(Pics: Peach Blossoms at Hangzhou and Naiyi and I at a snazzy gate at QiBao)
3/14/10 9:04 PM
Quick list of miscellany (to be expanded on in future installments):
Warheads have nothing on the dried fruits of China.
Buddhist temple. Absolutely beautiful.
Throwing money and candy.
Tea.
I think I'm watching a Buddhist Monk power walk.
I actually like spicy foods. Go figure.
We had jasmine root powder soup stuff for "lunch," which everyone agreed was a little too glue-like. It was a translucent gray, and tasted faintly of mint, but not enough to make it "appetizing" rather than just "edible."
Little Chinese children are incredibly cute. Word for children translates literally to "little friend."
Squat toilets are not user friendly.
That's it. I guarantee I'm coming back here.
This just in: Stomach and bowels reach peace agreement
The terms are as yet unclear. The spokesmen for both parties declined to comment, although significant improvements in bowel movements are already apparent. Farts continue to be smelly, but are infrequent and easily attributable to the environment or "that funny looking guy over there." More at 11.
Can't pin down what I like about the place. Maybe it's just all so new, that I can't help but love it. But it definitely goes much deeper than that.
The lights just went out in our apartment. We think it's a fuse.
Naiyi can fall asleep anywhere. I'm incredibly jealous.
There was a bunch of fish at a pond today at Hangzhou, and we were feeding them bits of bread. That was awesome enough, by itself, but then we started to see really big fish get closer to the surface. Ascending from the deep. Everyone started to throw more and more bits of bread and popcorn and corn (corn on the cob is sort of everywhere. People eat it on sticks, bought from street vendors. That and sweet potatoes are sold, to be eaten like corndogs and stuff [that's what's traditionally eaten at racetracks and things, right? Corndogs work on a stick, right?]. So people were throwing corn kernels, too) at the big fish, more and more, trying to get it to surface to get at the food. And then I thought, "big fish want big bread" (Neanderthalian logic = best logic), so I threw in a big chunk of bread. And it slowly but surely popped up and gulped the thing down. Oh the joy! And I got the whole thing on video.
Umbrella coming in handy. Despite the number of umbrella'd pedestrians, there is often one person who forgets theirs, and mine was basically built for two.
It's always nice to know my chopstick skills will sort of impress people. Sometimes when I'm nervous and tired, I'll fumble the first chunk of tofu or something, but for the most part I'm a pro. And especially for someone who hasn't used them for two consecutive meals before arriving in China, I think I'm doing okay. I can eat hard boiled eggs with chopsticks. Pick 'er up, take a bite (while holding onto it), chew, hang about, (still holding hard boiled egg), take another bite, chill out, and finish it off. At least I'm impressed by that.
The best compliment I've ever gotten was from David Fan (get well soon?!) as we ate together at (our school's mildly wimpy by comparison to the fireworks-drenched celebrations here) Chinese New Year: "you're pretty good with chopsticks – for a white guy."
Naiyi listened to:
Linkin Park
Britney Spears (Hit Me)
MJ (Beat It)
Korean something
"Burning"
"Show you the shape of my heart" by I Just Don't Know Anymore
Where there's more people, there's more stuff. Happiness, suffering, silliness, consumption, love, corruption, peace. There's just more here.
Saturday was my lucky day. At Qibao (which I need to talk more about) there was this pot in the middle of a little pond thing, and if you could throw a coin into the pot (it was pretty small and in the middle of the pond, and the mouth of the pot was really small), it would be your lucky day. And so I flipped coins at it, rather than throwing them, because I thought it would be more aerodynamic and accurate. So the first one I undershot a bunch, cuz I was just in the process of calibrating and everything. Then I made one much closer, but not quite there. And then I switched to the 10-cent coin, rather than the 1 yuan coin, so it was lighter and smaller, so it flew a lot straighter (even though there was a lot of wind, which was compensated for by my flicking strategy), and I nailed it on the third try. It was ridonculous.
"adorkable" has been used repeatedly to describe the students at the school.
We're now regulars at both the Baozi shop and the DVD store. The Baozi lady doesn't need us to place our orders any more. I want to learn how to say "the usual" in Mandarin. And the DVD lady said "see you tomorrow" on Thursday. When it turned out we didn't have time to drop by the store, but walked by the store anyway, she followed us out into the street. Everyone got a little scared for a bit. But I think it might get us a better price on DVDs, so it was worth it.
I found a place that sells scallion pancakes, and they're even better than mine (believe it or not). They have sesame seeds on them, and I think are cooked with more sesame oil than I use.
People are both shy and laid back – comfortable. People will hug each other, lean on each other, take one another's hand, and lock arms in the street, casually and comfortably. It's a nice, warm environment. I sort of feel bad that I grew up trained to flinch and get awkward when someone puts their arm around me or their hand on my knee. Naiyi is asleep on my shoulder as I scribble this down.
Food notes:
I realized today that I only use one hand to eat. There's a good feel to it, but I'm not sure of the full implications.
