Year of the Dragon

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!

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. 

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.