It's been two months since I've made a post!? I blame work and finals. Now that both are finished, I finally have two weeks to do whatever (else) I want! Actually, I meant to post this yesterday, but the internet crapped out.
To celebrate the end of finals, Z and I went to sing KTV this afternoon. One of the most famous KTV chains, ATT, has a newly remodeled branch not far from my apartment. ATT is also known for having the best selection of foreign songs (including one song from Radiohead, who are banned in China). At the entrance, a tall young man in a white dress shirt bows as you go in. Then you ascend one of two curved staircases into what looks like a low-ceilinged hotel lobby, everything in off-white marble. The all-young staff in black waistcoats help you figure out which room to order, or you can sit in the chilly waiting room and watch news on a little TV desk.
Like some less reputable hotels, KTVs rent out rooms by the hour. There are usually half a dozen different room sizes for different prices. The price also varies depending on the time, with evenings and weekends being more expensive. Since there were only two of us, the right size would have been a "mini" room, but they only had small rooms, which fit up to five people. The hourly price for the room on a weekday afternoon would have been 36 kuai (about $5), but there was also a special: we could pay 36 kuai per person and get a room for four hours, and they would bring us dinner, a fruit plate, and popcorn.
KTV rooms are small and windowless. The essential features are a leather couch that circles around three sides of the room, a big-screen TV, and a big coffee table with a giant ashtray. And of course the touch-screen computer for choosing songs. When you sing for four hours, you have to pace yourself. Early on I made the mistake of trying to sing two Nirvana songs and half my vocal range went mute. Bohemian Rhapsody would have to wait.
Exactly two hours in, when we were almost finished with The Sound of Silence, everything suddenly went black. It was also completely quiet, and for a few seconds I was disoriented. Then I could hear people walking in the hallway outside, and a vested employee came in with two bento boxes, two bowls of soup, and chopsticks. In the dark, he set them down on the table, and asked if we wanted a candle. I asked him what time he thought the power would come back and he said he didn't know.
For a while we sat in the dark room, eating by cell phone light. The food wasn't bad for something from a karaoke house. The employee eventually came back with a candle. When we were finished eating, there was still no sign of returning electricity, so we went outside. No sooner had the room door closed than four employees intercepted us to apologize about the sudden darkness. Z asked them if we could have a refund, and they agreed to give us half our money back--36 kuai. Z pretended to be mildly satisfied, but really we were both glad, having half-expected them to refuse any kind of refund ("it wasn't out fault"; "you already ate the food"; or simply "we don't do refunds").
At the end of the hallway, a group of middle-aged women were arguing with another employee. We left, and this time the doorman had four companions, and they all bowed and thanked us for coming. Next door at the Trust-Mart supermarket, a crowd was standing around the entrance, looking vaguely in the direction of the darkened bag check room. Apparently the whole block had lost power, which meant that the customers at Trust-Mart wouldn't be able to retrieve their bags from the newly installed electronic cubbies. I wondered how many people would have to cancel whatever plans they had because they were stuck at Trust-Mart, waiting for their stuff. And then about the mad rush that would ensue when the power finally went back on.
Wednesday, July 14, 2010
Friday, May 21, 2010
some potatoes and greens on the coffee table in my apartment
I'm starting to make plans for my trip back. For whatever reason, the semester ends in mid-July. I'll go to a few of the places in Sichuan that I've wanted to see--maybe I'll try to find one of the old towns that's still actually old, and hasn't been rebuilt as a tourist trap--and then go east, stopping in Guangzhou, Hong Kong, and Taipei before flying home sometime in mid-late August.
In about a week I'll have been in Chengdu for six months. I find that hard to believe. When I think about such a length of time in the abstract--such as before it happens--it's made up of habits, patterns, and repetitions. I see myself going to class every morning, studying every afternoon, working every weekend, etc. But when it happens, of course, it isn't really like that. Every class or lunch or studying session or neglect of one of these is unique, and the real events don't blend together, they elude categorization. And because every "event" is so different from every other, it's impossible to comprehend them all at once. So naturally my mind summarizes the period, alighting only on the most interesting or somehow otherwise memorable parts, and the time necessarily feels shorter.
A month or so ago all of the street vendors were selling pineapple. For the equivalent of 20 cents you could select a stick of pineapple from a jar of water on their cart, or else you could buy a whole pineapple (peeling optional) for a dollar a kilogram. A few weeks later the strawberries appeared. They were big, bright, firm, and delicious, and probably laced with pesticides. At first you had to pay a little over two dollars a kilogram; toward the end of the run they went down to a dollar fifty a kilo. Now they're harder to find. The woman who used to stand every day outside the gate of the apartment complex I don't see so often anymore.
One day, after I paid for a stick of pineapple and was inspecting the glass jar, trying to find the best stick, the fruit woman suddenly became agitated and started telling me to hurry up. Usually her patience is inexhaustible, so I was surprised--I looked around and saw a police car driving up. The police got out of his car and shouted angrily, and I took a few steps back, away from the fruit cart. The woman immediately grabbed the handles of the cart and dragged it inside the gate. The officer went as far as the gate, speaking in a rough tone of voice, but he stopped just outside of it. The woman, inside the gate, smiled at him indulgently. The police barked a few more times, but by then it was clear that he was only half serious. Then he left. I went inside the gate and grabbed a stick of pineapple.
