HERE'S HOW THIS WILL WORK

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My writing on the eight days I spent in China totals safely over 15,000 words.  I don’t expect any of you to read that, except probably Mom.  So, to help you, in this post I’ll tell you what the coolest parts are and you can go read those.  I’ll also summarize the interesting cultural bits here.  But feel free to read as much as you want.  So many memories!

 

HIGHLIGHTS

Wei Ming

Jin Mao Tower (the first time)

Benny grabbing me by the arm at the Temple of Heaven

Nothing is Interesting

The Great Wall and its merchants

Victoria’s Peak

Family Insight Tour

Jen

Last Day with Catie

 

CULTURE:

 

People in Shanghai are REALLY pushy.  In lines, on sidewalks, on buses, whatever.  It’s just the way it is.  It’s not personal, they just do it.

 

Going to the bathroom in the streets is TOTALLY cool for little kids in Shanghai.

 

Food is super cheap pretty much everywhere.  Clothes are mostly the same way.

 

No one really cares that they can’t get Google or Facebook.  They have QQ and that Chinese search engine, so why bother?

 

Premarital sex is really rare in China and they don’t have any sex education at all, really

 

Haggle markets are pretty popular

 

There’s way more American goods in China than you might expect.  We’ve definitely done  a better job invading this culture than we have in, say, Japan

 

Even the poorest people in Shanghai don’t really have it too bad

 

Chinese cities are EXCEPTIONALLY safe and murder, assault, and gang violence are nearly unheard of

 

Newspapers are totally slanted toward the government – even the English ones

 

Old people exercise and hang out together A LOT and it’s really good for them.  The government supports it too

 

HK has a seriously awful housing situation and a really bad drug problem, specifically with amphetamines and ketamines, which are often fatal and very publicly used

 

HK has awful academic culture – kids come to class fifty minutes late, talk on phones in class, sleep in class, have conversations over the teacher, and whatever else they like

 

HK is the only place in my life that I’ve seen high-rise slums.  I’m talking literally buildings full of slums that are 90 stories high.  90 stories high.  Lots of people jump.  Lots of old people jump.

 

Just like in America, people who grow up near historic areas don’t care for them.

 

High school is way harder than college/university

 

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Alright, I think that’s all I got.  Enjoy whatever you want to take from this.

 

Peace out.

Disembarking in Shanghai

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The people in Shanghai definitely seem to know how to work the ports.  Maybe even specifically how to work Semester at Sea.  I know some places do have certain events planned specifically for when our ship comes to town.

 

In any case, right when we got off the boat, standing just at the end of the port driveway were a number of sellers.  They approached us to offer watches, wallets, currency exchange, laser pointers, and probably a number of other things.  I didn’t know how to say “No, thank you” in Mandarin at that point, so I just continued through with the rest of my people.

 

There was a bridge that we had to cross before we could get to the ticket station – just a tiny little one, like the width of a standard two lane road or so.  There was a guy laying down on the sidewalk.  He was holding a bag in one hand and holding his chest with the other.  He was staring blankly and on his side, sort of convulsing a little bit, and maybe vocalizing just a tiny bit too, I can’t really remember.  We all wondered what the hell was wrong, and we also saw a man in a POLICE yellow jacket running away from him and around a corner – so maybe there had been help.  Dani, one of my friends, spoke a little bit of Mandarin and tried to talk to him to see if there was anything we could do, but apparently he said nothing back, or just said one word over and over that she didn’t know.  Eventually another local walked by and sort of shooed us away.

 

Our guess and hope is that he was just acting.  He was gone when we returned, and we never heard anything about him again.

 

A woman came to us and started talking to us.  She wasn’t trying to sell us anything – at least, not in any obnoxious way.  She said that she’d learned English in high school but hadn’t really used it since, and she was 35 years old now and had a family and kids.  Toby and I were pretty surprised at how good her English was.  She lead us all to the train ticket office that we couldn’t really use, but it was nice of her to try anyway.  She said that business had been good recently, and that she usually hung out in the area where we were, and that she grew up in Shanghai (I think).  I couldn’t really tell if she was a legitimate watch seller or one of the ones on the streets.  I started off thinking the first, but ended up thinking the second.  In either case, she seemed really nice and she was doing it for her family.  So I hope she does well.

The Train Station

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People are pushy in Shanghai, and niceties involving waiting in line don’t really exist.  We were at a self-service ticket machine at the main train station in town, and I was the second person in line.  There was really just one dude at the machine in front of me, and no one behind me even.  Then suddenly a pack of locals who knew each other just walked up to the machine from the side of the row of kiosks, and from beside me through the other roped aisle, and then there were five people in front of me, and they used the machine before me.

 

I didn’t really care because (a) I wasn’t buying a ticket, my friends were, and (b) it was the wrong machine anyway.

 

So we found the right place to buy tickets in a building about 200 yards away, and we found the English speaking service center as well.  SAS people were filling up the line right to the front, and in the middle of a transaction, when some local guy just starts busting his way through the line.  I mean, literally pushing people aside and running down the middle of the aisle, just going gangbusters on us.  The two people at the front of the line were fortunately able to stop him, which is good because they had already put some money in and he had money in his hand that he was trying to throw down on the table to say that it was his turn.  When they stopped him he just laughed, as if it were funny, but my friends did the best they could to let him know it wasn’t funny, and he should chill when someone is actually in the process of buying a ticket.

