When we are in love we love the grass. and the barns and the light poles

The contrast between the two leadership transitions this week is pretty incredible really. It feels a bit beyond me to make any sweeping conclusions about the events themselves, and there are countless articles doing that from every angle anyway with far superior contributions to the debates! But I will briefly summarise how they impacted me here, and what I've heard and seen.

The US election in Wudaokou
The American election felt a lot closer to me here in China than it ever has in the
UK, mainly because of the huge international community here, a large proportion of which are American. It might even be a more balanced spread of American opinions here than I'd be able to find in the states, because of the variety of states represented here among my friends. Asking each person who they were voting for or what their state was normally aligned with was so interesting because I would hear about their state's majority view, their family's view, and then their own as well. These little snapshots of the various demographics helped me to see the diversity of perspectives within the US and how people viewed the significance of their vote. Some people were very ambivalent, their states were already strongly aligned with a particular party and it was a done deal. Some of my friends were very passionately affiliated with a party, one friend did some house calling to Colorado the night before the election to try and convince swing voters from China! A lot of people I spoke to voted but weren't wholly satisfied with either candidate, and felt like they were choosing between a rock and a hard place rather than actually being able to select someone who stood for their views.
I went with friends to watch the votes come in live from the Stanford Centre in Peking
University from 8am ( on a side note, the centre is amazing and I'm so jealous), we were given a great complimentary breakfast and watched the CNN coverage before class. We returned for lunch in time to see Obama win, and then I caught his speech live in the Bridge cafe down my road a couple hours later, which was also packed with Americans. The bridge cafe had been advertising free beer for all if Obama won, and delivered on this promise which was very popular! There was a lot of celebrating on the streets and in the bars that night where I live, and cries of 'God bless America' all over the place.

The 18th Party Congress
The next morning at the start of our Classical Chinese lesson, Nick asked our teacher what she felt about the American election, and who she wanted to win. She was very pro Obama and gave reasons why. Then he commented that that morning was the important one with the start of the 18th congress and leadership transition, how did she feel about that? She said it didn't really concern her, she would just hear how it went and that was it.
The impact of the party congress session on my everyday life has been as follows:
- there are lots of volunteers wandering around the streets wearing communist armbands pinned onto their coat sleeves, apparently there are more volunteers for this than there were for the Olympics in Beijing, but I still don't really understand what they are actually doing, nor have I witnessed them doing anything except walking around.
- big posters and banners have appeared on the roads and in my apartment complex, and like during national week someone has put Chinese flags at the entrance to every part of the compound.
- the entrance to Peking University campus has upped the security at the gate and is asking for your cards to be let in which it has never done before. They are still pretty easy to slip thorough but it is a lot more strict than before. This is because most of the political protests and student movements of the past century have their roots at Peking University. Whenever the government is anxious about uprising or civilian unrest, they always make sure that the Peking University campus is being monitored very closely.
-the biggest annoyance is that the Internet is extremely slow because everything is being read. Not only are networks failing all the time but vpns, which are the way people can access banned websites are being hacked all the time and stop working for long periods of time. The Internet disruption has been going on for about two weeks and is expected to continue for roughly another fortnight.
-I watched CCTV ( China's version of BBC) for news about the party congress but the coverage was really very minimal. The first piece of news was about how supermarket workers were learning dance routines to improve fitness and work enjoyment, the second was about Chinese officials documenting the number of endangered birds in another province's marshland, and then finally they showed two minutes of footage about the congress, a sweeping shot of the delegates, individual shots of some of the big names and then some silent footage of Hu Jintao speaking with the news reporter talking over him the entire time. Not particularly in depth or groundbreaking, I will need to try and stream the foreign news to get any substantial footage or analysis. Although from articles I've read about how dull the speech was, maybe the Chinese public have been spared!

Please press 1 to conform

An advert from the Beijinger magazine this week:

Weath of nations
Meet, mingle, make money

Beijing's most exclusively club and caviar cafe
-Beijing's 100 richest Chinese men
-the number one richest foreigner from every country who also reside in Beijing
-anyone named Adam Smith
Address: We'll tell you
Email: membership@weathofnations.com

I don't think I qualify but it made me laugh! I heard today that there are actually more multimillionaires in Beijing than there are foreigners. This city is crazy.

What have I done this week?
-Classical Chinese exams
-ThinkInChina, a group that I'm involved in ran an awesome talk by Prof Xie Tao on Sino-American relations
-ate a lot of Taiwanese pancakes...
-ran out of English teabags. This is the beginning of a serious problem
- discovered that only British people put 'x's at the end of texts and messages! We have been confusing Americans we know here for so long without even realising! I had no idea that it was a British quirk, it's blown my mind.

In other news...
The heating has just turned on! Heating is provided by the government in the northern part of china from November 15th to March 15th, individual buildings have no control over it. However this year because the 18th Party Congress is coming up so all the government officials will be in town, and because there was forecast a snowstorm soon, we have had the heating turned on ahead of schedule! The heating will be at 18 degrees or higher inside for the rest of winter, and I'm so glad! At the moment the temperature is still bearable but it is just about to plummet into the minus numbers and will become drastically cold very soon, too cold for snow even apparently. I'm bracing myself for that, jaded Beijingers have not spoken favourably of the winter here.
My Internet and particular access to the blocked websites has got so much slower because of the upcoming party congress, it's so annoying.


Shopping

Shopping etiquette in China is very different from in the UK and I feel obligated to attempt some kind of explanation. Here are some basics for your typical shopping experience in Golden Towers indoor market near where I live, which is where we buy almost everything now excluding food. It's four stories of little stalls, two floors are exclusively clothes and shoes and the upper two have stalls selling almost anything else you can think of.

