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.
