Year of the Dragon

Scorpions in the snack market near Wangfujing, waiting to get...

Mon, 21 May 2012 03:30:38 -0400

[Flash 10 is required to watch video.]

Scorpions in the snack market near Wangfujing, waiting to get cooked. Nom nom nom.

Qingdao, a photo essay

Tue, 08 May 2012 01:32:09 -0400

For the Worker’s Day holiday of May 1st, I took my first trip outside of Beijing with a friend from college. We went to the Eastern port city of Qingdao, a quaint little beach town of 9 million (that’s right, the size of New York City. Welcome to China.)

Qingdao is famous for being the home of Tsingtao beer, enjoyed in Chinese restaurants the world over and proudly identified on every bottle as “China’s well-known trademark”. The town was a German concession in the early 1900s, which is how it came to be the beer capital of China, to boast both a cathedral and a protestant church as its main attractions, and to have its nicest neighborhoods filled with very European architecture.

I had a nice time in the few days that we were there, but I can’t say it’s a place I’d visit again. Despite the fact that it was not yet warm enough for beach weather, every public space and tourist attraction was so crowded that it was necessary to use the elbows out crowd-swimming technique I’ve perfected in Beijing subways just to get around. But in general the city mostly felt like a generic resort town, not Chinese enough and not German enough to really warrant a visit.

Anyway, here’s a recount of the weekend, in the form of an unorganized collection of pictures of things that caught my attention, and the attached stories that you may or my not find totally inane.

Here’s the train station on the way there. Chinese people all get the same days off, so traveling during holidays can be a nightmare. On the way back, our only choices for tickets were first class on the bullet train or a twelve hour standing ticket. We went ahead and splurged on the first class (a first, for me). I’m all for authentic experiences, but a 12 hour standing ticket seemed like a bit much.

On our first day, we took the Lonely Planet’s recommendation for a less crowded beach that was supposed to be not too far away and ended up at Huang Dao after a 2 hour ordeal of bus changes, ferries, and several miles of disoriented walking. (Of course, I later found out that the new bridge connecting Qingdao and Huangdao is the longest in the world, at 43km. I missed that entirely). The beach was deserted by Qingdao standards, and it was wide stretch with soft, golden sand.

But the island itself was very strange. There were huge skyscrapers being built by the dozen in every direction. The city is clearly in the middle of an enormous construction boom, yet everything, even the complexes that appeared to be finished, was empty. I counted as many as 15 construction cranes in my field of vision at one time. Where so many people, with so much money, would show up from to suddenly come buy luxury condos in this corner of China I have no idea. I won’t speculate as to the economics behind that, but it doesn’t look good to me.

This was one of the entertainment options at the HuangDao beach. It’s a sort of human hamster wheel in which people pay to induce nausea. I thought it was very funny/ unappealing.

The restaurants at HuangDao, which were practically deserted, did not have a menu but a huge colection of red buckets with live and sort-of-live seafood of all kinds, many of which I never even imagined existing. It makes food-ordering an intimidating experience, but still less scary than a Chinese-only menu.

These were the weirdest creatures they had for sale. They are 6-10 inches long, have no eyes, no visible organs of any sort, and just wiggle around opening and closing the little hole on their tip and looking gross. They were so strange I wish I had made a video. I have lots of opinions about what they actually look like, but needless to say, I was too much of a wimp to try eating one of them. If you know what this is, please leave a comment!

This is our lunch, trying to escape from its plate.

Our very delicious lunch, after having failed to escape.

This is just a picture of the ocean mist rolling on to the beach that I like to imagine as a government official suspiciously eyeing what appears to be a four-member family.

After dark, the streets of Qingdao come alive with clandestine clothes markets selling knockoffs for extremely cheap prices. I’ve never seen this in Beijing. Here is my friend buying US$5 perfect looking “Nike” sneakers from a very nice man.

“Long live Chairman Mao”. A Cultural Revolution slogan, long forgotten under air conditioning and the needs of modern living.

Guns are illegal in China, but apparently charging people to take pictures of hilarious hilarious mock executions is not. This, terrifying to me, got a huge crowd of people taking pictures and waiting for their turn.

The Tsingtao beer museum. As unbiased and moderate as anything in China, it included the following description of the history of the brewery right as you walked in:

History is centuries-old, but Tsingtao Beer will be fresh forever. May the glowing dawn of the new century always shine on vigorous Tsingtao Beer. The Century-old Tsingtao will lead the spirit of the times, devote to our society being keen on reform and create new replendence in the 21 century. The history let us witness the past and also promise us a great future.

Beer Street, the stretch in front of the Tsingtao Museum, is billed as the fun bar strip of this beer-drinking town. I got very excited when I saw these signs outside, imagining all of the fun I would have at the Chinese interpretation of German pubs. Turns out they were just Chinese restaurants exactly like all other Chinese restaurants, with good, fresh Chinese seafood, and beer on tap. Big letdown.

From the historical ads portion of the beer museum.

This is what the beach looked like on Monday, even though it was still way too cold for a beach day. Don’t want to imagine what it looks like during actual beach weather.

