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...)
My 22nd floor perch looks out onto restaurants, stalled construction efforts, a ktv, the sleeping cars of a seemingly out-of-place parking lot (peeps here go underground…mole people) and drunk peeps whose voices somehow manage to carry all the way up and into my living room. And I’m surrounded by other tall apartment complexes, these seemingly compact pillars that dot any archetypal modern Chinese skyline. And to me they look like ice cube trays, with each window delineating another frozen cube on an upended tray. Some of these ice cubes go to sleep earlier than others.
I’m a gadget wizard! Well, not really, but I did a good job of faking myself out. I needed some smoove jams while I cleaned/unpacked. Alas! my speaker cables were damaged during transport—1 totally frayed, the other totally severed. I guess I should at least admit that speakers are not necessarily gadgets, but I qualify things that require a cable or a battery of some sort a gadget. So with my working definition in place, I will continue…anyhoo, the shawnky cable predicament. What to do? so I opened up the wires (one white wire and one pink wire in the “master” bundle of black), then opened up the wires within the wires. Then I sort of mashed corresponding wires together with my tweezers. Wham bam, sweet tune-age! As long as I don’t move the speakers. So that’s a pretty cool victory!
Chongqing is a beast that is quite different from hangzhou. I’ve been here for a little less than a month and haven’t really ventured too much into different parts of the city—mostly the walk to and from work—but I think first impressions are lasting, even if this incriminates my person. I’m the girl who “looks mean.” Great. Funny how little comments like that from years ago can really stick with you… “aloof”, anyone?
hangzhou was relatively flat, chongqing is not. There are certainly parts that are flat—the tops of the hills, mostly, or the space necessary to plant a shopping mall. My apartment sits on the top of a hill. My school and the monolithic sprawling ginormo awesome shopping mall in which it rests are at the bottom of the hill (h&m, where a large is a large!). Along the way there are probably 15 different hot pot restaurants, boutiques, hair salons, pharmacies, real estate offices and all other manner of commerce and foot traffic-generating things.
and you don’t even really need a store, should you want to sell something. There’s a culture of basket folk here that was largely absent in hangzhou and jiaxing. They walk around, weary-looking men and women, carrying oversized, suspended baskets on opposing ends of a long bamboo pole. The image of the scales of justice comes to mind. But that’s kind of a weird analogy for someone lacking the poetry to relay it (that would be me). Anyhoo, The pole rests on their shoulders and bobs up and down as they descend or, unfortunately, ascend the hill. These people are many and their movement is constant. And labored. They sell the usual things—fruit, toenail clippers, plants, household products that you don’t know you need until you see them all arranged in a basket on a pole. A few days ago I had a very lucky day, though. I was walking to work and I could see something different. I could clearly see two birds of some sort, but not the standard fare of chicken or duck. As I got closer, I realized that the more majestic, sad one of the two (their feet were rubber banded together) was actually a grouse. This was a word I hadn’t ever typed until a few days ago. So…how can I be so sure that that was a grouse, and why does the presence of a grouse for sale on a dirty, hilly sidewalk in chongqing strike me as newsworthy? 1) I google image searched “grouse.” Right-o! 2) it was an unusual sight for china, and that’s saying a lot. Log that shit for posterity!
In case people selling shit out of baskets isn’t cool enough, there’s another even more ubiquitous culture here. This is where the mystery that is a “bang bang” enters the picture. “bang.” literally means help. So a bang bang is a helper. They hang out on street corners smoking, wearing the same bang bang-issue green, military-inspired clothing. They carry around sticks with ropes on them and wait for someone to scream “bang bang!” and they will carry literally anything. I’ve seen raw meat, i’ve seen oversized luggage, I’ve seen electronics. This last one is probably the most depressing because it so clearly paints the disparity between rich and poor (hey, that’s china!). The same way that the bicycle taxis in jiaxing did. But you can’t let that guilt interfere with someone else’s capitalism. I could boycott these services “out of principle” but that wouldn’t really be putting any money in their pockets. anyhoo, bang bangs are cool. They add a very distinctly Chinese flavor to…china.
Also on the hill to school is a continuous flow of goo. We’ve got little kid piss (and sometimes shit, hey hey hey!), trash juice, juice juice, rain—all manner of liquid steadily streaming and converging in parallels rivulets determined by the sidewalk grooves. It’s kind of gross but completely fascinating. When I was walking to work today—via sidewalk, duh—I watched a grandpa pick up his grandkid, and spread his/her (I didn’t check out the anatomy…) legs so he/she could urinate directly into one particular sidewalk groove, to ultimately match my walking pace down the hill. Ahh, daily life. (another after the fact note: yesterday i saw a dude pulling a cart of goat carcasses up the hill. i think there were 3 of them, glorious and uncovered).