A few weeks ago I went to a place called Luodai, which has a lot in common with Jiezi, the old town I visited last month, including the narrow, car-less stone streets, the multitude of small shops selling all kinds of sweet snacks, and the new-ancient architecture mixed almost seamlessly with the real-ancient buildings--which are only distinguishable by the "naturalness" of their decrepitude. What makes Luodai different is its fame as a Hakka town. The Hakka are a minority with their own language and culture, although supposedly they are ethnically indistinguishable from Han Chinese. For a long time they have primarily occupied the eastern provinces of Guangdong, Jiangxi, and Fujian. However, around the turn of the 18th century, the Qing emperor Kangxi encouraged a lot of them to relocate to Sichuan, which for evil reasons was lacking in population. A lot of the Hakka moved to Luodai.
One quintessential Luodai food is "heartbreak noodles" (伤心面), which supposedly serve to remind Hakka people of their far-off homeland. But in case the memory of Eastern China isn't enough to make you cry, the spiciness can help. These noodles were so spicy they gave me a headache.
May Day weekend is a national holiday in China, and this year it was also the second annual Zebra Music Festival. The three-day festival comprised three stages and multitudes of bands and DJs from all over China and the rest of the world. The international acts included Does it Offend You, Yeah? (UK); Exile Parade (UK); and Reptile and Retard (NL). The festival was held in a big park near the Panda Base (which I also visited while I was there--pictures later). Z and I went on the second day and stayed overnight in a borrowed tent, which we set up on a hill right in front of the main stage. Aside from the music, one big attraction was the Jägermeister tent, where if you played a game of foosball you could win a shot of that awful stuff.
The festival was a lot of fun. A few of my friends went on the second day (pictured below), the crowds were exuberant, and at night it rained like hell. Finally, here are a couple movie posters for films coming out this year that I'm excited about.
Monday, April 19, 2010
Swedish Pesach
Unfortunately, I didn't manage to have a Seder on Passover. And Trust-Mart didn't even stock unleavened bread. On the other hand, avoiding hametz wasn't too difficult, since most of the bread around here tastes like Styrofoam. The two biggest staples are rice and noodles. Still, in the spirit of tradition, I went on a matzoh hunt one evening. I guess when its main competition is Styrofoam, cardboard doesn't sound so bad.
I finally found the afikoman--or something resembling it--behind the checkout counter at IKEA. It was wrapped in a blue, wedge-shaped package with the label "LEKSANDS KNÄCKE: NORMALGRÄDDAT," which is Swedish for "Passover matzoh." I was also excited to find a jar of real blueberry jam (blueberries are a relatively uncommon fruit here), and found the two make a good combination.
And I was reminded that IKEA is a pretty fun place. You can sleep on any of the displays (people here do so frequently, I've heard) and the staff isn't allowed to bother you. You can try on costumes (Rorschach, anyone?), play with stuffed animals, eat cafeteria food, and look out the window.
I finally found the afikoman--or something resembling it--behind the checkout counter at IKEA. It was wrapped in a blue, wedge-shaped package with the label "LEKSANDS KNÄCKE: NORMALGRÄDDAT," which is Swedish for "Passover matzoh." I was also excited to find a jar of real blueberry jam (blueberries are a relatively uncommon fruit here), and found the two make a good combination.
And I was reminded that IKEA is a pretty fun place. You can sleep on any of the displays (people here do so frequently, I've heard) and the staff isn't allowed to bother you. You can try on costumes (Rorschach, anyone?), play with stuffed animals, eat cafeteria food, and look out the window.
Thursday, April 15, 2010
Ancient Town
The Monday before last was Tomb Sweeping Day, when families traditionally visit the tombs of their forefathers to make sure they're all in order. Since there was no class that day, and I was invited to teach again at the English school in Chongzhou on Sunday morning, it became an overnight trip. The last time I taught at that school was also my first time teaching an English class (when I gave those "Christmas lessons"), and coming back three months later with a little more experience and confidence gave me a feeling of accomplishment.
Chongzhou is only an hour away from Chengdu by bus, but the climate makes it feel a lot farther; both times I've left a gray, smoggy Chengdu to arrive in a warm, bright Chongzhou. My friend Z____ came along with me, and after class we walked around taking pictures.
There's an ancient town called Jiezi (the "z" is pronounced almost like "ts", and the "i" at the end is sort of like "ə", the generic unstressed vowel) not far from Chongzhou, so that afternoon we decided to take a bus there. And we would have taken the bus, if there had been one. Instead, there was a line outside the bus station, and every ten minutes a van would pull up in front of it. Then an attendant would oversee the cramming of as many people as possible into the van (short of sitting in another person's lap). I was lucky; because of my height they chose me to sit shotgun.
We drove for about half an hour down dusty roads that were mostly under construction. Suddenly, the traffic got extremely crowded with pedestrians, cars, and motorbikes, and we started to make our way through some kind of open market. A few times we stopped unexpectedly to let somebody in or out--I couldn't figure out how the people standing on the side of the road communicated to the driver that they wanted to get in the van, or how they knew the unmarked, unremarkable silvery-gray van was the right one.