If there isn't a price on it, you should never accept the price the shop owner asks for. Haggling is a must.
You can't try on clothes, which makes it an issue for things like jeans. Coats and jumpers are sometimes allowed to be tried but only if you ask nicely, and it depends on the stall. Luckily they are so cheap you can normally justify taking a chance on them.
If they tell you that the item is a genuine brand, pure wool, silk, leather, good quality, or original- these are all lies. Nothing is going to be real, and never pay for something based on that sort of justification.
None of the stalls have any names and are unlikely to be particularly identifiable. Most of the shop owners are playing music loudly on their laptop which means that the songs all combine with the next door stalls music and create an incoherent noise. If they aren't doing that they are sitting watching Chinese tv dramas on their smart phones.
Never appear to really like something, because then they know for sure they have a buyer. It's a bit like flirting with a shop owner and their product, you have to play hard to get! For example i say in a very uninterested tone to whoever I'm with that I have to have that hat no matter what, but examine the hat, find a loose thread, act shocked and disgusted at whatever price the stall person gives and appear to be on the point of leaving, citing the quality and extortionate price as my reason. Then I give an offer about thirty percent lower than I would be willing to pay, pitifully describe myself as a broke student and plead for a lower price, or accuse them of trying to rip me off because I'm a westerner and say I've already passed three other stalls with the same product who are willing to give me cheaper. At the end, put the item down and start to walk away slowly until they run after you agreeing. This charade has to be performed with every individual purchase, and I have to admit, it's really fun! Buying things like this is so addictive, and a lot more fun than when the price is set because it feels like you're earning your own deal in a way. It gets easier to gage what is a reasonable price to settle on when you start figuring out how much each item should cost, at first it was very hard to know if we were getting a good deal or not.

Hold the handrail and stand firm, be careful chothes sandwich

The last few weeks have had far too much worth writing about for me to actually get around to doing so!

Summary
Happenings of the fortnight

• Travelled to an unrestored section of the Great Wall and camped in the mountains! The area was found by my friend Chris a few years ago and he organised a trip for a group of us to go, we camped in a clearing that could only be accessed by an hours hike through farmers trails so our equipment was carried by donkey across the mountains. The wall was Ming dynasty and totally untouched, we were the only ones there as its not a tourist destination at all.
• Unfortunately I had my laptop stolen from on top of my mailbox (I am now trying to get used to using an iPad and downloading all the gadgets, still not very used to touch typing though!
• Went to Xian with my class and the Oxford group as well, all inclusive trip organised by Peking University as a treat for us, transport, food, accommodation and sights all covered for a fee of twenty pounds! Such a bargain.
• Last night was invited by our neighbours to their sons second birthday party at a karaoke bar. As the native English speakers we were invited to sing all their favourite western songs, so lots of Adele and Taylor Swift renditions!
• The road outside my flat has been dug up by lots of migrant workers for no reason as far as I can see, they've paved some of it back up in a patchy way, but in the middle they've dug shallow metre wide holes and then put cones on top. Because the traffic needed more obstacles than the cars, scooters, bikes and pedestrians offered already.
• I've tried donkey burgers, which are burgers that have donkey meat in them and not a fast food brand as I initially presumed. They are actually a Chinese traditional food and really good! There are big helpful photos of donkeys in the window to make sure you can find the restaurants that serve it, as well as the signs that say DONKEY MEAT on them.

Today I wandered through the Olympic forest park which was beautiful, the leaves are all changing and it was full of colour. Speakers down all the paths gently playing lullaby versions of songs like 'Scarborough Fair' and 'Can you feel the love tonight', facilitated the peaceful atmosphere, and we had a good time watching parents posing their children beside tress with reeds or leaves in their hands to document autumn.

Xian
Last weekend's trip to Xian initially made me a little depressed about Chinese tourism and in particular the preservation of genuine culture. I've been to Xian before, it was on my school trip where I was innocent and starry eyed about everything I saw, each stop on the package tour was fascinating and I trusted the authenticity of each exhibit. I am definitely a lot more jaded now and know a lot better than I did then, revisiting the Wild Goose Pagoda for the second time I saw that the Classical Chinese signs were screwed in by metal bars and couldn't be older than about fifteen years, and our tour guide happily told us about how there was a very famous building which got too old so they were in the process of knocking it down and rebuilding it all again. Sure enough I passed by the building full of paints and ladders inside, with newly carved wood panels. I concluded pretty fast that returning to these places would not have the magic which their novelty had brought my fifteen year old self the first time. The next day my classmate Laurence and I did the unthinkable and missed the Terracotta Warriors out of our tour to explore the city of Xian itself, and I do not regret the choice. Exploring the calligraphy streets that morning, eating the amazing local foods like biangbiang noodles (the character for the noodles is so complicated that it hasn't been computerised and has over fifty strokes!) was so nice, we actually ended up being filmed for Shanxi television as part of a documentary on ancient Steele inscriptions as we had studied them a bit and bumped into a film crew interviewing a specialist. Token westerners who can speak Chinese are clearly good fleshing out footage for documentaries.
My faith in genuine Chinese culture was restored by the Xian Muslim quarter, which was just so cool in every way, great street food, really fun shops and lots of little alleyways with cool things happening. We stumbled on a courtyard where some local Chinese Muslims had brought out a speaker system and were dancing together to traditional music. Some of them were in traditional dress, some were just in casual clothes, it was too structured to join in if you didn't know the moves but also very free, same sex or different partners were both acceptable and some just moved around alone. It was strange seeing the Chinese looking so relaxed, it's not what you'd really associate with them, and it was really mesmerising!

