[If you are looking for the post relating to 8-bit Starcraft click here.]
So March came and went and so did my 23rd birthday. It’s my first “real world” birthday. I’m getting pretty close to the half-way point to 50. Only 7 more years until I’m 30. I hate aging. I have too much stuff I have to do and I don’t feel like I’ll live long enough (I’m tentatively putting my DOD at age 65) to get it all done. Hopefully I can get all the stuff I want to get done before I’m too old. You know, make like 3 epic masterpieces of action/sciene-fiction/animated cinema. Probably get a wife in there somewhere. Make a kid or two.
I’ve only now started to understand my friends who were no longer in college. Being a grown up is lame and difficult. I feel a little bit directionless. It’s like “Well done with college, now what?” Also things get kind of boring. I’m going to have to start talking about like… Mutual funds and proctology and roth RIAs (IRA’s? RIA? I don’t know). I’ve had tons of people tell me things like “Yeah, you won’t have such and such and opinion once you get into the real world” and so on and so forth. Frankly, it’s starting to get me down. It feels like over the course of one year my youthful optimism has died. I’m sure is has to do with the fact that in China optimism for “I personally can change the world, make things better, and make myself better in the process” is pretty much non-existent. It’s very oppressive to the mind here. So… I feel rather like I’ve lost a bunch of my “I’m awesome I can do stuff” attitude since I’ve come to China. I’ve had to change my attitude and the way I do things so many times and in so many ways that I’m afraid it might have actually affected who I am.
I guess what I kind of desire is just having some people around to talk about things I’m interested in that are also interested in the same subject. I haven’t talked about movies and special effects and all the little intricacies and so on in forever.
However, my friends here are still cool and they gave me a good birthday. Here’s what Helen gave me:
Cool chocolate peanut:
My actual present:
It’s a Giant’s Wallet. I can hold up to 500 Rupees with it. I thought the Adult’s Wallet was a big deal, but I figured out that the money in China is just barely too large to fit into it. Now that I have the Giant’s Wallet however, I can finally save up enough money to buy Biggoron Sword and a new bag of bombs.
On the way to my birthday dinner:
Me at the Brazillian BBQ for my birthday meal. My birthday cake was blueberry cheesecake! It was clearly made with what tasted like Velveeta, but still, some form of cheesecake for my birthday is better than no cheesecake for my birthday:
Ahh… fat… feeling fat after gorging myself on meat and Velveecake:
That’s not my hand:
A few days later (on my actual birthday) I went out to see a friend downtown. I also found a donut shop. I glanced inside and I didn’t see any donuts though. This confused me:
Craftsmen selling things on the street. The guy on the right is selling tiny bicycles he made out made of wire. The man on the left is selling animals he’s making out of bamboo leaves and plant stems. He even made some pinwheels with them:
Spirograph drawings. This is immensely confusing. I had no idea you could sell these, it’s something that kids make. It’s as easy as making mud pies. There were more people standing around watching her make these Spirograph drawings than people even approaching and looking at the guys making the bamboo sculptures or the wire bicycles. Did Spirographs just not make it to China and then this woman figured it out and makes money off of it? More power to her I guess but I just I don’t understand. How was this more fascinating than a man making a grasshopper out of leaves and pins?
Here’s iuh as we eat lunch. The only picture I’m allowed to post:
So she wanted to go to the library. I thought it would be pretty cool to go a Chinese library so I agreed to go. Where does information in China come from? Hell I can’t even remember the last time I went to a library in the US. A long time ago I apparently walked right through this library (actually I even talk about it in this post.).
Gotta say, this is probably the nicest library I have ever been in. For a country that keeps such a tight fist on information (quote what I’ve heard a couple times: “but we’re not as bad as North Korea”) it sure doesn’t look like it on the surface. Here’s the Shenzhen Library:
I even met a couple students of mine while I was there. Didn’t get a picture though. I find it rather amazing how often I randomly run into people that I know here versus back home. It seems to happen all the time. How is that statistically possible? There’s more people here but I know just as many people here as back home so doesn’t that make it less likely I’ll run into someone I know? I mean I even met someone I knew thousands of miles away in a different part of China. Might be because more people know me than I know them. Dunno. Weird.
Anyway look at how nice this library is, jeez, can you imagine our libraries getting this kind of funding?