After the crowded market, the scenery quickly turned green and rural. The road was lined with tall, straight trees, and behind them were fields of yellow rapeseed flowers and intermittently an old, brick farmhouse. But this only lasted about 15 minutes, and then everything was under construction again. We came to a gigantic intersection where equal numbers of buses and tractors were lumbering around, kicking dust into the air. This was the stop. When we got out of the van, the driver told us that Jiezi was just a short distance up ahead. We could have taken one of the motorized pedicabs that were waiting around, but after riding down a bumpy road for the better part of an hour we opted to walk.
In retrospect, we should have taken the cab. For about 20 minutes we walked down a gravel road with no sidewalk, dodging mud puddles and the continually passing, continuously honking trucks that carried over-sized loads of sewer piping and other construction materials. The ancient town is being expanded into a luxury resort. Immediately around the town, the architecture at least is trying to mimic the old style. A little farther out, everything looks modern. On a fence, behind some people digging with shovels, there was a red banner that Z____ translated for me as "Never forget the policy."
The real "ancient town" is only a few blocks of buildings in the middle of all the mayhem, but once you get there it's surprisingly peaceful. True, the streets are full of tourists (though I might have been the only foreign tourist that day), but the absence of cars on the narrow, carved stone streets, and the profusion of outdoor tea houses with people dozing in their chairs, and the generally relaxed manner of the locals makes Jiezi feel like a decent place to live. The main street runs parallel to a wide river. Branching off from the street toward the river are numerous, narrow side roads with quiet guesthouses, and at the end of each there is at least one tea house where you can sit and look across the river at the bright green hills on the other side. Actually, when we were there, this experience was somewhat diminished by the heavy tractors that kept driving up and down the river, which had been made temporarily shallow so they could build a new bridge.
Looking out the entrance of a restaurant (hanging meat overhead)
Making sesame-peanut candy in front of the shop
Steamed buns--brown sugar, black rice, sesame filling, meat filling, ...
Medicine shop
The first section of the main street
Chongzhou is only an hour away from Chengdu by bus, but the climate makes it feel a lot farther; both times I've left a gray, smoggy Chengdu to arrive in a warm, bright Chongzhou. My friend Z____ came along with me, and after class we walked around taking pictures.
There's an ancient town called Jiezi (the "z" is pronounced almost like "ts", and the "i" at the end is sort of like "ə", the generic unstressed vowel) not far from Chongzhou, so that afternoon we decided to take a bus there. And we would have taken the bus, if there had been one. Instead, there was a line outside the bus station, and every ten minutes a van would pull up in front of it. Then an attendant would oversee the cramming of as many people as possible into the van (short of sitting in another person's lap). I was lucky; because of my height they chose me to sit shotgun.
We drove for about half an hour down dusty roads that were mostly under construction. Suddenly, the traffic got extremely crowded with pedestrians, cars, and motorbikes, and we started to make our way through some kind of open market. A few times we stopped unexpectedly to let somebody in or out--I couldn't figure out how the people standing on the side of the road communicated to the driver that they wanted to get in the van, or how they knew the unmarked, unremarkable silvery-gray van was the right one.
After the crowded market, the scenery quickly turned green and rural. The road was lined with tall, straight trees, and behind them were fields of yellow rapeseed flowers and intermittently an old, brick farmhouse. But this only lasted about 15 minutes, and then everything was under construction again. We came to a gigantic intersection where equal numbers of buses and tractors were lumbering around, kicking dust into the air. This was the stop. When we got out of the van, the driver told us that Jiezi was just a short distance up ahead. We could have taken one of the motorized pedicabs that were waiting around, but after riding down a bumpy road for the better part of an hour we opted to walk.
In retrospect, we should have taken the cab. For about 20 minutes we walked down a gravel road with no sidewalk, dodging mud puddles and the continually passing, continuously honking trucks that carried over-sized loads of sewer piping and other construction materials. The ancient town is being expanded into a luxury resort. Immediately around the town, the architecture at least is trying to mimic the old style. A little farther out, everything looks modern. On a fence, behind some people digging with shovels, there was a red banner that Z____ translated for me as "Never forget the policy."
The real "ancient town" is only a few blocks of buildings in the middle of all the mayhem, but once you get there it's surprisingly peaceful. True, the streets are full of tourists (though I might have been the only foreign tourist that day), but the absence of cars on the narrow, carved stone streets, and the profusion of outdoor tea houses with people dozing in their chairs, and the generally relaxed manner of the locals makes Jiezi feel like a decent place to live. The main street runs parallel to a wide river. Branching off from the street toward the river are numerous, narrow side roads with quiet guesthouses, and at the end of each there is at least one tea house where you can sit and look across the river at the bright green hills on the other side. Actually, when we were there, this experience was somewhat diminished by the heavy tractors that kept driving up and down the river, which had been made temporarily shallow so they could build a new bridge.
