As I’m sure most of the people who read this website know, I recently returned from a year in China.  It was a lot of fun, but the reality of living in a surveillance society where full-fledged censorship is a constant part of your life was very uncomfortable.  It left a deep impression on me and helped galvanize my opposition to encroachments on free speech.

Today the internet is joining together to protest two acts being considered by the legislative bodies of our federal government – SOPA and PIPA.  I do feel for my friends who are musicians and artists.  The creative process is a long slog, and most artists are never given their due by society, either in respect or monetary gain.  However, I believe that the MPAA and RIAA are largely outmoded predators when it comes to artists.  They give musicians pennies on the dollar for their work, and even most fairly well known artists face a reality where the majority of their creative rewards end up in the purses of large corporations.  Add to that an idea of fair use that’s gotten downright weird, and I don’t believe they’re doing consumers, musicians or art any great service.

The internet has provided a decentralized and communal way of raising awareness for artists.  Far from devastating independent artists, it’s inspired a new movement spearheaded by bands like Radiohead, OKGo, and a million other small and local acts, even as media conglomerates have seen reduced profits (or not?).  There’s more music in the world now than there’s ever been, more paintings than there’ve ever been, and more written works.

Once the process of free speech is undermined, that reality goes away.  Anybody who’s lived in a censored society can tell you that a controlled artistic environment is a dry and fallow one.  Controversy and rebellion are the tools that artists use to push the envelope to stimulate conversation and change.  I think that it’s in everybody’s interest to ask themselves whether preserving the right to have a few rich artists is enough to venture our ability to make art that reinvigorates society and sustains a sense of possibility and hope that maybe tomorrow will be better than today.  Personally, I’m not willing to take that chance.

SOPA and PIPA in their current form do not explicitly guarantee a society where freedom of expression is curtailed, but they open a number of avenues through which this could be achieved in stark and disturbing ways.  Most people don’t see information as a compelling enough cause to rally around, but all art is information at its heart.  We don’t have to put the fox inside the henhouse, we just have to leave the door open a tiny bit.

I urge everybody to call their representatives, especially artists.  I’ve compiled a list of representatives from MN and WI with contact information for greater ease, since I know that’s where most of the people who will read this come from.  The people who know me well know that I don’t often take a public political stance (it makes me sort of uncomfortable), but this is an important conversation that I feel the need to add my tiny voice to.

To my friends in music, I’m always glad to collaborate, buy your stuff and provide whatever help I can.  I look forward to being able to set up my studio again wherever I end up in the fall and hopefully do some recording (for free… or for a six-pack and some good conversation, if you insist).

-RS

The following congress members have pledged their support for PIPA/SOPA:

Al Franken, D-MN (651) 221-1016

Amy Klobuchar, D-MN (202) 224-3244

Herb Kohl, D-WI (202) 224-5653

The rest are noncommittal:

MN Elected Officials

WI Elected Officials

Update: Tammy Baldwin and Tim Walz assure me that they are opposed to the bill.  Paul Ryan, Michelle Bachman, and Jim Sensenbrenner are also publicly opposed.  Feel free to call and offer them approval of their stance, even if you don’t like how they vote on other issues.

Like China, but green.

Dali is about four hours north of Kunming and a popular stopover on the way to Leaping Tiger Gorge.  Kat and I left D in Kunming while he got his visa extended.  We had expected to regroup in Dali before heading to the gorge to take in the scenery.

Unfortunately, visa processes are not always painless, and Dom fell victim to some bureaucracy.  While we had been told a visa could be issued quickly and easily over two days in Kunming, the actual process ended up taking eleven.

So the gorge didn’t happen, but we did end up spending a lot more time in Dali, which wasn’t the worst thing that could have happened.

Dali is way up in the Cangshan mountains.  Its elevation is about a mile up, and the temperature fluctuates wildly in the winter.  By day, it was in the sixties and high seventies, by night we were at freezing.