People actually come to the library to study. I don’t even know what I would use a library for. If I need information I can use the internet, it’s updated faster than a book. If it’s not on the internet it doesn’t exist.
I’ve found overall however that the internet isn’t used the same here as it is back home. I read some studies awhile ago that compared the two. In the US the top reason for using the internet is for research purposes (anything from checking sources to finding a phone number). In China it’s primary purpose is for entertainment like games, movies, music, and TV. That’s really its only purpose. Why would they research anything on it? In many people’s minds you can’t always trust the internet due to an overwhelming amount of factors that I don’t feel like writing down right now. If they want to know something then someone above them will tell them the answer. That’s how they do research papers in class. They look up whatever information is provided in the books that the teacher gave them and then tell the teacher the answer that they think the teacher wants to hear. I’ve read their papers, they’re all almost exact duplicates of each other with same quotes from the same people with the same opinion.
I find this to be so much different than the US. For instance I specifically remember in high school there was a question on a test in my economics class that I knowingly answered wrong. I disagreed with what the teacher was saying and I gave my examples and arguments. I got the answer marked as wrong, but I didn’t care because I said what I felt was the right thing to say. My students all tell me they’re always doing the opposite. They tell me they always just say what the teacher wants to hear. This is actually one of the reasons they get annoyed when they ask my opinion on something and I refuse to tell them. I always tell them I’m not going to give them my opinion because I want them to figure out their own opinions, not just to tell me what they think I want to hear.
Oh now I’ve found the part where it gets a little weird. I don’t fully understand the alphabetizing system, but check this out:
Here’s where I keep my blog blocked for another month or two. I’m going to include some html tricks to try and get past whatever sensors might pick up on the post. Sorry Chinese guy reading my post, give me a break this time okay?
1) Marxism and Lenninism aren’t Philosophy or Social Sciences? I think just about every philosophy major and social scientist in the world would disagree with this classification. It’s like saying “I don’t like insects but I like butterflies. A butterfly isn’t an insect because butterflies are beautiful and I like them more, meanwhile cockroaches are gross. Therefore butterflies aren’t insects and cockroaches are”. At the base, scientifically and objectively, they’re both insects. The library is showing its personal opinion, not something a place of knowledge, learning, and free thought is supposed to do.
2) Entire sections devoted to single people? I don’t know what to say about that. Idolization much? Of course in the US we probably have whole sections devoted to Christianity and the following of Jesus. I’ve found that Mao is idolized here in much the same way that Christ is idolized back home (portraits in people’s homes, sometimes there’s a little altars with his picture, every time I say “Mao” I get corrected with “Chairman Mao”, etc). However, they at least give Mao a couple imperfections. They recognize that Mao was human and that he did some bad things “70% good, 30% bad”.
I was happy about this until I found out that everyone says the same thing. Whenever it comes up, this is the same ratio that gets brought up every time: “70% good, 30% bad”. This shows me that people don’t actually have all the information and they are instead just repeating what they’ve been told. If they had all the information and gave it an independent analysis, each person would give a different number. Even if the ratio continued to show favorable results, there would still be different numbers depending on the person based on the simple fact that people are different and some would have come to different conclusions than others. If it was “90% good, 10% bad” or “75% good, 25% bad” they’re still different numbers because different people would come to different conclusions based upon their own independent thoughts and attitudes toward what he did. However, it’s always the same number. I fear that he is slowly being turned into a Christ-like figure that will have (and already has had) things that were bad about him conveniently “forgotten” to preserve his image.
I am anti-messiah. People are people and sometimes they do great things. Yes, Mao was a great man and he did some rather amazing things. However, he definitely did some really awful things as well. If he had lost the revolution or had another one come up after him in the 60’s, the local populace would see him as being up there with Hitler or Kim Jong Il. It’s always good to remember that we are humans and to strive to be great, but if we forget our mistakes then we cannot learn and grow from them. Mistakes and bad things are just as important to remember as the good things. However, that goes against the main Chinese cultural idea of “face” and honor. At least in the US we poke fun at the fact that a few of our founding fathers were total sex hounds.
