We should have anticipated that the “live baby octopus stew” on the menu would actually include a live baby octopus, but we didn’t and were surprised. It was wiggling all around in the soup and continued to wiggle around as the waitress cut it up with scissors. All the cut up pieces then proceeded to keep wiggling for the duration of the meal as we guiltily ate around them.
There seem to be three types of English-language t-shirts in
1) Those that honestly attempt to convey an idea in English, albeit with some misspellings and/or grammatical errors
2) Those that employ random phrases apparently taken from the internet and placed onto t-shirts (e.g. “Join our mailing list and win prizes,” and other, often much longer passages), conspicuous because of their simultaneous grammatical correctness and contextual meaninglessness
3) Those composed of random letters that spell no words at all, taking advantage of the sheer novelty of our alphabet
The Pizza Hut in
The level of technology in
Americans are surprised that I’m married. Chinese people are surprised that I’m studying Buddhism.
I was trying to explain to my conversation partner that I like Beethoven. She said she understood, but that it was four people. I said, four people? She said, Bea-ta-le-sa?
Outside of the beauty parlor on my street there are many clumps of hair on the sidewalk!
In the library when it’s raining the students all place their umbrellas on the ground still open (presumably to let them dry), so they take up a lot of space.
A British guy on our program, in reference to the climb up the Great Wall, noted that he “probably lost about two stone.”
Also: I did not anticipate all of the weird and exotic bugs that I would encounter in
I took an hour-long bus ride and was standing for most of it. When this old couple wearing matching Crocs (those plastic shoes with holes that everyone says are really ugly but really comfortable) got out of their seats to get off the bus, they more or less ordered me to sit down and take their place.
I have been here two weeks and today was the second sunny day!
My language partner had an interesting take on learning British English (which is what a lot of Chinese people learn). He said that, first of all, the words are more slurred, so it is more difficult. Second of all, he felt that a person learning English should not attempt to speak with that accent unless they already spoke the language very well. Sort of like British English is ‘advanced’ English.
I was having trouble explaining to my conversation teacher what kind of movies I like. I have used the term ‘non-mainstream’ a remarkable number of times in describing to various Chinese people my tastes and lifestyle choices. Nevertheless, the teacher first guessed that the type of movie I was referring to was Korean dramas. She finally said, Oh! I know what kind of movie you like! and wrote down 蓝, 白, 红 - Blue, White, Red. I was surprised that she knew these movies.From my room in my host-mom’s apartment, I often hear someone practicing the flute. The flute-player is playing the same Mozart piece that a guy on the
Apparently, many Chinese high schools do not permit students to date. High school here is so competitive and test-oriented that things loosen up a little bit once safely in college.
The other day we spent a very long time in class answering the pressing question: “Forest Gump says: Life is like a box of chocolate; you never know what you’re going to get. Do you agree or disagree?”
There was a huge crowd of people outside a gate on the street. It looked like the president or a celebrity was about to come out and people wanted to catch a glimpse of him. I asked someone what they were waiting for and he said, 孩子 (child[ren]). 孩子? Like, a baby prince? Finally he said, 考试 (test). Oh! They were waiting for their children to finish their exams! How weird.
White people not in my program that I pass on the street in
1) What the hell do you think you’re doing here? This town isn’t big enough for the both of us.
2) Thank goodness I found you! You’ve probably been through many of the same experiences of culture shock that I have.
When we were stopped at the border passing into
It’s interesting to consider the extent to which I am able to interact with my Chinese teachers, and that if I did not speak Chinese, they would probably seem like strange and mysterious foreigners. Instead, they seem very familiar.
On a similar note, I had a mostly functional conversation with an old man in the lobby of our hotel. I told him I went to
Apparently only a few decades ago this city was just the temple and a few surrounding houses. My host-mom actually grew up within the walls of the temple complex. Now it is a remarkably westernized and modern city.