Naming people
One thing that I've had the honour of doing is giving Chinese people English names. Giving yourself either a Chinese name as a westerner or an English name as a Chinese person feels very odd, names are so important but not something you are used to having control over, even nicknames aren't something we get much of a say in. Now suddenly you have the right to decide how a whole ethnic group will address you in a totally new language, and I have to say that most of the time I don't think any of us are very good at it. Picking a nice and normal name in an alien language and culture mostly comes from being lucky.
I will use my two attempts at a Chinese name as an example. My first one, 李心结 or Li Xinjie, was given to me by my Chinese teacher when I began Chinese. I think, the logic was that Li (means plum tree) sounds like one of the syllables in Macleod if you mispronounce it as I expect he did, and Xinjie means pure or clean heart, a bit like the meaning for Catherine. So far, pretty normal. However, what I discovered the hard way was that it also happens to be the name of a very well known actress and singer from Taiwan. Introducing myself in Taiwan last summer provoked laughter everywhere I went, much like if a Chinese person went around in England saying their name was Britney Spears. Very unfortunate, or very cruel of my Chinese teacher. I realised after that summer that I needed a new name for my year abroad, and resumed the hunt, but it is very hard to figure out on your own and eventually went to a different teacher for help, who gave me the name 李恺婕, or Li Kaijie, Kai meaning joyful and happy, and Jie meaning beautiful or something like that. On trying this name out in China I have yet again been met with some laughter though, because apparently the characters used in my name are not used in any words, and most Chinese people don't recognise them at all. The sound of the name is fine from what I can tell, but it's virtually impossible to tell people how to spell it because each sound has at least thirty possible ways it can be written. Chinese people always use other words that the character is in to help them write it, so that makes my name a bit of an issue. Still, I can't get a third name, it just feels too picky! My course coordinator was in hysterics at both my names and suggested I get business cards with my characters and their pronunciation to help people, which is never a good sign.
Naming Chinese people so far has been harder than I expected, one that sticks out in my mind for its comic value was one of the Chinese students that comes to English corner, which is where we go for dinner with them and talk in English. He had a girlfriend back home who he didn't think had a Chinese name so a friend and I decided to help and name her, by asking questions about her hobbies and interests. Eventually based on her taste in films and love for theme parks we decided to call her Daphne, as in the one from Scooby Doo. However when he came back from October holiday he told us that she already had an English name, and she was called Blue. There are worse I've heard, one friend has taught a child called Hannibal, another called Lucifer. It's a complicated process which is humorously unsuccessful on both ends I think.
Chinese people really struggle to understand how English names don't necessarily have meanings, because the meanings are really important in their culture. I was explaining how I am named after my grandma and how that was common to one Chinese girl this evening, and she just thought the whole thing was ridiculous. It's funny how things that I take for granted as normal seem so strange to someone looking from a different perspective, why does badminton have 'bad' in it? Why would it be bad? And why do we say 'watch your head' when the doors are low? It makes no sense.Things like this are being shown to me daily by my Chinese friends and pupils.

Mushrooms quote be or not to be?

My Golden Week 

• number of  trains taken: 7 
• number of nights spent on trains: 2.5
• total number of hours on the train: 45
• distance travelled by train in total according to google: 2433 kilometres

My first proper experience travelling in China was not made alone, but with the whole of China, who decided to travel with me! I should have understood this when we had such a hard time buying tickets to any destination but it was one of those facts that didn't become true until we were living through it, such as the standing train back to Beijing at 2am when I was pushed up against a bin in the train with a sleeping chinese man on top of it, with as much personal space as my shoes took up on the floor, or waking up at 4am to queue for Changbaishan nature reserve, only to find that the queue was already stretching back 20km from the entrance to the park, and we woke up too late (we should have been wise and slept in the car from 2am apparently)!  The two most lasting impressions I think I came away with from the week which also were facts that I already knew, and have now lived through to some extent. One is just how many people there are in China, and the other is how incredibly vast China is. If you look at a map of China and see the distance between Beijing and Changbaishan nature reserve, it looks like a day trip comparative to most other places, but I assure you it is so far! I spent the whole week marveling at the fact that somewhere this huge could ever be unified, let alone when the fasted mode of transport was horse! America grew in size with the railways being built along the way, but China never had any of that. Yet somehow it has largely remained under the control of one government for thousands of years! It really makes you look down on England for failing to keep the Scotland or even Durham under control for so long to be honest. 

Tourism

The amount of travelling in the first week of October in China is totally mind blowing both as statistics and experiencing it first hand. According to the Finincial Times there were 425 million visitors to national tourist destinations during Golden Week this year, 660 million travelled by either road or sea, and in one day the Forbidden City had 148,000 visitors. To Changbaishan, China’s largest nature reserve on the North Korean boarder there were over 40,000 visitors on the Wednesday. We attempted to be six of those 40,000 and failed! When we arrived in Baihe Tuesday evening, we quickly realised that presuming we would be able to find a hotel on the night was naïvely optimistic. There was nothing in Baihe except for cheap looking little hotels, but none of them had any room, or would even let us into their lobby to ask. It felt a little like a nativity journey re-enactment with no rooms in any inns, moving down the streets rejection by rejection. At one point, I went up to hotel owner who also said she had no room and in a fit of despair asked her ‘if there is no room with you, and you say that there is no room with anyone else, then what should we do?’ She took pity on us and gave us the stable equivalent of our story, which was a room in her mother’s house about 20 minutes’ drive away from town, with a home cooked dinner and bus to take us to the park in the morning for a very reasonable price. Her mother lived out in the mountains in a tiny little bungalow with all her own vegetables and hens, there was no toilet or running water except boiled rain water, her oven was an open fire and our heating was that we were sleeping on a kang (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kang_bed-stove). The food was amazing, we were roasting warm and it was all a pretty crazy experience! We were very lucky to befriend the driver as well because not only did he take us to Changbaishan but when we failed to get tickets on the Wednesday he took us to do lots of other things we would have never found on our own, like white water rafting and beautiful walks.