Alright, done preaching and done with the library. It’s a nice day out so let’s go to the park. Look how many people there are! The only time I’d experienced what felt like more people than a green space could handle like this was Central Park:
Lots of people were flying kites:
This guy is flying a kite that’s waaaaay up there. Question: How do you look badass while flying a kite? Answer: You use the same rod and reel that Robert Shaw used to reel in Jaws:
Here’s an alien tree:
I don’t know what’s going on here. I’ve heard from students that this park has matchmaking events every weekend. The parents of adult children who don’t have husbands or wives will go to the matchmaking event and start meddling and try to find them spouses. I don’t know if that’s what this is at all, but I thought I would show this picture while also finding a reason to tell you about matchmaking events:
Look out for Forbit, I hear he’s a thief:
You can find really nice quiet spots if you just walk off the path 20 feet or so:
These are pictures on the way home. There’s a band playing cover songs inside of this crowd of people:
The subway train’s doors got stuck so we all just kind of stood around waiting for them to get fixed:
I don’t know if I have ever shown this. To get to the metro station in Dongmen you have to walk through a mall. This is one of the ads for the mall. Apparently Jessica Alba circa Sin City 2005 approves of interesting shopping:
I decided to commemorate my first birthday dinner in China at the first McDonalds in China. I wonder what this says about me:
The giant mega screen showing constant ads outside broke:
Somehow some of my students remembered my birthday? Nice. It was a miniature tea set:
No More Birthday
Lotus root: It’s a decent food. It doesn’t have flavor really. It’s just kind of a slightly hard root vegetable.
Tang: A drink mix invented by William A. Mitchell and popularized by NASA using it for their astronauts. I survived on Tang as one of my only sources of vitamins during college.
I give you: Tang and Lotus root soup:
Yes, it tastes exactly like you think it tastes. Helen kept saying it was lotus root with orange soup. I had trouble accepting that because I knew it was Tang. I know Tang well. It’s a kick in a glass and it has kicked me many a time. I’ve never thought about using Tang as anything other than a something to mix with vodka or something to drink while watching court TV. Inventive to say the least.
Here’s a picture of a toy (it’s a Chinese version of a hacky sack) that got stuck on a ledge. I laughed because I’m thinking of the kids playing this game, accidently launching it over the edge, then seeing in dismay that they will never, ever, EVER get their toy back:
I went to get my haircut. Getting a haircut is always a big deal because you have to stop them from making your hair look like what cool trendy Chinese guys wear. The popular style here is basically a big poof in the back and then it gets shorter and shorter as it slopes down to your forehead. It looks ridiculous and it especially looks ridiculous if you’re balding at all (like me). I have to carry photos of Brad Pitt with me, show them, then tell them to copy what they see (point back and forth from Brad Pitt’s head to my head).
This guy that worked there kept getting pictures of me. My hairdresser told me: “He thinks you are very cool looking.” I did my usual defense of people taking pictures of me without asking by whipping out my camera and getting them before they’re done taking the photo. It usually makes them stop but it didn’t work with this guy:
I’ve told you about the touching things here right? It’s more acceptable for guys to touch each other here. I mean like touch anywhere at any time. I’ve had students come up to me and put their hands on my shoulders while I was standing at the urinal. I’ve seen one student using a urinal and then another student come up behind him and hug him around the waist and lean his head on his back.
This isn’t weird. No one gives it a second glance:
So since my favorite burger restaurant (Johnny’s) closed, I’ve been looking at other places around my Chinese class to grab dinner. I found a really upscale place through a random set of elevators. Didn’t expect it. It was neat:
I discovered a couple things at a bookstore I went to. One, I forgot about Simon’s cat. Apparently Simon Tofield figured out a way to cash in on his fun couple of cartoons. Speaking of which you should click here.
Next, I never noticed this until they were side by side. Look at the faces of Chris Tucker and Jackie Chan on these covers. Look at how their souls seem to gradually whither and die in the time between Rush Hour and Rush Hour 3:
G.I. Joe: All American Hero. Starring by list of importance: Asian guy who is not the hero of the movie and is in fact merely a henchman to the main villian, White guy who is the hero of the movie, a woman, the black guy. I’m actually impressed the black guy was included at all, although black people are more acceptable to have in movies. I’m curious to know if people look at the cover and think that the Asian character is Chinese. It’s okay though, I would expect this cover to change like this. Marketing people will always change the cover to be whatever will sell the best and obviously you’re going to sell more movies to people who think they’re watching a movie that subconsciously stars themselves:
A couple of photos of a slow day where I live:
There are these cats that live on the campus of my school. This one startled me by being right outside the bars on the second floor of my building:
There was one day where I had to completely change my lesson because it wasn’t working and was instead getting my students pissed off at me thinking that I hated China and so on. I believe I briefly talked about it back when it happened at the end of this post. I decided to completely redo the lesson part way through the day, but to do that I needed to not teach the lesson that I had on hand for the rest of the day. So we didn’t do the lesson and just talked about whatever we felt like in class.