Food is very community-based, by design. We each have small personal bowls that need to be constantly refilled, with many dishes in the middle that you just keep reaching for. Rarely do they get passed around, because of the reach afforded by the chopsticks. At restaurants and things there are big rotating things in the middle, so what is available for you to eat is pretty dependent on what other people want to eat, or vice versa.
We went out to eat a place called "little sheep" (Xiao de Yang; http://www.littlesheephotpot.com/), which is called "hot pot" in English, but there's a better phrase in mandarin, which I'm forgetting. Basically there's a big pot of boiling water in the middle of the table, with a bunch of flavoring things boiling in there, and they give you raw meats and dumplings and tofu and shrimp and things to put in there and cook yourself. And so people toss in thin slices of beef for everyone, and we all chill and wait around as they cook in there, and then we go and fish for the pieces of meat and give each other meat when we find a good stash and things. Small cups of tea also need refilling and passing around.
The closest we, as Americans, typically get to this kind of helping-everyone-eat culture is serving one another dishes, but this is short lived and essentially ends by the time the meal has started.
Interesting foods consumed recently:
- Cow veins (at first mistaken for jellyfish by Naiyi)
- Cow ventricles (That's the word, right? They just called it "a part of cow lungs," but it looked like what I imagine ventricles to look like)
(There may or may not exist a video of me eating a silkworm.)
Beer is okay, but not that big of a deal?
You also lose track of how much you've eaten pretty quickly, and you certainly can't keep track of how much everyone else has eaten. The bowls are small, and you don't "fill up" a bowl per se, because it mostly has rice in it, and you might toss in a piece of meat or fish or veggies on there, and take a bite, and then go back and get more food, and toss it on there, and take another bite. There is no fill-the-plate, finish-the-plate system like in America.
It's also common for people to just give each other bits of food. "Here, have some beef." They can just pop a bit onto your bowl. They're not in huge, meal-sized cuts, so people can give you a little of this, a little of that. At home, where people basically load what they want to eat onto their plates at the beginning of the meal, and finish it, this basically can't be achieved. The food on someone's plate represents their own approximation of how much they want to eat for the meal. Tossing another slice of pizza or another chicken bone or another hunk of meatloaf is like asking them to eat another full meal, and clearly throws off their food consumption comfort level.
The lack of a passive but prominent message of "I'm not that hungry" – little food on the plate – does lead to something I call "fei chung bao le" – extreme fullness. I'm frequently given more food than I would otherwise be willing to handle. I'm compensating for this by working on getting my appetite up to size, by getting my host family used to the idea that I can't eat as much as a horse – a feat Baba seems able to routinely perform – and by exercising at Chinese levels rather than American levels, as explored earlier.
End of food notes.
Yes, there are IKEAS here. Gigundo.
Pens are generally better here. Many more free-flow ink pens. America seems to be the land of cheap ballpoints and clicky pens. Better pens for the finer details of the characters, I think.
Also, a solid 1/3-1/2 of the students are glasses'd. I'd like to attribute this mostly to the diminutiveness (that is a word! Cool!) of the characters in books and things, and the detail you need to be able to see in order to get the meanings behind them.
Guitar store dude interlude:
I just went to a guitar store, where there was this crazy awesome salesman dude, and we talked for maybe 2 or 3 hours or so. Man that dude was awesome.
I went to the store to test if the guitar store leniency held true in China. Ya know, how you can walk into a guitar store and can just sit there and play, and not be expected to buy anything. So I just sat down and started playing guitar, and this guy came over and started listening or something. I thought he was just there to say "you gonna buy that?" but we struck up a conversation. First we talked about what music was like in China, which was great. He likes a lot of different music, that wouldn't really be listened to by one person in America. It seems like the listening public only has sporadic, limited access to music in general, so he winds up liking Coldplay, H.I.M. (His Infernal Majesty, which is some death metal stuff, which sounds not so bad when he plays it, acoustic), and new Green Day, among other things.
He says he studied Music Theory in college, and whenever he played stuff he'd written, it's very apparent. He'd mention something offhand about the suspended fourth or a key change, and I'd nod and smile. We both agreed later that Music Theory wasn't all that great, and I liked the way he put it: "It is beside you, not in front of you."
But anyway, he talked about the economy really screwing over bands that want to play. That a lot of people can play really well, but can't get their band to the point of making money. So they take a job, or maybe two, and soon playing music just becomes something they do in their free time, not something they can do to make a living. And very few people can afford to buy a ticket, and so there aren't many clubs, and it's all essentially a vicious cycle, fed into by multiple sources. So he said he'd sung in a band in college, but they couldn't keep it together.
He speaks really good English, because he says he likes singing in English much better than in Chinese. It's because the Mandarin language is made up of a bunch of small words and syllables, so no matter what the rhythm essentially feels the same to him. English has words of different lengths and syllable counts, and it makes for better singing.