Awkward Turtle

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Eventually we ended up at a fairly nice restaurant in a building called either Union Square or Times Square.  There were a lot of shops in the bottom, and we stopped in a candy store for a minute to get some stuff although the workers seemed mad at us and like they wanted to rush us out.  We were kinda hungry at this point and just figured we’d look around and see what seemed appealing.  We got to (I think) the third floor and found a pretty classy looking place with a lot of window views and some English and some pictures on the menu and it looked within our price range probably, so we went in.

 

The food was really good and really cheap.  Like, I think we each paid about $10 US for our entire meal, and we got drinks, a main course, and a dessert for each of us.  The only bad part was that we couldn’t drink the water because it makes Americans sick to their stomach.  Well, really just anyone that didn’t grow up with the water in the area.

 

The waitress was really cute.  She spoke a little bit of English but not too much.  I forget exactly how we got to talking about it, but somewhere in the conversation about the staff some of us mentioned that we thought she was cute, and I was one of them.  Dani said she was going to tell her, and the next time she had to come over, Dani actually did tell her.  She smiled, but didn’t react too strongly at all.  I felt a little embarrassed, just a teeny tiny bit although I mostly just didn’t’ care, but mostly felt a little bad about it because I feel like it was a bad place to be for the waitress.  I said “Oh man, awkward turtle…” and made the awkward turtle motion with my hands.

 

The waitress was looking on from the wait station, and imitated with her hands and made a face as if to wonder what it was.  I told her it was a turtle.  She didn’t know what that was, and she held out a pen and a piece of paper and asked me to write it.  I didn’t write down “awkward,” just “turtle,” and she took the pen back.  I wonder if “Awkward turtle” is translatable in Mandarin.

Cloud Nine (Jin Mao Part One)

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My roommate had told me that there was a place in Shanghai called Cloud Nine that was the highest bar in the world.  He seemed like he was pretty excited about going – he goes out to bars a couple times in every port – and I didn’t really care at all.  A bar that’s high up.  Who cares, you know?

 

Anyway, the group of three and myself had absolutely no plans, and we were near the Jin-Mao Tower, so we decided we should go up.  While we were on the way, Eric noticed that the building right next to it was even taller.  It’s the one shaped like a basket, that kind of looks like it has a handle at the top where you could pick it up if you were tall enough.  We walked into the bottom of the building and asked where the observation deck was, and the pointed us left.  We thought they were pointing to Jin-Mao, so we stopped in the next door and asked again.  They again pointed us left.  So we went out and we went left.

 

We finally came to a security check-point which was the entrance to the deck.  They called it the Sky Walk.  As it turns out, it’s not the top floor you get to see, but the floor that’s on the bottom of the “handle” of the building.  It’s made of glass, and you can walk across it, and right through your feet you can see Shanghai 900 feet below you.  It’s pretty freaky.  We didn’t actually do it, though we know some kids who did.  It cost something like $15 US and we didn’t feel up to that.  We though Jin-Mao might be free, so we headed there.

 

We tried to go up in the JM tower as much as we could on our own.  We finally made it to like the 54^th floor or the 84^th floor or something like that, and we asked how to get all the way up to the observation deck.  They told us we had to go down to B1, and the entrance was down there.  I think we had actually gotten to the bar at the top by that point, and we found out there was a one-drink minimum (about $10 US), and we decided to try the observation deck, and to hope it was free.

 

It wasn’t free.  And the line was long.  So we went to the bar instead.

 

It turned that the bar was Cloud Nine.  Weird.  I had absolutely no plans to go there, and there I was.  It was really beautifully decorated with black and red everywhere, candles on the tables, and a great view out the windows.  They had chocolate gold coins on the desk where we had to ask for a table.  I took some, and then we took pictures in the waiting area, which was clearly designed to allow you the widest view possible for photographing.

 

We finally got a table and looked through the menu.  We also tried the nuts, which were extremely spicy (but free).  I don’t think any of us got anything to drink.  I think Catie and Dani both got ice cream/parfait, and I just got some scoops of ice cream.  Eric might have gotten a drink, but I’m not really sure.

 

Anyway, the view was amazing.  We had a window seat, and just had an awesome full view of Shanghai early in the night when the buildings were just lighting up.  We could even see some of them turn their show lights on.  It was seriously classy, too.  The tables were well-separated, and there was no real bar area for people to get drunk and rowdy.  You had to wait for your waitress to come for a drink.  The music was also really, really nice – acoustic English and American stuff.  I would have liked to have asked for the soundtrack, but it probably wasn’t really a workable agreement.  We sat and talked for a good while, until Eric needed to leave, then paid $10 US and headed out.  We all really liked the place.  It was just nice to sit and talk and look and know that – even if drunk SASers showed up – they couldn’t ruin our having a good time because the place just seriously wouldn’t allow that.

The Colombians

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We wanted to talk to some people from not-SAS that first night in Shanghai.  We went back into town and took a cab – though I can’t remember for the life of me where we asked them to take us.  In either case ended up on pretty much the brightest and most neon street in Shanghai, which was pretty cool, but we had no interest in shopping really.  I was looking for a Starbucks in particular so I could get internet for like ten minutes.

