They Have a Different Word for Everything

TUESDAY 08/26

2008-08-31T12:32:00.003-04:00

-Woke up late, finally feeling rested. Calm soon turned into near-panic as I tried to figure out what I wanted to do for the next week between classes and the games. I felt the clock ticking and pressure to make the most of my time. After re-reading my ACC literature, I realized I didn’t really have time to travel anywhere and that helped limit my options.

-Called Alan, who agreed to help me find Capital University of Business and Economics (where ACC is located) and my dormitory within the University compound. We met at the Dawang Lu subway stop. The subway was intolerably hot and crowded, and I began to rethink my plan of using it to transport myself and my luggage from the Media Village to school.

-Alan showed me to the school, straight up to the ACC building, and gave me an introduction to the neighborhood as we walked. I wasn’t ready to meet anyone from ACC yet so we stopped just shy of the office. For lunch, Alan showed me to an impossible-to-find North Korean restaurant (there’s no sign, it’s located in a decaying building in a back alley off of a non-descript road) and we enjoyed bowls of the best Bibim-bap I’ve ever had in my life.

-Previously we were thinking of going to the Beijing Zoo, but Alan was meeting a friend for dinner and we were out of time. I followed him back to the newly-renovated Qianmen district where his hostel was. In the hostel, we had our hides tanned by a pair of Finnish guys in doubles game of pool, which wasn’t really that fun. I left Alan there and walked back through Tiananmen Square to the Line 1 subway. It was a miserably long, crowded ride home and by the time I got out of the subway at the Media Village it was dark and rainy. I met Brian again outside of the logistics office, but he was on his way to an office dinner.

-With nobody else around and nothing left to do, I went back to my room, packed, ate instant noodles for dinner, did laundry and watched “Mr. Right” on HBO. I also switched my cell phone into Chinese—the first step in my planned Total Immersion Regimen.

-That night we had crazy lightning and thunder unlike any I’ve ever heard before—abrupt, shredding groans instead of the low rumpling I’m accustomed to.

MONDAY 08/25

2008-08-31T12:25:00.003-04:00

-Went into the IBC one last time. I hadn’t had a chance to say goodbye to Maria the night before. The whole research room was completely packed up into boxes—they really waste no time ‘striking the set,’ as it were.

-Ate breakfast and teared up watching the ‘closing credits’ on the commissary TV set (the Closing Ceremony had just finished airing in the States). Someone did a really good job putting those credits together—spectacularly beautiful scenery from around China and a lot of very moving moments from the Games. It was also cool to recognize so many of the names popping up along the side of the screen.

-Met up with Victor and former Changchun co-worker Alan, along with several of Victor’s friends, in Wangfujing for an astoundingly good hotpot meal. Alan was on his way to Sichuan but had a few days to stop over in Beijing.

-After lunch, Victor, Alan and I walked slowly through central Beijing to Jingshan park. Jingshan park is a small park directly to the north of the forbidden city. Most of the park is taken up by a mountain which was created with the dirt dug up while constructing the moat around the Forbidden city. From the top of this mountain you can get an astounding 360° vista of the city. We hung out on this mountaintop for a while, enjoying the perfect weather and the golden sunlight.

-Leaving Jingshan park, we caught a bus to a certain hutong a few minutes away. Victor, I realized, had quietly planned and led the entire day so I never had to worry about what I was doing next; for that I am extremely thankful to him.

-The hutong was an experience. I still don’t know quite what to think of it. It was an old, traditional Beijing hutong on the surface, but behind the doors and storefronts were campy boutiques, trendy art and clothing shops and coffee shops which somehow reminded me of the Beat Generation. We met up with Matt, one of the people with whom we’d had lunch (also an ACC graduate and a very accomplished Chinese speaker).

-Met up with some of the research room for dinner at Din Tai Fung, a world-famous chain of restaurants specializing in dumplings. Apparently they’re on the New York Times’ list of the world’s top ten restaurants. It was probably the nicest place I’d ever eaten in China. Victor did a great job ordering, and true to their reputation the restaurant delivered some mighty fine dumplings. I think this was also the first time I’d ever had real xiaolongbao (soup-filled dumplings).

-Bid Alan goodbye (at least until the next day) after dinner and went back to the Media Village with Victor, who had to collect his laundry. We hung out until his shuttle to the IBC arrived. Then we said our goodbyes and parted ways.

-Found Brian in the logistics office. After he got off work we spent a few hours sitting outside enjoying the weather and talking.

SUNDAY 08/24

2008-08-31T12:09:00.005-04:00

-Last day of the O’s!

-A funny thing: one of the “pump-up” tracks played in the National Stadium was from the Ghost Recon soundtrack. I wonder if they actually acquired the license.

-Woke up early to see if I could catch indoor volleyball and handball. Ended up just having time to see handball, Russia vs. Poland. It’s a funny game. Here’s what gets me: soccer keepers have to defend a massive net from a ball that has been kicked at high velocity and potentially infinitely close range. Handball goalies have a considerably smaller net to defend, the ball is roughly the same size and goes slower, and attackers can’t get within a certain range of the net, and yet they still let in dozens more goals than their keeper counterparts. Hmm. . .

-Rushed to the bus to try to catch water polo. After a few minutes waiting for the bus in the blistering sun I decided to instead check out some of the sponsorship exhibitions. I trekked through the IBC to the side gate, only to watch them close and padlock it: Closing Ceremony access road restrictions were going into effect. Stymied, I decided I might as well just take a nap on the big leather couches in the lobby. When I arrived, the couches were already strewn with napping and resting journalists with not one seat left. Getting discouraged, I resolved to just go to the Lenovo internet café and check my email. Thankfully they had an open computer, or I might have flipped out.

-On my way out of the café I noticed one of the Olympic torches in a display case in the wall. I asked the attendant if I could take a picture of it. “Of course!” she said, then waited there expectantly while I withdrew my camera and took a few shots. Before I could even turn to leave, the attendant incredulously asked, “Well, don’t you want to hold it?!” I said, “Sure. . .” and withdrew the torch from the case. I stood there admiring it for a moment, hefting it, examining the flame-producing mechanism. The woman remained there staring expectantly. Sure enough, as I moved to put the torch back in its case, the woman interjected, “Well, don’t you want to have your picture taken with it? Out here in the hall?” That seemed like a good idea, and frankly I wasn’t about to disagree with this woman. So there I stood, feeling more than a little self conscious, holding an unlit Olympic torch aloft in a crowded internet café filled with cynical journalists.

-Funny things around the IBC: the entire cooking staff was Scottish, and they all spoke with heavy Scottish accents. And the Starbucks employees were literally the friendliest, most outgoing and happy people I have ever met in my entire life. And it wasn’t that superficial, bouncy, in-your-face kind of friendly—it was for real. Starbucks literally seemed to have combed Asia to find such uniquely friendly people, since the baristas were from such far-flung regions as Taiwan and Thailand.

-Just like with the Opening Ceremony, the task of making the Closing Ceremony scripts fell to the research runners, which of course meant that one again, I knew the whole show ahead of time. I also got the print out our very last start lists and results, which was satisfying—most of the time my shift carried me through until half or three quarters of the day’s games were over, so I had to print all day but never got the satisfaction of actually finishing. This time, it was I alone who got to scrawl the “DONE” in big, highlighter letters across our printing schedule.

-The Closing Ceremony was, in this man’s humble opinion, terrible compared to the Opening. The artistic bit was cool but obviously could never exceed the Opening and just felt like more of the same. The speeches were interminable; watching the torch die was depressing. We all had a good laugh when Boris Johnson, mayor of London, came onstage looking completely disheveled and clueless.

-After my shift and the end of the Ceremony, a number of us found our way to the café on the rooftop of the Main Press Center. I hung around for a bit but was altogether too tired to be much fun, so I took my leave.

-On my way out the door, I had the random afterthought of jumping on a computer in the internet café. Once there, I jumped on Skype, took a leap of faith that my phone could call internationally, correctly guessed which combination of numbers would get me dialed out of the country, and called home. By some chance, my whole family was home at the same time and could access Skype almost instantaneously. It was the first time I’d spoken with them since I’d left for China and it was great.

-Went home and fell asleep mid-sentence while writing this journal entry.

SATURDAY 08/23

2008-08-31T12:00:00.003-04:00

-It was a beautiful, sunny day, which I got to experience for about 35 seconds during my walk from the air conditioned media bus into the air conditioned IBC.

-Our task for the morning was printing names onto the BOCOG-issued Certificates of Thanks for all the researchers. At first we had only an exact number of certificates so there was no room for error, and if I sound too excited about that then you’re starting to get a sense of just how adrenaline-deprived we were for the last few days.

-Saw Mary Carillo and Brian Williams, completing my NBC Talent Sightings checklist.

-My tour of the IBC with Tong got called off—apparently her employers were busy.

-The first researchers were beginning to leave, which was sad. Things were finally coming to an end.

-Went to the Water Cube after work and met Victor. We watched the last round of the men’s 10m platform diving (guys, that’s really high. Like, three stories high) and the medal ceremony. The winner was a dark horse, an Australian, and seeing how genuinely happy he was to win that medal was truly heartwarming. Really, I’ve seen less joy in a child’s eyes on Christmas morning. All the other athletes I’d watched take the podium seemed happy alright, but this Matthew Mitcham was just beaming.

FRIDAY 08/21

2008-08-31T11:51:00.007-04:00

-Covered an earlier shift again. It works for me: I don’t mind getting up early, and having evenings free means I get to see more events.

-Games were really winding down—we were averaging 2.5 events/hour that needed printing, which made for a very slow day.

-Spent about 2 hours writing my opinions of the Opening Ceremony ‘scandals’ on my new Tumblog. I had picked up a stomach bug and was feeling a bit low.

-In the afternoon a writer came in and had me make a bajillion copies of various closing ceremony-related packets. It ended up being a backbreaking 3-hour technological nightmare, the details of which you shall be spared.

-At 7:30 I met with Tong and her friend to arrange some guest passes for her and her employer to come tour the IBC. I figured it was the least I could do after she showed me around USA house.

-Brian and I headed out to the basketball venue. We caught the tail end of the Spain-Lithuania semifinal. The place was packed, and we squeezed onto the stairs to watch the US-Argentina semifinal.

I don’t really follow basketball, but it was still cool to see all these big names in basketball—Bryant, James, Wade—playing together. The entire time I wanted to yell “Kobe!” after Kobe made a basket, but his shooting game was way off and I never got the chance.

-At one point a guy from the commentator booths came out and tried clearing away the forty or so people sitting on the steps. At first I tried ignoring him, but for some reason he singled me out to pick on. He claimed that commentators were complaining that we were blocking their view. I’m certainly not one to stop people from doing their jobs, but there was no way I was blocking anyone’s view—I was on the lowest step, behind a wall, whereas most of the people were sitting above me. I calmly and firmly argued my cause—I’m not blocking anyone’s view, so I’m not moving. The guy kept at it for a while but he realized he wasn’t getting anywhere and he didn’t really have a leg to stand on. He eventually backed down, but not before shooting me an oh-so-hateful stare. I was nervous for about five minutes after that, worried he was coming back with help, but I soon relaxed. The reason I even mention this incident: I haven’t been bullied since middle school, and it’s nice to know that I can still stick up for myself.