The old town forms the center of the city.  It’s made up of a cluster of restored buildings surrounded by a wall, all dating back to the 1400s.  The aptly named “Foreigner Street” houses most of the knickknacks and tourist-friendly shopping, while there are a humbling array of bars and hostels once you start moving away from the middle of the old town.

By Foreigner Street, where the "nice ladies" operate.

The city itself is overrun with expatriated foreigners and backpackers.  Dali has a reputation of being the Jamaica of China, and it definitely drives that point home with sheer dreadlock volume.  It’s an extremely friendly place, but it harbors a significant network of unsavory drug connections.  We were offered hashish on the street our first day out of the hostel by a woman on the street.

We learned later that the women on the street were part of a large and violent drug cartel that operates through the city catering to tourists.  There were stories about people that were rumored to have been dealing with the cartels, usually terminating in, “And nobody saw him after that.”  Apparently the wrath of the government has also come down on Dali, and any time that conversation turned to the towns hippie-dippy reputation, locals got very nervous and started warning about undercover agents.

So don’t do drugs, kids, mmkay?

This didn’t particularly affect our stay in Dali, though.  Scenery and nature were the aim of our trip, not recreational drug use, and scenery was freely available in Dali.

Erhai Lake: A Pretty Good Lake

Our first day was spent hiking the considerable distance from our hostel to Erhai Lake.  In retrospect, it probably would have been better to bus our way there, but we could see the lake and wrongly assumed that it would be a good time to walk there.  It turns out that Dali slopes toward the lake, so even though you can see it, that doesn’t mean you’re anywhere close to the actual body of water.

Once we reached the lake, it was a nice walk.  There are paths around the shore stretching as far as you’re willing to walk.  You can also see the somewhat horrifying site of the farmers washing their crops in the lake before they sell them to the shop owners in town.  Perhaps you will see a Chinese child relieving himself into the lake some fifteen feet away.  ”Oh,” you’ll say, “I ate a ton of those vegetables at breakfaOHMYGOD!”  By the time we reached the lake it was already getting late, and we had to head back to avoid being stranded in the dark, so we perhaps didn’t spend as much time there as we would have liked.

The other main attractions in Dali are the temples and architecture.  The three pagodas are probably the most famous old structures.  They looked nice, but were too expensive, so we settled for staring at them from a distance from the gates.

Zhonghe temple is situated around half way up the mountains and is accessible by chairlift.  The whole way up we heard unfocused chanting from the area.  We never managed to pinpoint exactly where it was coming from, but safe money is that there’s a real, functioning monastery in the area.  Once you’re at the temple itself there’s not a whole lot to do, other than enjoy the view.  A monk in the main section of the temple beckoned us in, so we decided it was worth taking a look.  Once inside we had incense thrust into our hands and there was more beckoning.

In retrospect, I should have known something was up.  ”Complimentary” is not a word you hear thrown around all that often in Chinese.  When you do hear it, it generally means “you are already paying too much money for this.”  Sure enough, before our incense had even burned down, the “monk” was gesturing for us to sign a book filled with signatures and written requests for health, happiness, world peace, and whatever else stoned tourists pray for (it was all in English, so the Chinese who visited the temple must have known what was up).

The gist was that we were supposed to give him at least 100元 (around $15 US) for him to pray for us to receive whatever it was we wanted.  He also made it clear that we had consented to this implicitly by taking the incense we had been offered.

Now, I know in retrospect I should have said, “So long!” and gone along on my way, but it is surprisingly hard to turn down a man dressed as a monk giving you the puppy dog eyes while making the confused expression of a child who has just been told that Santa is not real, and by the way the cookies you left out for him last Christmas aren’t the kind your dad likes.  I think I gave the guy about 50元.

I hear they filmed "The Quiet Earth" here.

Our other major Dali excursion was Dali Geothermal Paradise.  The buildup to the trip was enormous.  We had to take one bus an hour or so away, then take a second bus to get to the hot springs.  I definitely wouldn’t have tried getting there without a Chinese-speaking guide, as the process was not at all straightforward.  We ended up walking to the main gates, which was not a small trek, and took us probably another hour just to get to the entrance.