 

Anyway, we found a Starbucks and saw a group of white people there, and figured we should go talk to them to find out about their travels.  They said they didn’t mind us sitting with them, so we asked where they were from.  All three were from Columbia, although they had lived and studied in other places as well.  One of them had been there for a year and a month or so, and his Mandarin was becoming pretty okay, but the other two had only been there for a month and theirs wasn’t so good.  But they still taught us some words.  They told us how to say “too spicy,” and “too expensive,” as well an equivalent of “Oh crap!” and the conversational agreement (which is, where we say “mmhm, mmhm, mmhm” when listening to someone talk, they just say, “ah, ah-ah, ah-ah-ah, ah, ah-ah”). 

 

The older girl with them was a lawyer – already out of law school – and currently working with the Columbian government in Shanghai.  I think all three of them were actually, and said they hadn’t really made too many Chinese friends.  They said their job typically consisted of going to factories or workplaces and making sure that the standards of safety and hazard for the government of Columbia were met.  They also said that a lot of Mexicans (the rich ones) lived nearby, and there were some Latin American clubs that they all liked to go to, but they were taking a night off for now.

 

I also tried asking them about growing up in Columbia, but they didn’t really say much.  It’s hard to tell people, “Tell me a story like on The Moth or This American Life!” and not have them think that you’re crazy for expecting it or wanting it in the first place.  Oh well!  They talked about how kids would go to “the farms” (just empty areas where they grew up) to have parties where they could drink or have sex or whatever else they wanted, although they said that they never got nearly as messed up as American kids at bars and in their basements did.  I also asked about the US government dumping herbicides on the coca fields, and if that pissed them off.  They didn’t seem to think it was a big problem, because apparently the south is the only place that grows it and almost exclusively grows it.  I wondered how Leiha from DC would have responded to them.  That was one of the things she cared most about.  I kind of wished she had been there so I could hear what she had to say about it.

The Palestinian

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Went to the Yu Gardens because the Columbians said they might meet us.  Tried to txt  but it was a landline.  Walking through and it got busier and we came near bargain shops.  About to step into a shop and saw a non-Chinese dude so we said some stuff in English and he responded.  He was Palestinian but spoke perfect English with no accent.  He was a nursing student in Ohio and was now studying at the Second Military [some M word] Academy somewhere in Shanghai.  He’d only been there for a month but had a girlfriend who helped him learn some Mandarin.  He had all his classes in a hotel and lived there too and didn’t like the food.  He had some ME friends, one from Tunisia and one from Jordan, one was also a nurse and one was a doctor.  Or maybe one was a dentist.  Anyway, we said it was good to talk to him and parted ways.

 

It was CRAZY CROWDED in the Yu Gardens shopping part.  Literally packed, shoulder to shoulder as you walked through.  I paid heed to the advice of “Pretend you have the shoulders of a linebacker,” and kind of just powered my way through without being too pushy.  It also helped that I was many inches taller than most of the people around me.  Dani hooked arms with me and Catie with her and that’s how we got through.

 

We had our first hagging experiences there sorta.  I asked for journals and didn’t realize so I didn’t buy them.  Dani bought some scarves at the original price which was a little too much, but they’re nice and we didn’t really know and she was willing to pay the price so whatever.  I saw some glass Buddhas in a shop somewhere and took a picture and the girl told me no pictures and tried to sell and said she’d give me half price when I said I wasn’t interested, but I seriously wasn’t interested, and just kept walking away.

 

I saw a golden sculpture in the window of a jewelry store.  I thought the price on it said something like Y150 which is like $21, so I was totally going to buy it for mom.  Catie and I went into the store later and went to the high quality jade part and some things for upward of $50,000 USD.  I think some were even more than that.  I asked the person at the counter how much the ship was and she said it was 24k gold and then that it cost something like $50000 US or maybe it was $5000 US, I can’t remember anymore, but it was way too much.  I think the 150 part referred to the weight of gold.

The Beggar Girl

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A tiny tiny tiny tiny little beggar girl came up to me on the streets.  I think she asked me if I wanted anything, but I said no.  I still had the New Years candy in my hands.  I looked at it and kind of offered it to her, basically asking if she wanted a piece.  She nodded.  I started to unwrap the gold twist-tie at the top of it, and she just reached up to about my waist level and grabbed the whole bag.  I said, “Oh, the whole thing?”  And she just smiled sooo big and walked away, then she waved at me and said in her tiny tiny tiny voice, “Byebye!”

 

Girl’s got game.

 

I kind of wanted to hand it out to more kids, but as long as it goes to good use, I don’t really care at all.

The River Banks

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There was a river somewhere in Shanghai that we were walking by, and we realized that the banks were made of thick concrete walls that you could totally walk on or sit on if you wanted to climb badly enough.  It wasn’t really much of a climb – about two feet up from a sturdy staircase railing – definitely not the kind of protection they would put up if they really didn’t want you on the banks.  Plus there were absolutely no signs posted at all.  So we crossed to the other side of the river and sat on the banks.  The concrete was cold, but the sun was out right now and if we faced toward it, it was warm.

Catie and I just enjoyed the view of the river.  We said ni hao to the people passing by.  Many of them looked surprised.  Some of them said hello to us after we said ni hao.  One girl had a piano bag.  A middle aged man was looking at us a lot back and forth and tripped a little bit on his way up the stairs.  One guy climbed right on up in between us, and I thought he was going to push me and I told Catie to hold on tight and I held on tight too.  He walked away the second he got up there, down the river, towards the sun.  We talked about our families and our relationships with our parents.  I think we talked about a few other things too, and at some point she said “Tell me a story!”  I don’t know what the best story from my life is, so I told her the Mike Birbiglia story that I like so much about the time he got in a car crash.  I seriously teared up at the end.  She didn’t.  I’m way more emo than I should be.

