days ago. my shit was all moved on new year's eve eve, but I still clung to my squatter's rights in my olde quarters. two nights ago was my first sleep in my new abode. also the first time since Columbia, MO, USA that I've lived with a real deal “roommate.” but it's weird. I don't want to leave my room. a lot of that had to do with the fact that I've had all this shit to unpack. but it also has to do with knowing that there's someone else in this space. and if I listen hard enough through the wall that connects our rooms, maybe I can hear him breathing. that's right, it's a him. and a british him. and maybe british hims are different than other ones. but I sort of don't think so. at least not in the fact that they breathe. particularly when living.
how I came to live with another human is a long, dramgedy (get it, I combined drama with tragedy!). the drama comes from the fact that I wouldn't even be here in Hangzhou if living alone had never been promised to me in the first place. gotta love the verbal contract in china. no matter who makes the promise, get it in writing. even if it's just a fucking text message. and even if the promiser is from the same continent as you. the tragedy is that my other place was so much cooler. and not just because it only had one person in it. my bed was bigger. my shower had hot water that lasted for longer than 5 minutes (I'm back to that retardedness here in the new place. sigh.).
a red line came up under retardedness, which I still have no intention of changing. however, I right-clicked out of curiosity. the suggestions were many and varied: beardedness, beardedness', retardates, retardants. ok, only 4. but I was pleased. anyhoo, I feel like I've complained about my current living situation enough (here as well as in the real world), which hasn't made it one bit better. not one tiny bit. we'll see how this seemingly large defeat affects my overall mood for the next few months. I'm curious to see what perspective this “stepping out of my body to self-monitor” will afford me. if it's not a lot, I'm going to be totally pissed with both moody me and omniscient me. but homeboy will be heading back to en-guh-lund in a little while, so then I'll be back to living alone. until people further manipulate words/promises to suit their own agendas. pretty sure I can count on that. and yet I'm the one who has to have “principle” and “do the right thing.” “barf.” which apparently means letting people (rather, person) bully me to cover her own arse.
if I want to find nice things to say about it—and oddly, I'm inclined to do so right now—I can say that the view is better. for starters, i'm on the 10th floor, so I actually have a view. I can also say that the neighborhood is cooler than where I was. besides main road, there are little roads that wind past bakeries, cigarette stores, cafeterias and all manner of strung-up clothing. so it's definitely got a more Chinese feel to it. I should mention that here my actual apartment is not adjacent to an elementary school. so the gleeful and joyous sounds of small children no longer wakes me up. thank god. them shits were loud, yo. there's sposed to be a nice noodle joint around too, so that could work in my favor while I'm on the cheap this month. only 26 more days until payday. heh heh. nervous laughter. about that being on the cheap…
since it's the new year I've (of course) adopted a resolution, which I actually copied off someone else. I have to buy a very expensive plane ticket out of Hangzhou for spring festival. along with all the other people who live in china. and there are a lot of them. anyhoo…that resolution: I'm not going to drink beer for a month. or eat a subway sandwich. this is not because I believe I have a problem with either of these things, specifically in the area of over-consumption. this is just to save money. and a small part of this is to prove that my life can still have meaning without said items. it's worth pointing out that I only said “no beer.” whiskey and/or other spirits are totally acceptable, provided someone else does the providing.
listening to kunek right now. flight of the flynns. and I just wanted to get it down for posterity that this album, more than anything else, represents korea for me. particularly my year in ilsan. so many subway and bus rides into the gangnam area of seoul. and this is what I would listen to. it's a good memory, just because I can still pinpoint exactly how I felt. not necessarily happy (actually, I'd have to say closer to very unhappy), but happy to be on a mode of transportation that signified [quite literally] movement. even if events in my life didn't reflect the same metaphorically significant parallel of forward motion.
how I came to live with another human is a long, dramgedy (get it, I combined drama with tragedy!). the drama comes from the fact that I wouldn't even be here in Hangzhou if living alone had never been promised to me in the first place. gotta love the verbal contract in china. no matter who makes the promise, get it in writing. even if it's just a fucking text message. and even if the promiser is from the same continent as you. the tragedy is that my other place was so much cooler. and not just because it only had one person in it. my bed was bigger. my shower had hot water that lasted for longer than 5 minutes (I'm back to that retardedness here in the new place. sigh.).
a red line came up under retardedness, which I still have no intention of changing. however, I right-clicked out of curiosity. the suggestions were many and varied: beardedness, beardedness', retardates, retardants. ok, only 4. but I was pleased. anyhoo, I feel like I've complained about my current living situation enough (here as well as in the real world), which hasn't made it one bit better. not one tiny bit. we'll see how this seemingly large defeat affects my overall mood for the next few months. I'm curious to see what perspective this “stepping out of my body to self-monitor” will afford me. if it's not a lot, I'm going to be totally pissed with both moody me and omniscient me. but homeboy will be heading back to en-guh-lund in a little while, so then I'll be back to living alone. until people further manipulate words/promises to suit their own agendas. pretty sure I can count on that. and yet I'm the one who has to have “principle” and “do the right thing.” “barf.” which apparently means letting people (rather, person) bully me to cover her own arse.
if I want to find nice things to say about it—and oddly, I'm inclined to do so right now—I can say that the view is better. for starters, i'm on the 10th floor, so I actually have a view. I can also say that the neighborhood is cooler than where I was. besides main road, there are little roads that wind past bakeries, cigarette stores, cafeterias and all manner of strung-up clothing. so it's definitely got a more Chinese feel to it. I should mention that here my actual apartment is not adjacent to an elementary school. so the gleeful and joyous sounds of small children no longer wakes me up. thank god. them shits were loud, yo. there's sposed to be a nice noodle joint around too, so that could work in my favor while I'm on the cheap this month. only 26 more days until payday. heh heh. nervous laughter. about that being on the cheap…
since it's the new year I've (of course) adopted a resolution, which I actually copied off someone else. I have to buy a very expensive plane ticket out of Hangzhou for spring festival. along with all the other people who live in china. and there are a lot of them. anyhoo…that resolution: I'm not going to drink beer for a month. or eat a subway sandwich. this is not because I believe I have a problem with either of these things, specifically in the area of over-consumption. this is just to save money. and a small part of this is to prove that my life can still have meaning without said items. it's worth pointing out that I only said “no beer.” whiskey and/or other spirits are totally acceptable, provided someone else does the providing.
listening to kunek right now. flight of the flynns. and I just wanted to get it down for posterity that this album, more than anything else, represents korea for me. particularly my year in ilsan. so many subway and bus rides into the gangnam area of seoul. and this is what I would listen to. it's a good memory, just because I can still pinpoint exactly how I felt. not necessarily happy (actually, I'd have to say closer to very unhappy), but happy to be on a mode of transportation that signified [quite literally] movement. even if events in my life didn't reflect the same metaphorically significant parallel of forward motion.
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