-It was a rough game with lots of penalties (though whether that’s typical for a basketball game, I don’t know). Somehow the Redeem Team’s fans were vastly outnumbered by fans of Argentina; I had heard that many Chinese were huge fans of American basketball, but if that’s true it certainly didn’t show. The Argentina fans were being obnoxious, too, loudly booing the US during free throws and cheering at American penalties and gaffs. Between the poor sportsmanship and the discomfort of sitting on concrete stairs, Brian and I decided to peace halfway through the game. The US eventually won.

THURSDAY 08/21

2008-08-31T11:46:00.002-04:00

-Slow day. I came in early to cover for a runner who was working off-site at BMX, but it got rained out. The rain was so heavy that my shoes got drenched on the way in, and I spent most of the day padding around the research room in my socks.

-Watched Modern Pentathlon with mild amusement. For the show jumping part of the event, horses are assigned by random lottery, and a few of the horses were extremely naughty and either refused to jump or threw their riders.

-Met Brian for dinner in the commissary and decided to go watch the women’s soccer gold medal match, USA vs. Brazil. The game was awesome. It was nil-nil the entire way through, and it seemed impossible that Brazil didn’t manage to score—their ball-handling made the US team look like they were in middle school, and the US spent most of the game desperately playing defense. In the first overtime, the US took one lucky shot that went in, then fended off the vicious Brazilian counter-attacks for the remaining 25 minutes. Some amazing saves by Hope Solo. Stuck around for the medal ceremony and heard the US national anthem for the first time in person.

WEDNESDAY 08/20

2008-08-31T11:22:00.014-04:00

-Dick Ebersol came around in the morning handing out NBC pins.

-Funny things from around the IBC: sign over a bucket reading, “Please drop dead, batteries here.”

-Set up a Tumblog (a few of the RSS feeds I now read have opened my eyes to Web 2.0). Unfortunately I can’t access it from the restricted internet in my dorm.

-After work, I went by the set of the Today Show and watched for a bit.

-Then went to the Bird’s Nest and met up with Janique and Stacey to watch Usain Bolt win the Men’s 200m.

-After the race, Janique and I headed over to the Heineken House, a club that had been set up in the Beijing Agricultural Exhibition Center. It was actually more of a concert experience than a club, and hundreds of orange-clad Dutch thronged a floor beneath the stage where a band was playing. After a few minutes of that, we went outside and hung out with some other NBC folks until the club closed at around 2.

TUESDAY 08/19

2008-08-31T11:08:00.005-04:00

-A very good day. Received a compliment on my marathon information packets as soon as I walked in the and it was only uphill from there.

-All the sports were stacked in the afternoon, so I had a very light morning. I used it to listen to Chinese Pod, practice characters and catch up on some important emails. I was feeling the end of the Olympics draw near and I spent some time contemplating how, exactly, I wanted to use my last few days.

-After work, I got on a buss to the Argentina vs. Brazil soccer semifinal. The place was packed, and all the volunteers—usually infinitely patient and good-natured—were clearly at their wit’s end dealing with the throngs of hurried and self-important media types pouring in. I somehow managed to find my friend Janique in the stands (she texted me incredibly detailed directions). I cherry-picked the most exciting part of the game, sitting down just in time to watch Argentina score two crushing goals against Brazil.

-Unfortunatly, I only got to see a few minutes of the game, as I had planned to meet Tong outside the stadium. My disappointment was short-lived, however, as Tong brought me to the [normally off-limits] athletes section of the extravagant USA house, a posh club where US athletes and their families can go to relax. Tong was working with US Wrestling Team, who were celebrating the gold-medal victory of their 55kg contender Henry Cejudo. I met some really nice people and I got to hold and admire Mr. Cejudo’s medal—very cool. Don’t know when I’ll be that close to a gold medal again. Tong showed me her extremely impressive collection of Olympic pins and hooked me up with a dozen freebie pins from USA House so I could begin trading, too. After helping some guys find a cab, she then gave me a complete tour of USA House, from the rooftop club to the basement boutique.

-Shortly thereafter I headed home, catching busses to the IBC and then to the MV, and went to bed exhausted.

MONDAY 08/18

2008-08-31T10:54:00.002-04:00

-Phelps was in the IBC for an interview (he had just won his eighth gold) but I didn’t get to see him. Instead, I watched his interview on the live feed. I thought he did a pretty good job and was quite articulate.

-Watched in shock and dismay as Liu Xiang DNF’d his heat for the 110m hurdles. Again, it was awesome to be watching the live, uncut feed because I could tell something was wrong long before Liu took the field. Backstage, Liu was hobbling around, halfheartedly doing stretches, then occasionally standing up and pacing in frustration and despair. The broadcasters’ banter confirmed there was something wrong. In Athens, Liu Xiang became the first Asian man to win any track & field event. He became an overnight celebrity in China and the 110m hurdles final was expected to be the most-watched television event in Chinese history. Today, he must have known that he couldn’t run, and any other athlete might just not have shown up, but he had to show that he was at least trying for all of his millions upon millions of fans. I watched as he false-started, the tore the number off his leg and hobbled off the field. I’m told the stadium went dead quiet, and within a few minutes it had become nearly empty—with no Liu Xiang, people just left. The feed I was watching followed Liu as he limped down a side hallway, collapsed against a wall, and just sat there with a blank, disbelieving expression on his face. And there he sat, waiting for the fallout and no doubt feeling the disappointment of his country, his sponsors, his hordes of adoring fans, and himself. He seems like a very sensitive person—when he couldn’t run in New York earlier this year, he’d wanted to get on the microphone and apologize to all the Chinese fans who had come to see him—so this must have been devastating. What surprised me most is how alone he was; the entire time I was watching, nobody was there to help him. No doctors, no coaches, nobody to assist him or comfort him. I wondered what China’s reaction would be—anger? disappointment? encouragement?

-After a frenzied morning, things began to settle down in the afternoon. Week two had begun, and with it came a lot of the more off-beat or untraditional sports like synchronized swimming and BMX, hammer throw and modern pentathlon, water polo and show jumping.

SUNDAY 08/17

2008-08-31T10:42:00.005-04:00

-As planned, I woke up at 7 with the intention of being on the subway at 8. Succeeded all too well and was at our planned meeting spot at 北土城, leaving me with forty-five minutes to kill.

-To pass the time I first went to find the media entrance to the subway, since it had moved since I was last there and I didn’t want to be late for work. Who should I run into but Ted, an old acquaintance from the days when I went to the youth group at my church. I knew he was in Beijing working for CCTV and we had been in touch on Facebook, but it didn’t make it any less surprising to run into him. He was on his way to see a handball match, so I let him go.

-Having found the media entrance, I went to explore places where Libbie and I could hang out. Directly across the street was a long park with a stream running through the middle. It had started to drizzle when I came upon an old, traditional-style house that I presumed was part of the park. I asked an attendant if I could go in and look around. He consented. Slowly, I walked around an old, moss-covered courtyard, admiring the ornate woodwork, the detailed painting, the tranquility of the rain falling on the stone. I sat down beneath an overhang and smiled at the beauty of it all. “How picturesque and Chinese!” I thought. “This will make the perfect place for Libbie and I to sit and catch up. And look, more quaint still, here comes the attendant with a caged bird!” The attendant took the birdcage and hung it on a hook behind me. Not five seconds later, the tranquility of the courtyard was obliterated by the loudest, sharpest and most shearing sound I have ever had the misfortune of hearing. I practically leapt out of my skin twisting around to see where the noise had come from, to quickly realize that it was the bird. It squawked again. The noise was intolerable. Another thirty seconds of trying to endure the noise and I was on my way out.

-Libbie and I finally did meet, after a miscommunication about which subway exit we were meeting at, exacerbated by the fact that all the nearby roads were closed for the women’s marathon. We walked back and forth through the park and talked.

-At 10:30 I headed back to the IBC for work at 11. Libbie really wanted to see where I worked. Much to my surprise we were able to hustle her through the media entrance without any sort of identification by pretending she was my cousin. We tried the same trick again at the IBC with less success. I was cutting it close with work, so we parted ways and Libbie went to explore the Green a bit before going home.

-Today was our medal-heaviest day: 35 gold medals were being awarded. I saw, for the first of what would be many times, Bela Karolyi, hanging out with one of our gymnastics researchers.

-After work I bolted to the Water Cube to see rounds 3.5 through 5 women’s 3m springboard diving. This time I put my camera away and enjoyed it as a sporting event.

Again, Guo Jingjing won. Supposedly we were witness to her career final dive—she announced plans to retire after this Olympics—but we’ll see if they let her quit. Both she and Wu Minxia take respectful bows to the spectators after each dive. I stuck around to watch my first medal ceremony. China took gold and bronze, Russia took silver.

SATURDAY 08/16

2008-08-31T10:15:00.013-04:00

-An awesome day that began the way of so many other days: getting shut out of yet another swimming event. I should have known I didn’t have a chance, as there were four gold medals being awarded that morning (including Phelps’ controversial seventh gold which he won by 1/100th of a second). Nothing else was going on locally, so I went to the IBC and had a leisurely breakfast and watched the swimming on TV.

-Several cool things at work. Most notably, Canada won its first gold medal. In honor of Marc, our resident Canadian, we put together a rather involved medal ceremony that was perhaps on par with even the Opening Ceremony. All work in the research room stopped while we prepared for Marc’s entrance at 5 pm. A shrine to famous Canadians was constructed along one wall, topped by a full-page color printout of Dudley Do-Right. Somebody produced a Canadian flag, and Cory devised an ingenious way of hoisting out of a drawer and up to the ceiling using string and paper clips. A selection committee found a suitable music video to the Canadian national anthem on Youtube, and Maria had me distribute print-outs of the lyrics. I also managed to get a flashlight from Production Logistics (they have everything back there) for a spotlight. Thus, when Marc walked in the door, he was greeted by all of this: a dozen researchers (and a few Canadians from other departments) belting out the Canadian anthem to music while the spot-lit flag rose majestically towards the ceiling. Marc made an admirable off-the-cuff acceptance speech.

-I got to do some actual research today, too. The commentators needed more information on the women’s marathoners. I found out the top 15 competitors and used a combination of NBC databases, interviews, articles, etc. to put together packets of information about each of them. I was later told that the information was well-received and useful. So there you go, my little contribution to Olympic coverage (well, that and the packets I made for the Men’s marathon a few days later).

-After work I sprinted to women’s 3m diving semifinals, just in time to see Wu Minxia and Guo Jingjing take their final dives. Guo won the round handily, to nobody’s surprise. I was extremely frustrated with myself—the dives happen so fast, and I feel like I wasn’t fully in the moment because I was trying to take pictures at the same time. Fortunately, though I didn’t realize it at the time, I would have a chance to redeem myself at the finals.

-On my way out of the Water Cube I was accosted by Brian. We made our way over to the Bird’s nest and got in with no trouble. Getting into venues when it’s not primetime is much easier.

-We watched a few Women’s Heptathalon 800m races, which were mildly entertaining (not least for the many beautiful women in track outfits). One touching scene: a Chinese racer came in second to last. Most of the other racers had fallen to the ground in exhaustion, but this Chinese girl went up to each of them one by one, congratulated or comforted them and helped them to their feet. It was extremely sweet and gracious.