Looking out the entrance of a restaurant (hanging meat overhead)
Making sesame-peanut candy in front of the shop
Steamed buns--brown sugar, black rice, sesame filling, meat filling, ...
Medicine shop
The first section of the main street
Saturday, February 27, 2010
A half-meter of panda, please.
In Chinese, pretty much every noun uses a measure word. "A person" is yi ge ren, which is literally "one (measure word) person". Ge is the most generic measure word, so I guess it could also be translated as "one unit of person". The way that measure words are categorized is interesting. Zhang is the measure word for something flat--yi zhang zhuozi for "a 'slice' of table", yi zhang piao for "a 'slice' of ticket" (or any other paper-like object). For animals, zhi is usually used, so yi zhi gou is "an (animal-unit) of dog". One of my favorites is tiao, which is seemingly used for anything longer than it is wide. This includes yi tiao sheng ("a length of rope"), yi tiao lu ("a length of road"), you tiao, the name for a length of fried dough sometimes eaten for breakfast, and even yi tiao yu ("a length of fish"). I've heard that in China many people don't consider fish real animals (I guess this is analogous to pescetarians who think of themselves as vegetarians), so when I first learned about yi tiao yu, I thought it was telling of this fact. But then my friend told me that tiao can apply to other animals as well, like in the alternative to the yi zhi gou already mentioned, yi tiao gou: "a length of dog". If I wasn't already a pescetarian, it would make me think twice before buying one of those sausages hanging in front of the little shop down the street.
Saturday, February 20, 2010
"Welcome to China. We have walnut milk." - Chinese people
Everybody goes home on Chinese New Year. The shops all close, the cities empty of the large portion of their residents who come from the country, and the trains fill up to standing room only. Luckily, my friend Diana invited me to go stay with her family in Kaiyuan for the holiday, saving me from two weeks in a post-apocalyptic Chengdu. Kaiyuan is in Yunnan province, which is just south of Sichuan. The city is a four-hour drive from Kunming, the capital, and this is where we landed when we flew there two weeks ago. Despite being next to each other, Sichuan and Yunnan's climates are completely opposite (at least the parts I've seen). Chengdu is in a basin, and in the winter it is pretty much continuously grey, clammy, and just above freezing. Yunnan, on the other hand, is hot, and because it's on a high plateau the air is dry. It makes me think of southern California.
We took a taxi and got to the bus station around 4 o'clock, and bought tickets for a bus two hours later. The station was crowded but not overwhelming, and we only had to wait about 15 minutes in line at one of the dozen ticket windows. We were both pretty hungry and there was a cafeteria, but all they were serving were some elderly-looking noodles, and we couldn't find a table that hadn't already been occupied by flies. So we went to the convenience store instead, and bought some pistachios, sunflower seeds, peanuts, desiccated date cake, spicy papaya, and bottled tea, and then sat outside in the bright afternoon sun.
The Greyhound-style bus was pretty poorly kept, none of the overhead lights worked (which after the sun set turned out to be a bummer), and the windows rattled so loudly when we hit bumps in the road that I was afraid they might shatter. But the bus was also mostly empty, and so the ride was pretty comfortable. While there was still light I just watched the changing iron-red hills and the weird, skinny trees with tufts of needle-like leaves at the top and in the middle, cracking sunflower seeds and throwing the shells out the window. I've read several times that in China, every square meter of arable land is under cultivation, and whenever I go outside of the city this seems to be true. What from a distance look like gradually sloping hills with wild vegetation turn out to be terraced garden plots, crisscrossed with raised mud walkways.
We got to Kaiyuan around 10 o'clock. By China's standards, Kaiyuan is a small town, mostly organized around the axis of one main arterial. Diana's apartment is on the arterial, but a few miles north of the town center. Her mom had cooked a late dinner for us, including stir-fried potato slivers, cabbage, and spicy pickled garlic cloves. Diana's family was extremely welcoming, hospitable, and generous. They graciously accommodated my vegetarian preferences, gave me my own room, included me in all of the various family and extended family outings, and when we left her mom sent me back with a big jar of homemade "rose sugar", which as far as I can tell is made of rose petals preserved with sugar--an exotic take on the fruit jam idea.
Two days after arriving, I took the bus back to Kunming for a couple days to see my friend, Z____, who happened to be traveling through. This time the bus ride was in the morning, and I got to see a completely new stretch of land, which we'd only passed after dark the day before. The land was mostly red, flat farmland with hills in the distance. Every once in a while, at a gas station, there would be a few guards or officials sitting under a cinderblock shelter, with more cinderblocks to hold down the plastic roof. Along the road there were also villages, which mostly comprised crumbling, faded brick single-story houses of indeterminate age. Sticking out amid these humble, handmade dwellings, there would sometimes be another kind of house--new, wooden, tall, and boxy, often painted garish pink or green, with a new car in the cement driveway. This sometimes created the appearance of a Malibu beach house that had been air-dropped into the middle of a medieval village.
