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….