-The marquee event was the men’s 100m final, the competition to decide the world’s fastest man. Usain Bolt of course won it handily in his signature gold shoes, and probably could have knocked another few hundredths of a second off his score if he hadn’t started celebrating before he crossed the finish line. For 9.69 seconds of running, Mr. Bolt then enjoyed about of hour and twenty minutes of victory laps and interviews. On the one hand it struck me as unsportsmanlike to draw as much attention to himself as Bolt did, but on the other hand, that was probably the peak moment of his entire life right there. The body can’t stay at that level of performance for very long, and it’s unlikely he’ll gain such fame for anything besides running so it makes sense to milk the fame for all it’s worth while you have it. To get out of the stadium the athletes must march past rows and rows of press boxes containing reporters and cameramen and do interviews. Brian and I stuck around to watch him pass ten feet in front of us.

-After Bolt left Brian and I went upstairs to see the views and check out more of the architecture. Got back home very late considering that I was waking up at 7 the next day.

FRIDAY 08/15

2008-08-31T09:26:00.004-04:00

-Woke up early, only to be shut out once again from the swimming. The big swimming events are during prime time, so the media section is always packed. In order to get in, you needed a special green ticket (which I of course did not have).

-Instead, I finally got into the Bird’s Nest (which had also been on high-security lockdown since before the opening ceremony). Needless to say, it was extremely cool to finally be inside. I blundered my way around until I found the press section. I was rewarded with getting to watch Tyson Gay win his 100m sprint heat.

-Work continued to go smoothly. Mark and I have made a habit of watching the shooting events together; Jeff and I watch gymnastics. I had a good conversation with Monica at lunch and learned that she was on the US National Crew team and spoke some Chinese. -It was a pretty huge day in terms of important events. Individual all-around gymnastics was the headliner: Nastia Liukin and Shawn Johnson took Gold and Silver for the US and Yang Yilin snagged bronze for China. Phelps won his sixth gold; Lopez Lomond and Tyson Gay ran more heats. Matt Emmons missed gold once again, placing 2nd in prone rifle, and Du Li redeemed her earlier loss by taking gold in 50m rifle.

-Probably the most exciting part of an already-exciting day: I chose the right time to walk down the hall. First, I had my first glimpse of Bob Costas—it’s always fun to see how different people look on TV and in real life. Not five seconds later, though, I see a crowd gathering around the Green Room at the end of the hall. The crowd parts a bit, and there is Nastia Liukin, waiting for an interview. I’m walking briskly and as I round the corner I nearly trip over Shawn Johnson, getting a hug from one of her many enthusiastic supporters. She looked up, looked me straight in the eyes, and smiled. I smiled back but kept walking.

-After work I called Tong, one of the Chinese graduate students I had met at Tufts through my Chinese practice partner Ningyu. We set up a time and a place to meet. I then set off to meet Colton again at Peking University. Making clever use of the Media Transport busses, I got myself a free ride to the Peking U campus (where the table tennis hall is located), and in the mean time got some Chiense practice and made friends with Lucy, the bus attendant. We agreed to meet in the future to practice speaking.

-Maybe I just imagined it, but as I walked across the Beida campus I couldn’t help but notice that it has a very Harvard-like feel to it. I did some people-watching while waiting for Colton at the south gate.

-We hopped in a cab to Wudaokou and found a real Chinese restaurant. We ordered a few delicious dishes and had a much less hurried conversation than the last time we met.

-Parted ways with Colton at the table tennis security checkpoint, and had an uneventful trip home.

THURSDAY 08/14

2008-08-31T09:21:00.001-04:00

-Work was work—nothing eventful.

-After my shift I met Victor, one of the researchers. We strolled across the Olympic Green, admiring the stadiums, the lights, the fountains and the crowds of people. We walked out past the Crowne Plaza to a hot pot restaurant and had a veritable. It was my first real Chinese meal since arriving in Beijing, and it was the first real Chinese hotpot I’d had in more than a year. God how I’d missed that meal. We had a wonderful conversation and it was clear to me that I had found a good friend.

WEDNESDAY 08/13

2008-08-31T09:07:00.004-04:00

-Spent the morning catching up our results and start lists.

-After that, a relatively easy afternoon. Had some bonding time with Cory, listened to some Chinese Pod and kept up the books.

-Because I had come in early, I also got to leave early. At 7 I got off my shift and Brian and I went out to watch some events. First, we hopped on the bus to Badminton. It was awesome. We watched a lively men’s doubles quarterfinal match between Poland and Denmark (the Danes won). There was a short break during which some cheerleaders appeared and danced around uncoordinatedly with people in Fuwa costumes. After that came women’s singles. This was a crazy match, the world’s #1 ranked female badminton player Xie Xingfang versus Germany’s top seed Xu Huaiwen (also of Chinese descent). Their styles were complete opposites of one another: Xie was tall, bamboo-thin and arrogant, with fast, whippy strokes. Xu was a shorter, stockier woman who was deceivingly fast and finessed, but who seemed to win points by sheer force of will and earnestness. You could see her panting after each point, where as Xie showed no visible signs of distress. Despite this, they were matched almost perfectly, and they chased each other point for point for two long games. Both games went the exact same way: the German would take a six or seven point lead early on. The crowd would begin to cheer anxiously for Xie, and she would catch up point by point. Xie would wear down Xu with long rallies—once a rally lasted more than ten hits or so, Germany inevitably got nervous and gave up the point. At around 16 or 17 points, China would tie it up, then pull ahead. Then Germany would tie and pull ahead again. At the last minute, Xie would pull ahead and take victory. It was really fun to watch and it made me understand why badminton players can acquire rock star status in China.

-After badminton we hopped in a cab to Chaoyang Park, where the Beach Volleyball venue was located. We got out at the wrong entrance and had to walk the entire length of the park to get to the stadium. Still, it was cool to see the park. When we got there, the US (Branagh-Youngs) was playing Cuba. Disappointingly, the Chinese were rooting for their Communist brethren. At most games, the Chinese crowds are guns for hire (I heard that at one game a solitary Russian had stood up and orchestrated an entire section to cheer for his team), but here they had a clear preference. Also, if there’s one downside to sitting in the press section, it’s that nobody claps or cheers. I wanted to be across the way with the crazy face-painting, flag-waving American crowds. We watched the US dominate the second half of their first game, then get destroyed by Cuba in game two. Brian and I were both exhausted and decided to leave (apparently the US came back and won the match in the third game).

-We took the shuttle back to the IBC and indulged in bacon cheeseburgers from the commissary. Then back to the MV, and bed.

TUESDAY 08/12

2008-08-31T08:52:00.004-04:00

-Tried to get into swimming again to see Phelps, but again got shut out. Instead I went to go see men’s sabre preliminaries.

-Work went extraordinarily smoothly as we got our system down perfectly. I continued my goal of being productive during downtimes by listening to Chinese Pod.

-After work I met up with some of my sound technician friends at some outdoor tables at the MV. By the end of the evening we were having a heated discussion about the ethics of cultural assimilation and the meaning of democracy. I have more questions and more ignorance about the topic than I expected. Then again, it’s the kind of topic where disagreements usually come down to opinion rather than to logic and the only way to find an “objective” answer is to take a poll.

-Got to bed early since I had to come in a little earlier the next day in order to cover one of my fellow runner’s shifts while he working at a different venue.

MONDAY 08/11

2008-08-31T08:51:00.001-04:00

-My journal entry for today started normally, but seems to have completely disappeared after the first paragraph. Bizarre.

SUNDAY 08/10

2008-08-31T08:39:00.004-04:00

-I resolved to make this a better day. I awoke in time to go in and see an event. I got shut out of the Water Cube, where Phelps was about to win his first gold medal, because George Bush was in attendance and security was extra-tight.

-Instead I headed over to the National Indoor Stadium, where the Chinese gymnastics team was having its qualifying round. The whole time I was sitting there I couldn’t get over how young the girls were (underage or not—they’re still young) and how much pressure they’re under. Especially for the Chinese athletes, when they fail, they not only fail at their event, they fail at the only thing they’ve ever done in their entire life, and they fail their whole country. It’s clearly not healthy: just look at Du Li, the markswoman who was expected to win China’s first gold but who ended up choking and coming in fifth.

-Went to work and finally put together what would become our authoritative system for printing and sending documents. That was a huge relief, and it gave me something to do every morning when I first came in so I could get started right away.

-Now that I knew exactly when I had to get up to print things, I had some time on my hands. I replied to some emails, caught up my Facebook, read the news and watched Olympic events on WinTV, the buggiest and least reliable piece of software I have ever had the misfortune of using. I realized that I should find some sort of regular, self-improving activity to do during these blocks of time between events and began brainstorming.

-After work I reluctantly headed back to do laundry. I was feeling mentally restless and I decided I needed to find some kind of creative release. I ended up sitting in bed and writing for a few hours—the outline and the first few scenes for a series I want to make. It felt great, and it was just what I needed.

SATURDAY 08/09

2008-08-31T08:37:00.000-04:00

-On Friday, I tried to brace myself to prepare for a post-Ceremony let-down. And on Saturday, sure enough, it came. Work was frustrating: for the first (and pretty much only) time, the hours were dragging by. We still hadn’t worked out a good system for keeping track of what needed to be printed and sent to New York, so all day I was going crazy checking and re-checking the database for start lists and results. It wasn’t stimulating, it wasn’t gratifying; just panicked and frustrating.

-Spent the evening by myself and went to bed early.

FRIDAY 08/08

2008-08-31T08:22:00.007-04:00

-FIRST DAY OF THE OLYMPICS!!!

-Chatted with my friend Brian down in Logistics, checked email, then headed to work. Grooved out to some Daft Punk (Human After All) and some Ratatat (Mirando, Party & Bullshit) on the way over.

-The research room was hopping. There were dozens of scripts to be made for the Parade of Nations. We were burning through printer paper so fast that the girls in Production Logistics were getting accustomed to me coming in and asking for inordinate amounts of it. This time, they basically just pointed out the hand truck and told me to go at it. -Ran an errand down to BOB (Beijing Olympic Broadcasting, the ‘host feed’ that has cameras at every single event and venue) and got to see their very cool control room. They have glass-backed rooms so you can see what’s going on. The place is basically a giant wall of TV monitors with every single feed from the games coming in. Also saw Jim Lampley twice (the talent, as they are called, are always easy to spot since they’re the only ones who wear suits).

-Had a lovely conversation with my boss, Maria, while we furiously taped athlete bios to index cards for Matt Lauer and Bob Costas for the Parade of Nations that night.

-Things started to calm down around 4 PM. With the lull, I grabbed myself an iced coffee and went to stretch my legs. I was shocked to see that the sun was still in the sky—for some reason, as soon as I entered the windowless IBC, I would immediately begin to assume that it was dark out.

-At 6 PM I was given the task of delivering Parade of Nations scripts to some of NBC’s big names. In this way I caught my first glimpse of big boss Dick Ebersol, as well as getting to see the inside of Control Room A, which (I believe) is where the producers sit during showtime. Like the BOB control room, the front wall of Control A is all TV screens. There are three tiers platforms with workstations on the floor facing the screens. The back wall is made of glass and allows you to see straight onto the NBC studio set.

-Delicious dinner—New York strip steak with some kind of onion gravy.