Whenever our bus passed another car--which was about once every three minutes--the driver would lean into his horn before swerving into the opposite lane, sometimes swerving back just in time to avoid oncoming traffic. Once or twice, when the roads were crowded, this "passing lane" would grow to two or three lanes wide--as drivers who felt that other cars in the middle of passing weren't passing fast enough proceeded to pass them--and it felt like a miracle when we got back into our (single) lane without getting into a head-on collision. The bus was also full this time, and although the wind was strong I kept the window open because at any given moment it seemed like half the passengers were smoking. One man had a tattoo of a swastika on his hand, but I assume the direction was a mistake.
The eastern bus station in Kunming is pretty far from the city center, and it was a little bit challenging figuring out which buses to take. A few times I got what seemed like contradictory information from different people. On one of the buses there was a girl sitting behind a big, cardboard box, which was tied shut with straps. In the middle of the ride the box started crowing.
Kunming is smaller (and cheaper) than Chengdu, but it also seems to have a higher proportion of foreigners. There is one street in particular that hosts a whole plethora (really, an entire, honest-to-Kant plethora) of Western restaurants. On Wednesday morning we went to a French cafe called French Cafe, where we had a chocolate crepe, a strawberry tart, and panini. A happy man tried to sell us a jar of honey through the window.
Then we went to a farmer's market down the street, where I bought a wedge of goat cheese to take back to Kaiyuan. (I was also planning to buy several more wedges at the request of some friends in Chengdu when we passed back through the following week on the way to the airport, but on that day the cheese stall turned out to be closed, since it was only a couple days after New Year's.) The market and cafe are also right next to a beautiful park of walkways, bridges, gardens, and lakes, filled to the brim with dapper old men (the park, not the lakes). One common phenomenon in parks in China is a group of old ladies dancing. These are often traditional folk dances where everyone does the same thing at the same time. In this park on this day there was a particularly large group of dancers, and not all of them were old ladies.
After the park we went to a bakery and bought a green tea-flavored roll thing, but half an hour later we were accosted by three children begging for food. After making them promise to share it, we gave them the roll, but the kid we handed it to ran away, and the other two kept following us asking for food. For some reason, poverty is much more conspicuous in Kunming than it is in Chengdu. Kunming seems to have a higher number of people begging, a lot of whom are missing limbs or are otherwise mutilated--this it has in common with Hong Kong. I saw a few of these doing calligraphy with brushes held between their toes. Another phenomenon that seems to exist in Kunming but not Chengdu is performing or begging children. Every other corner had a child or two singing with a cheap, little microphone and amplifier, and none of the children looked very happy to be doing it.
Walking through the center of the city, we came to a little plaza, on either side of which was a line of old people in white lab coats. Each one was standing behind an office chair. The men and women in the coats didn't look at us as we walked passed, but seemed to be gazing benignly into the walls of the buildings across the street. I wondered if a chemical lab nearby was having an emergency evacuation (and was going to great lengths to ensure each staff member would still have a place to sit...), until a woman passing by sat down in one of the chairs and the scientist behind it started giving her a shoulder rub.
Z____ had been teasing me for being so fascinated by the old men in the park earlier, and when we passed a table selling "old man hats", I started trying some on. I was surprised to find one that I actually liked, and I asked how much it was.
"160 kuai," the lady said. I thanked her and started walking away.
"Don't you want that hat?" Z____ asked. "You have to bargain!"
"There's no way I can get it down to a price I'd be willing to pay," I said.
"Those hats should be 50 kuai at most," said Z____.
"But she wanted 160! She'd be insulted if I asked for 50."
But Z____ assured me this was not the case, so I walked back and made the offer, trying to sound jaunty. The lady laughed and shook her head, saying she couldn't possibly go below 100.
We started walking away again, when the lady called out after us "Ok! 60!"
Z____ replied "We'll take it for 50!"
"Well, in that case..." the lady conceded, and that is how I became the owner of an old man hat.
Me and Diana with bananas and hat
It seems like there is always one movie that must be mentioned immediately whenever anyone talks about movies here. When I first arrived it was 2012. For the past month or so it's been Avatar. In Kunming I finally saw it (in 3D...golly!). This was also my first experience going to a movie theater in China. We arrived two minutes after the nominal start of the movie, just in time to find out that it would be shown dubbed in Chinese with no subtitles! But since I was more interested in the animation than the dialogue, this didn't stop me from enjoying the film. When we entered the theatre, the lights hadn't yet been turned off, and a lot of people were still chatting. There was a picture of a space station on the screen, which I guessed was some kind of promotional preview, maybe for Avatar: The Game, or Avatar: The Theme Park Ride. We found our seats and I turned to Z____ to say something, but noticed that she seemed strangely engrossed in the preview. I looked around at all the people talking to each other but watching the screen, and then realized that there were no previews. The movie had started. There was a pretty steady stream of conversation going on around us through at least the first hour of the movie, but since I couldn't really understand it it was easier to tune out.
I'm writing this sitting by the window in a bakery, and there's a group of kids setting off fireworks right outside. They light a firework in their hands, and when it starts popping and shooting sparks everywhere they throw it on the ground and play soccer with it. One of them was standing by the window earlier staring at my laptop, and when I looked at him he grinned and gave me a thumbs-up.