 

A homeless man who didn’t speak much English at all came up to us and put his hand out for money.  Catie still had her bag of candy, and was going to offer him a piece, but ended up just giving him the whole bag.  He seemed surprised that she gave it to him that easily and even seemed happy and smiling while she did it.  He smiled at her and his eyes kind of shined.  He took a few steps away.  He turned back and smiled again, and through a tiny bit of a laugh he said “Thank you.”

 

Before we decided to leave, we took one last look down the river.  We said, “Appreciate!  Appreciate!!”

Wei Ming

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We took a walk or a bus from this point – I forget – and ended up at the bright street that we had been at the prior night.  We walked around for a little bit, and got bored seriously very quickly, and decided we wanted to people watch.  We were just going to kind of stand and do it, but then I thought of Mr. Aeschbacher and thought that we should get a vantage point instead.  So we walked forward to a little area that was raised and had some picnic tables and a little ledge around it.  We hopped up on the ledge and sat there.

 

I held out my hand, which said “Do you speak English?” in Chinese characters.  We looked at people and said ni hao! and smiled, and they smiled and laughed, and sometimes looked at my hand and said “No” or “Sorry” or both.  Some of the girls looked back at me and I pseudo-flirted with them for two seconds when they looked at me and looked back.  Some guys looked at Catie and she did the same.  One college aged guy came up to us and asked us “What can I help you with?”  We apologized and said that we were fine, we just wanted to talk to people.  He walked on with his family.  A Chinese man with a big DSLR camera stood right in front of me and took a picture of the two of us.  I kind of posed for him, but not really.

 

Then a girl came over.  She asked if she could talk to us, and we said of course she could and got really excited to talk to a local person.  We wondered how old she was – we guessed she was probably in high school because she looked it and her English was really good – and she told us she was twelve years old.  We were both pretty shocked, and asked her again to make sure she really meant twelve years old.  Her mom had come over with her.  I forget exactly the order in which we talked about things, but I can remember a bunch.

 

We asked her if she grew up here, and she said yes – she referred to herself as “Shanghaiese.”  We talked to her about her classes in school, and she said the subjects she was studying including Japanese and English.  She told us she had just been standing on the other side of the square listening to the Japanese speakers but not talking to them, and that she didn’t like her Japanese teacher because he was an old man and he was boring.  She imitated an old grumpy man hobbling around a room with a cane and frowning.  We asked her if she liked school and if she was happy.  She said that when she comes home from school, she just does work and eats dinner and then does more work until ten o’clock, and then she goes to bed.  In the morning she feels tired and gets up and walks to school, and sometimes she’s late.  The teacher yelled at her recently and said if she was late one more time, she’d have to clean the classroom for the whole week.  So she was sad, but then she would talk to her friends, and then she was happy.

That was one of those sentences that could only come from a kid, or a person just learning a language.  “I feel sad, but then I talk to my friends and I’m happy.”

 

She said that her name was Anne, but I insisted on learning her Chinese name, which is pronounced like “Way Ming,” with an upward accent on the Ming.  When I asked about that she said I was “very clever!”  We told her about Semester at Sea, and I showed her a picture or two of the boat and told her all the places we were going.  I wrote down the website for her too, and Catie and I gave her our email addresses and told her to please email us sometime.  Later she said that she really wanted to do Semester at Sea, and talked about other kids in her class talking about things like it too.  We knew at this point that her family didn’t have much money, so we told her there was lots of financial aid, and that if she went to Fudan University then she could go for free.

 

She said that the only things she had ever wanted were a computer and a watch.  She wanted to “play” on the computer, so I asked her if she played games.  She said that she would use MSN Messenger and QQ, which is their version of Facebook (approved by the government!), and that if she knew she could talk to her friends, maybe she’d be motivated to do her work more quickly.  She had only seen one friend over the entire New Year’s break – they just came over to her house the other day.  Anyway, her mom got her a computer for New Year and she was really excited, and this day she told her that if she talked to the foreigners for twenty minutes, she’d buy her a watch.  We didn’t know how to feel about that, so we asked, “Oh no, are we homework for you?!”  She said no, she liked us.  I wouldn’t know to believer her or not at first, but we talked to her and her mom for like an hour or something, so I think she probably did like us.

 

She said that her mom stayed at home to take care of her, and that her dad was a mini-bus driver.  I was surprised, because she was SO serious about education and I assumed her parents would be a doctor and a lawyer or something like that.  Her mom used to teach her English when she was little, but now she’s in English class and her mom isn’t, so she teaches her mom English.  At one point her mom said something to her in Chinese, and she leaned up against her mom and waved her arms at her side and half-shouted, “You study English very hard! and now you can talk to the foreigners!”  She was being nice when she did it, so instead of mean it was actually just pretty adorable.  You needed to see her mannerisms to really appreciate it.  A lot of times she would smile, and then purse her lips together but you could tell she was still sort of smiling.  This happened in the two pictures we got, too.