Once we were in the park, we found out that we were definitely there in the off, off, OFF season.  The park was more or less abandoned, and I think we saw maybe three other people over the course of the day.

Luckily for us, nature has no idea whether people are on vacation or not, so the springs themselves were fantastic and totally unoccupied.  The park itself had at least a dozen springs enclosed in wooden shacks.  Unfortunately, we learned that the allure of a white lady in a swimsuit was enough to attract everybody in the park to our pool once they figured out where we were.  By the time things became a thinly veiled staring contest, it was time to head out.

Imagine three grown Asian men in their underwear staring directly at the camera and you sort of get the feeling.

Finding the way back to Dali was a rushed and mildly nerve-wracking experience.  You have to flag down the bus that takes you back to town.  This bus has no preordained stop, but we were told we would have the best luck waiting in front of “the hotel.”  We picked the first hotel we found with somebody outside of it, and thankfully it turned out to be the right one.  The crowd kept getting bigger though, and after we saw the third full bus fly by, we started getting nervous that maybe we were going to be sleeping in this hotel instead of using it as a busstop.

The bus stops running at 5 PM.  We finally caught one at around 5:01.

The bus was full of locals, and a little boy in the back was absolutely transfixed by me.  I tried to answer his questions as best I could, and his mom seemed to appreciate it.  Before she got off the bus she gave me a packet of some seeds we had seen the locals carrying in giant bags that probably had two or three kilos of the things in them.  They tasted a little strange, so I asked what they were.

“Oh,” she told us enthusiastically, “Cannabis seeds!”

Kunming Main Square

Kunming is the capitol of Yunnan province.  However, despite this lofty status, there’s really not a ton of things to do there other than hang out in the hostel.  We did have a go at making the town interesting, though.  The first day we wandered north of the hostel to Green Lake Park, which is apparently considered one of the most beautiful places in China.

It's OK, I guess...

Unfortunately, when we arrived in early January, the park was not so green and scenic.  It was, however, full of elderly Chinese people.  It’s a fairly common sight in a Chinese park of any size to find groups of 10 to even 50 people dancing in sync to traditional Chinese music.

I don’t know when everybody learned the steps, but demographically it seems to start with women who are around 40-50 years old, so I would guess it dates from somewhere around that time period.  The basic format is that somebody will bring a boombox or a giant amplifier, set the song up, and a crowd will form over the day, often with a couple of people wearing traditional dress.

Nobody knows where the stone forest got its name...

Green Lake Park had the most dancers I’ve seen in China. It was hard to traverse the park because you had to walk in huge arcs to avoid the dance groups and move quickly lest you be engulfed in the constant flux of expanding and contracting dance troupes.

Kunming’s biggest natural attraction, however, is the Stone Forest.

The stone forest is enormous and overrun with all manner of tourists.  Chinese tourists seem to have a predilection for moving in clusters, and the main part of the park is choked with swarms of them.  The main part of the park is a dense cluster of formations with kitschy names like “The Sword Pond,” “The Natural Karaoke Hall,” and “The Elephant.”

The origin of the elephant's name is also a mystery.

We decided to strike out toward the most remote thing we could find in the park: The Eternal Mushroom.  Away from the main section closest to the entrance, the park was actually pretty empty and quiet.  After spending a few months in China, silence imparts a deeply unnerving (if not totally unwelcome) feeling.  In the end we decided that we had probably made the right choice.

The mushroom itself was pretty fantastic.  Not because of any extreme amount of eternality, but more because of the level of “Oh, China” absurdity.  There is a path that runs the breadth and width of the park, done in pavement and brickwork, that serves as your yellow-brick road to interesting stone formations.  Our assumption was that the road would continue in a loop for the duration of the walk, leading us to the mushroom before taking us back to our original starting point by way of other fantastical rocks.  As with most assumptions, we ended up being wrong.