The next day we got a room in the woman’s hotel and the little group of people we’d befriended mothered us for the rest of our time there in a lovely way, we found out that people had been forced to pay to sleep on the hotel lobby floors and in their cars because there were no rooms in any hotels that night. We were very close to a night on the streets and hadn’t even realised.

Changbaishan on our last day as well was not what we had imagined. After our failed attempt to get into the park on Wednesday because we arrived too late, we woke up at 330am on Friday to go and queue in the dark by the entrance along with hundreds of Chinese people. Just before it opened, lots of Chinese soldiers arrived to man the queues, the gates opened and the mass charged into the centre to buy tickets. We got our tickets, took our bus up into the park, had a long walk through hot springs and around a waterfall wearing massive red coats that we’d rented when we realised how freezing it was on the mountain and when we walked back to the main area looked at our watches to discover that it was 630am. It felt totally surreal.

The main attraction of Changbaishan is the Heaven lake right up at the top of the mountain which is reputed to have it’s own mythical sea monster and be extremely beautiful. We were taken further up the mountain in little buses which swerved around the sharp corners and hit everyone into one another, then were pushed off the buses and left at the top. The top of the mountain felt like a little Everest or something, snow covered with snow and dust pelting your face in a way that actually caused pain. You could see only a few feet ahead of you before the whole landscape disappeared into cloud, and in the distance was an eerie trail of puffer coated pilgrims one by one leading off into the whiteness. We joined the trail and braved the winds up the little steps feeling extremely vulnerable and wondering when the lake would appear. At one point, everyone seemed to stop, and we discovered that if we had any visibility at all, the lake would be below us. However us being in a cloud at this point, it just looked like more unknown. A couple of times the cloud cleared briefly and a cry would rise from the Chinese people who rushed to the edge and attempted to see the lake. I am going to say that I saw the water bank for a moment, but I can’t be a hundred per cent certain. Mentally, physically and emotionally drained we joined the queues to get back on the buses, and discovered that it was only 850am.

Losing Face

Something that we really encountered on the holiday was the importance of saving face for Chinese people, and how bad it is when they lose face. There is a lot of emphasis in Chinese culture on public appearance and blatant admission of failure. It is acceptable to get things wrong and have faults or mistakes, but it is not acceptable to have them publically acknowledged or made known outside of private situations. Sometimes this results in very annoying attempts to avoid admitting defeat.

One example of this for us on the trip were that in small talk with the woman who owned the little hotel we were staying in, we mentioned that we hadn’t tried some of the local delicacies yet, such as dog. This offhand remark was taken on as a challenge and resulted in her husband driving all around the back alleys of Baihe trying to find us a dog restaurant at ten pm on our last night, becoming more and more anxious as we drove to many that were already closed. We didn’t even want dog, we were at most considering sharing some side dish at some point to say that we’d tried it or something, it wasn’t a big deal. Instead, we ended up in a private room of a dog restaurant with about eight different types of dog dishes such as dog skin, dog sausage and boiled dog, with her anxious husband waiting to see our reaction to the famed delicacy.

All of us were thanking him repeatedly in Chinese full of smiles and murmuring words of support to one another in English that he couldn’t understand such as ‘Keep going it’s just meat, don’t think about it’ ‘Cesar could you have a couple more pieces so that it looks like we’ve eaten a reasonable amount?’, or from Will ‘I’m genuinely going to throw up’. It wasn’t helping our appetites that they had two dogs one of which was a puppy we’d been playing with all afternoon and grown quite fond of. Our offhand comment and Chinese saving face had led to a situation now completely out of our control. Then a new crisis ensued when we mentioned that at some point we needed to go to a supermarket, all of which were closed at this point yet still a wild goose chase ensued. We could only save his face and stop the mayhem by telling him we only wanted to buy some bottled water, knowing that he had these at home, and could give them to us instead.  

Definitely the worst loss of face I have brought about took place on the train from Qinhuangdao to Shenyang. I was sitting in a carriage away from the others just because of how the tickets worked out in a set of four seats with three Chinese people playing a card game together. As the younger guy reached over to put his card on the pile, he accidentally spilt the entirety of the older man’s flask of boiling water onto my legs. It was all very dramatic, everyone around us jumped up, I was in extreme pain, no one really knew what to do. I took some clothes to change into and see how bad the burn was (it was ok in the end, I’m quite accident prone and actually have done this to myself recently), and when I opened the door again I was confronted with about five different types of creams and ointments (one actually was toothpaste?) being thrust in my face by his relatives in the vicinity and entreating me to put them all on my legs at once. The girl next to me was frantically trying to dry my seat and items that got wet, the mother was instructing me on how to apply the creams and the father put his flask well away and did not refill it. The card game was definitely over. The boy who knocked the flask onto me at this point looked as though he had lost the will to live. The initial panic had resulted in rapid ‘I’m so sorry I’m so sorry I’m so sorry’ with bowing and begging hand gestures, but now the despair had set in he just sat opposite me and stared hollowly into the distance, totally inconsolable. I repeated to him that he didn’t need to worry, that my legs were a lot better, that I’d done this myself many times before, it was an accident and to continue playing, but nothing worked. The whole carriage of Chinese people had seen the incident and the loss of face, particularly because I was a foreign girl, was extreme. In the end I managed to bring them all into conversation about travelling, studying, moon cakes (I was forced to eat one that he was bringing back to his family) and so on until the atmosphere became more relaxed, but the initial tension made me realise just how seriously losing face affected Chinese people, and that it wasn’t to be underestimated.