They really wanted to know about things I noticed about China and what sort of issues I’ve had in China etc etc. So I showed them these two pictures which they thought were funny. The hand shows a really long (three to four inches) pinky nail that lots of men here have and the person on the left is the big hair I talked about:
They said: “oh no, those people that do that are just crazy! No one wears their hair like that or their nails like that…” Which is why I’ve seen it so much and when I draw it you can instantly recognize what I’m talking about right? Anyway the next part was more crazy. I started talking about language difficulties I’ve had here.
We never realize how much we rely on our ability to read until we can’t read anymore. Most Chinese people forget that foreigners can’t read. There are many dialects and accents in China, but they all have the same writing system. So if they don’t understand each other, they can still write characters and understand what the other person is saying. Often, assuming the person doesn’t just give up on me, if I don’t understand what someone is saying in Chinese they will start writing it down, hoping that I’ll understand it better that way. The next step for someone in the US might be to speak slower (or more loudly as the case may be) if someone doesn’t understand, but in China it’s writing. Everyone knows how to read right? How can I not know how to read?
When this idea has come up in class before, the students usually seem to quite suddenly have a very eye opening experience (a lot of chatter fills the room as they talk to each other in astonished voices). They never even thought that I don’t know how to read and if I don’t know how to read there’s no way for me to get any information that is written down. They can’t even think of the idea of knowing only the spoken half of the language because to them it’s so intertwined you can’t know one without knowing the other. Then they suddenly start thinking of all the information they learn from writing and then try to imagine how exactly I live here. It’s impossible to them. Frankly it’s almost impossible to me.
Anyway, to give an example of what I mean when I try to explain what exactly their writing looks like to me (a bunch of meaningless lines) I usually draw a bunch of meaningless lines on the board that look like maybe they could be a real word. So I did. Then they looked confused for a second and asked what it was and I said: “Nothing. That’s exactly what I mean. It doesn’t look like anything to me.”
Then one student said: “It’s bird!”
Then the whole class started laughing and thinking it was really cool. Apparently I actually did write a real character down when I was trying to write something that didn’t mean anything. I wrote down a real character completely by chance.
So my students say this is the character for “bird” (a specific kind of bird, like some kind of sparrow or something):
Speaking of writing words in different languages, this is probably one of the top words I didn’t expect to be spelled wrong in China:
The police station doing some drills or something. They’re always doing something in their courtyard when I walk by on Wednesdays. Sometimes they’re just playing basketball though:
Some people walked by as I waited for the bus. They were carrying long sticks of bamboo. The kid is riding the bamboo and being awesome:
Science fair! The science fair of course starts out with everyone lining up and being orderly:
Then they shot off rockets and stuff. I remember doing rockets in Junior high, but I think we had to make them out of compressed air. We filled litre bottles up with air and then shot them upwards. People in China are much less afraid of being sued though so they get to use actual explosives.
April Fool’s Day
On April Fool’s day I was on high alert. I had one student successfully put glue in my hand (sort of successfully?). I tried to prepare ahead of time for them trying to trick me. I would do things like enter the classrooms from the opposite door than I always walk in so they couldn’t prepare for me. I would get nervous when I saw large groups of students looking and watching like this:
Here’s a chalkboard of a class I walked into:
Happy Owen’s Day! Haha just kidding, it’s not Owen’s Day, it’s April Fool’s day. Got you!!
They were gonna give me a 10 trillion dollars!? Aww! If this were any other day I would have taken that at face value! I could bail out a whole bank with that amount of money! I could even almost pay off the entire US National debt!
Here’s the other side of the board:
Yay my students love me! This is the class that only started having me this semester. Before that they had another teacher whose name is spelled similar to Robot. So the fact that it says “We love Owen not Robo t” is supposed to reference that.
I then had to say: “Aw hey, he’s nice you guys. He means well.” But secretly, in my head, I was like “Yes! In your face Robot for telling me I was an irresponsible and immoral teacher that one time!”