 

After talking there for a good while, Catie and I started to feel very cold, and we needed to get food before going back to the boat, so we asked her where her favorite place in this area was.  She told us to go to the place a building down with a blue awning on the second floor and they had good snake food there.  Our eyes widened.  Snake food?  Well, whatever.  If this kid liked it it’s probably good.  We tried to go on our own, but they could tell we would never make it, so they walked with us.

 

I walked beside Wei Ming and her mom and Catie walked behind us.  They had a conversation the best they could in half-English and half-Mandarin, and Wei Ming and I just talked.  I asked her why she was so serious about school.  She said that her mom never got a chance to study very well, so she wanted to make sure that her kid would have a chance.  She also said that her mom wanted her to be a doctor, but she didn’t want to be a doctor.  She wanted to be a translator.  She’s definitely well on her way.  She also said that her mom was born a country-person and was really really poor, and she could only move to the city because her husband was a city-person.

 

We tried to take a picture.  She smiled super big, but every time the flash went off, she had pursed her lips again.  It’s too bad, because she had a really nice smile.  We gave her and her mom a hug, and they left.

 

When we went into the place she told us, we saw a big sign.  It said “Snack food.”

Adorable.

 

(When we were standing at the ledge, I asked her to ask her mom if I could marry her when she turned 18.  She asked her mom, and she laughed and said, “This is a very difficult question!”  I couldn’t explain it, but it wasn’t like I was attracted to her, it was that she seemed like such a symbol of hope and goodness in the world that I was just kind of saying, “You’re awesome.  It’s too bad you can’t be in my life.”  But yeah.  This is the girl who stole my heart, and if you were there, she would have stolen yours, too.)

Jin Mao Part Two

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I had no plans for that night and didn’t really even have a group to go out with and if all else failed I was just going to go to JM tower and see who else was there, but I ended up hooking up with Helen and Heather to get a ride over and hang out for that night at JM.  They hadn’t been there before and I told them that it was seriously beautiful and just a really nice atmosphere and a chill place to be and they should come with me, the whole thing would only cost $15 max.  So they came with me.

 

We got a table near the window right near the entrance and we took some chocolate from the front desk (mostly me).  They actually looked through the drink menus to try look for something they’d never tried before, so I figured I would look too – especially since they charge you anyway.  Heather ended up getting a Mojito, and I got a Moscito, which is the same thing but with no alcohol – just Sprite and mint leaves.  Helen got something fruity which I forget the name of and don’t think I’d really ever heard of before.  I forget how long it was until they brought out our drinks and when we had the conversations we did.  Heather said it was seriously the best Mojito that she had ever had, and Helen said her drink was actually very good as well.  My Moscito was okay.  At least it wasn’t just plain Sprite.

 

Helen asked me why I was at Semester at Sea, and I told her as best as I could, although I’m actually not really even sure why I’m here.  I just kind of always felt that it would be the best thing to do.  I brought up Brown and Penn State somewhere along the line, and she asked me why I switched.  I told her the reasons (math, act sci, roller hockey, drumline, THON, etc.) and she asked me what Thon was.  I explained.  I’m guessing that pretty much everyone reading this (if anyone reads this at all) knows what it is, so I won’t tell here.  But when I was talking about dancing and what it takes to become a dancer and what happens that weekend when you’re actually on the floor for 46 hours straight and the parents come up to you and just say thank you for everything you’ve done for four years, I teared up.  I actually did just a tiny bit when writing this too.  I’M SO EMO.

 

There was a very pretty candle on the table.  I used it to put some light on the ice cubes left in the bottom of my drink and took a picture with my macro lens and it came out really pretty.  Helen did the same with what was left in her glass.  Eventually we took pictures of each other, and I had her take it in zoomed in black-and-white over top of the flame, and that came out really nice as well.  I took some pictures of her, which also looked really nice, although I’m a black-and-white elitist and I think they’d have looked better in B/W  :-P

 

At some point they both said something to the effect of “This place is awesome.  Good call on coming here, man.”  I was really glad they enjoyed it.  I heard that some other people I had raved about the place to didn’t enjoy it so much.  I felt bad for them.

 

The music was really good this time around, too.

 

Pierce had told me that if you went down the first of the three elevators you needed to take to get out, you could see the entire hotel straight down from the 84^th floor to the 54^th floor.  So I told them that, and they followed me, and all three of us were blown away.  I have some pictures I can show you sometime, but it seriously almost gave me vertigo to look at it.  It was incredibly lush, too.  I leaned on the railing and held out my camera to take a picture, and for a fraction of a second I lost my grip.  I got a hyper-shot of adrenaline and was able to catch it before it really even left my fingers, but it was a scary idea.  I had like 200 pictures on there at that time.

 

If I do ever make it back to Shanghai, I’ll be going there on the first night.

To Beijing

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4am wake up call.  Breakfast was bad, maybe I ate the bread and had orange juice.  Sat around for a long time, got in last group – Group C.  Katie W was supposed to be on our bus but had no stamp on her passport, so had to come later and delayed another group, but made it in time thankfully.  A pretty Chinese girl lead us through the airport.  We had special gates.  Totally received the most efficient pat-down of my life, and they even let me take my peanut butter.

 

Our tour guide’s name in Beijing was Benny.  He was six-foot-three-inches and had a deep voice and an accent that sounded nearly Russian.  Sometimes he laughed like a machine gun after a subtle joke for one second, and that was enough to make us laugh.  He was a really cool guy.  Wore a long black peacoat that zipped on the side.  He took us from the airport to the first meal we had, a Lazy Susan (spinning table) meal at some Westernized Chinese food restaurant.  It was pretty good stuff, not great, but yeah.  There was a huge laughing Buddha in the lobby that some people posed with.  I took a picture of them.  We climbed five flights of stairs, which was fine.