(http://voices.yahoo.com/the-concept-face-chinese-culture-566703.html, http://www.culture-4-travel.com/losing-face.html)

Mid-Autumn Festival http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mid-Autumn_Festival

The Mid-Autumn festival traditions seem to consist of buying loads of moon cakes and eating them with friends and family while you look at the moon. That is pretty much it. If it is possible then people will try to return to their families and be with them for the holiday, and if you come from far away you will tend to bring the specialty moon cakes from that area back with you for them to try.

We bought moon cakes and milk tea which we ate out on the roof of our hotel while watching the moon. I don’t really like moon cakes but talking to a lot of Chinese people they don’t actually either, and just do it for the sake of tradition! They are so stodgy and dry most of the time. Still- 入乡随俗(Chinese version of when in Rome)！Also, so many tacky marriages everywhere, so so many.

National Day- this is the celebration of the Communist Party formation on October 1^st 1949, flags appear all over the place and there is increased patriotism a bit like July 4^th in the US, but otherwise little impact. One street seller who we were buying breakfast off was criticised by a passer by for selling to foreigners on National day but it wasn’t very serious. The nationalism is mostly directed into anti-Japanese sentiment which we saw when we went for lunch at a Japanese restaurant that day and it was completely empty. The waitresses seemed really surprised to get any work at all that day! After that we then went to the September 18^th Museum which was pretty harrowing, very gruesome depictions of Japanese atrocities and so on. I found it most interesting watching the Chinese parents taking their children round the museum and listening to how they would explain the events to them. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Day_of_the_People's_Republic_of_China

Brief Outline of the trip (still unfinished as I haven't had time to write it all!) 

Beijing-Qinhuangdao 3 ½ hours with a seated ticket

Qinhuangdao is a seaside city which China apparently decided a few years ago was going to be the Chinese Miami and started making into a tourist destination as quickly as possible. It is definitely not Miami yet, but flashy hotels are starting to increase along the beach, even if you still have oil rigs and massive trading ships about a mile away from them.

Highlights- amazing weather, swimming in the sea and riding the motorboat, awesome Chinese barbeque with all the staff from the sailing team that Will’s friend Tom works for, who looked after us so well while we were there.

Qinhuangdao- Shenyang 5 hours with a seated ticket

Shenyang- population of 8 million people but not even worth more than half a page in our Chinese guidebook because for China, that hardly qualifies it as large (Beijing has 20 million).

Highlights- Celebrating Mid-Autumn Festival and National Day, Imperial Palace, Museum about the September 18^th invasion by Japan, going around asking a grumpy shop assistant how much lots of items in a shop were worth before realising that it was a 10kuai store.

Shenyang-Tonghua overnight 10 hours train hard sleeper ticket

Tonghua- there is nothing in Tonghua. We had some dumplings for breakfast and were stared at a bit.

Highlights…

Tonghua-Baihe 9 hours seated ticket

The slowest train ever, stopping at the most insignificant stations I have ever seen. One was literally just a house, with nothing around it for miles. No one was there, but still a half an hour break was clearly necessary. The scenery was stunning as we were going through the mountains and the leaves were changing colour, but once you have been watching said scenery for about 6 hours you end up a bit jaded about it and just want to get off the train. 

Tomorrow I am off to camp on an unrestored area of the Great Wall, and I'll let you know what that's like when I get back! 

Hover, Dancer of life

Summary:
I have done a month of class now and am about to leave for a trip to Qinhuangdao plus hopefully quite a few other places if we manage to crack the Chinese train network.
I'm now 21, thank you to anyone who wished me happy birthday!

October holiday and the Chinese train system
Last week we discovered that the first week of October holiday was suddenly a lot closer than we had realised and that if we weren't careful we would be stuck in Beijing for the entirety of it. We also realised that we need our passports for travelling within China and for sure on planes, which limited our modes of transport to train as Will doesn't have his back from the visa office yet. Big exciting plans were made of travelling to Mongolia or the Tibetan boarder and so on, in the relative comfort of 30hour sleeper trains. These dreams were dashed by the ticket offices in Wudaokou, and almost impossibility of trying to buy tickets anywhere as a westerner on one of the two major holidays in the Chinese calender hit us hard. We queued for hours from 730am outside the ticket office, only to be told at nine that on the day of tickets being released and being one of the first in the queue, that there were no tickets to any of our destinations except the odd hard seater (which is like being in the underground at rush hour but for 30hours and with worse hygiene). After a few attempts, we went up one last time determined to actually come away with a slip of paper and a destination on it regardless of what it was.
Do you have a ticket to here?

The ticket office...

meiyou (no we don't)
how about here?
meiyou.
here?
meiyou.
here??
meiyou.
Do you have any tickets anywhere??!
meiyou. (this is said to us at the front of a queue of Chinese people going down the street as far as the eye can see, and after all the people in front of us have been happily skipping away with little pink tickets in their hands)
I don't believe you. Qinhuangdao, do you have tickets to Qinghuangdao??
you. (yes)
Finally we have found a ticket going to a smaller city by the sea, about three hours away and leaving tomorrow morning. We are planning on getting another train, probably sleeper to some of the bigger places further north after a couple days, but first we'll hopefully hang out and go sailing for a bit as Will has a friend who teaches sailing there. Mission sort of accomplished.
The whole experience felt like everyone else knew something we didn't, and no one was going to tell us how to play the game. As if I was saying 'open up!' instead of 'open sesame', so nothing was happening and I was totally oblivious to why what I was saying was any different. I just really hope that when we get to the ticket office in Qinghuangdao (you can only buy tickets from the place you're in and a certain number of days in advance), we will be better at working the system, whatever it is. Either way, there is a really good group of seven of us going and that alone should be enough to make the week fun.