The next night we ended up going to a movie bar, which I believe was called "Movie Bar 1895". They advertised as having live music and old movies. We had a hard time finding it and had to call three times for directions, but when we finally made it the waitress greeted us as if we were distinguished and anticipated guests. The bar had a PA, a piano, and several guitars, but the live music that night turned out to be a middle-aged woman singing movie theme songs over Music Minus One. Around 10:30 the woman left and the staff lowered a projector screen over the stage. The staff hadn't yet decided which movie to show that night, so they gave us their DVD album. We suggested 8 1/2, but were dismayed when they started the movie without turning off the lively Latin music playing over the PA. "Most of the customers here don't want to watch the movie, so we have to leave the music on" was the explanation. Looking around at the group of Chinese people playing cards, the white guy with his laptop, and the couple enjoying a romantic evening in the corner, I realized they had a point--none of them seemed too interested in watching a Fellini movie. We watched it with subtitles for about half an hour, and I laughed a couple of times imagining that the Latin music was the movie's soundtrack, and then we left.
I was hungry after that so we went to a sort of food court where we'd been the day before. Yunnan is known as having a large number of ethnicities (as recognized by the government), and each restaurant in the food court represented the food of a different one of these ethnic groups. This time it was late when we arrived, however, and most of the places were closed. Also unlike last time, the food court was ridiculously filthy. Pools of water and other liquids lay on the floor with paper plates, napkins, leftover food, trash, and plastic mats and buckets. The tables weren't much better. We were wading through this, looking for a place with that magic combination of openness and cleanliness. As we were walking, a scrawny young man suddenly jumped in front of us and started shouting "Eat! eat!" and making weird growling noises and miming someone shoveling food into their mouths. We ignored him and walked past, but soon realized that this was the only truly open restaurant. For a while the guy--who was actually a waiter--would come around and shout something at us, but we kept ignoring him and eventually he stopped. We ordered a famous Yunnan dish called "across the bridge noodles", which are rice noodles in a big bowl of hot, oily soup, with mushrooms and vegetables that you add at the table and that you hope will be sufficiently cooked by the hot broth. I made sure with the waitress that the soup had no meat in it and also no meat in the broth, but in retrospect I'm almost sure that it was chicken broth.
An hour later in the hotel room my stomach started hurting; over the course of the night things deteriorated until by morning I had completely rid my digestive system of all traces of food--past, present, and future--using all means at my disposal. The next day I had a fever and couldn't hold down anything but bread and water. This was also the day when I was supposed to take the bus back to Kaiyuan. But I'll save that story for another time.
While we were walking around in Kunming, Z____ and I entered a convenience store to buy some water when a little glass bottle with a green and white label caught my attention. The picture on the label looked like a big walnut. And lo...walnut milk it was. I had never noticed walnut milk before, but after that of course I started seeing it--and advertisements for it--everywhere. The walnut milk consisted of nothing but walnuts, sugar, water, and sometimes an emulsifier. I was so excited I bought three different brands and wrote reviews of them. I have never seen walnut milk in the U.S.--does it exist there?
Another place we went was "lady street" (女人街), which is not a red light district, but a big shopping mall that caters only to women (I know, what a strange concept). The mall was a lot like those malls in Taipei where each floor is a ring of tiny shops organized around a central escalator. We went down to the basement and saw what I think can best be described as a "manicure warehouse": rows and rows of tables and easy chairs with women getting manicures, pedicures, and a few massages, stretching as far as the eye could see (more or less).
Finally, I would like to mention a clothing store bravely called Unsightly & Peculiar, and a restaurant called My Favor Restaurant with, underneath this in big letters, the subtitle My Favor Steak. That's all.
We took a taxi and got to the bus station around 4 o'clock, and bought tickets for a bus two hours later. The station was crowded but not overwhelming, and we only had to wait about 15 minutes in line at one of the dozen ticket windows. We were both pretty hungry and there was a cafeteria, but all they were serving were some elderly-looking noodles, and we couldn't find a table that hadn't already been occupied by flies. So we went to the convenience store instead, and bought some pistachios, sunflower seeds, peanuts, desiccated date cake, spicy papaya, and bottled tea, and then sat outside in the bright afternoon sun.
The Greyhound-style bus was pretty poorly kept, none of the overhead lights worked (which after the sun set turned out to be a bummer), and the windows rattled so loudly when we hit bumps in the road that I was afraid they might shatter. But the bus was also mostly empty, and so the ride was pretty comfortable. While there was still light I just watched the changing iron-red hills and the weird, skinny trees with tufts of needle-like leaves at the top and in the middle, cracking sunflower seeds and throwing the shells out the window. I've read several times that in China, every square meter of arable land is under cultivation, and whenever I go outside of the city this seems to be true. What from a distance look like gradually sloping hills with wild vegetation turn out to be terraced garden plots, crisscrossed with raised mud walkways.
We got to Kaiyuan around 10 o'clock. By China's standards, Kaiyuan is a small town, mostly organized around the axis of one main arterial. Diana's apartment is on the arterial, but a few miles north of the town center. Her mom had cooked a late dinner for us, including stir-fried potato slivers, cabbage, and spicy pickled garlic cloves. Diana's family was extremely welcoming, hospitable, and generous. They graciously accommodated my vegetarian preferences, gave me my own room, included me in all of the various family and extended family outings, and when we left her mom sent me back with a big jar of homemade "rose sugar", which as far as I can tell is made of rose petals preserved with sugar--an exotic take on the fruit jam idea.