At LaoShan, the sacred mountain. Would have enjoyed this a lot more if moving through the crowds hadn’t felt like the process of being born, as aptly described by my travel companion.

A Daoist monk in a sacred mountain watching the door to the temple and reading on his Kindle.

If you’re feeling a bit lazy when it comes to hiking up the mountain, there are always options. 60 Kuai (about $10) will get you there!

"The State Administration of Radio and Television omitted parts of the steamy nude portrait scene..."

Thu, 03 May 2012 00:41:43 -0400

“The State Administration of Radio and Television omitted parts of the steamy nude portrait scene where Kate Winslet flashes her rack, claiming that 3-D boobs may be too much for the average Zhou (Ed. note: pronounced “Joe”) to handle. In an official statement, SARFT says that “considering the vivid 3-D effects, we fear that viewers may reach out their hands for a touch and thus interrupt other people’s viewing.””

- City Weekend magazine, on Chinese censorship of Titanic 3D. Sometimes, real life in China is enough. Who needs comedy?

“Prohibition hop,” my single favorite piece of...

Thu, 26 Apr 2012 05:31:37 -0400

“Prohibition hop,” my single favorite piece of Chinglish so far, spotted in the elevator of a high end office building near Shuangjing station. May mean “Don’t jump,” but I like to think of it as a swell roaring 20s dance move. Just look how happy that guy looks!

Into the Wild

Sun, 22 Apr 2012 11:21:41 -0400

Into the Wild:

Check out Mariana’s account of our visit to the Great Wall. Her blog reads like poetry, so you will immediately wonder why you bother reading mine at all. Please don’t leave permanently.

Here are my pictures of the same trip.

Borrowed stories

Sun, 22 Apr 2012 04:32:00 -0400

This week, I went to meet a college friend that is now doing a master’s degree at Renmin University (Literally: the People’s University). Renmin was founded by the Communist Party at around the same time that they founded the People’s Republic, and unlike the more famous Tsinghua and Beida, it’s not yet very international, and packs a lot more students in a relatively small campus. This, of course, results in an endless stream of wonderful stories that have turned her into one of my favorite sources of information about the secret lives of Chinese people (okay, maybe not so secret sometimes).

It was raining when I came out of the subway station, so I was unlucky enough to miss one of the more typical sights right outside campus: a group of women carrying their young babies, seemingly just sitting on the side of the street. To the untrained eye (mine) they may look like a bunch of moms getting some not-so-fresh air for their kids outside, but turns out they are the city’s fake student ID and diploma vending mafia. A Chinese law protects women that have children under one year from being imprisoned for petty crimes, and as you can imagine, this creates all the wrong incentives, as well as a powerful young mom cosa nostra.

These “guerrilla moms,” as they are despectively called, have kid after kid (unregistered, as having more than one is also illegal) so they can keep the business going, unpunished. The IDs are sometimes bought by people that want to get train discounts and such. The diplomas, which go for about USD$300, are reputedly perfect-looking and probably used for darker purposes. The children are born in violation of the one-child policy and thus unable to obtain a registration or “hukou” so they don’t have access to basic government services including the public education system.

Other common sights around campus make for what my friend calls the “most interesting commute in the world.” As she crosses a small green on her way to class, she’ll see the typical early morning Chinese activities that include sword-waving, dancing in perfectly coordinated groups, and tai chi. But she also gets another surreal treat: students, standing on their room with their books, loudly screaming English sentences. “HIS DOG’S NAME IS SPOT!” This is apparently a radical English learning technique developed by one of the professors, and since the kids packed eight to a room in the dorms, it’s no wonder they have to go outside for their screaming sessions.

And speaking of dorms, that’s its own set of interesting stories. I have come to appreciate more and more the luxuries we have going to school in the States, and the incredibly silly things that we all whined about. Space is really at a premium, which is why walking around at night on weekends will likely interrupt several young couples’ make out sessions. Since the dorms don’t have desks, a seat in one of the libraries is hot real estate, and almost impossible to find on any regular week day.

Additionally, students get charged for everything. They have to use their student ID to take showers, which I imagine tend to be short since they get charged by the amount of water they use, as well as the amount of data when they go online, and the electricity that is consumed in their dorm (which is why few AC units often stay off through the hot summers). None of this is particularly expensive, but Big Brother knows how long you shower.

Bureaucracy can move at a glacial pace, especially for the international students, since all sorts of extra requirements, and probably bribes, are required to get anything done. My poor friend did not get her official card for about three weeks, so she could no turn on the water for a shower. She went to a nearby gym the whole time. The good thing is that bribes can sometimes work to their advantage, like the time she was let into her room despite getting there after curfew (11 pm, I think) because she regularly buys the security guards cigarettes and she is now a favorite.

My friend has learned the hard way that you do not write an essay critical of Mao in a Chinese college class, and that studying law as an undergrad is a bad idea (unless you really like memorizing the entire civil code word by word). She also says that the weekly Friday night “English Corner” gathering around the central fountain is a great way to meet hundreds of Chinese people really eager to talk to you, but highly recommends not publicly sharing your phone number for anyone to take unless you want to get phone calls for months of people that want to be friends.