Chinese Children
I've started teaching English part time to earn some travel money which has been good fun so far. One of my students Alicia who is 10 has 2 hours of small group tutoring plus another hour and a half with me straight afterwards on a Saturday morning which seems loads to me. After class last week her mum came up to me and started talking to me about how it was too much time and wanted to make some changes, which I presumed meant she wanted me to teach her for less time as she wasn't coping with the workload. I was however, totally wrong. What she meant was that the week off English was too much time for Alicia and that she wanted to arrange some extra classes during the holiday to keep up Alicia's work. It's very hard core but it works, her English is great and she's been moved up a class already! This is a classic example of the Chinese Tiger Mum, totally ordinary in Beijing but a lot more rare in the UK! Have a look at the article written last year about the phenomenon: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704111504576059713528698754.html
Another aspect of the Tiger Mum stereotype which has impacted my life in its own special way is the music practice. All through the early evening in my block of flats there is a cacophony of various classical instruments (piano is the dominant one) echoing through the buildings and onto the street outside. There is a child in the flat above mine that plays the piano very devotedly, and has been practicing one particular piece repeatedly for a good few hours now. Unfortunately their level has not reached the stage where it is enjoyable for anyone to listen to, but that day will come if she keeps at it like they have been since we moved in!

Breaking out of the expat bubble
Really getting close to local Chinese people is something that even the most enthusiastic foreigner struggles with here. I know some people that live with Chinese people and some who are really incredible at Chinese, and yet it would be almost unheard of for a westerner or even another Asian ethnic group to be closest to only Chinese people. I have made quite a few Chinese friends since I arrived here and I can definitely see myself getting to know them well, but I don't think it will ever become the case that I rely on them equally or more than the other foreigners who I've come across. It feels like in Beijing you have an instant bond with every other nationality except for the Chinese, and the average Chinese person lumps us all together into the same Laowai/foreigner category too. It's hard to say who is enforcing the divide more because it is definitley something that both sides contribute to, and it is a shame that integration doesn't come more naturally. Talking to friends who are doing year abroads in Europe and South America, blending in with natives has come quite naturally but here if you are to manage that you really have to push for it and with that it is still something you are unlikely to succeed at as far as I can tell from what I've seen and the people I've spoken to. However, I am hopeful that I will continue to be close with the Chinese people I've already got to know through various different activities and I am going to keep making an effort to meet more Chinese people naturally. A couple days ago I decided to do some of my language work outside in the little park inside my flat compound. For the first twenty to thirty minutes I was totally ignored or given strange looks, but then a little boy ran up to me and said 'hello my name is Bobby', and all of a sudden there was a deluge of children trying to work out how to play fruit ninja on my Ipad, and a kind woman next to me teaching me how to eat the roasted lizi nuts she had brought with her in the Chinese way. I even got invited to go on a day trip with her when I get back in October! I don't know if I'll be able to repeat that kind of encounter but it's a sign that people aren't as uninterested in you as it seems most of the time.

An inspirational quote printed on my bike seat for you all to ponder:

Hover
Dancer of the life
Just like a travel in life Let soul travel
WiND DANCE

Rick with chicken

Highlights of this week

Double Tiananmen: My friend  Immy left to go back to England on Sunday (this was not a highlight), and as a goodbye for her on Saturday we went on a cycling trip round Beijing, going from Wudaokou to Tiananmen Square at midnight. Seeing the Forbidden City at night and cycling around the city on virtually empty roads was so incredible. Particularly amazing because I went in the morning with the Cambridge and Oxford classes to do it the touristy way and the comparison between the crowds of matching hatted tour groups and silence of the roads at night was really striking. It felt like we’d been allowed in a theme park after closing to do as we pleased!

Visitors:  We’ve been lucky enough to have a lot of visitors from home this week, most of them just finishing off a summer of traveling around China and heading back to university in the next couple days. It’s been really fun feeling like the local showing them around (which everyone was doing to me a couple weeks ago!) and catching up with them before we part ways again. Thank you Chloe, Alice, Josh, Becky and Sam for coming to say hi!

·         The university lakes: I found out this week that Peking University used to be the part of the palace gardens and that there is a huge park within the campus with lots of lakes and forest, sculpture gardens and a pagoda! The area is so beautiful, it has no real academic function it’s just for people to enjoy and it feels like you’re miles away from the crazy traffic of Beijing. In the winter the lake freezes and you can rent ice skates which I’m definitely going to do!

Things I did this week that I’m don’t really want to do again

• ·         The Peking Opera. Last night the Oxford and Cambridge group went to the Peking Opera as part of a university trip, and although I don’t regret going, honestly I do not feel the need to ever repeat the experience! I was warned by some more jaded foreigners about the style, and even told to bring earplugs, but I’m usually quite open to new types of music and able to see some merit in them. The impression which Peking Opera music left me with was that someone decided to give about fifty five year olds massive saucepans lids and told them to bang them together as fast as they could for as long as they could in no particular rhythm, then occasionally stop so that a troupe of babies could scream unintelligibly for about ten minutes at a time, while people in colourful costumes and disturbing face masks performed tricks with swords and jumped around the stage.  To give credit where it’s due, the dances and sword tricks were extremely impressive and clearly very sophisticated,( Jackie Chan actually started learning how to do stunts from working in the Peking Opera to show the kind of level they were performing) however it was difficult to appreciate that fully when my ears were in agony. It is clearly an art form too sophisticated for me to understand, and I will leave it to those more cultured than I to enjoy. sample a taster and see if you're up for it!  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mN9iXlfxpxI
• ·        Four hours of non-stop ancient Chinese into modern Chinese class. Unfortunately unlike the Opera I’m not really at liberty to decide not to do that again, and will have to return to that on Tuesday.