This one seems pretty eternal, right?

The path was not a loop, and it did not lead conveniently to anyplace except the mushroom.  What the path did do was rudely dead end at the mushroom with a terminal fifteen-by-fifteen foot square.  Even this was sort of unclear, since there were a bunch of possible mushrooms around us.  Which structure actually constituted said mushroom was kind of a mystery.  In the end, I don’ t think we were entirely sure which mushroom was the most eternal, so we settled on the one that seemed like the best option for a photo op and just kind of rolled with it.  At that point we had to face the fact that we had to return via the exact same two-mile trail that had taken us to the limits of the park.  Luckily, the weather was fantastic, and I have no right nor inclination to complain.

We made one other accidental discovery while in Kunming.  Apparently our hostel was adjacent to a gay bar.  We went down to the bar district looking for a cheap beer and a table we could sit at, and we basically picked the first place that didn’t scream, “YOU COME IN? BEER GOOD! GOOD DEAL! YOU SIT! YOU SIT!”

Our first impression was that the imbalance between Chinese men and women was a lot worse than we had originally thought.  Also, people seemed a lot more friendly and happy to see us Westerners than in most other bars we’d been to.  We had people offer to buy us drinks, try to introduce us to their friends, simply come up and say “Thank you for coming here!  It’s so good to see you!” in a totally unassuming and warm way.  Fantastically nice crowd of people.

Eventually, as the pole dancing grew more intense and people started to get a bit more drunk, the truth of the situation hit us.  That isn’t to say that we were displeased, but just kind of a shared, “Oooooooooooooh. Got it.” sort of moment.

The official line in China is that there are no gay people.  They don’t exist.  What gay people?  Nope.

Unfortunately for China, they do exist, and apparently things are pretty bad for them.  There was a huge security detail at the club, we came to realize over the night.  It wasn’t totally clear whether the detail was there to keep things from getting out of hand in the club or to keep people from harassing the people in the club, but hopefully it was the latter.  I’ve personally known at least one person who got beaten up in China on account of their sexuality, so the threat is definitely very real.

Our first destination was the Chengdu Panda Base, which is the world leader in the production and detainment of pandas.  At first we walked for a long time, following a more or less silent Chinese man who was power walking his way into the park.  At one point we weren’t sure we had the right Chinese guide or if we were still heading toward pandas, but we shouldn’t have doubted.  Finally we came out of the winding paths in the bamboo forrest and saw this.

Oh, hey! They have pandas here?

That first bunch of pandas was pretty neat.  There was a flurry of picture taking and jockeying for the best panda observation spot.  Then we moved on to the next enclosure… and the next enclosure… and the next enclosure.  The number of pandas that are at the Chengdu park is pretty amazing, and if sheer panda volume is your aim, it will fulfill all  your desires and more.  Eventually as a group we settled into a silent routine of panda, picture, move, repeat.  By the end people weren’t even looking at the pandas as we moved by.  ”Oh, a panda,” they would say disaffectedly, “Whatever.”

One of the more interesting features of the zoo was when we were ushered into a teahouse during the trip for an educational movie on the breeding center’s techniques.  ”Chengdu park is number one in genital shocking,” it boldly proclaimed.

Yes, that’s right, the revolutionary secret to Chengdu’s success at panda breeding is as follows: they knock the pandas out, then they shock them in the balls while manually pleasuring them.  Genius!

The crowd was fully revived and reinvigorated when we got to the baby pandas.

Baby Pandas: Literally Too Cute

There’s a sliding scale of panda exploitation at the Chengdu facility.  For $75, you can take your picture with a red panda.  For around $150 you can hold a baby panda and take a picture, which is scientifically proven to be the cutest thing in the world.

After the panda park, we used the next day to go to Le Shan Da Fu, which means “Giant Buddha at Le Mountain.”  It seems like a pretty apt description.

Big.