At the end of the trip as we were waiting for the bus back to
I was not able to get a sleeper bus to go home from Xilinhot back to
Later in the day I went to Sanlitun to investigate some DVD stores. One of the DVD stores had been ridden of its bootlegs (prompting a British guy to ask, 为什么? [Why?]) and was almost empty. Another had ordinary Chinese movies, which I was browsing when a woman asked me, in English, “Looking for movies?” I said, yes, just browsing, thank you. She went into the back and I kept looking around. She then called, “This way, sir.” I followed her through a long maze of corridors before arriving in a back room where other foreigners were browsing through booklets of movie covers. The customer would tell an attendant which movie he or she wanted, and the attendant would walkie-talkie to another person, presumably in an even further back room, who then brought the movies in.
Riding a camel in Dunhuang helped me to remember precisely why I didn’t like riding that horse in
We slept in the desert, and it’s possible that I have never seen the stars so clearly. I have definitely never seen shooting stars so clearly, if at all. The loud Chinese woman made sure the evening wasn’t too peaceful by telling (or shouting) jokes and riddles all night (she later told me that she was a high school math teacher, and when I told her I studied Buddhism, she responded that her mother loved Buddhism, and gave me a Buddhist magazine). We ate ramen noodles for dinner and I slept with the British fellow in a tiny 5-foot by 5-foot tent. There was a sleeping bag but no pillow, so I used the sleeping bag as a pillow.
At my hostel they have a world map which is different from every world map I’ve ever seen because
At the Dunhuang carpet factory the woman showing me around and selling me things spoke disconcertingly near-perfect British English. She revealed that she was not a native, however, when we were bartering over the price and she kept saying, “I know, I know, you are the student.”
I went to Dunhuang’s famous Mogao caves, full of Buddhist images and statues. My reaction had three components:
1) Awe at the grandiosity of it. There are over 800 caves, each an unbelievable sight in its own right, some with huge hundred-foot-tall Buddhas, some with thousands of tiny Buddhas. Why, I ask, when there were already five hundred caves, did someone say, “Hey, let’s build another one!” I guess it’s because they had money.
2) Sadness at the fact that it is now a museum for scholars to puzzle over and not a place of worship. As a result, it does not feel like a sacred site in the way that it should. Why would any sacredness stick around just to be stared at by all these tourists?
3) The feeling that no matter how impressive any thing or place like this may be (and this is one of the most impressive things and places I’ve ever seen), it is, at best, a finger pointing at the moon. I might as well find such a pointer anywhere – in a book, or inside myself.
The fact that I had such a complicated reaction highlights an obvious problem of mine: I should have just loosened up and enjoyed it.
My teacher said that more and more Chinese people are practicing Buddhism (at least in the sense of going to the temple and praying), including Communist party members. She said, half-jokingly, that this was maybe because they had done bad things.
My new language partner turns out to be very interesting: he rides his bike everywhere, and, like a regular Chinese No Impact Man, he brings his own chopsticks to restaurants, doesn’t use disposable items, and doesn’t use air-conditioning. I guess there's a full-circle thing going on here that's hard to fully wrap my head around: conservative, old-fashioned rural Chinese people=liberal, blog-loving New York yuppies.
The government just opened a newly-refurbished ‘traditional architecture area’ by 前门 (the front gate, south of
In 798, the modern art district, we were looking for an indie music store when we passed a sign that said, “Welcome President of Latvia to Dahe Gallery!” We found the music store, which was surrounded by suited Latvians. Inside, the guy played us some ambient noisecore (!) before switching to a band called Car Sick Cars, a Chinese band that sounds exactly like Pavement, the Pixies, Sonic Youth, etc. The guy then pulled out an electric guitar and said that he could play along. He plugged it in and started rocking out rather loudly, when a fellow in a suit came in and said to him what could only have been something like, “Sir, could you keep it down! The president of
Today inside the Olympic park area we went into a ridiculous Coca-Cola museum type thing. As we entered, an enthusiastic employee gestured wildly with both arms as she greeted us with a loud, “Welcome!” Further inside we encountered more and more employees who had apparently been instructed to dance around in place in order to inspire and motivate the visitors, perhaps to make the place seem ‘cool,’ ‘hip,’ ‘in with the youngsters,’ etc. The result was, needless to say, completely absurd. At the end we were given free bottles of Coke, which we took with our meal of McDonald’s. I have probably not eaten at McDonald’s in fifteen years. I expected a guilty pleasure, but unfortunately it was disgusting.