LANGUAGE PARTNERS

Last week I was given a language partner by the university and I’ve met up with her this week for dinner. We were each given a card with a number on it in a field on campus and all the Oxford and Cambridge students as well as an equivalent number of Chinese students ran around shouting out their numbers until they found each other. There are probably simpler ways of doing it but never mind. Mine is called Evelyn, she’s a marketing major and really sweet. When I first met her we were chatting in Chinese and she said in English ‘I can see that you have studied Chinese for two years as you speak it so well!’ which I felt really proud of until I introduced her to a couple of my classmates and she repeated the same phrase to them without them having actually used any Chinese yet. So that compliment was slightly devalued. We went out for dinner with her friend Liu Li, and he was really good conversation as well. I had felt a bit concerned that I wouldn’t have anything to talk about but it felt really natural and I learnt a lot about China and how their perspectives differ from mine.

While we were discussing Chinese TV and it’s western equivalent, I accidentally said that a lot of my boyfriends watch ‘Game of Thrones’ rather than male friends, which made them laugh as well as somehow managing to say that I had children instead of ‘when I was a child’. Not quite the impression I intended to give but I certainly won’t be making those mistakes again anytime soon, so I’m going to take it as part of my learning curve!

POLLUTION
The days after it rains are always best, the rain clears out the pollution from the air and you can see blue sky, breathe deeply and not have to cough all the time! There are lots of ways to measure the levels of pollution in Beijing at any given time, apps for the Iphone and a nice comparison between the American version and the Chinese one which is usually significantly lower. However my way of assessing has been whether you can see the mountain in the distance down the main road, on a good day it is very prominent and on a bad day you wouldn’t know that there even was a mountain. I didn’t know it existed until about a week into living here because the weather had been bad, but since it rained lately it’s in full view right now. I got quite a shock the first time I saw the mountain appear out of nowhere one day! Bad or good, I don’t really know what I can do to protect myself from the pollution. I have no choice but to smoke the however many cigarettes worth of chemicals whether I like it or not so I almost don’t care what the apps say.

QUICK CHINA QUIRKS AND INCIDENTS 

• ·         Given the events of the past few days, it feels pretty essential that I make some comment on the outburst of anti-Japanese feeling at the moment in Beijing and the protests. In the area where I live the impact hasn't been extreme but there are still tangible marks of agressive nationalism. Yesterday on my way to the underground there was a stall set up on selling t-shirts with 'boycott Japanese products' written on them which was proving very popular. Some estate agents had signs saying that there was a discount for anyone who was against the Japanese on the issue of the islands, and there are anti-Japanese slogans all over the place. My flatmate Anna went for dinner with her tutee's parents and the mother ended up being very heated, saying that the Japanese kill without hesistation and that they only sell China bad products while the Chinese only sell high quality ones, surprisingly irrational comments from a well educated Chinese doctor. I had been told about the strong anti-Japanese feeling but seeing instances like these still comes as a shock. If you're interested in the topic take a look at my flatmate Dani's blog which is a lot more cultured than mine! http://lettersfromalaowai.wordpress.com/
  
  

• ·         Continuing with the TV topic from last entry, Liu Li says that the government has very strict regulations on shows and where they can be shown as well as content matter which makes Chinese TV as terrible as it is. Even things like X-Factor style shows are limited by the government to only having a certain number of them across all the channels because they are afraid of the influence which a winner might hold over the people. It’s really interesting.
• I have an American friend who is going to work for CCTV (the Chinese equivalent of the BBC channels, I love the acronym!) to subtitle the Emmy awards by reading through their scripts and telling them whether the translation is correct and when there are any dirty jokes, references to homosexuality or politics. These jokes are then changed completely or edited out of the Chinese version.
• ·         Talking about the Olympics, a lot of the Chinese people think that their ceremonies were better but actually aren’t very proud of it because of the comparative amount of money which the Chinese spent on them. The people I’ve spoken to feel that the budget should have been less extravagant and the money spent elsewhere, and it is a point of tension with the government. One of my other Chinese friends Jessica didn’t think much of the music but loved Mr Bean, she said that Chinese people had always thought the British didn’t have a sense of humour but after she saw that she realised that they did! So there’s something which has been achieved!
• ·         My language partner Evelyn has a younger brother who her parents kept hidden for three years until the government found out, and they were ‘punished’. I’m not entirely sure what the penalty would be but it costs a fine of £10,000 or more to legally have a second child, and that would be bad enough for her family let alone any penalty they received for trying to conceal him.
• ·         When I said in complete ignorance said the Taiwanese word for Facebook instead of the Chinese one, I apologised and said that it was because my speaking teacher was Taiwanese not Chinese. I was corrected again and told that Taiwan was just a province of China like Yunnan or Guangzhou, so they were still just Chinese. I need to be careful not to let things like that slip off the tongue too often! 

Fun mistranslated menu items for your enjoyment, taken this time from only one restaurant:

Starch la pig face
custard package
Rick with Chicken
Fillet Cucumber
Spicy fried chicken gristle
Honey Burn Potato Son
Fragrant Sheeps excellent bone
Roast lentinus edodes
silkworm chrysalis
Spicy delicious trotter
Starch agaric

Classes begin

In Brief:

·         I’ve finished my first week in Peking University (So pleased about the three day weekend! Unfortunately two days are six hours non-stop starting at 8am. That part is not so great.)

·         I have been given a scooter which Anna and I share and are totally in love with.

·         I’ve joined the church for internationals in Beijing which great, everyone’s been very kind to me!

·         We have got cable TV working in our flat and I challenge you to find anything on it that isn’t indescribably weird or the most terribly acted thing you’ve ever seen. As a way to ‘learn Chinese’ though, it’s fairly enjoyable if not a bit mystifying.

Things I’m trying to get used to:

·         Beijing men’s crop tops. For old men here it is completely acceptable in any context to roll their top up and have their midriff on show to cool down. It is probably one of the least attractive things I’ve ever seen. The people who are most inclined to do it are usually the ones with the best pot bellies.