When we got back on the bus, Oliver broke out his iPod speakers and played Benny and the Jets.  No one really knew the words at all.  We asked Benny if he knew the song, and he said no, at which we were all surprised.

 

Water in the airport was $.50.  That’s the cheapest bottled water I’ve found anywhere in my life.

 

I hung out with Edwin B, a graphic designer from Lebanon, on the bus.  We talked a good bit and talked about the game we played in the park with the Temple of Heaven and stuff like that.  We got out of the bus to take a trishaw ride to a traditional house (project/slum) for a home-cooked meal.  I thought he would sit with me, but he abandoned me to flirt with that tiny little girl named Coelie (pronounced CHALE-ee) and put his arm around her on the way.  I rode with Mrs. White, the dean’s wife.  She talked about people going out and how her daughter never got too bad.  It was an awkward spot, because I knew otherwise, but didn’t want to broach the subject.  Looking back on it makes me a little bit sad.

 

The “real” house that we ate at wasn’t much of a real house.  Tourist money definitely helped them out.  They were dressed like other poorer people we had seen (who really weren’t poorly dressed at all – maybe a function of cheap-as-hell clothing?), but the house was different.  There was carpet flooring and a big-screen TV and lots of pictures, including a huge framed photograph of the matron’s grandson, who was 1 at the time but it 3 now.  The food was good.  I don’t think I took any pictures.  Oliver took 17000 pictures or something on the trip of every god damn thing he could, so he took a bunch here too.  I feel a little weird taking pictures of people’s houses.  I feel like it’s telling them that they’re like a people-zoo to us.  Travel is weird.  Also they had tons and tons and tons of food – enough for 15 people – which I’m sure no normal slum house would have.

 

Every place we ate gave us Sprite, Coke, beer and water.  We would have been fine with tea.  Or water.  Or whatever else they drink.

 

There were fireworks seriously everywhere.  Outside of the slum/project house there were fireworks in the street.  I did take a picture of that and it came out looking like there was a fire in the middle of a road.  Apparently people even set them off on highways and just let cars pass by through the flames.  It sounded like machine guns, the little ones popping all the time.  Some people put off big ones too.

Temple of Heaven

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We had gone to Temple of Heaven earlier that day.  You can wiki it if you’re interested, but basically the emperor moved in and wanted a crazy awesome place to worship or whatever so he made this incredibly and elaborate temple.  The tiles on the ceiling are blue to connect it with heaven (usually they’re yellow for the earth) (we couldn’t go inside anyway) (it’s only wood and has no nails which is kinda cool) (but we couldn’t tell, we just heard).

 

The park around the Temple was nice though.  Old people just go there all the time to have fun – seriously, even if it weren’t for tourists they would be there.  Some practice singing and we saw a bunch of them.  There was a row of maybe a dozen or so playing Chinese Chess two at a time.  Some were playing a game kind of like hacky-sack except for with a big feathery thing instead.  I asked Benny what the name of the game was and he said, in his deep almost-Russian voice, “It’s called:  Kicking de Shuttlecock.”  Someone else was there and we smiled at the grandeur in his voice.  He told me the Chinese name but I’ve forgotten it.  I think it was two syllables.  We played with some of the older people in the park.  I was alright at it, but couldn’t do the tricky kicks like they could.  One of them realized I was okay and went back and forth with me a lot and tried to help me do it right, but I never really got it.  They were really really good and agile for people their age.  I mean, they may have easily been 80 years old and they were still rocking this thing.  And there were tons of them in the park.  My group played with one who was very tall and bald and another shorter one who looked a bit younger and had black hair still.  Both were wearing blue.

 

At one point I was walking in the front of the group following Benny.  I think he could sense I wasn’t really enjoying the place, and he grabbed me by the arm and said in his deep almost-Russian voice, “So what’s up.”  He said what’s up but I knew he was really asking if I was having a good time or not and what he could do to make it better.  I wasn’t really ready for it though.  It was very assertive of him.  He had a lot of confidence to do it, which was cool.  But I just told him I was doing fine and just trying to soak it all in, which was a load of crap, but what the hell else was I going to say?  I couldn’t tell him I didn’t really want to do so much sight-seeing or that I wished I could learn Mandarin in the next three minutes.  Oh well.

Tea Ceremony

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We went to a tea ceremony.  One person narrated while one person at a table for each 15 of us demonstrated (There were 98 of us total).  The demonstrated were seriously talented.  Poured from like ten feet away and hardly missed a drop.  Deadly efficient.  At one point they put some nut into hot water and it sort of unfolded and exploded into this beautiful flower.  I’d never seen it before or knew anything like that existed.  There were more of them in the gift shop already unfolded so I took some pictures.  We got to try four kinds of tea.  I only liked the first two.

 

After dinner that night I went to Starbucks with some girls I knew from the ship – Bailey and crew.  I had a chocolate muffin and we talked.  We went to HaagenDaaz and saw some people I didn’t want to talk to and sat upstairs.  It was too classy and we left when they gave us a menu, and didn’t get anything at all.  Bailey and crew left then, so I walked to the 7/11 to pick up toothpaste (didn’t bring on the flight) and mouthwash (didn’t have anyway).  There were fireworks outside the door when I was checking out.