-Took care of a few final tasks after dinner. At quarter of 8, I went to the commissary and got myself a cookie and a mocha espresso. Then I pulled a chair up to the research room TV set and watched.

-The Opening Ceremony was truly unforgettable and I watched it in a near-stupor, transfixed. I was feeling China’s pride and getting very emotional. It was extremely painful to have to watch it on a tiny TV screen knowing that just a few hundred meters away it was happening live. The room was nearly empty since most of the researchers had been recruited as ‘spotters’ in the Parade of Nations staging area, making note of which athletes would be participating and reporting it to the appropriate people.

-It was really fun to get to read along with the script—I knew what was coming, what was going to be said, when to run outside to see fireworks. The best part, perhaps, was getting to hear the banter between Lauer and Costas during the ‘ad breaks’ (obviously there were no ads yet, since it was being taped).

-At the end of the ceremony I ran outside to watch the fireworks display. It was a heck of a show, with ‘works going off all along the north-south axis of the city. At one point there were so many explosions that the ground was literally trembling. Of course, I’m hard to impress, having witnessed the over-the-top month-long fireworks display that is Chinese New Year.

-Since we knew the media busses would be mobbed, Brian and I went back inside to the research room to bide some time. We watched a slo-mo replay of Li Ning’s flying stunt and saw that he’d received a bit of a jolt while transferring from his “elevation” wires to his “running” wires.

-Ran into Matt Lauer in the hallway on the way out and introduced myself. We chatted for a minute, but he was clearly very busy so I quickly took my leave.

-On the way out of the IBC, Brian recognized a cameraman whom he had met previously (between working at Logistics and the Today Show, Brian knows pretty much everybody). I was feeling particularly outgoing and I decided to strike up a conversation. I wanted to know what it was like actually being there in person at the ceremony. As we walked out of the IBC, it became clear that it was going to be a long ride home—hundreds of people were flooding out of the IBC and packing into the media busses. I must have been grumbling about it because the next thing we knew, this cameraman and his friend had invited us to ride with them on their private van back to the Media Village.

–So, while we sped past long lines of busses jam-packed—standing room only—with world-class athletes just trying to get home after a long Opening Ceremony in our private, air-conditioned van, I smiled.

-Back in my apartment I cleaned up, then stayed up until 4 AM recording the events of the day.

THURSDAY 08/07

2008-08-31T07:54:00.010-04:00

-I woke up having had strange dreams. My head was heavy and my bed was comfortable, and I found it nearly impossible to drag myself to my feet.

-Finally forcing myself awake I went and ate breakfast at the MV cafeteria. Then went to Lotus, a nearby supermarket, and bought some instant noodles and some drinks. The ashier was clearly having a bad day: she rung me up impatiently and left me standing at the end of the counter with no way of carrying my groceries home. I asked her if they didn’t have plastic bags. With nothing short of hatred in her eyes, she stuck out her palm for the 2 mao bag charge, then reached under the counter and threw a plastic bag at me. I was a little shaken and extremely put off to have such a needlessly hostile encounter so early in the morning

the Media Village

-A busy day at work—more kinks to work out of our scanning/filing system, some of our competition schedules were outdated and needed re-doing. Midway through all this, our Beach Volleyball researcher dispatched me to the beach volleyball venue to pick up press kits. I was excited—my first chance as a runner to actually run somewhere. I hurried off.

-My momentum was killed when I learned that the next bus for beach volley didn’t leave for half an hour. This ended up being great: I had a captive audience with whom to practice Chinese. I chatted with the bus driver while we waited for departure time, then talked to the bus attendant on the trip over. -At the venue, I spent 15 minutes trying to find someone who would know about media kits. I finally found the FIVB Press Liaison, who informed me that all of the kits were currently being held up in customs. I reported this back to the research room, got the guy’s phone number and picked up all the other literature I could.

-Having 45 minutes to kill before the next bus left, I decided to go check out the venue. On my way over I had my first brush with a Rabid Pin-Trader. Let me explain: everyone affiliated in any way with the Olympics gets a big, yellow identification card from BOCOG which one wears around the neck on a yellow lanyard. Some people like to decorate their lanyards with pins; for example, many people who have worked with NBC in previous games wear their official NBC pins from Athens, Sydney, Torino, etc. Some people take this game a little further and will obsessively hunt down every single Olympic pin they can find. Their lanyards look like steel girdles, weigh twenty pounds and can be heard jingling from hundreds of meters away. Truly serious collectors will also carry cloth wallets stuffed with all the hundreds of pins they can’t fit around their necks. Anyway, lots of TV stations, newspapers, sponsor companies, athletic delegations, etc. give away free pins to their employees, so the best way to get other people’s pins is to trade your freebies for someone else’s rarer, more valuable pins. This not only creates a fascinating marketplace, but gives rise to a ruthless social culture. Anyone wearing a pin on their lanyard runs the risk of being accosted, sometimes forcibly, by a total stranger and asked to trade. I’ve been stopped by a collector who put himself bodily between me and the bathroom door so I couldn’t escape. I’ve been riding the subway and have people lean in so close to my lanyard that their noses were practically touching my chest. Today, at the beach volleyball venue, I only had one pin (which I wasn’t willing to trade), so upon realizing what my assailant was after I made my hasty getaway and hurried inside the stadium.

-The inside of the venue was very cool, and I resolved to come back and watch a game. I’d heard that the beach volleyball venue in particular acquired a “party” atmosphere at other Games and I wanted to see what that actually meant.

-Same bus driver, same attendant on the way home, only all of a sudden the Chinese-speaking part of my brain had decided to throw up its arms in exhaustion. Within the space of a few minutes I suddenly found myself incapable of stringing together even the most basic sentences and listening to complete gibberish.

-I didn’t get back to the office until 5:30, at which point I got another treat: we were making photocopies of the Opening Ceremony script for all the talent. In addition to knowing what the broadcasters were going to be saying 24 hours before pretty much anyone else in the world, it was also neat knowing that the binders I was putting together were going to put into Matt Lauer’s and Bob Costa’s hands, then read to tens of million of viewers. This perfectly encapsulates the nature of my job with NBC Olympics: yes, I was making photocopies, but they were Dick Ebersol’s photocopies, and when I was done making them

I could go watch Usain Bolt run the 100 meter. -After work I hopped in a cab to Dongzhimen, where I met up with none other than John Speed, one of my Chinese [language] classmates from Tufts. He, by complete coincidence, was rooming with one of my Chinese language classmates from Exeter.

We caught up over dinner—he was in Beijing with China Care and had been doing all kinds of interesting things on the side, such as exploring Beijing and being hired to test the English language abilities of bank tellers before the Olympics. For some reason it was nearly impossible to find a cab, so we split a ride home.

WEDNESDAY 08/06

2008-08-30T14:11:00.003-04:00

WEDNESDAY 08/06 -Today was the first day of sporting events with the beginning of women’s soccer prelims. One of the runners’ main responsibilities was to print out start lists for games and send them via scanner to New York, since a handful of games were being called live from 30 Rock. We also were responsible for printing results for every competition and filing them in binders so the research room had hard copies/archives. Thus, having a few days of soccer prelims gave us a chance to develop and test our organizational systems and get the kinks out before the more hectic days came along. The difficult part wasn’t the printing or the scanning, but keeping track of the starting, ending and start list posting times of 30 different events and getting information to get to New York within a few minutes of its availability. At the peak of the Games we might have 70-80 competition starts or results coming out in a single day, or 20-30 medals awarded.

-Before I go on, I guess I should explain what the “research room” actually does and how it works: The room is open 24-7 and staffed by a few dozen researchers, each working 12-hour shifts and each of whom is required to be an expert in certain sports. The researchers sit down at the computer workstations on the floor. Then, there are several people up on the raised part of the room (befittingly called the ‘platform’). The platform has a radio panel that allows a variety of writers and producers to be in direct communication with the research room. When a call comes in over the radio for information, the platform directs the question to the appropriate researcher, who then comes up with an answer as quickly as possible and tells the platformer, who in turn feeds the info back to the writer or producer. During downtime between their sports, the researchers try to preempt any possible information requests—if Croatia wins this handball preliminary and has to face Poland, when was the last time that match-up occurred and who won?— in an attempt to achieve coveted “negative split.”

-After returning from work I wasn’t quite ready for bed, so I decided to go for a long walk. I was trying to find any place open that sold food—a convenience store, perhaps, or a restaurant, or a street grill. But everything around was dead, save for a 24-hour McDonalds. I couldn’t bring myself to go in, so I returned to the Media Village and resolved to buy myself some snacks as soon as possible.

TUESDAY 08/05

2008-08-30T13:55:00.002-04:00

-I was working a later-than-usual shift today because all of the school-program runners had a big banquet dinner at the Crowne Plaza. That meant I didn’t have work until 3 PM.

-I got myself up at a reasonable time, ate, then hopped on a subway to the Lama Temple. It was a pretty cool place—lots of creepy ornate Buddha’s and incense cauldrons throughout. I was in a reflective mood and I spent a long time just watching people pray—lighting incense, standing before a steaming cauldron, bowing to the cardinal directions or kneeling and placing their foreheads on the ground. Everyone had a slightly different style of prayer: some held the arms out straight and upraised; some bent the elbows and kept the hands flat together. Some people bowed deeply from the waist; some nodded their heads instead. The youngest one there was probably five years old and the oldest perhaps ninety-five. I’ve never really understood prayer and I have a lot of questions about it, so watching these people gave me plenty of food for thought.

-At the subway transfer at Beitucheng there was a long line at security. Several reporters were complaining to an unfortunate volunteer about the line and wanted to know if there was a special media entrance; she clearly didn’t understand what they were saying. I stepped in and did my best to translate. Three [cute] volunteers waiting in line in front of me, hearing that I spoke a little Chinese, took the opportunity to strike up conversation. They all went to the Beijing Forestry Institute and were working in an Olympic post-office. They all seemed very impressed that I had the “infinity” sign on my credential (meaning “unlimited venue access”). They hijacked me for a photo op in the new subway station and kept me company for the rest of the ride. It’s random little things like that which keep life spicy.

-I still had time before work, so I went to see GE’s exhibition. All of the major Olympic sponsors had exhibition halls along the road leading to the Water Cube and the Bird’s Nest. GE’s featured a rousing video about the possibilities of their technology solutions, and interactive exhibits about all of their major technologies—water purification, metals, light, wind turbines, etc.

-Working the late shift meant I was responsible for delivering the daily internal newsletter, the Daily Olympian, from the research room (where it is produced) to the Crowne Plaza Hotel where all of the bigwigs were staying. At 1:30 AM or so, the newsletter was done. I delivered it to various places around the IBC before catching the bus to the Crowne Plaza and delivering the rest. If the lobby is any indication, it’s a damned nice hotel.

-I got home by 3 and went to bed.

MONDAY 08/04

2008-08-30T13:53:00.005-04:00

-Just took it easy in the morning before work—I had been feeling unusually tired and I decided to give myself a day to sleep, lest I need begin making use of the 24-hour Starbucks in the NBC commissary.

-Reasonably busy day at work, despite supposedly having run out of things to do the day before. Just did various jobs and errands for the researchers and writers.