The housewife in me

Sun, 15 Apr 2012 08:56:00 -0400

For the first time in my life, I have almost unlimited amounts of unstructured time and a total lack of direct social pressure. Before, there was always school or a job, and even during breaks or as a kid, a family around me to dictate what I was supposed to do: when to get up, what to wear to the dinner table, how often to shower and brush my teeth. I am now as far away from anything I’ve known as is geographically possible. I am living a strange sort of consequence-free life, where other than occasionally calling home to confirm that I am still alive, there is absolutely nothing I HAVE to do. I could probably spend the next ten months watching pirated DVDs of I Love Lucy and not only would no one know, I could get on a plane, head back to my reality, and try to get a real grown up job lying about all the meaningful and life-altering experiences I had during my post-grad fellowship.

I was afraid of what that could mean in real life for me. Would I devolve into a far from home couch potato, sleeping until noon every day and looking at cat videos on YouTube? Would I sleep on my own pile of unwashed laundry and only interact with the McDonald’s delivery guy? (Yes guys, McDonalds delivers here.) Would I go to bars every night to get drunk and get hit on by sketchy expats from every European country? This little pressure could reveal some ugly sides of me, but as it turns out, they haven’t been so bad, just a little… how would you call it, lame?

Where exactly my project is going to end up is still in its defining stages, as I’ve run into frustrating dead ends and my tendency to be constantly filled with self-doubt and indecisiveness has not gotten any better with a college diploma. However, being on my own for the first time is teaching me things I didn’t know about myself, the most surprising of which is my desperate need for domesticity. It’s really scary, actually, it seems that I have been a dormant homemaker all these years.

I should have suspected it on my trip to Ikea, during the first week in my new place. Having never been particularly fond of buying things, I don’t think I had ever felt the uncontrolled agony of desire that the maze-like Swedish store provoked in me. The fact that everything was so cheap only made it worse, as I could theoretically buy anything I wanted. I found myself having brutal internal battles, trying to convince my brain that no, I did not need that beautiful spice rack because I didn’t even own any spices yet (in fact, I owned only one suitcase’s worth of clothing). In the end, I won a few hard battles, but lost more than I like to think about. I got there meaning to buy only some sheets, but left with candles, curtains for my room and many daydreams about my future kitchen’s color scheme.

The two happiest purchases I’ve made since February were a coffee maker and a new mop. The coffee maker is easily predictable, of course Colombian me would miss coffee enough to finally find an affordable machine on Amazon.cn. The mop is a different story. Mops seem to be everywhere in China, there’s even a blog dedicated to their ubiquitous presence. We just had a normal one at home, that was painfully difficult to clean and a little icky, so I finally decided to invest a new fancy sponge contraption that squeezes out the water with a little lever. My roommate Jess and I have been binding over our newfound joy in mopping and marveling at our sparking clean floors ever since. We could probably star in a 1950s Pinesol commercial.

In the weeks since I started classes I’ve developed a little bit of a routine. Most days I come home and I cook some lunch for myself. Despite the fact that I could eat out for an almost ridiculous low price, I’ve come to look forward to stopping by the market, staring unnecessarily long at all the unknown vegetables and settling for something safe, then getting home and flipping through iTunes looking for an NPR podcast to listen to while I cook. My meals have gotten a little more adventurous as my trust in my culinary abilities increases, and this week I decided it was time to be really bold and subject other people to eating my food.

I am admittedly a rookie in this dinner party thing, so I invited the easiest possible group to please: a mix of my various Chinese friends, from random Starbucks acquaintances to email pen-pals. I figured if anything went horribly wrong, they would generously attribute my failings as a cook and a host to cultural differences or the bland and unsatisfying nature of Western food. I picked a crowd-pleaser menu that they probably hadn’t tried before, and I asked them to get here around 7 o’clock for chili and quesadillas.

Despite the fact that I started scrubbing, cutting and prepping as soon as I got home from school at 1pm, I still somehow managed to not be finished cooking by the time people showed up. The kitchen looked as if a nuclear explosion had just taken place in there (I’m sure my sister Mariana will happily share horror stories about what happens when I attempt to cook… I am famous for ignoring the wash-as-you-go method, and all methods in general, really). I forgot that I didn’t have enough bowls for everyone, so I had to do it college tailgate-style and serve everyone chili in paper cups. I couldn’t find sour cream so I served my nachos with whipping cream. But despite these and other failings, I still had the pleasure of watching a group of Chinese people devour quesadillas for the first time (using chopsticks, naturally) and declare that they “look like Chinese food” (a very high compliment indeed) and that they were “derricious.” They even complimented my vanilla-scented Ikea candles. It was really, really fun.

I look forward to doing it again. Next time, I might even take some real pictures of the food I made, and be one of those blogger people that post pictures of their food. (I did say that this much time could reveal pretty scary sides of me). For now, enjoy some crappy cellphone photos:

Mmmm black mushroom quesadillas with chopsticks.

Early morning walk near Yonghegong. Thank god for cellphone...