 

The hotel had CNN and BBC.  I only watched CNN at first because my roommate Justin (the tall Philippino guy) had it on, but later found out they had BBC too.  I was really excited to be able to catch up with the world, although to be honest nothing great every really came on when I was in the room.  But it was nice to know the world hadn’t exploded while I wasn’t watching.

 

I read the first 100 pages of The Alchemist that night, roughly.  Justin came back around midnight and we both went to sleep.  At some point I may have played some piano.

 

We went to Tiananmen Square the next day.  The posts had half dozen security cameras.  I took some pictures of me near Mao.  There were lots of merchants there.  We walked through the Forbidden City, which looked a lot like the Temple of Heaven.  There were dragons at one point that could put incense smoke out of their mouths.  The incense was apparently in huge piles in huge cauldrons up at the top.  That seemed like a pretty awesome idea.  The sign when we left said “Your visit is over.  If you would like to return, you will have to buy tickets again.”

 

There were no trees in most of the temple.  When the emperor wanted to kill someone, he’d say that he would spare them if they were hiding behind the trees.  It was also 9 meters deep.  If he wanted to kill someone else, he’d tell them he’d spare them if they could dig out.

 

We went to a Western Style buffet.  They had French fries.  I learned how to use my BlackBerry.  Just turn it off and then on and it’ll pick up signal.  Who knew?

 

We went to an orphanage and brought them three computers with monitors too.  We all did a little bit of work cleaning.  Some did the classrooms, I did the bedrooms (which were almost spotless), and some did the library, which was crazily cluttered.  After we were done we got to play with the kids.  One kid made us leave his room so he could change pants, but he spoke no English so he had to pantomime.  That was a little awkward but more funny.  A lot of kids had roller blades and I was jealous.  I would kill to play hockey right now.  We all played tug-of-war and my side one (because Benny yelled at boys to join my side).  There was this one little kid who still looked a little dirty who was a total baller.  Running around taking whatever he wanted and playing with whomever he wanted and high fiving and whatnot.  Awesome.  Balls to the wall.  Good for him.

Nothing is Interesting

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We had yet another Lazy Suzan dinner that night.  This time it was Peking duck, which was the first time I’ve ever had duck and it was actually pretty good.  Same drinks as usual.  I also discovered I love soy sauce, kind of.  It always falls to the bottom and pools there so the concentration is never perfect.  Oh well.

 

I went to Starbucks that night to take care of some long emails I’d received and some long ones that I wanted to write as well.  I was still wearing the five layers that I had been wearing all day because it was freezing in Beijing and even the bus didn’t have a heating system.  Well Starbucks did and I was seriously sweating just from sitting in there.  I stripped off a couple layers but the bottom layer was my underarmour so there wasn’t really anything I could do about that.  I was working on my Penn State schedule, which will be happening soon, and it wasn’t going as well as I had hoped.  I don’t think I’ll be taking quite the classes I had planned to take in the fall, which is okay.

 

There’s a black thing like a fruit in all the pastries.  Well actually, there’s one like a fruit and one like a jam.  I don’t like either and I always had to pick them out or spoon them out.  I don’t understand, why can’t everyone just have icing filling?!

 

I almost finished The Alchemist that night after I finished at Starbucks and came back to play some piano, but had ten pages left when Justin came back to go to sleep, so I turned the lights off and went to bed ten pages before finding out what the treasure near the pyramids was.

 

The next day we woke up and went to a kung fu school after breakfast in the hotel, where I always just had corn flakes or chocolate crispies or whatever – which turn milk WAY more chocolatey than I thought.  Oh, also orange juice.  Anyway, they did a kung fu performance which was pretty impressive.  The place was freezing though.  They were dressed in bright orange.  I took pictures of the silhouette figures in the back of the place while they ‘taught’ everyone else some simple moves.  I thought of the time that PSU Drumline tried to teach a clinic at the Mifflinburg show and just felt sorry for the performers.  I would have much rather just said Good Show to them, but didn’t know how.  A lot of people took pictures with them as well.  Benny got in on a little of the action as well.  At this point he was wearing his awesome brown and yellow horizontal striped sweater which we all dug.  Kids were rollerblading outside. I talked to Dani about how I wasn’t digging the partying people were doing too much or how much touristy stuff we’d been doing.  She talked to me before about her conversation about similar things with Rob Abowitz and how he said there’s a very steep learning curve as to how to get the most out of travel.  I think I made her depressed.  Oh well.

 

There was this lady on our bus.  She might read this.  It’s okay.  She’s a professor.  Benny said that we were going to the school and we’d pass the Olympic village on the way.  She asked if we could stop there for five minutes to take pictures – even when the handbook on all trips EXPLICITY STATES you are to NEVER ask for special stops.  He said that we would drive by.  She said something very very close to, “Come on, we keep doing all these uninteresting things.  Can’t we do something interesting for five minutes?”  Everyone that was in earshot was seriously floored and for the most part totally embarrassed.  We absolutely could not believe she just said that to our tour guide.  She continued that “It’s all my students know about.  It’s the symbol of China now.  We don’t know about the Great Wall or Tiananmen Square anymore, it’s the Bird’s Nest.”  That’s totally not true, she just has a skewed perspective because she’s an architect.