When it was built more than a thousand years ago, it was the biggest statue in the world at 23 stories tall.  America can’t let records for stuff like giant statues just roll by, so we are destroying that.  It also used to be maintained by the monks, but now the Chinese government has taken over.  There’s apparently been a lot of discussion about the degradation of the statue and restoration efforts that will have to be undertaken.  Up close, you can see that the monks used to paint the statue different colors, and the whole thing is littered with cubby holes, ostensibly for shrines and statues that have since been stolen or taken off site.

The area was a functioning monastery once, but now it’s more or less been turned into a giant ball of twine equivalent.  One of the things people kept saying as we traveled to these places was, “I wish I could see what this place was like when it was real.”  Still, it’s an awfully impressive feat of human engineering.

The first stop was Chengdu.  This was my first introduction to the sleeper trains of China, which are actually pretty nice.  A “soft sleeper” is the second highest level of luxury, and ran us between $30-$40 US for most of the 24 hr legs of our trip.  The soft sleeper gets you a bunk in a cabin that contains six total bunks.  Around 10 PM the lights go out, and you do your best to conk out until morning.  Lower bunks are coveted and cost a small premium.  It’s because they not only serve as a place to congregate and play cards but also as an extra layer of storage, since you can stash your bags underneath them.

The first train we had was probably one of the more enjoyable ones, since we were all fresh and well rested.  A little Chinese girl thought that the white people were the most amazing thing she had seen, and she kept peeking out from around corners to squeal, “Waaaaaaiguoren,” which is Chinese for “foooooooreigners.” Once she found out Kat spoke Chinese, there was no getting rid of her, and she was our little sidekick for the rest of the trip.

Now, we headed south in order to get warm, and our hope was that the getting warm part would happen fast.  Upon arrival at Chengdu, we found that we had seriously underestimated how far south we had to go.  In fact, it was snowing our second day there.  The hostel that we booked ended up being probably the nicest one that we found during our whole trip across China food-, bed-, and friendly-wise, and we were pretty much spoiled from that point on.  ”Oh, it’s nice,” we’d say wistfully, “But it’s no Sim’s Cozy…”

Our first order of business was finding somewhere to celebrate New Year’s.  After some deliberation it was decided that we should make our way to a rasta bar that was having an ex-pat party.  Now, taxi drivers in China aren’t really known for their sense of direction.  Our particular cab that night stopped no less than seven times to make Kat get out and ask people on the street where this place was, before unceremoniously dropping us half a mile from where we needed to be and telling us to just go find some white people.

Ironically, that turned out to be more or less the solution.  We spotted maybe ten waigos like ourselves headed down the street.  Miraculously, they turned out to be heading to the same place we were.  We asked half-jokingly if they minded if we followed them, which led one of the guys to give Kat a long, slow look up and down before he said, “Yeah… I guess so.”  Way to be classy foreigners!  Way to represent!

The actual party was a loud but generally pretty chill affair that featured dozens of foreigners trying to couple with random Chinese ladies.  I ended up attracting the attention of a tiny Chinese girl who was maybe five feet tall (MAYBE).  She came and sat at our table for small talk.  ”Are you FBI?” she asked, very seriously.  ”Uh… No?” I replied, not knowing if this was flirting or a serious request.  At this point she leaned in real close and stage-whispered, “I am ALIEN!”

The whole conversation was indecipherable.  I was half expecting her to tell me her hovercraft was full of eels, and it was a little unclear how much English she actually spoke.  At one point I asked her what she did in Chengdu and she replied very emphatically, “Rob. A. Bank.”

The next day we were treated to the ball dropping in NYC, delayed 12 hours by the curvature of the earth.  I was ecstatic over this little piece of American culture abroad, and we counted down with Times Square, “10! 9! 8! 7! 6! 5! 4! 3! 2!” At which point the newscast unceremoniously cut away to footage of… a Chinese highway?  Thank you, China, for an epic letdown.