·         Not being able to flush toilet paper. The sewers here can’t cope apparently so everyone has a bin next to the toilet where you have to put your used toilet roll. It’s less annoying than I anticipated but still strange.

·         I know that I’ve already done a road rage rant but I am still struggling to adapt to the completely crazy road habits. I don’t know if I will ever get to the stage where when I’m cycling to class I don’t inwardly scream at the man in a massive cart who abruptly stops in the middle of the cycle path and start texting, or the people that decide to wheel a disabled old man backwards into the oncoming cycling traffic for me to dodge, or the man who drives up the cycle path the wrong way completely blocking the whole thing for no explicable reason. I can definitely see myself adapting to using my horn a lot though. My patience is wearing thin.

Things I’m really enjoying

• ·         The underground and buses as well as being cheap have little Chinese TVs to watch while you’re riding them. The content is hit and miss, sometimes it’s just pictures of traffic, once it was advertising a restaurant where you sit on toilets and eat from miniature urinals, my personal favourite was the Chinese version of total wipeout while I was on the bus a few days ago. Still, it’s a nice touch. On the central line actually they even have lighted adverts in the underground tunnel itself that you can watch through the windows instead of just the pitch black that I’m used to. I saw a creepy cartoon on it last night, as with many of the Chinese commercials I’m still clueless as to what it was advertising.
•  The Peking University Canteen. You top up your university card and can eat anywhere you like. The food is so cheap it even puts what I’ve had locally to shame. I ate a massive three dish meal with rice today for TEN PENCE. That is ridiculous value for money.

CLASSES

Classes are with my class from Cambridge so in many ways that feels like one of the most familiar things here, in other ways it’s very different. We start at 8am on the dot, if you are more than five minutes late then you lose half a mark off your final grade and if you don’t turn up to one then you lose a full mark. If you miss more than a quarter of the classes then you automatically fail the course. I’m fine with turning up to things, but I tended to slip in late most of the time, admittedly more than five minutes late on many occasions. So I will really have to sort out those habits, otherwise the end grade might not be pretty. The classes are all in Chinese, you cannot make the teachers speak a word of English to you even though they are probably all fluent. Our first 8am lecture was on the history of the types of literature written in different dynasties and what distigushes one form of poetry from another. I think that was the hardest one we’ve had so far, and I came out definitely not knowing most of what she said. It’s a learning curve.  

TELEVISON

 I went to a talk yesterday that said Television is the most tightly controlled media in China. I don’t know what messages they are trying to send out to the people with these programmes but they all seem to be mind-rotting and hyperactive. Think of the most drug induced children’s shows (In my head I am thinking of In the Midnight Garden), on E numbers. Something as strange as that is almost at the level of the average television show here.  Currently Dani is watching a man with horns on his head be lifted into the air suspended by ropes while he screams in feigned agony for some reason and fairly cheesy Chinese pop music plays softly in the background while an audience watches. We are totally lost. He is now miming along to a peaceful song.

‘Beijing youth’ is what we have taken to be the equivalent of ‘Friends’ in the west, however it is truly awful. There are three guys and three girls from what we have figured out, and I think they pair off in the end from an advert we saw where they were all together on a snowy mountain with the women in wedding dresses, but despite seeing several episodes now, we haven’t really figured out much else. The acting is pantomime level at best, every basic emotion is exaggerated and expressed far too clearly, yet the content matter is meant to be serious. We’re planning on getting addicted and if we manage I will let you know what it’s really about. 

Adverts here are exhausting to watch because they are so hyperactive. They jump from one scene to another so fast and everything contains as many flashing lights, animations and sound effects as possible. They also show the same advert up to four times in the same advert break until you are familiar with every frame of the annoying but attractive Chinese girl licks the remnants of a yogurt drink off her lips seductively. By the time the show starts again you are relieved just for the pause in scenario jumps all over the place.

CHURCH

I’ve been going to the nearest Beijing Christian International Fellowship (bcif) church to where I live for the past couple weeks now, and it’s been great. Religion in China is a tricky subject, technically you’re not able to talk to anyone under the age of 18 about religion of any kind, and the Chinese churches have to be in authorized government buildings run mainly by members of the party, all of whom have to officially be atheist so you can infer the implications on the teaching in these. I’ve heard that they are a lot better than they have been in previous decades but that the general focus is on good works for your nation rather than faith in God, and it is used as a tool for keeping the people loyal to the government. This isn’t what I go to but  I do want to go along at some point to a nearby one and find out more about it first hand, it would be good for my Chinese as well. The majority of Christians in China aren’t actually members of this church but meet in what is called the ‘underground church’ which is illegally run in people’s homes. If I tried to go to one of them I’d just draw attention to them and cause them harm, so I won’t be doing that. The one I go to is a foreigners only church, which means it doesn’t have to be run by the government, you have to show a foreign passport to be allowed entry, and Chinese people can’t come. It’s really strange, I’m glad that I can go and worship freely but it doesn’t feel right that I am able to be above the law while the rest of China has to abide by these regulations.

The international community there is so good though, everyone is really welcoming and I’ve met so many great people so far, with lots of interesting backgrounds. Americans are definitely the dominant nationality but there are plenty other countries represented as well and it’s an incredible cultural exchange. That is true not just of church but the Wudaokou area in general, there’s a strange bond you feel with people from anywhere in the world other than China while you’re in Beijing, a kind of ‘us vs. them’ as you try and adapt to the majority and new culture. That affinity allows you to interact with a lot of different occupations, ages and backgrounds in a really unique way which I love. Getting to know other internationals is very easy, and the massive area I’m in already feels like a world village of sorts.

I tried uploading photos but the internet is just so slow, so I’ll do it next time! Sorry for writing so much, and thank you for reading!