-After work I jumped in a cab to Wudaokou to meet Colton, a friend of mine from Exeter and one of my first Chinese language classmates. We had been to Taiwan and Beijing together on Mrs. Fontaine’s trip, but it didn’t make it any less surreal seeing him after two years of little contact. We really just wanted a place to sit and talk, so we headed for the nearest open restaurant, which just so happened to be California Beef Noodle King. We spent an hour catching up over mediocre fast-food noodles and sprite. He had class the next morning, and I had work, so before long we went our separate ways.

SUNDAY 08/03

2008-08-30T13:43:00.003-04:00

-Took the subway to the Forbidden City with Natalie and Andrew in the morning. This was my first time on the Beijing subway, and overall it was not an unpleasant experience. Our BOCOG credentials got us free subway tickets and free admission to Gu Gong.

-If there’s one thing you can say about the Forbidden City, it’s that the place is huge. Really, the only reason you would need courtyards that big is to show off (which I suspect was exactly the point). With 8000+ rooms, if you were born in one room of the City and slept in a different room every night, you wouldn’t have to sleep in the same room twice until well past your twenty-first birthday. I had a new perspective on it this time having watched both Bertolucci’s The Last Emperor and Zhang Yimou’s Curse of the Golden Flower. We walked from the entrance in the south straight through to the north gate, then walked all the way back again via a slightly different route.

-The most exciting development at work was that we got two computers for exclusive runner use. We also got tentative shifts: it was looking like I’d be working from 1PM -10 PM or 5 PM – 2 AM. (Actually, my shift ended up being neither of these, and I worked most days from 11 AM – 9 PM).

SATURDAY 08/02

2008-08-30T13:36:00.003-04:00

-Long, uneventful day. In the morning I went exploring, wandering through the fencing venue and the National Indoor Stadium with a purpose in my stride that I hoped would make it look like I was actually supposed to be there. They were rehearsing medal ceremonies in the fencing venue.

-At work we made more binders, learned about the various news feeds and computer databases we would be using. But for all intents and purposes we had already done about as much as we could do before the beginning of the games.

-That night a group of runners went to Houhai, one of the bar districts. I was not really impressed with the area—it was seedy and very touristy—and I felt no need to ever return.

FRIDAY 08/01

2008-08-30T13:25:00.002-04:00

-I neglected to record this day in my journal. To the best of my memory, it went as follows:

-I met some of my sound technician friends for a quick breakfast at the media village cafeteria. We then proceeded to the Secure Bus (as they call it) to the IBC. The bus is “secure” because before you can get on it your bags are scanned and you are walked through a metal detector sensitive enough to pick up the foil gum wrapper in your pocket, then mag-wanded front and back by a cheery Olympic volunteer. Once the bus entered the Olympic Green, though, you did not need to go through security again.

-I followed some sound guys into the NBC wing of the gargantuan IBC. Down an exceedingly long and windy color-coded hallway with lots of off-shooting smaller color-coded hallways I came to the “runner pool,” where most runners bide their time between jobs. A man there directed me to the research room and told me I’d be reporting to Maria.

-The research room was mostly empty when I got there, which gave me a chance to look around. Along one wall there was an elevated platform with desks, computers, printers and some kind of radio device. The rest of the room was filled with clusters of tables, all of which had computer workstations on them.

-Before Maria arrived I met two of my fellow research runners, Cory and Natalie. They gave me an extremely warm welcome, which helped alleviate some of the tension I was feeling. For some reason they had arrived a day before the rest of us and so already knew the ropes. Our first task was to create hard copies of the room’s Research Manuals. These were basically encyclopedias of information about every sport in the summer games, with bios, rules, predictions, historical results and a variety of other info. I’ll spare the details, but suffice it to say it was a very paper-intensive process: We probably used close to 160 reams of paper over the course of a month. If there’s a hell for those who kill trees, I’m going there.

-That kind of project took up pretty much the whole day—creating all kinds of binders, folders, manuals, rulebooks, etc. and shelving them in an organized fashion. The research room was responsible for keeping a vast amount of information on-hand and available quickly, and we would spend much of the first week doing the infrastructural legwork necessary to make that level of organization possible.

-That night, Natalie, Brian Andrew and I went out to look at the venues. I got my first look at the Bird’s Nest and the Water Cube, all lit up in the dark. I typically dislike most modern Chinese architecture (e.g. the Pangu hotel next door or the Ling Long Pagoda), but I think they did an exceptionally good job with both of those two buildings (the new CCTV tower is another new building I approve of). We went inside the Water Cube ([H2O]3) and sat in the front row seats. The Bird’s Nest was off limits because there was a rehearsal for the Opening Ceremony going on.

THURSDAY 07/31

2008-08-30T13:13:00.005-04:00

-Logan airport was surprisingly crowded for a non-holiday Tuesday morning in midsummer, and most of the people there did not look like business traveler (must be the stimulus package).

-Waiting to check in, I glimpsed my first NBC employee, identifiable by her NBC-issued luggage tags. I also ran into Tufts’ very own Wang Laoshi and his son, who were also headed to Beijing.

-My Chinese experience began unexpectedly in the terminal at Logan. I was studying characters to kill time and a Chinese man sitting nearby leaned over and struck up conversation. He worked in Qingdao but was in the States on business. Sitting next to him was an adorable old woman who I initially assumed was his mother. It turned out that this woman—small, frail and very old—had ventured all the way to Boston to see her relatives, not speaking or reading a single word of English. You think Logan is confusing, try navigating it as an aging illiterate foreigner.

-The only notable thing about my stopover in Chicago was that I had an extremely disappointing steak and egg sandwich.

-On the flight to China I was seated next to two other runners—Eric and Andrew—who ended up working in the Research Room with me. I tried to put myself on Beijing time by forcing myself to sleep as soon as we took off. -That flight never gets shorter. It somehow doesn’t seem right to me that I get a personal TV screen on my transatlantic puddle-jumps to London and Zurich, but am reduced to watching a worn-out VHS on a single, dim screen at the front of the cabin during my 13-hour transpacific doozy. I killed time by reading the Sports Illustrated Olympics edition, watching the in-flight movie and admiring polar ice floes and vast, barren tracts of Siberia out my window.

-The new terminal of the Beijing airport was, as has been said a million times before, impressive. Less could be said for the air quality—you could barely see the wingtips from the window seat.

-Took a bus from the airport to the media village. Depending on which translation you read, the media village was called the North Star MV or the Green Homeland MV (a more direct translation—绿色家园媒体村. Amusingly, the whole naming issue was also completely moot: there was only one media village, and none of the cab drivers knew where it was anyway.

-Settled in—found my room, unpacked, went down to NBC Logistics and got my cell phone, took a “get my bearings” walk.

-Bravely integrated myself with a group of other NBC-ers who were hanging around in front of our building. We struck off in search of dinner and eventually found it at a Papa John’s. Not exactly what I was in the mood for, but it appeared to be the only game in town (that or KFC—we were in a special Restaurant Free Zone). Spent my meal chatting with some of NBC’s sound guys. Everyone in the sound crew already knew each other from other gigs—it gets to be a pretty rarified field at their level. I had a lovely conversation with the guy who mixes the sound at the Super Bowl.

Starting up again?

2008-08-22T03:47:00.004-04:00

To all of you who wrote me comments in 2006--THANK YOU. I am sorry to say that I am only now reading them, since I forgot that I had my comments set up so that I had to moderate and approve them first. Needless to say it's been a long time since I've checked my admin page. . . So I'm back in China, which means it's time to start writing again (at least while I still remember English). I've have a year of successful journal-keeping under my belt and I'm now much better at writing short and avoiding comma splices. THADWFE was nice but I feel like I need a fresh start so I'm contemplating some new sites/formats. Keep an eye out for a link. In the mean time, a beautiful picture:

Chapter 3: Changchun, First Visit

2006-11-12T11:01:00.000-05:00

Chapter 3: Changchun, First Visit

The plane landed in Nanjing for a brief stop-over. Coming in to land, it didn't look like we were anywhere near a city (and in fact, we probably weren't). The countryside was beautiful. I was strangely apathetic to it, though; for the past few days, I'd been out of sorts. For one, I was exhausted, mentally and physically. But it went beyond that—I was uncomfortable somehow, restless. There were a few reasons for this, I decided. First, I was nervous about meeting the people at these schools, with whom I'd been corresponding for the past few months. But the greatest cause of my anxiety, I think, was the prospect of teaching. Waking up every day, and teaching. What if I wasn't any good at it? What if I didn't like it? How was I possibly come up with enough stuff to teach a class, day after day after day?

We had to disembark from plane in Nanjing, for about twenty minutes. I went to the bathroom, then looked out the window for a while. Then we climbed back on. The ride wasn't long enough for my liking. The least stressful moments in traveling, for me, are when you're on that bus, or that plane, and you're just waiting for it to arrive. Nothing you can do but wait, so why worry? No decisions to be made. Anyway, I fell asleep again as we approached Changchun, and missed seeing the landscape out the window of the descending plane. Jett tried to show me, but again I was filled with a strange apathy; I just wanted to rest. I didn't want to have to hold that uncomfortable, leaning-out-over-Jett's-lap-across-the-seat position, chafing against my seatbelt and that damned immobile plastic arm rest. What little bit of the countryside I did see reminded me a shocking amount of Italy—golden fields of crops, bathed in a very cold, autumn light, with little groves of trees scattered about or lining the roads.

We landed without event. The Changchun airport wasn't much to look at. Jett and I wondered why everyone was always in such a hurry to get off the plane, especially when their bags wouldn't be out on the carousel until long after the last person had disembarked. We took our time, and by taking a staircase down to the baggage claim instead of the escalator, managed to beat most of the people off the plane anyway.

Our bags were among the first ones out. When does that ever happen?

There were a few hundred people clustered behind a cloth-tape barrier, waiting to pick up people coming off the plane. I saw a white woman standing in the crowd. This was it.

“Charles? Are you Charles?”

“Yeah, hi, uh—“

“Hi, I'm Tracey.” There were a few other foreigners and a couple Chinese people with her, it now became clear. “I saw the foreigner in the crowd, and I figured there was a pretty good chance that it was you.”

She was British; I hadn't expected that. On the plane, I had actually been very confused, because I had somehow gotten it into my head that her name was Tracey Xia, but then I could have sworn she was a Westerner, too. It turns out that I had met a Tracey Xia at the GLV a few days before I left.

I introduced Jett, and we were introduced to the welcome wagon that had come to pick us up: Tracey, Andy (the school's owner), Michael (a teacher with a leather jacket and a Mohawk), and a few TA's ; who, exactly, I am embarrassed to say I don't remember. I only remember the people I talked to.

We walked out across the parking lot to a big blue van. It was very flat around here, and the sky was huge. I'd had no idea what the weather was going to be like, but I had expected it to be colder. We loaded our bags into the trunk. Andy hopped into the driver's seat, and Jett took shotgun. Tracey and I sat on the first row bench. Michael, and two TA's sat in the back. If there was anyone else, I don't remember. It was a forty-five minute ride into the city, through bronze fields of wheat and corn. I talked with Tracey most of the time, and got almost all of my multitudinous questions answered.

The van pulled to a stop outside what is now my home away from home, the Bei An office. Of course, I didn't realize it at the time; for no reason at all, I just scrutinized the Korean restaurant across the street. I stayed put in the van while a lot of people ducked in and out; I gathered we were picking some more people up. Eventually, Luke and Shelby, two other foreign teachers, hopped in. The hold-up had something to do with a teacher called Young Andrew; he had Luke's cell phone, or something. I would never meet Young Andrew, but he would nonetheless have a very deep impact on my life. But more on that later. With everyone aboard, we slid the door closed, and headed for dinner.