That night we decided to try some regional cuisine, and headed out for hot pot, which is probably the most famous Szechuan export.  It’s basically a big, giant pot full of a pepper called “mala” that used to be used (I kid you not) as a numbing agent for dental surgery before the advent of Novocain.  I love the stuff, and virtually nothing you say can dissuade me from eating me some hot pot, but China, she does love to try.

The restaurant we found wasn’t far from our hostel, and it actually looked pretty ritzy and upscale.  However, for reasons that I will attempt to conjecture, we found the restaurant’s windows all open wide at around 6 PM in early January, and we could see tufts of steam rising from other tables across the room.  If you’re imagining this steam coming from their tables, you are dead wrong.  It was coming out of the mouths of the patrons.

Now, I can only assume that this is so, but my belief is that there was some Chinese medicine going on here.  In Chinese medecine there’s a constant too-hot-too-cold fight going on in your body, and the medecine swoops in to Mama Bear your system and get things back to just right.  So if you’re eating spicy foods, that room being cold is a definite plus, medicinally, I guess.  For China it makes sense.

Unfortunately, being an ignorant westerner whose mastery of chopsticks is at best “proficient,” a drop of some thirty degrees in the environment makes for some interesting eating.  On the bright side, you have an open flame on your table, and most of your head ends up going numb from the mala within ten minutes.

Overall, it was actually a fantastic meal, and despite the cold, we were back in that restaurant within two days.

I promised an interesting Visa story, yes?

On the particular tourist  visa I had for China, I’m allowed to stay in the country for 90 days at a time.  I was planning on trying to get an extension to remain in the country for at least another month, maybe three, which my teacher had told me was a cinch.  He practically said, “Don’ wooorry ’bout it!” in a thick Jersey accent, all the while waving me off and puffing up his face like Joe Pesci.  Or at least that’s how I remember it.

Here are some good things to know when extending a traveler’s visa in country:

1. It’s not the same to get your visa extended in Beijing as it is in Guangzhou.

It seems like more or less everywhere has different rules.  For example, in Qingdao they demand proof of holdings in China of $100/day you wish to remain in the country.  So if you don’t have, say, $3000 ready to be dropped down on the table at the police station, you’re not staying.  I’ve talked to a ton of people who extended their visas elsewhere, and they weren’t forced to do this, although technically you’re supposed to.

While traveling, we found out the hard way that although it’s possible to get your visa extended one month out in Dali in two days, it takes damn near ten days in Kunming.  For the record, in Qingdao it took me about eight days to get an extension of six days, which means I received a conveniently pre-expired visa back from the police.  That brings me to my second point…

2. Chinese holidays will always interrupt the visa process somehow.

In my case, it was the Mid-Autumn Festival, which is famous for lanterns, dragon dances, and shutting down the entire infrastructure of the city for about a week.  I came back on Friday, and there was a helpful note saying the office would be closed for the next seven days.  Bam!

3. You will get, at best, a 30-day extension.

That 90-day extension?  Yeah, that wasn’t going to happen.  My teacher seemed flabbergasted that it wasn’t possible, but it’s not.  Maybe it is if you go to somebody crooked or connected with the government.  I’ve heard stories of people being given residency permits in shady back alleys or being walked directly into police stations straight to the computer terminal by an agent and walking out with technically impossible extensions.

You will not get that if you do it the normal way.

4. An extension to your Chinese visa invalidates your old visa.

Funny story.  I didn’t need to extend my visa in the first place.  It turns out that if you have a 90-day duration visa that says it’s valid for a year, and that visa is multiple entry, you just have to leave the country and hop back in and you’re good for another 90 days.  Oops.

Getting the extension made my old visa expire.  That visa, which you can only apply for in your country of residence, is really good.  I should have just kept it.

Long story short, nobody died, but I had to leave the country for a while, and that was expensive.  I flew back to the US, got a new visa, and then came back into the country.  I was upfront with immigration about what had happened, and although I did get a scolding at the gate I was allowed to leave without paying a fine (Thank you, Beijing Airport Staff!).  Now I have a new visa that should be good for another year, should I so choose to use it.