Also my most common phrase at the start of class is “if it’s not for this class, please put it away.” Dang kids and their new fangled “newspapers” and “music.”
So here’s the big school prank. Are you ready? See if you can figure it out. Here’s the kids watching the prank:
Here are the kids that are doing the prank:
Did you get it? Here I’ll explain it: They were almost late for class.
Yep.
That’s it. That’s the joke.
They all stood on the bridge and then ran to their classrooms about 30 seconds before the bell rang. Close one huh?
There you go. That’s April Fool’s Day in China.
The Last of It
When I first started making these noodles I wasn’t really looking forward to them. They were just some quick noodles, nothing special.
Then I saw this guy’s face as he ate the noodles and I became much more excited to eat them. Quick noodles in China taste way better than the ones in the US and this guy proves it:
So one day I woke up to drums beating and cymbals clashing outside my room. Apparently there was a dragon walking down the street behind my house. No one lives on that street though, it’s just sort of a road that doesn’t go anywhere. I don’t understand what they were doing but there they were, being a dragon and walking down the street toward the shipping containers. Here’s a really awful photo after they were almost run over by a semi. I personally would not want to be wearing something that obscured my vision in a place like this:
Unrelated: here’s some students making some kind of movie:
Some days when it clouds over and rains it looks pretty cool. I sometimes forget there’s a mountain there until the clouds get out of the way:
Everyone trying to view the singing competition. They have a lot of singing competitions at this school. Not one art show though. :-(
Have I ever shown you how I study? Cause this is how I do it. Whenever I remember I put little post it notes with drawings and words on them in places where I really have no other option but to accidently see them and read them. So this is what my bathroom looks like:
I’ll let you guess what each one means. Scroll down to see the answer:
Dagai = Pretty much
Woerma = Walmart
Duche = traffic jam
Tiao liao = seasonings
Lu kou = intersection (road mouth)
Next set:
Caishichang = Vegetable market (like a farmer’s market)
Chaoshi = Supermarket (Bonus, if you say Chaoren it means Superman)
Shucai = Vegetable
Qing Jiao = Green pepper
La jiao = Hot pepper
Xihongshi = tomato
My favorite:
Xinxian = Fresh
So the other day I found two amazing things at the same time: Swiss cheese and salted butter. This was a really good day for me. Whenever I’ve found butter it has always been the unsalted variety which is like… I mean what’s that useful for?
Next, 95% of the cheese I find in china is that horrible processed American cheese or a velveeta-like spread. This is what people here think cheese is. It’s hurtful. It pains me. So when I walk into a store and I see a block of swiss cheese? Oh man. What a day.
Once I saw these two items I was on a mission. I was going to make a grilled ham and swiss. I found some sliced ham and I also found what was labeled as “sandwich bread”. I was a little nervous because every time I’ve tried to buy sliced bread it has always been sweetened, but I figured maybe it would be different if the bread was labeled as being for sandwiches (I was right btw). The main difference between a regular sliced bread loaf and sandwich bread is that sandwich bread comes in packs of 6. They take the center 6 slices out of a loaf of bread and then seal them up in a different plastic bag. This of course causes them to get quite stale quite quickly, but beggars can’t be choosers.
So I had all my ingredients and when I got home I started making the sandwich so I could eat and watch LOST:
With no cooking equipment except a rice cooker and a broken hotplate, I figured out that I could actually use my hotplate to fry things like a skillet. I just didn’t have any control over the heat or anything and it would shut off after a couple minutes thanks to its “MICROCOMPUTER”:
I also found unsweetened mayonnaise. I figured out there were two types of mayonnaise and some of them in the Kewpie brand say “sweetened”. I figured the ones that didn’t say anything must be regular. Not as good as Hellmann’s, it’s a little too tart, but don’t care:
You see that sandwich? That was a damn good sandwich. I’ve perfected the rice cooker grilled sandwich technique by this point. Now I’m really good at it. I know exactly how long it takes for the butter cook versus just get really soft and melt, I know at what point the cheese is actually melted versus still in chunks.
I’m so proud of that sandwich.
I’m gonna make another one right now. It’s raining and it’s looking like another typhoon, but I’ll be here eating my sandwich and watching Doctor Who.
Ttyl!