I taught him some of the music I've been writing, and he liked it very much. He asked if I tapped any of my music, so I played him some things. (Dad and Guinness [cuz those are the only people who can recognize any of the stuff I wrote]: It's that lick after the opening of Aslan = Roosevelt that sort of goes down and then comes back up. Dad: it's the section that you think should start the song, rather than the intro that we have now.) As I already said, he knows music theory pretty well, and he started analyzing it, and it irked him that I sort of defeated and went past a cadence, (a logical, satisfying musical ending), and so he turned my taps into arpeggiated chords, and analyzed from there. He found a nice different sound to the same musical notes, and gave it a different ending. It was a lot of fun hearing my normally jagged music played so… normally. I want to "give" him those chords, as it were, to let him do with them what he will. I think he'll write something good with them, and while they technically come from something I wrote, even through the simple tweaks he made, they're thoroughly his own. But anyway.
He told me about a club that has open mic nights, and I want to find a way to make it down there, but it might be pretty hard to do. There's also a jazz band from the Philippines that plays there, so I really want to see them play.
Forgive me if my expoundings sound irrelevant to you, but my conversation with him gave me a ton of insight it the lives of many of the people around me. What it is like to live in Shanghai, as told through guitar.
At the beginning he asked me if I liked it in Shanghai, and I said I liked it a lot. It's always interesting, I said. But he said it could really wear down on someone, and I can definitely see how that happens. What I thought was really interesting was that when I asked if he'd like to go to America, as his English is so good and he liked a lot of the music from America, and the economy was better, so he might start a band. But he said it was essentially the same everywhere. I know I sound really impressionable right now, basically just talking about this guy as if he knew the absolute truth. That his worldview is unique, in that it is True. Which I know it isn't, and isn't why I'm getting all of this down. It's just that we connected really well, and had a very honest and often sad discussion about what it was like to live in China, in America, and in general.
We could relate on a lot of musical levels, as well. We both hate the pop music from our countries, and he really didn't like the traditional music, which I thought was interesting. There were some Pipas and some Erhu and some big ol' Guzheng (wiki all of these, if you're interested. Very cool stuff. And some other instruments, like Dizi and Xiao and stuff, but I don't really care about the wind instruments. Stringed stuff is where its at. [Aren't I cultured? I know the names of Chinese traditional instruments!] Also, I don't know if I should call multiple Pipa "Pipa" or "Pipas," but I'm not sure how to go about finding that, and I'm not sure I care enough) at the store, but he really despised them. I forget exactly how he phrased it, but the traditional music was all too straight-laced and unoriginal. And the store he worked in really sucked. He was the only one who knew anything about guitars, and everyone else was wearing full suits and playing shoddy (and somehow thoroughly pretentious) Bach on the Steinways. They clearly weren't musicians, but businessmen who sold instruments. They would always greet the customers, but when they inevitably wanted to play some guitars, they would turn to him to consult with, and ignore him afterwards. He seemed really stuck somewhere he didn't want to be. Which I can relate to. But I'm just stuck in high school, while he's stuck in China.
I played a bit of a song for him, and he really liked it. (Actually, it was part of that song I wrote for the Hamlet project, Ms. Brown.) So he wanted to learn how to play it, but it's very hard, and I don't even really know how I go about playing it. (If you want a very crappy recording of the song, you can email me at ifeedgremlins@yahoo.com. The part is from 1:16-1:34, those of you who already have it.) So we spent the better part of an hour playing and picking apart that one bit, and he wound up getting really quite good at it towards the end. I was stunned to hear him play my music.
End of Guitar store dude interlude.
I know I've been doing a lot more general discussion than I have been detailing where I've gone, but there's a sort of loose routine to the days now, and I don't think of listing things I've done as terribly exciting. But the things I'm thinking, as a result of being in Shanghai. Man. I love me some thinking.
I'm beginning to wonder how much flexibility there is in the Mandarin language. Very little, I think. If I wanted to say "What's up?", I could say it in any number of ways. "'tsup?" "'zzup?" "wazza?" "wuz shakin'?" etc. But in Mandarin, you have "ni hao," and that seems to be it. If you wanted to put a different inflection or emphasis or take away a syllable here or there, you literally have a different meaning. Just some of the few words that I know that are similar to "ni," which means "you,": "na" = "that," "nin = "you (polite)," "niu" = "beef (I think)," etc (more examples here and here http://www.yellowbridge.com/chinese/wordsearch.php?searchMode=P&word=ni&search=Search http://www.yellowbridge.com/chinese/wordsearch.php?searchMode=P&word=hao&search=Search&dialect=M&select=whole .) If you try to screw with it at all, the definition goes out the window.
Okay, just cuz you asked so nicely: Friday was ping-pong practice, Saturday we went to Qibao (google it) and the Shanghai Sports Park (that only might be the name, so I'm not sure if you can google it, even if you wanted to) where we rode a 5 person car-bike and took paddle-boats out onto a lake, Sunday was (I really should've done a 'complex list' format, eh? Semicolons and whatnot?) an awesome day trip to Hangzhou, were we saw silk things and really good tea and West Lake, which was beautiful, and then we went to a too-amazing-for-words Lingyin Buddhist Temple (If you google anything, let this be it), and came back in time for dinner.
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