Thu, 12 Apr 2012 12:37:22 -0400

Early morning walk near Yonghegong. Thank god for cellphone cameras.

[Click on the pictures for captions and to enlarge them] Last...

Fri, 06 Apr 2012 08:36:09 -0400

A restored portion. Lots of stairs.

Dystopian village by the Great Wall

Only one half restored. Picture perfect.

Don't juuuuump!!!!

[Click on the pictures for captions and to enlarge them]

Last Wednesday was a holiday, so my new BFF Mariana and I headed for a little-known portion of the Great Wall about three hours out of Beijing via public transportation. We spent a few hours walking on (and climbing) a mostly unrestored portion of the Wall, and had a picnic on top of a tower in ruins. It was sunny, windy, sandy and wonderful in one of those “my-life-feels-like-a-movie” kind of ways. We had it all to ourselves and only ran into a single group of hikers all day. That’s unusual in China, especially anywhere near the big ol’ Chang Cheng.

Since spring hasn’t really kicked in yet, the pictures, unlike the experience itself, were a bit underwhelming, so I decided to play with some filters. I normally leave my photos pretty much untouched, except for a little contrast. I’m not sure how I feel about these, as they look a bit Instagrammey (yes, I just made that into an adjective).

What do you think? Do you like the more natural pictures, or should I keep playing with filters? Let me know in the comments or write me directly, I actually really would love some feedback (and to know that people are still occasionally reading this).

Note: this thing will only let me give the pics tiny captions. Please pay attention to the sixth photo, where you can see that only one half of the Wall is restored. The half facing the village and the main road, of course. Picture perfect!

Spring not coming fast enough? Here in the land of Make-Believe,...

Thu, 05 Apr 2012 06:45:00 -0400

Spring not coming fast enough? Here in the land of Make-Believe, that’s not a problem! Why worry when you can just cable tie some fake flowers to those pesky trees that just won’t get with the program?

"Go and do what? “hike”? during the weekend? That’s so tiring! Why would I spend my..."

Wed, 04 Apr 2012 10:57:03 -0400

““Go and do what? “hike”? during the weekend? That’s so tiring! Why would I spend my weekend day looking at a bunch of stones? I’ve seen lots of pictures.””

- My Chinese roommate, on why he has never been the to wall (as in, The Great Wall of China)

Just walked into a little tea place, looked up at the TV and saw...

Tue, 03 Apr 2012 03:47:19 -0400

Just walked into a little tea place, looked up at the TV and saw THIS. Coverage in a Chinese news channel of the liberation of 10 military hostages that FARC has been keeping in the jungle for a decade . This unexpected bit of news from home, so out of context and so very far away made me start crying. Still trying to figure out what kind of tears those were.

Americana, a la Chinese

Mon, 02 Apr 2012 04:29:00 -0400

Today was one of those good, solid China days when I remember why packing up one day and moving to Beijing without a clear plan and a single word of Mandarin was, against all odds, the greatest possible idea.

It went well from the start. I left the house at 9 am and met with my friend Andrés. On the way to the bus station, we saw a Chihuahua wearing a medical face mask. People here wear those often as a way to protect themselves from the awful smog, but this is the first canine version I’ve seen. Please tell me this isn’t just great/insane:

Since neither of us speaks Chinese, getting to our destination, which included three English and pinyin-free bus transfers, was an act of faith. We managed to find our way, mostly thanks to locals that were fascinated with the lone Westerners in those parts of outer Beijing, and took it upon themselves to find out where we were going and make sure we got off at the right station. The bus ride itself was eventful: we drove past an unfinished and abandoned knockoff Disney World that I had already read about, we saw a couple of spectacular stretches of the Great Wall, and we even saw a camel.

Shaky picture from the bus. That would have been the Cinderella castle of “Wonderland,” now abandoned.

After over two hours of travel, we finally got off where we needed to be, which we only knew to be the right spot because the bus driver yelled at us and pointed to the door (where else could these foreigners possibly be going if not to the trogolodyte caves?). A local guy with a car harassed us until we agreed to let him drive us the 3 km to the entrance of the caves for 10 yuan, and on the way we commented on how barren and lonely the area looked, we didn’t see a single human being on the way there.

Though not one of the main tourist attractions near Beijing, the thousand-year old Guyaju caves were very interesting. Once a group of high schoolers left, we had them all to ourselves, which is an unusual and nice feeling in China.

We had lunch and a nice nap in the sun on one of the terraces in the mountain, and then started looking in the distance at the little town by the foot of the hill. I pointed out it looked very odd and non-Chinese. The houses, with pointed triangular roofs and lots of spaces between them looked too large and Western for such a small village. We could see no people at all, and oddest of all, there was a blue church right in the middle of the town, which Andres described as “very fake-looking.” I pulled out my glasses, and the more we stared at the village the stranger it seemed. Next to the church, a string of buildings made a very recognizable main street. They were painted in bold colors, something we’d never seen in gray, gray China before. “It looks like one of those old cowboy villages,” I said. Cue ominous music.

A CHURCH?!! In a Chinese village? And no people? Something strange is happening here.