Two days after arriving, I took the bus back to Kunming for a couple days to see my friend, Z____, who happened to be traveling through. This time the bus ride was in the morning, and I got to see a completely new stretch of land, which we'd only passed after dark the day before. The land was mostly red, flat farmland with hills in the distance. Every once in a while, at a gas station, there would be a few guards or officials sitting under a cinderblock shelter, with more cinderblocks to hold down the plastic roof. Along the road there were also villages, which mostly comprised crumbling, faded brick single-story houses of indeterminate age. Sticking out amid these humble, handmade dwellings, there would sometimes be another kind of house--new, wooden, tall, and boxy, often painted garish pink or green, with a new car in the cement driveway. This sometimes created the appearance of a Malibu beach house that had been air-dropped into the middle of a medieval village.
Whenever our bus passed another car--which was about once every three minutes--the driver would lean into his horn before swerving into the opposite lane, sometimes swerving back just in time to avoid oncoming traffic. Once or twice, when the roads were crowded, this "passing lane" would grow to two or three lanes wide--as drivers who felt that other cars in the middle of passing weren't passing fast enough proceeded to pass them--and it felt like a miracle when we got back into our (single) lane without getting into a head-on collision. The bus was also full this time, and although the wind was strong I kept the window open because at any given moment it seemed like half the passengers were smoking. One man had a tattoo of a swastika on his hand, but I assume the direction was a mistake.
The eastern bus station in Kunming is pretty far from the city center, and it was a little bit challenging figuring out which buses to take. A few times I got what seemed like contradictory information from different people. On one of the buses there was a girl sitting behind a big, cardboard box, which was tied shut with straps. In the middle of the ride the box started crowing.
Kunming is smaller (and cheaper) than Chengdu, but it also seems to have a higher proportion of foreigners. There is one street in particular that hosts a whole plethora (really, an entire, honest-to-Kant plethora) of Western restaurants. On Wednesday morning we went to a French cafe called French Cafe, where we had a chocolate crepe, a strawberry tart, and panini. A happy man tried to sell us a jar of honey through the window.
Then we went to a farmer's market down the street, where I bought a wedge of goat cheese to take back to Kaiyuan. (I was also planning to buy several more wedges at the request of some friends in Chengdu when we passed back through the following week on the way to the airport, but on that day the cheese stall turned out to be closed, since it was only a couple days after New Year's.) The market and cafe are also right next to a beautiful park of walkways, bridges, gardens, and lakes, filled to the brim with dapper old men (the park, not the lakes). One common phenomenon in parks in China is a group of old ladies dancing. These are often traditional folk dances where everyone does the same thing at the same time. In this park on this day there was a particularly large group of dancers, and not all of them were old ladies.
After the park we went to a bakery and bought a green tea-flavored roll thing, but half an hour later we were accosted by three children begging for food. After making them promise to share it, we gave them the roll, but the kid we handed it to ran away, and the other two kept following us asking for food. For some reason, poverty is much more conspicuous in Kunming than it is in Chengdu. Kunming seems to have a higher number of people begging, a lot of whom are missing limbs or are otherwise mutilated--this it has in common with Hong Kong. I saw a few of these doing calligraphy with brushes held between their toes. Another phenomenon that seems to exist in Kunming but not Chengdu is performing or begging children. Every other corner had a child or two singing with a cheap, little microphone and amplifier, and none of the children looked very happy to be doing it.
Walking through the center of the city, we came to a little plaza, on either side of which was a line of old people in white lab coats. Each one was standing behind an office chair. The men and women in the coats didn't look at us as we walked passed, but seemed to be gazing benignly into the walls of the buildings across the street. I wondered if a chemical lab nearby was having an emergency evacuation (and was going to great lengths to ensure each staff member would still have a place to sit...), until a woman passing by sat down in one of the chairs and the scientist behind it started giving her a shoulder rub.
Z____ had been teasing me for being so fascinated by the old men in the park earlier, and when we passed a table selling "old man hats", I started trying some on. I was surprised to find one that I actually liked, and I asked how much it was.
"160 kuai," the lady said. I thanked her and started walking away.
"Don't you want that hat?" Z____ asked. "You have to bargain!"
"There's no way I can get it down to a price I'd be willing to pay," I said.
"Those hats should be 50 kuai at most," said Z____.
"But she wanted 160! She'd be insulted if I asked for 50."
But Z____ assured me this was not the case, so I walked back and made the offer, trying to sound jaunty. The lady laughed and shook her head, saying she couldn't possibly go below 100.
We started walking away again, when the lady called out after us "Ok! 60!"
Z____ replied "We'll take it for 50!"
"Well, in that case..." the lady conceded, and that is how I became the owner of an old man hat.