Dinner may be too strong a term; it was only four or five in the afternoon when the van pulled into a courtyard, and everyone hopped out. Through some glass doors, we found ourselves in a very nice restaurant, walking up the stairs to a private room on the second floor. There were already a few people in the room, including Andy's wife, Sarah. Knowing where the room was, I went to wash up. I felt filthy from traveling. When I came back in, I still didn't feel like sitting down. There was a small porch abutting the room, and I went outside to join Luke there. We talked for a few minutes, and he took my picture. We were called inside just as I was about to ask him that most crucial question: do you have you Z-class visa? I was really fretting about this at the time, and whether a school could issue me one or not was the ultimate deciding factor. Inside, Jett told me that he had asked another teacher about the Z-visa on my behalf; he had one, all right. Whew.

What a dinner, that was. I was not expecting anything like this—a six-person welcome brigade at the airport, followed by an all-expenses-paid dinner, followed by—what else? The specialty of the evening was shark dumplings, which were delicious. The rest of the food was great, too. I spent most of the meal chatting with Luke and alternatively stuffing my face. Everyone was so friendly, and having so much fun.

After dinner, we went to check into our hotel. Since my dad had made the hotel reservations, I didn't really know what to expect. But I know I did not expect the Paradise Hotel.

It was lavish. There was a giant classical frieze in the lobby. Brobdingnagian red lanterns hung outside for National Day. The room we were in was nearly RMB 300/night, practically nothing in American dollars, but rather something in China. It was not the most expensive hotel in Changchun—the Shangri-La and the Days Hotel in Changchun's big commercial center went for more than more than 1000 Yuan per night. But nor was it the cheapest. We went up to see the room; it was lovely, with two single beds, a big TV, and enough open, carpeted space to host a party. We decided to stay.

After we'd dropped our stuff off, Diana took us down to the train station to buy our tickets. The station was at the end of the road the hotel was on, just a short walk away. It was really quite generous of them to help us buy tickets to a a city, so I could look at, and possibly sign a contract with, another school. A soft-sleeper car for our ten-hour train ride came out to be a whopping 135 Yuan, or about USD $17. After that, Tracey and Michael took us to an internet café right around the corner from our hotel. They said they'd return at nine, to pick us up for a night on the town. I called home on Skype, and we played a few rounds of Counter-Strike.

We met Tracey and Michael at the appointed time in front of our hotel. The first stop that night was the Classic Bar. The bar was on XiAn DaLu, one of Changchun's major streets. Giant metal arches bedecked with Christmas lights lined the road. It was quite chilly out, and I didn't have quite enough clothing on. We didn't want to have to buy too many drinks in the bar; moreover, Jett and I had never tried bai.jiu, the traditional Chinese hard liquor. Tracey and Michael had brought a little bit with them—some straight, and some cut with Coca-Cola. I couldn't stand the stuff cut with Coke. Raw, it tasted very strong, and almost herbal. I was not a fan. After we finished what little had been brought, Tracey, Jett and I stood outside the bar, chatting and trying to keep warm, while Michael went to find a convenience store to buy more.

Michael was a long time in the coming. Eventually, Tracey sent him a text message, and we went inside. It was brain-puree-ingly loud. A live band played on a stage at the front of the room. All around the perimeter of the room was a chain of flags, which didn't quite fit with the rest of the futuristic, video-screen nightclub image. We sat at a small table near the door. The band was singing many of its songs in English. And they weren't Chinese, they were Filipino. One poor guy was relegated to 'tambourinist'. He just stood on one side of the stage, doing his best to look cool in his immaculately adjusted baseball cap, playing the tambourine in the middle of a nightclub. At one point, I withdrew my camera to take a picture. Immediately, Tracey and two club attendants made for my camera. I managed to snap a shot, sans flash, before Tracey lowered my hands.

“You're not supposed to do that in here.”

Whoops.

Michael came in at some point, bearing bai.jiu. Of course, we couldn't drink it inside. In the meantime, someone had bought some beer for our table. I just sat there, watching the band. At some point, a short-ish man, wearing a jersey and a baseball cap, came up and introduced himself. He was one of the clubs DJs, he said. We chatted a little bit, over the music. Then he slipped me a VIP card and went on to schmooze with the next person. The VIP card wasn't bad—15% discount on all snacks and drinks.

Just a few minutes later, another man, a Filipino, came up and started talking with me. His name was Happy; he was the club manager. He handed me his card, and tried giving me another VIP card. I told him I already had one. He was very nice, to the point where I felt a pang of guilt when we all gathered our stuff and walked out of the club five minutes later.

The next stop was the Rock Club, on RenMin DaJie. Michael had put the bai.jiu in water bottles, and put those into his bag, so we could sneak them into clubs. As we went through the metal detectors, the bouncer saw the water bottles and began to give us trouble. Micheal suddenly got very effusive and jovial, and we just sort of laughed our way on through the metal detector.

The Rock Club is one of the better night clubs I've been to, since people actually dance there. That, and there are almost no foreigners. We sat down at a table in the back. The seating in the room was shaped like a “U” around a giant dance floor, at the head of which sat the DJ, in front of a giant video screen. There was also a “U”-shaped balcony with more seating. Throngs of sweaty Chinese men, and and a few women, were out dancing.

We sat at the table for a while, just taking in the sights. A crazy Chinese guy in leather pants and with hair down to his butt was up on the small stage, singing. There were video monitors here and there; it took me a while to figure out that they were actually playing live footage of the dance floor. As cool as the dance floor looked in real life, the dance floor on the video screen looked even cooler. It could have been something from MTV.

Jett pointed out that pretty much any partying I happened to do in college was going to be lame compared to China.

We went out on the floor and danced for a while. Some guys wanted me to go solo, and a circle started to form, but I was not up for that. I humored them a little bit, but then moved on. It was fun, but by the end, I was dead tired. I had been tired when we left the hotel; the rest of the evening was just going to be a game of endurance for me.

Out some double-doors and across a hallway, there was another, smaller bar in the same building. This one was nearly empty. Another band of Filipinos was singing to the empty room. I could never be a performer like that. It would just bum me out so much, to be singing to nobody all night. I spent most of the time in this bar feeling embarrassed and sad for the band. It was way too loud, so we couldn't really talk, either.

It was getting pretty late; maybe 2 or 3 in the morning. We left the Rock Club for one final destination—Popcorn, a KTV. There was some question as to whether it was open when we first arrived, because it looked quite dark. But it was. Inside, we passed a desk with a tired-looking girl attending it, and herded ourselves into an elevator. The doors opened, and we were led to a private singing room.

This part of the evening was frustrating. I just sat on the couch. There was some difficulty finding and selecting English songs. A lot of the songs had incorrect or generic names, and so turned out not being what we expected. Eventually, a poor KTV attendant got involved. Michael kept cuing it up to Paranoid; he sang it two or three times that evening. Jett wanted to sing some Korean songs, since they had them. It felt like I was going deaf. At the lowest point, we had no songs cued up while Michael was sorting something out with the attendant; it defaulted to Ricky Martin's “Livin' the Vida Loca” music video, over and over and over again. I thought to myself, “oh, well, at least he's hot,” and put my head back on the sofa.

After perhaps an hour of this, Tracey said she'd had enough. Of course, we needed her to get back, so after Jett finally got to sing a Korean song, we called it a night. It ended up being Michael who took us home, actually.

In Zhuhai and Shenzhen, there was a special, elevated night-rate for taxis. In Changchun, flagfall is five kuai around the clock. There are so many taxis in the city, I don't understand how all of them make enough money to get by. Of the vehicles on the road, I'd say 45-55% are taxis and buses, give or take.

Upon arriving at the hotel, we thanked Michael, went upstairs, and collapsed into bed.

The next day, Jett and I woke up late; too late for the included breakfast. We wanted to see The Last Emperor's palace that day. So we washed up, dressed, and headed outside. I had a map of Changchun that Tracey and I had pilfered from the Shangri-La; I knew roughly where we were going. Jett, as I think I've mentioned, was a great hater of maps, so I folded it up and kept it in my pocket for the rest of the day. It would be there if we really needed it.

We wandered out onto the street, past the internet café we'd used the previous night. The street crossing signs in Changchun are extremely funny. For “stop”, there's the traditional red hand. For “go” there's a little green person. But the green person actually “walks”—the lights composing his legs and arms flash on and off alternatively, like a little two-frame animation. The funniest part is, all of the crosswalk guys move at different speeds. Some of them move at a leisurely stroll, while others go at an impossibly fast sprint. I'll take some video footage of one of them; it's really something else.

Jett and I were walking along a main road. At some point, we needed to cut left across a side street, but I couldn't tell for sure which was the one I had identified as “ideal” on the map that morning. So we just plunged in. We quickly found ourselves in a labyrinth of smoky hu.tongs.

I was depressed. I didn't like Changchun that much—so flat and poor and sprawling. That morning, I had stood at the window of our hotel room, between the drawn curtains and the glass. Jett was still asleep. I just stood there for maybe fifteen minutes, looking out over the city. I felt like I had stepped back in time. There was a Communist-era feel about it, accentuated by the fact that I had just come from open, modern Zhuhai. It was cold here, in appearance and temperature; and the sun never got all the way up in the sky, so even at 11:00 in the morning, it felt like late afternoon.

Walking through these hu.tongs now did nothing to help my mood. Jett and I were both very quiet. Old Chinese men sat squatting on street corners, smoking and watching us fixedly as we walked by. They were just sitting there. There lives were just quiet and poor and empty. I was extremely hungry, too, which did not help. I hadn't eaten since 'dinner' at 5:00 the previous day.

We solved the hunger problem in an unlit restaurant with a rough-hewn wooden floor. We walked in the door, and a man said, “Beef noodle soup.” It wasn't a question, it was just what they served.

“Sure”, we said. “Two bowls.”

There was a group of four or five young men who came in just after us. They were a caricature of the good-spirited, life-hardened, working class group of friends—they came in noisily, crowded around a table, wolfed down their noodles and drank a few giant bottles of beer apiece, and tromped back out before Jett and I were finished eating.

The beef noodle soup was delicious, and I felt much better.

We paid, and struck out in the general direction we expected the Palace to be in. We saw a lot on the streets. This was real China, far from the city center, far from the foreigner hotels and shopping malls. It was a bit unsettling, but it was good to see it.

We came to a major road, picked a direction, and walked a bit. We could have been close to the Palace, or we could have been a mile away; I only had the roughest of ideas. We crossed the street, and kept walking.

Somehow, we found it. Down one street, we saw a sign with a picture of some classical Chinese buildings. We walked towards the sign. When we got to the sign, we looked down the road, and there was the building that the sign was a picture of. As we go closer, we could see—there were the high walls, the gates, and, visible through the gates, the palace. We went down to the turnstyle entrances, and read the informational signs. This was it all right, and not one of the other temples or landmark buildings in the area. The ticket booth was offset from the entrance, so we walked over and cued up. Tickets were incredibly overpriced, but then, there aren't too many tourist attractions in Changchun. Even the Lonely Planet guidebook does everything with reference to the train station, and only describes that part of town; evidently, their writer didn't think the city was worth anything more than a brief visit. I'm not inclined to disagree, really—it's a fine place to live, but I wouldn't come on vacation here.