On the way back, we decided to take a little detour and check out what was going on in that strange ghost town. This was the entrance to the town, which begins to explain what exactly is going on:

Please notice that everyone in the add is blonde, blue eyed. Not that that’s at all unusual in Chinese advertising.

Yes, Jackson Hole, Hebei. Modeled after the Wyoming resort town by same name, this vacation complex for Beijing’s new elite is an unbridled display of Americana on drugs. The security guards, awkwardly wearing cowboy hats, invited us in to take a look. One of the advantages of being foreign in China is that people seem to miss all those cues that say you don’t have any money, so they treat you as if you were a 24 year old millionaire and prospective vacation home buyer. We were promptly pushed on a golf cart and given a tour of the very large complex, which is still partially under construction.

Hundreds of massive American style houses were arranged in neighborhoods with names like “Grand Canyon,” and we saw a working four wagon red choo choo train, little log cabins straight out of a frontier mining town, statues of rodeos and Indians, and houses decorated with all sorts of American kitsch from plad curtains to cow hide upholstery.

We were taken to the visitor’s center, where nice Chinese people wearing plad shirts and red bandanas around their necks treated us to hot tea, gorgeous, expensive-looking brochures with titles like “Cowboy Living”, and a good dose of background country music. I really hated not speaking the language so I could ask all the questions I was dying to have answered. Is this a hotel, or are the houses for sale? How much are they? Whose idea was this? Whose money? Did they hire American cowboy-living consultants to get the look so perfectly right? What kind of people buy into the project and what are they looking for? Some googling when I got home solved some of my doubts, but I still hate not being able to get to the bottom of the story on my own.

After that, we were free to roam around “Road 66” and take some pictures of what Chinese architects imagine the United States to look like (hint: exactly like a cowboy movie, but with more expensive houses). The whole project was surprisingly well done, most things were relatively tasteful (for a movie set or Disney World attraction) and with a few exceptions like the bronze Mickey Mouse statue and the Chinese street signs, most things were copied well enough that they could easily belong at an over-the-top cowboy themed resort in the United States.

From the people that brought you $10 Louis Vuitton, I present to you: The Wild, Wild East!

Alaska and Hawaii were cheated out of this tasteful home decoration. The sign above the entrance says “Vacation Home”

Too much cognitive dissonance!

They painted a pre-faded Route 66. If that’s not attention detail, I don’t know what is.

I wonder what they are going to put inside of the church. A gift shop? A big statue of Buddha?

Who knew the last stop of the Donner party was a Beijing suburb?

It’s a bit far, but can you tell that the security guard is wearing a cowboy hat?

Main Street. Tumble weeds still under construction, coming soon.

Don’t worry, there are many more US$ 900,000 houses to come in this frontier wonderland!

The knockoff Disney World might have never been finished, but that doesn’t mean you won’t get your fix of Mickey Mouse around these parts.

Last but most definitely not least, the brochures for the complex include a picture of a white guy, presumably one of the partners of this ground breaking venture, posing with both ex Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush. If he were really committed to the cowboy themed, he should have just stuck with Dubya.

[I have soooo many questions about this. WTF]

Olympically speaking

Sat, 31 Mar 2012 14:06:19 -0400

[For more pictures, skip the rant and go to the end]

I’m sure entire books have been written exploring whether the massive investments that cities and countries make to host events like the Olympics or the World Cup make financial sense in the long run. So I’m not going to waste space by trying to make a reasoned argument on the subject, as I know very little about it. However, I visited Beijing’s Olympic Park today and it got me thinking about how the infrastructure changes involved can really change the feel of a city.

By pure coincidence, this year has brought me to a couple of places that have been big hosts recently. Beijing, as you know, hosted the 2008 Olympics, and Cape Town, where I stayed for over a month this past July, was one of the main stops for the 2010 Soccer World Cup in South Africa. Both places were the most recent hosts for their respective events, and in talking to people about them I could feel animosity about the expense that the games represented. I imagine locals as a new bride’s little brother, sitting in the empty reception room after a big wedding party. After an admittedly fun night, he sits looking at half eaten $10 appetizers and a couple thousand dollars in rapidly wilting flowers, wondering if after that bash daddy will have enough money left to put him through college. Sure, the family looked good to friends and family, but could it possibly have been worth it? They seem to think not.

As I was getting ready to leave the house, I ran into Zhao Chao Min, my Chinese roommate. He asked me where I was going, and seemed really disappointed when I told him I was going to the Bird’s Nest Stadium and the Water Cube, now famous landmarks that I had yet to cross off my list. “You think those are nice?” he asked. I do, and I told him so, especially the stadium. “They are supposed to represent the new, modern China,” he said with disdain. “I think they’re ugly. But worse, I think they’re such a waste of money. That’s OUR money.They were so happy to show that to everyone, but who uses them now anyway? It makes me angry.” I mumbled something about design and tourism, but he just recommended a beautiful park I should visit instead, and left for work.