Where on earth did I go during that time and now?  Tune in next time and find out!

Wow.  Two months, just like that.

While China is a civilized and forward-thinking nation, I’ve still got to master the vocabulary necessary to install a net connection in my apartment.  I’ve been using the local internet cafe, which seems like a pretty good place to pick up.

Internet cafes in China are… odd.  Compared to other places I’ve been, I can say this for them: they’re cheap, they’re up-to-date technologically, and they are annoying as hell.

Generally, the one I frequent is stocked by about 50 teenage/tweenage boys and a smattering of girls.  Each station comes with a set of headphones and a big ‘ol monitor connected to a computer that’s packed with games of questionable legal status.  The breakdown of customers is as follows:

~25% Watching ppstream

This is China’s (unfortunately named) hub for pirated content.  Imagine if The Pirate Bay were left totally unchecked.  Actually, I’m around %50 sure that ppstream is somehow government affiliated.  I don’t know how it would survive otherwise.  It’s instant access to streaming copies of virtually anything you could want to watch (if you know Chinese).

~25% playing World of Warcraft or Warcraft 3

What can I say.  They like it.

~15% trading stocks

The daytrader is alive and well in China.  You can find him in virtually ANY internet cafe watching streams of numbers and graphs that would make Rain Man sick to his stomach.  I have very little idea what on earth they’re actually doing, but it seems important, and they’re always screaming for the FuWuYuan to get them more drinks or ramen or… I dunno… Pocky?

~15% playing I Have No Idea

The games on a Chinese net cafe computer are vaults of the bizarre.  They feature direct ripoffs of pretty much every game you’ve ever played.  Dance Dance Revolution?  Got it.  Weird rip-off Mega Man?  Got it.  Three different games featuring the likeness of one Mitchell Mouse? Indeed we do.

The best part about these particular gamers is that they have a tendency to crank up the headphones to the point that they’re basically a Hi-Fi and then broadcast the music/sound effects to the whole room.  I can tell you that Mickey’s trademark “Huh ha!” gets a little bit old when you just want to check your email.

50-75% Heavily Smoking

Chain smoking lives on in China.  There was a recent movement to increase the amount of anti-smoking warnings on each pack of cigarettes, and it was met by the public with distaste.  Right now there’s a small warning on each pack, but nothing the likes of Chile’s Don Miguel.

Smoking is bad, mmkay?

I honestly don’t know if it would make any difference.  The Chinese like to smoke.  It is not unusual to be bordered on either side by a pair of chain smokers, blank eyes staring while their hands twitch, Mickey dancing on screen while ash drops in your lap.  Fine vintage culture shock.

10% Swearing loudly in English

They’re a loud 10% though.  The number goes higher when a laowai’s presence is made known.  Cries of “FAHKAHYOO-WA!” and “YOU SHEETOH MEEE!” are not uncommon.  And while they are hilarious, they do not do much to improve intercontinental relations, and should give anybody pause before trying to swear in public in a foreign language.

There’s also a complicated dance of the passports before entering.  I was personally required to buy my own card that allows me to log onto a computer (so they can track what I’m reading? Not sure…) and I am required to show my passport when entering.  Upon entering, foreigners are allowed only to the second floor, for reasons I suspect I understand, but that I am ultimately unsure of.  Any breach of these rules will be met with vigorous gesticulation and shouting that will go way faster than any beginner can understand.  Figuring out these policies took me a solid month of bringing various things to the front desk and being turned away over and over again until I got it right through a combination of carrying a dictionary and plain old dumb luck.  It sort of reminded me of this story, actually.

I’ll be trying to post more in the future.  I should have some interesting Visa-related essays in me soon…

Tomorrow will be our 12th day in Qingdao. It also marks the point that our Chinese class will pass 1000 vocabulary words.

If that sounds like a lot, that’s probably because it is. The method of teaching at our school boils down pretty succinctly to “memorize absolutely everything.” The surprising thing is that at 1000 words there are still more huge gaps than solid spaces. If it doesn’t show up in an apartment, a restaurant, a mall, or in a phone conversation, I don’t know what it is.