Me and Diana with bananas and hat
It seems like there is always one movie that must be mentioned immediately whenever anyone talks about movies here. When I first arrived it was 2012. For the past month or so it's been Avatar. In Kunming I finally saw it (in 3D...golly!). This was also my first experience going to a movie theater in China. We arrived two minutes after the nominal start of the movie, just in time to find out that it would be shown dubbed in Chinese with no subtitles! But since I was more interested in the animation than the dialogue, this didn't stop me from enjoying the film. When we entered the theatre, the lights hadn't yet been turned off, and a lot of people were still chatting. There was a picture of a space station on the screen, which I guessed was some kind of promotional preview, maybe for Avatar: The Game, or Avatar: The Theme Park Ride. We found our seats and I turned to Z____ to say something, but noticed that she seemed strangely engrossed in the preview. I looked around at all the people talking to each other but watching the screen, and then realized that there were no previews. The movie had started. There was a pretty steady stream of conversation going on around us through at least the first hour of the movie, but since I couldn't really understand it it was easier to tune out.
I'm writing this sitting by the window in a bakery, and there's a group of kids setting off fireworks right outside. They light a firework in their hands, and when it starts popping and shooting sparks everywhere they throw it on the ground and play soccer with it. One of them was standing by the window earlier staring at my laptop, and when I looked at him he grinned and gave me a thumbs-up.
The next night we ended up going to a movie bar, which I believe was called "Movie Bar 1895". They advertised as having live music and old movies. We had a hard time finding it and had to call three times for directions, but when we finally made it the waitress greeted us as if we were distinguished and anticipated guests. The bar had a PA, a piano, and several guitars, but the live music that night turned out to be a middle-aged woman singing movie theme songs over Music Minus One. Around 10:30 the woman left and the staff lowered a projector screen over the stage. The staff hadn't yet decided which movie to show that night, so they gave us their DVD album. We suggested 8 1/2, but were dismayed when they started the movie without turning off the lively Latin music playing over the PA. "Most of the customers here don't want to watch the movie, so we have to leave the music on" was the explanation. Looking around at the group of Chinese people playing cards, the white guy with his laptop, and the couple enjoying a romantic evening in the corner, I realized they had a point--none of them seemed too interested in watching a Fellini movie. We watched it with subtitles for about half an hour, and I laughed a couple of times imagining that the Latin music was the movie's soundtrack, and then we left.
I was hungry after that so we went to a sort of food court where we'd been the day before. Yunnan is known as having a large number of ethnicities (as recognized by the government), and each restaurant in the food court represented the food of a different one of these ethnic groups. This time it was late when we arrived, however, and most of the places were closed. Also unlike last time, the food court was ridiculously filthy. Pools of water and other liquids lay on the floor with paper plates, napkins, leftover food, trash, and plastic mats and buckets. The tables weren't much better. We were wading through this, looking for a place with that magic combination of openness and cleanliness. As we were walking, a scrawny young man suddenly jumped in front of us and started shouting "Eat! eat!" and making weird growling noises and miming someone shoveling food into their mouths. We ignored him and walked past, but soon realized that this was the only truly open restaurant. For a while the guy--who was actually a waiter--would come around and shout something at us, but we kept ignoring him and eventually he stopped. We ordered a famous Yunnan dish called "across the bridge noodles", which are rice noodles in a big bowl of hot, oily soup, with mushrooms and vegetables that you add at the table and that you hope will be sufficiently cooked by the hot broth. I made sure with the waitress that the soup had no meat in it and also no meat in the broth, but in retrospect I'm almost sure that it was chicken broth.
An hour later in the hotel room my stomach started hurting; over the course of the night things deteriorated until by morning I had completely rid my digestive system of all traces of food--past, present, and future--using all means at my disposal. The next day I had a fever and couldn't hold down anything but bread and water. This was also the day when I was supposed to take the bus back to Kaiyuan. But I'll save that story for another time.
While we were walking around in Kunming, Z____ and I entered a convenience store to buy some water when a little glass bottle with a green and white label caught my attention. The picture on the label looked like a big walnut. And lo...walnut milk it was. I had never noticed walnut milk before, but after that of course I started seeing it--and advertisements for it--everywhere. The walnut milk consisted of nothing but walnuts, sugar, water, and sometimes an emulsifier. I was so excited I bought three different brands and wrote reviews of them. I have never seen walnut milk in the U.S.--does it exist there?
Another place we went was "lady street" (女人街), which is not a red light district, but a big shopping mall that caters only to women (I know, what a strange concept). The mall was a lot like those malls in Taipei where each floor is a ring of tiny shops organized around a central escalator. We went down to the basement and saw what I think can best be described as a "manicure warehouse": rows and rows of tables and easy chairs with women getting manicures, pedicures, and a few massages, stretching as far as the eye could see (more or less).
Finally, I would like to mention a clothing store bravely called Unsightly & Peculiar, and a restaurant called My Favor Restaurant with, underneath this in big letters, the subtitle My Favor Steak. That's all.
Thursday, February 4, 2010
Photos from Hong Kong
Near the end of the main street of the main town on Lamma Island, an island near Hong Kong Island where no cars are allowed. To the right is a used bookstore and vegetarian cafe.
Something I ate at a vegetarian restaurant.
A view from Kowloon Park.
Smaller statues in front of the Giant Buddha.
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