 

Suffice to say, we did not stop at the village, thank god, because it would have been boring as all hell.  The drive-by was fun enough though.

 

But seriously.

 

I chewed a lot of gum those days because I was afraid for developing cavities and stuff.  We got water bottles on the bus and always handed them back hand-over-head down the line.

The Great Wall

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The Great Wall is pretty crazy to see.  It’s not a life-changing experience but it was good to be there.  I snapped some nice zoomed in black-and-white photos of myself.  Just you wait!

 

What surprised me most about the wall was the number of vendors and merchants there.  There were even some ON the wall itself, selling beer and Coke and candy bars.  They would hike up and come in through the holes and stairs on the bottom of the Chinese side of the wall, I guess.  I don’t think they were supposed to be there but whatever.

 

We took a cable-car up to the wall and took a toboggan down.  Both of which were pretty fun.

 

There were about a hundred vendors lining the dirt path up to the cable-car area, though.  That was also pretty shocking.  They all screamed at all of us when we walked by.  “I know you!”  “Do you want another t-shirt?”  “Do you want another hat?”  “One dollar!  One dollar!”  Sometimes I feel bad about not buying things from people, but I didn’t buy anything that time.  I felt like they really shouldn’t be at the Great Wall.  Then again, maybe I shouldn’t be there either.

 

The girl tour guide with SAS talked to me on the wall.  I was walking forward and she and Benny went back and forth a few time in Mandarin and then she started talking to me.  I wondered if Benny told her that she should talk to me because I wasn’t talking to anyone else.  She asked me about where I was from and what I studied and what I wanted to do with it and I asked her what she studied and what she had done for work so far and what she wanted to do later.  She used to teach English but said “kids these days” are too obnoxious for her so she moved on to giving tours.  It was nice to talk to her.  She also told me that Beijing University is the Harvard of China, and it has 30,000 people.  I was glad, because if it only had 6,000 like Harvard then life would just be hell for Chinese over-achievers.

Acrobatics

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We went to an acrobatics show which was pretty awesome.  There was body balancing and spinning plates and tricks on bikes and guys running on rotating rings and going on balance boards on top of rolling things and yo-yos.  It was pretty sweet, pretty impressive, though very touristy.  I saw some people there from the China Guide trips and ended up running to them and giving them hugs and talking to them and eventually just sitting with them.  Benny asked me when I hugged them, “Are they from the same boat?” and I said yes, and he asked if they were on there own and I said no, they found a tour guide on their own called China Guide and he asked, “Why?”  Then he laughed and walked away.

 

I bought Coelie some snacks and she gave me a couple bucks later.  I got a tiny package of Skittles and was happy that it was small and cheap.  I wish it could be like that in the States.

 

I finished The Alchemist that night.  His treasure was a hint to go back home and look under the sacristy tree, where he found a huge Spanish treasure.  He gave some of it to the gypsy, and I don’t know what he did with the rest, but it didn’t really matter.  Fatima sent him a kiss in the wind and he said he was on his way.

 

I went down to the lobby to hang out and play piano and work on the poem that I got inspired to write when Eric was talking about sonnets, but couldn’t because people kept coming in and out and talking to me.  (Life’s tough!)  I wasn’t really getting good lines to come through anyway, so it didn’t matter.  Jose told me he had a full bottle of Jack by himself in the last hour and that he did that pretty much every week while playing poker with his friends back at school.  He had hiccups pretty badly.

I ended up talking to people until 1AM or so.  A friend was supposed to come hang out with me around midnight, but she ended up talking to another guy until it was time for the wake up call, which is no big deal.  Except for I dislike the guy that they were talking to, but again, no big deal.

 

I think I’m going to try to be extra nice to him.

Being nice to people you like is easy.

 

We got the wake-up call and prepared to go.  The bus was cold and it was dark.  Dani and I walked quickly and I asked for a window seat at the counter.  We got on the first subway and got to the seats before anyone else, except one kid who caught up with us.  I fell asleep waiting and couldn’t find food except for my crackers.  They had taken my peanut butter.  They found a knife in Dani’s bag but let her keep it.  CAN YOU BELIEVE THAT.  SHE KEPT A KNIFE AND I COULDN’T HAVE SEALED PEANUT BUTTER.

 

My window seat was the only shitty window seat in the whole plan pretty much.  It was actually an aisle seat, and the steward’s seat was to the right of me, and then the emergency door, and then had a doughnut-sized window about two feet away from me and a foot behind me.  I was pretty upset about that, but whatever.  Life’s tough!  It was pretty uncomfortable though and I couldn’t sleep at all.  I listened to a Radio Times about “What makes us want to do a good job” and then downloaded another one about conspiracy theories on my BlackBerry before we left and listened to that too.  Thank god for them.  Otherwise I would have gone crazy.

 

I came back to the ship and just waited for dinner and to find Catie.  We didn’t have any plans to hang out, but I knew she would hang out with me.  Somehow I was talking to Spencer who happened to know, and said she was already back and would be back on the ship around dinner.  I told him to please have her look for me in my room or on the sixth deck.   Eventually the three of us met, and we took the ferry and a cab to Victoria’s Peak.  Some other people came with us when we looked for an observation deck but they left quickly because I Forget Why and because Toby wasn’t there.  Toby’s really cool so I understand but there was no way she was going to find him at that point so whatever, her loss.