Pretty much every language works this way, as far as I know. From what I remember of learning Spanish, it continued right up until we left. Conversational only means that you can ask how to say something without going to a dictionary every five minutes or reverting back to English.  If you were to learn 1000 words from the OED every week, it would take you roughly 10 years to learn them all.  Beyond that you have an equal number of words that have to do with scientific or professional language.

How do children manage this?  Easy.  They possess near-god-like powers.

Chinese is compounded by that whole “alternative writing style” thing. I’m beginning to sense that there’s a definite point that it will be easier to learn the characters than ignore them. Chinese is heavily homophonic, which means that “shì” can mean around 30 different things, and be used in an equal number of different contexts as a part of bigger words. Type “shi” in here under pinyin to see what I mean.

We have so many different things that sound the same in our heads right now that it’s time to learn some characters.

How bad can that be?  Estimates (‘cuz they keep making them up) put the total number of characters in use somewhere around 106,230. People who are named Raymond have around 48,000 characters to play with.  Most educated Chinese top out somewhere around 8,000-10,000.  General literacy is pegged around 3,500.

I am (if we are being generous here) around 350.

One week down, several hundred left to go.

I write like
David Foster Wallace

I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!

Works for me.

After five days in Beijing, we caught a plane to Qingdao.  The original plan had been to buy a ticket for a soft sleeper compartment on a train, but I found out the hard way that things don’t always work out the way you think they will.  I ended up going to the Beijing Railway Station to try and book a ticket, but they told me they were totally out for the next five days.  I found out later that it’s standard practice for scalpers to buy up huge lots of train tickets and then resell them on the open market.  So if you ever happen to be in China, book in advance.

The plane worked out fine.  It wasn’t terribly expensive (~$100 US) and got us to Qingdao with a minimum of hassle.  Christine managed to convince a cab driver to drop his bid from ¥200 down to ¥100 by just mentioning that our “Chinese friend” said it should cost that much.  He folded pretty easily after that, so if you don’t have a Chinese friend, make one up.  They are very helpful.

Fifteen dollars split two ways bought us around a 45-minute cab ride to downtown Qingdao.  Our friends later told us that it was because Qingdao is a peninsula, and the cab ride goes around the outside, avoiding the center as long as possible.

The ridiculous amount of construction probably didn’t do much to get us there any faster, either.  Qingdao is a city with roughly 3 million inhabitants, and an additional 4-5 million in the surrounding area.  It’s a small city by Chinese standards, but by US standards it’s huge.  It’s growing quickly, too.  It’s not a far estimate to say that we saw fifty or sixty construction sites on the way into the city.  Apartment buildings, malls, a subway system: It’s all coming to Qingdao in the next couple of years, and it’s all enormous.

The local specialty is called gàlà, and is basically a big huge steaming pile of clams served with a generous buttery pepper sauce.  They are delicious, and I will be eating more of them, no doubt.  Beyond that, it’s seafood paradise here, especially if you like any kind of marine creature impaled on a stick and grilled.  I hear the squid is especially nice.

from travelpod

Our language school and accommodations are very nice as well, although I don’t know if I’d be able to afford them if Christine wasn’t along for the ride.  We’re getting twenty hours of weekly tutoring from two different teachers, and although we haven’t used that to its full potential yet, it might be a pretty good deal if we can get to a difficulty level that doesn’t make us want to die or fall asleep.

Our host family is nice, too, although we may be a little too demanding of them.  Christine walked into the dining room this morning, and our host mom asked if she wanted some of what they were eating.  Christine said “sure,” and our host mother literally gave her the food she had just made for herself.  If you ask for something directly, you seem to get it more often than not, but people will give you their own shirt if you make it a matter of hospitality.  We’re trying to be careful about that, but it can be a bit weird mentally double checking every offer for miàn.

All in all, though, I think we’re set up for a positive three weeks here.