So with our overpriced tickets, we entered the palace grounds. At first, I thought we'd been totally had. The entrance let you onto the palace greens. All of the buildings here were ramshackle, empty. It looked like people actually had been squatting in them—there were the occasional blankets on the floor, or daybeds, and piles of garbage or rubble. We walked the perimeter. In the center, there was a dirt ring, where you could buy an expensive ride on an emaciated horse. We kept walking.

At the far end of the greens, there was another set of turnstyles. We used our tickets to get through these, too. Finally, we had entered the palace itself—courtyards, buildings furnished in their original splendor (well, maybe not in their original splendor, but at least they weren't full of garbage). The first few rooms we went into had pictures of people who had lived and worked in the palace at the time of PuYi, the puppet emperor (feature of the Bernardo Bertolucci movie The Last Emperor; much of the filming for that movie was actually done on-sight in the palace). Many of them were the hated Japanese, or Chinese traitors to the cause.

We walked through a few more courtyards and gardens. The place was massive; I would have loved to have seen it in its heyday. It was preserved well enough, although some of the rooms looked a bit bare. Occasionally, there'd be a room with wax statues of the various occupants of the palace. Each room had a placard with an English and a Chinese description of the room and its function.

After a while, all the rooms began to look the same. We had glimpsed a large garden from one of the inside windows, and now, we went to find it. It didn't take us long. I bought an incredibly overpriced bottle of water at the gate. Then, we walked around. Once again, the garden was in an okay state of repair, but was clearly far from it's original glory. Gardens are so expensive; I'd like to find a real, fully maintained, lavishly designed Elizabethan garden one day, and perhaps have a tea party there. Also, ever since I've been in China, I've been getting unhealthy amounts of enjoyment from watching, or even thinking about beautiful, European things. I watched Casablanca for the first time the other night, and almost forgot where I was.

We decided to pass on the Royal Bomb Shelter that day, and headed for the exit. We started walking home. But we were tired, and heck, taxis were only 5 kuai, so before long, I found myself handing my “Please Drive Me to the Paradise Hotel” card to a cab driver.

That night, we walked down to the train station, and spent forty-five minutes looking around for a restaurant It was quite cold by the time we walked back. When a Stranger Calls was on TV when we got back to the room; I didn't plan on watching it, but I got sucked in. After it was over, Jett went to bed, and I wrote for a little while.

RANDOM MUSING ALERT:

It's uncanny, how many languages have an all-purpose exclamation beginning with the “ay” sound.

Korean: [something sounding like] “aieesh!”

Chinese: Ai.ya!

?????: Ay ay ay!

Spanish: Ay caramba!

Yiddish: “Oy!”

And so on.

The next morning, we woke up late again. Just as we were walking out the door to the hotel, we ran into Tracey. She had a note in her hand that she was going to slip under our door, because she did not expect to find us there. She handed me the note to read anyway. Andy and Sarah would be coming by the hotel at 6:00 to pick us up for dinner, then drive us to the train station.

Now, the three of us went out to lunch. It was a long walk to the restaurant—up RenMin DaJie, through the commercial district, where the sidewalks were lined with vendors selling mooncakes, up XiAn Lu, to what everyone called the “Beijing Restaurant.” It was a fantastic meal, with the best sweet-and-sour fish I've ever had.

Tracey had to leave. She was going to meet a few of the other teachers in ShanHaiGuan, the eastern terminus of the Great Wall, where it runs straight into the ocean. The restaurant was right next to an internet café; I replied to emails for forty minutes, while Jett took a walk. Then, we meandered our way back to the hotel. We wound through the hu.tongs behind the major shopping centers, instead of taking the main streets. We passed a stall selling delicious looking sandwiches. They also advertised these iced drinks. We were both thristy, so we decided to brave the line. Finally, I got to the head of the line, and asked for two of the drinks. And they were just like, “Oh, we don't have any of those.”

We also stopped at a tea house on the way back, but it was mindbogglingly expensive, so we took our leave.

It was just starting to get dark by the time we got back to the hotel. We didn't want to go in just yet, and we still had plenty of time to kill before 6:00, so we walked through the park across the street. At the entrance, there's a 25-foot-tall statue of Mao. We strolled through, and let the sky get dark above us.

Faintly, we could hear this otherworldly singing—a long, rising wail. We walked towards the noise, across a stepping-stone bridge in a pond, up a steep hill, and through a glade of small trees. And there we found an old man. He was standing by himself amongst the trees. And every so often, he would raise his arms, and take a deep breath—and just wail. It would start out low, and slowly find a single, wavering, mournful note. He would hold the note for an impossibly long time. Then he would drop his arms, and stand in silence for a while. Sometimes he would turn to face another direction. Fifty yards away, Jett and I found a statue of an airplane with a large, stone pedestal. And there we sat in silence for an unknowable amount of time, just listening. Behind us, there was a tarmac with a few dozen ping-pong tables, and people continued playing, even in the dark. In front of us, we could see the last sliver of colorful sunset-light on the horizon. Neon signs were lighting up across the city; traffic hushed past behind the trees. And the man continued wailing his troubles away, out into the night.

We walked back to the hotel slowly. We gathered our things, and checked out. By six, we were sitting on the steps of the hotel. Ten minutes passed. Nothing to do but wait. Twenty minutes. Thirty minutes. They wouldn't have forgotten us, right? At 6:40, the van finally arrived. I wasn't irked at all; they weren't late out of malice, and there was plenty of time before the train arrived. We threw our bags in the back, and drove a few minutes out to the restaurant.

I didn't enjoy this meal so much. I can't remember exactly what we had, but there was a stew of some sort, and some squid, and something resembling french fries. It wasn't a long meal. Andy paid, and we left. Before we went to the station, we stopped by a small market, and picked up some cup soup, some Oreos, two individually wrapped rolls of bread, and some fruit.

At the train station was Gigantic Traveling Blunder No. 2. There was an X-ray machine for the bags, just as soon as you walked in the door. I threw my big bag on, completely forgetting that I had left my pocket knife in it. Actually, “pocket knife” it too weak a term—the thing was huge, much too big to be practical; but my usual pocket knife had broken shortly before I left, and I wanted to have one with me in China. I had bought this one online, not realizing quite how large it was going to be, but not having time to send it back and get a new one, either. In the airport, it had been no problem. But on a train, where you don't check any baggage, it was a big problem.

Anyway, with my bag half way through the machine, my stomach dropped in horror. Sure enough, there was some commotion in the scanning booth. A man came out and asked to see my bag. I unzipped a pocket and just handed him the knife. I didn't care what happened to it. I just wanted to get on the train. How could I have been so stupid?

What ensued was an incredibly embarrassing haggle with the Chinese police. They walked us over to a corner office, and asked me a few questions via Diana's translation. Then, they sent me outside, and spoke to Andy for about ten minutes. After a while, he came back out. He had left it like this: after we had boarded the train, Andy would go back to the office and pick up the knife. He would hold onto it as collateral until I came back to teach at Sino-American, which I was going to do anyway, right? We laughed off a little steam. I apologized profusely to everyone, Jett and Andy in particular.

The funniest part is, if I'd had the knife on my person, there would have been no problem at all—there was no metal detector for passengers, just an X-ray machine for the bags.

We went upstairs to the waiting rooms. Ours was nearly empty; we got prime seats right next to one of the entrance gates. The Sino-American team waited with us for a few minutes, then departed. Then, Jett and I took turns guarding the bags and running errands. First I needed to use the bathroom; my repertoire of Strange Chinese Bathroom Situations got ticked up by one, as I encountered a bathroom with fully enclosed stalls with doors, which would have been completely normal and private if it weren't for the large, blue-plastic windows on the doors that allowed you to see if someone was using the stall.

When I got back, Jett struck off to explore the station. When he returned, he gave me the run-down: there were a few identical convenience stores, a few other waiting rooms, and not much else.

“If we wanna make some friends on this ride, though, we should get a bottle of bai.jiu and some cups.”

That sounded like a good idea. I wanted to see the station, too, so I set off to look around and get some bai.jiu. First, I walked right, to the end of a long, empty hallway. There was nothing there besides an exit. I figured the train tracks must have run directly below the hallway, then—why else would it have been there, besides as a bridge?

I walked in the other direction, then, and found the convenience stores. A big bottle of bai.jiu, 46-53% alcohol, cost between 4 and 10 Yuan. It would have been just disgustingly easy to get drunk. I picked up a bottle, some plastic cups, and some tissues.

When I got back, the departures hall was packed. Jett told me I had missed a fistfight, too—the poor people were even on the same train together. Shortly, some attendants came and unlocked the gate in front of us. Then began the rush. Jett and I were among the first ones through. We walked down a long hall, and down some stairs. I was right—the trian tracks did go directly beneath that long, empty hallway in the train station. We found our car with little difficulty, and in the same fashion, found our berth.

And so there I was! My first sleeper-train experience in China. The room we were in was tiny. There were four bunks, oriented perpendicularly to the direction the train would be traveling, with windows facing the platform we had just come off of on one side, and a door to the narrow access hallway on the other side. Beneath the window was a small table, and a big thermos full of hot water. Jett and I arrived before our two cabin-mates, so we chose to take the lower two bunks. I put my big suitcase up on my bed, since there was no other place for it, and slipped my smaller bag and my bookbag under the bed.

Our cabin-mates were probably either boyfriend and girlfriend, or a married couple. Either way, they weren't going to be up for a wild and crazy night. Exchanging few words, they entered, put their bags up, and climbed onto their bunks.

The train started rolling. I kicked my shoes off, but stayed mostly clothed otherwise. Jett and I chatted a bit, and I took some pictures.

Then, I broke out the playing cards and dealt out for Blackjack.

We played a few hands. Then Jett said, “Y'know, we've got that whole bottle of bai.jiu. . .”

He grabbed the bottle out of our shopping bag, and poured two shots into plastic cups.

We played a deck of Blackjack. Then, we drank.

Once again, the taste was just revolting to me. I scrambled for an Oreo to get rid of the taste.

We played out the rest of the bottle this way. I don't know why. The strangest thing is, the bai.jiu had almost no effect on me. To this day, I've never been drunk, nor do I ever really plan on ever being drunk, having gone part of the way there and not having enjoyed it one bit. But there I was, lying on my bed, and I asked Jett, “Are you feeling this at all?” And he was like, “Are you kidding?”

It didn't seem possible. I stood up—I didn't feel dizzy at all. I got my toothbrush and toothpaste out of my bag with no problem. As I walked down the hallway of the train. I hopped on one foot. I walked heel to toe. I walked backwards. I recited the alphabet. Nothing seemed different.

So I set my alarm for 5:30 AM, and went to bed. And the train sped farther and farther away from Changchun, and closer and closer to Yanji.