Despite his advice, I took the bus headed for the Olympic Park. The whole area is the largest that has been built in the history of the games, acres upon acres of stadiums, pools, and towards the north, Beijing’s largest park, which now also includes tennis courts, running tracks, and a million other sports-oriented options. The National Stadium itself was stunning, but what caught my attention was not so much the structure itself, but what wasn’t around it. I’ve talked a lot before about how alive Beijing parks can be, full of people singing, dancing, writing on the pavement and practicing Tai Chi. There is hardly a place in Beijing that ever feels empty or sub-utilized. But the Olympic park did.

This is a holiday weekend, and I can’t say that there were no people there. There were tourist groups with matching red hats, taking turns to mechanically snap photos with the famous landmarks in the back. But the whole place still felt like that empty reception room, where I could just hear the echo of my own voice if I were to speak just a little louder. A few hawkers sold souvenirs over blankets on the ground, leftover Olympic keychains that they offered for 1 yuan, or about 15 US cents. There was something oddly depressing about how cheap they were, that NEVER happens in China. You might get it there after some intense haggling, but if as a foreigner you’re being offered a souvenir for anything less than 10x its fair price, then you know something is really wrong.

The area near the park is disappointingly boring. There were no food options at all, cheap or expensive, and no one just hanging out. The whole place lacked the wonderful democratic spirit of Chinese public spaces: it was full of barriers, check points, fences and signs to keep off the grass. The entire area felt weirdly deserted, empty. My mind kept filling up the wasted space with images of crowds wearing their national colors, the ghosts of an event four years too late, and I remembered another place where I’d felt the same way: Cape Town’s stadium area.

In Cape Town I stayed a couple blocks from the Green Point stadium, in one of the many hostels that sprang up for the World Cup tourists. The emptiness was there too, though there’s no park around it the way there is in Beijing, we could feel it when trying to use the modern, integrated, shiny and brand new public transportation system that was created to prepare the city for the huge influx of visitors. On a regular weekday, on the way to work in what should have been peak hour, we waited, completely alone, for over 40 minutes for an articulated bus to pull up to the station. We were practically alone on the bus too, as most locals still prefer the crowded minivans that still cover the same routes

In a city where a significant percentage of families can’t even get clean water, this fancy transportation system was just running in circles, emptily hemorrhaging the government’s money after the World Cup came and went. One South African I spoke to was much harsher in his criticism than Zhao Chao Min, and even suggested that the best alternative would be to take the whole Green Point Stadium down, as its very maintenance and the cost of the land were too high a price to pay for a structure that does little for the people of the city.

Big changes that happen to a city in preparation for hosting one of these mega-events are not organic. They don’t respond to any real current need or demand for growth, and so they can fit very awkwardly at first. Maybe with some time the cities grow into it, and fill the vast and empty spaces with a different kind of life. After all, in both Chicago and Barcelona, other cities that I visited this year that were once Olympic hosts, the Olympic Villa areas are some of the liveliest and more visited parts of the city. However, one has to wonder if investing the same kind of money on something that made sense for the people that live in the city instead of visitors that will come once and once only wouldn’t feel more natural. Maybe the economics of it work out just so.

In any case, I’m done with my rant, and here are some pictures

INSIDER TIP: For a spectacular view of the Bird’s Nest and the Water Cube, go to the Pangu 7 Star Hotel, the fifth and smallest in the row of buildings to the east of the stadium. Head for the bar on the last floor, the Happiness Lounge, and act like you know what you’re doing. It opens at 8pm, but if you smile a lot and make up lies about waiting for your friend who’s staying at the hotel but running late they will let you go in and look out of the window even if they’re closed. Try not to gawk too openly at the shiny stuff and the clear glass grand piano (!), and avoid actually buying a drink, unless you feel like getting totally ripped off. The lights on the stadium are turned on until 10pm, and I hear it’s really worth it to see it at night.

That’s me on the 7 star elevator. I had to.

Cool long strings of mini kites. I’d never seen these before.

Obligatory tourist self picture.

The lamps are mini bird nests too!

Keeping the nest clean.

Emptiness. Eerie.

Even the subway station was empty. That’s how you KNOW something’s really wrong.

For dramatic effect, the next subway station, same time, same day.

Fifteen Kinds of Violent Death

Fri, 30 Mar 2012 12:10:36 -0400

From the title, I know you think I’m going to write another whiny post about Beijing traffic. Alas, not this time! Just want to show you some pictures of Beijing’s most inspiring Daoist temple (which inspired me, for example, not to join Daoism).

The temple is divided into the 76 different departments of the Daoist pantheon, which I understand to be something like a much better organized and more bureaucratic Catholic hell, where people are given different types of punishment according to their relative offenses (English explanations were limited, don’t take my word for it).

The entire periphery of the temple is divided into small rooms with life-sized dioramas of what can happen to you after you die, depending on how nice and well-behaved you were while you were alive. So you get a sense of what this is like, imagine a wax museum version of the least pleasant third of Bosch’s Garden of Earthly Delights. Some of the offices are the Department for Inflicting Fifteen Kinds of Violent Death, the Department of Abortions, the Department for Wandering Ghosts or the Final Indictment Department. They include the following pleasant sights:

With equal importance and their own god alloted, the departments of Signing Documents and the Department of Confiscating Unwarranted Property were also there to terrify humans about the awful things that can happen to them in the afterlife. No photos of those, as all those people doing paperwork might be too intense for my blog audience to handle.

In their own extra large hall and with a real human to yell at me for taking pictures, these guys, Bi Gang, the Civil God of Wealth, and Zhao Gongming, the Military God of Wealth, carry out their job of “making profits on a fair competition basis in any commercial transaction.” Looks like Daoist gods could probably get a job in many a government agency back in the States. They’re probably a little to free-market for China right now, however.

And one last picture that, though not as entertaning, I really like. There are these red square tiles with a woven silk ribbon attached to them that people leave in sacred places asking for something in prayer. I have seen them both in Buddhist and Daoist temples, but I don’t know very much about either religion yet, something I hope to fix while I’m here.

There are thousands of these in Dongyue, and since it had snowed the night before, they actually looked quite beautiful. The tiles were an important reminder that what felt to me like the Madame Tusseaud’s of absurd physical punishment is actually a spiritual place for many people. I need to remember not to become like the Chinese tourists taking pictures during mass at Notre Dame, which annoyed me so much at the time. It’s not like our places of worship are any less entertaining or strange looking (Have you seen gargoyles lately? or that guy nailed to a wooden cross? Gruesome.)

My Chinese book, making sure we learn all of that essential...

Thu, 29 Mar 2012 00:49:59 -0400

My Chinese book, making sure we learn all of that essential survival vocab.

A wallet made out of a Harvard diploma! (hey, that’s more...

Tue, 27 Mar 2012 02:42:37 -0400

A wallet made out of a Harvard diploma! (hey, that’s more use than I’ve gotten out of MY diploma so far)

These are some of the playing cards designs available at...

Mon, 26 Mar 2012 11:53:50 -0400

These are some of the playing cards designs available at Panjiayuan, an “antiques” market (more like “fauxtiques”) and one of my favorite places in Beijing. Perfect for my collection of real life super villains. Which should I buy to impress my future guests at dinner parties?

Transportation adventures and La Uvita

Thu, 22 Mar 2012 05:43:07 -0400

Beijing has one of the cheapest and most complete public transportation systems in the world. Taking the subway costs 2 yuan, or about 30 cents, and taking the bus costs as little as 0.40 yuan, a measly 6 pennies. But cheap and convenient does not pleasant make, and moving around Beijing can often be a scarring experience.

China has a lot of people. (Please add that to the list of profound and unexpected observations I have made on my blog.) A lot. Millions upon millions. And they ALL want to take the subway at the same time as I do. To illustrate that point, let me link to a video I made of Guomao station at rush hour. Please imagine yourself as one of the people trying to get out of that train.

And watch this one of what happens after you get out of the train and have to try to get out of the station:

And this is just the station in general:

And if that’s not clear enough, let me post a picture I took yesterday of a line by a bus stop at 6:30pm, just a few blocks from my house:

And if you need an extra example, please check out this post about people getting into buses through the windows, also near Guomao station: http://www.chinasmack.com/2012/pictures/beijingers-climb-into-overcrowded-public-bus-through-windows.html.

Ok, I think you’re starting to get my point. It’s a bit crowded on the train and bus. But here’s the thing, it’s not just the sheer amount of people that makes it horrible. And I’m sure you think I’m going to go into a long a detailed description of body odors and anonymous butt grabs, but I actually have to give Chinese men some credit and say that they have been unwaveringly respectful and I have not felt threatened in any way so far, or even been stared at as anything other than a foreign curiosity, which is a lot more than can be said for any other public transportation method I’ve used in the world. And the smells are not so bad, especially in comparison to what it smells like OUTSIDE. (Let’s just say Beijing is not the sweetest smelling city. Smog + public toilets… yeahh).

What’s really bad about it is just how rude the people are. Maybe this is where I should be culturally sensitive and say something like “Chinese people have different cultural conceptions of personal space and social etiquette blah blah”. But I can’t bring myself to be so nice. In big, anonymous crowds, they are just jerks. People here will physically push you out of the way instead of asking you to move, they will cut you in line, casually elbow you, and ignore your need to go through in any particular direction forcing you, in turn, to have to gnaw your way out of the crowd. They will get in the train and stop dead on their tracks, blocking the door for the two hundred people behind them. Middle aged ladies with ugly perms are the worst offenders, and they usually make sure to bring along a few bags so they have extra items to poke you with and block your way.

In over one month in Beijing I have never, EVER heard someone apologize to someone else for any reason. I know what you’re thinking… “but Laura, you don’t speak a word of Chinese, how would you know?” Believe me, you’d know. Those blank stares and utter indifference can’t possibly be some code apology I can’t decipher. In fact, every time I make some sort of minor kind gesture (“here, old lady, let me get off my hard earned seat and signal with my hand that it is free for you before someone tries to slide under my butt to sit before I am fully erect”) people do a double take and stare in disbelief before deciding that it’s not a trick, and finally flashing me a distrustful and confused smile.

Taking the subway is an exercise is anger management. In order to preserve my sanity, I have taken to softly muttering cuss words in Spanish at people, which is surprisingly therapeutic. Once I feared I was really starting to lose it when a long day of getting lost and nearly run over in Beijing resulted in my taking out my cellphone and holding it up to my ear screaming everything that was wrong with the city. There was no one on the other end, of course. The cell phone was just a prop so innocent passerby would not freak out at the foreign madwoman screaming to herself and call the police. That’s how I came to decide it would be a good time for me to think of transportation alternatives.

Then I got a bike. A whole new era of transportation adventures began.

The bike, a little purple cruiser complete with a big old basket to carry my stuff, was a gift from a friend of a friend of a friend who was moving to Shanghai (shout out to Ben Burns!). It hadn’t been used all winter, so it was covered in a thick layer of grime, the tires were a little flat, and the whole frame wobbled and rattled because the metal spoke of one of the pedals was a bit twisted. But a free bike is a free bike, so I rode it back to Paul’s and found a street bicycle repairman that understood enough of my arm waving and pointing to put some air in my tires and give me a slightly higher seat. As I was triumphantly riding the bike home, euphoric as I am every time I have some sort of successful communication, the chain fell off. After half an hour and covering my hands in black grease, I managed to get it back on and kept going. One hundred yards later, the chain just snapped. Mad and disappointed that I never seem to win when it comes to moving around this city, I tied my bike next to some random pole and took the subway home. I debated abandoning the stupid thing to its own luck.

Here is the bike, chain snapped, where I considered abandoning it for good.

The next day I’d cooled off, and decided to go back and rescue the poor thing. I walked back with it the remaining two miles, and went with a Chinese-speaking friend to her bike-repairman of choice. This time the bike was fixed for real. It got a new chain, a new pedal, and an overall tuning that for less than USD$10 left it like new. Riddled with guilt over having considered getting rid of the beautiful thing, I washed it (despite being warned that if it looked clean and pretty it was more likely to get stolen,) and I named it La Uvita -the little grape. It’s a fitting name, both because it’s little, round and purple, and because in Colombian Spanish, or at least in my mom’s special brand of Colombian Spanish, “uvita” is a name for a car or similar object that is used but in mint condition.

La Uvita has quickly become one of my absolute favorite things about living in Beijing. The city is just too huge to be walkable, and the bike has given me a lot of freedom and mobility, and it lets me experience a lot more when moving from place to place than I ever could on the subway. For most trips, it’s also significantly faster than public transportation. Beijing is theoretically great for bike riding because it’s so flat, dry, and most major streets have dedicated bike lanes. But this is still China, of course, and things are not quite so simple.

Before I got on my bike my friend Andres explained the one and single rule of riding in Beijing: you never have the right of way. That’s proven to be some of the most useful advice I have gotten so far, because once you stop thinking of the way things should be, and simply accept it as a given that other people will either pretend you are not, in fact, occupying your own particular chunk of physical space in front of them, or will actively try to kill you, then it’s a lot easier to shut off your righteousness, stay calm and focus on surviving.

I know I said Beijing had dedicated bike lanes. What I meant is that Beijing has dedicated bike/moped/electric bike/rickshaw/moto-truck/pedestrian/ice cream truck/taxi dropoff lanes. And that cars sometimes like to go in them to either block them completely or go very very fast, just because. And that going the wrong way is standard practice. So necessarily, riding a bike is constant act of self defense. As a result of that, I have made a couple of decisions that do little to help me fit in or gain me cool points in any group.

Yes. In a city of 19 million people, I am one of TWO that wear a helmet. I thought when I started to do it that I would get funny stares from Chinese people, but they have actually largely ignored me, since I can’t get any weirder to them, I suppose. From their perspective, what more can you expect from someone that once willingly gave up a subway seat? Crazy.

This is what I wish I looked like riding through Beijing.

It’s the other expats that find this most absurd and nerdy, and I have been the victim of constant shaming and harassment. Because, as everyone knows, when you’re in China you’re in sort of vacation, and the rules of physics, much like the rules of general morality, immediately stop applying to you. (It’s a simple principle, really, the same one that makes it okay for certain middle aged high level military personnel of certain unnamed embassies to pursue you despite the fact that you met them with their wife and child, but that’s a story for another day…)

I am obviously aware that I look dorky and idiotic wearing a helmet, which is why I have developed a little technique to justify the decision to myself. Every time I am riding my bike and there is a near-accident, I play out the alternative results in my head, had I not managed to swerve in that last milli-second. In every one of these tragic accident scenarios, my helmet saves my life, and I immediately feel smug about my dorky-but-life-saving choices. This is a useful psychological game to play with myself in order to keep doing what I know I should, but it seems to have permanently hardwired my brain in worst-case scenario mode. This means that every time I forget to wear my helmet, which, if you know me, you know is pretty often, my mind automatically plots the thousand gruesome ways in which my brain will end up splattered all over the pavement. It makes for a pretty terrifying ride.

This is what I actually look like to other Beijingers when I wear that funny, inexplicable hat while riding my bike.

And I think my helmet is cumbersome…

Tue, 20 Mar 2012 20:03:36 -0400

And I think my helmet is cumbersome…