Chapter 2: Shenzhen

2006-11-09T09:32:00.000-05:00

Chapter 2: Shenzhen

On the last morning, Jett and I met at 8:00 AM downstairs, right outside the building. I was a few minutes late, which I felt bad about—I'd been 5 minutes late a few too many times in the past couple weeks. I hated chronically late people, and yet there I was, becoming one. I had not gone to bed until very late the night before, so I was tired. I just hoped I could sleep on the bus to Shenzhen. We took the long walk, down the street to the GLV. It was as hot as the day I'd arrived, making my departure feel all the more circular. We breakfasted at the Yunnan noodle place; they'd just wrapped up the breakfast-y food, so I had braised beef soup. Then, we went over to the GLV. Apparently, we couldn't just collect our 100 RMB key deposit and leave our room keys on the desks in our apartments, as some other people had told us we could—that was just a special exception for those leaving before Student Services was open for the day. So we schlepped all the way back to our apartments, got our suitcases, and walked back to the GLV, one last time. I began to sweat, but inside it was nice and cool. Jett went to the Student Services window and got his money back. (It's funny, all of the initialisms in the GLV stand for other things: Student Services (SS) = the Nazi Schutzstaffel; something else was called “AA” = Alcoholics Anonymous; there were a slew of others, but I've forgotten them all.) After that, Jett went to get directions to the bus station from Mei Ling. I, too, got my blasted 100 RMB back, and kissed my keys goodbye.

And we walked out of the GLV, out onto the white tiles of the Culture Plaza, where the heat was making the air ripple.

It still hadn't fully hit me that it was over, that we were leaving.

Traffic was pretty bad for such an odd time of day. We got a taxi from the same place Marie had left from the day before. The driver helped me get my suitcase into the trunk. Jett had the directions, but just as we were about to climb in, someone called him on his cell phone, so he thrust them at me. I got in the front seat and showed them to the driver. There paper was actually folded in half, with two sets of directions written on it, and I had one of those incredibly sucky, panicky, trying-to-get-someone-who's-on-the-phone's-attention-while-the-driver-has-the-directions-by-the-corner-pinched-between-his-thumb-and-forefinger-and-he's-trying-to read-them-and-I-kept-gently-trying-to-pull-the-paper-away-but-he-just-doesn't-get-it-and-meanwhile-Jett-is-trying-to-talk-distractedly-but-really-can't-be-bothered moments. So of course, the driver ended up reading the wrong set of directions, and we took off going the wrong direction. We wanted the Gongbei bus station, but we took off in the exact opposite direction, probably for the Xiangzhou station, which was the other thing written on the paper. Jett got off the phone, and I finally got to double-check. Sure enough, he confirmed that the driver had read the wrong one. I flipped the paper over and showed it to the driver; he grabbed it, and squinted at it against the steering wheel. Then, with a sharp nod and an “mmm,” he veered into the right lane and took a turn.

Turning around took almost ten minutes sitting in traffic. We just drove around the block, and essentially came out on the street where we had picked the cab up in the first place. I was in a tense-shouldered, anxious mood, where I would remain to some extent for more than a week, until I got settled in again. I took deep breaths, and reminded myself that there was nothing I could do, as we broke through the traffic and began to wind through streets I had never seen before. Every fifteen seconds, there would be a loud “beep!” as the taxi meter clicked up another .25 kuai. Apart from that, it was quiet; Jett and I didn't talk. It made me a little uncomfortable, as we approached the bus station, to see that we had really just scratched the surface of Zhuhai. It didn't even feel like we were in the same city.

The cab ride came to perhaps 25 kuai, the second-most expensive I'd ever taken after the fiasco on my way to the GLV on my first day. I picked up the tab; I think I was a round or two behind Jett, in terms of paying for stuff. The bus station was just an asphalt courtyard, not even that big. In fact, it felt cramped, with so many buses packed into such a small space. It was dangerous, too; all of these lumbering monsters turning around. In order to get into or out of the courtyard, you had to drive through a little one-lane tunnel through the surrounding building, adding to the congestion and claustrophobia. Basically, the Gongbei bus port was a giant, automotive sinus.

Jett was in Seasoned Traveler Mode. He was not messing around. If it had been just me, I would have been moseying about, observing people to see what to do, trying not to make too much of a fool of myself. As soon as we were out of the taxi, however, Jett took charge, walking at a brisk clip towards the most likely entrance. It was comforting, to have another person with me, no less someone who had lots of experience traveling around Asia. At the same time, I wanted to discover for myself the nuances of getting myself around in a foreign country, instead of being led through it. I certainly didn't resent having Jett there; it was just a situation where I wanted two mutually conflicting things—to both be alone, and to have company.

We got inside, and Jett hopped straight on the back of a line. The lady at the counter spoke some English, so with the help of a piece of paper, he bought us two tickets for the next bus to Shenzhen. They departed every fifteen minutes, I believe. It still boggles my mind that there are enough people in a given region to even fill a plane to a given city, let alone a bus every fifteen minutes. And all of the cars on the road—where the hell are they all going? Sometimes, when we're driving late at night (usually going to or from the Cape), and it's past midnight and the roads are still jammed, I just have to wonder to myself. It strikes me as strange because, although I represent one of those cars on the road, I'm making a trip that I don't usually make; it's an unusual circumstance, that I'm out driving that late. But I know that every night, the late-night road is full of cars, not just this one particular one that I'm happening to witness. Are all the cars you see past midnight going to places they don't usually go? Are they all full of people in unusual circumstances?

Our bus arrived at the station. I don't know how we came to figure it was our bus, but I showed a guy my ticket just to be sure. My luggage consists of 1) a large, rolling bag, 2) a smaller rolling bag, which also has backpack straps, and 3) a small backpack, which zips onto the back of the smaller rolling bag. It's an extremely convenient system—when I'm traveling with a full load, I zip the small backpack onto the medium bag, put the medium bag on my back, and roll the big bag. Jett was traveling with two bags: a big hiking backpack, and a small one. The advantage was that he only had two bags, and neither of them needed to be rolled. The downsides were that he had to carry his smaller backpack while wearing his bigger one; that, and it's much harder to access things in a backpack than in a suitcase. Now, I loaded my big bag into the belly of the bus (say that ten times fast), leaving me stuck with the medium-sized roller/backpack, with the small backpack attached. I would have checked that, too, and just kept the small, detachable backpack, but there was a 1-bag checking limit. We boarded the bus.

The seats were tiny and close together. We spent perhaps ten minutes fiddling around, trying to get my bag in such a position that it did not a) cut off blood circulation, b) force my leg into the narrow aisle, where it would have been trampled or tripped on countless times, or c) impinge on Jett's comfort. His bag fit neatly beneath his legs. The overhead storage shelves were laughably skinny—more of a magazine rack than bag storage. I found a semi-comfortable position in the end, but it was very claustrophobic, and precluded all leg movement.

After the bus got underway, I had a look at my ticket. Tim had given me the name of the bus station we were to meet at. I realized then, however, that I had never communicated the name of the station to Jett. How had he purchased the tickets without knowing that? A few minutes of detective work, and I got the whole story. As it turned out, Emily (the Singaporean girl he had met in Zhuhai) actually lived in Shenzhen. She had given him the name of a station, one of Shenzhen's five or six. Tim had wanted us to go to a different station. How had this happened? Why didn't he tell me about Emily? And how had I forgotten to tell him about what Tim had said? We checked our guidebook—the station we were set to arrive at and the one Tim had mentioned didn't seem too far from one another; then again, the Lonely Planet map had me convinced I could walk from the Hong Kong island train station to my hotel, too, but that would have been suicide. I sent an email to Tim on my BlackBerry, informing him of our mistake. It was all I could do.

The bag situation was pretty much intolerable, so we began to look around for other empty seats. The back of the bus was a long bench seat with nobody on it. We saw our opportunity, and moved. It was a good move. I had room for my bag; moreover, with it on the seat next to me, I could lean on it. As we left Zhuhai, my phone switched carriers, and I knew—we were gone. We weren't taking any streets that I knew or had seen before, so it didn't mean much to me. If we had driven past the GLV, I might have had something to think about.

Some indeterminate amount of time later, probably 20 minutes or half an hour, we stopped at another station to let on more passengers. Then, I fell asleep for a while.

I woke up with a jolt as the bus hit a gigantic, neck-breaking bump. I had probably slept for 45 minutes. We were well out of the city, and into a countryside of sorts; fields of a low, fronded tree stretched to the horizon, punctuated by the occasional town or cluster of buildings. I was exhausted from the night before, so things weren't registering all the way; try as I might to look upon the landscape with wonderment, or a writer's eye, or anything else, I couldn't. It just sort of washed over me, leaving a few snapshots separated by brown, hazy brain-smog. Much of the highway was on supports, impossibly high off the ground, sometimes as much as perhaps fifty feet. Thus, most of what I saw was from an elevation. I remember passing over/through this small city. It was one of the most bland-looking places I'd seen. It was poor, for sure, but not even the quintessential gritty, 'storybook' poor that one can see in, oh, the Detroit of '8 Mile', (which I watched the other night). Seeing towns like that, and thinking about the lives of the people who live in them, usually has a profound psychological impact on me. If you've know me for any amount of time, you've heard me wonder at the sheer number of people out there in the world, and how many redundant, or meaningless, or worthless lives are being lived out there. It depresses me, because it makes me wonder how I can be anything more than a drop in the bucket. If someone dropped a bomb and everyone in one of those towns died, I wouldn't really care, nor would they really care if someone dropped a bomb and killed me. But one day, I hope they will care; I hope I do something that makes me worth caring about.

But passing that town in China, I didn't feel depressed at all. I think it's because I'm not Chinese. In America, I pass people who I might become one day, in towns I might live in. I don't want to be one of those people, and I don't want to live in their destitute, depressed town, but it's possible. But in China, I'm a visitor. The people living in that city in Guandong will not have a life like mine, nor will mine ever be like theirs. I don't have to worry that I will end up living in that nothing of a city—it may happen in America, but it will never happen in China.

I remember passing a truck full of pigs on the highway. I hadn't seen a farm animal in so long, I'd forgotten what they looked like. My mental image of 'pig' had gone from flesh-and-blood creature to a little, pink, animated glyph. There were fields of a crop which I couldn't identify. There were steep mountains. I realized why the architecture was so strikingly ugly. First of all, the facade-building material of choice is white bathroom tile, which grays with age, and gets long, streaky rust-stains from peoples' air conditioners. But the real killer, at least down south, is the metal bars. The front of every apartment is made of open metal bars, so people can hang their laundry out to dry. No building, no matter how nice, can look good with bars on the windows, save for tacky bamboo-shaped ones.

I couldn't sleep for the rest of the ride, though I tried. A couple had parked themselves on the bench between Jett and I, and were dozing in each others' arms. There were a few TVs in the bus—terrible, grainy, and jittery, as all bus televisions seem to be. They were either receiving some sort of bus TV station, or playing a VHS designed to look like a bus TV station. There was a Chow Yun Fat movie, along with some other things I don't remember. But every ten minutes, the same exact run of advertisements would interrupt the movie for about five minutes. I got so tired of seeing those logos. I wasn't even watching the movie; it was just one of those things that caught my eye/ear from time to time. From what little I saw, I could see that movie was disturbingly violent; I have since learned that a large number of movies and TV shows from Hong Kong and China are just absurdly graphic. People complain about movies in the States being to violent, but at least in the states, directors have the tact to use a shaky camera, or put the wound just off screen, or only show the violence for a split-second. None of that pussy-footing around in China—I thought I had a pretty strong stomach for movie violence, but some of the stuff I've seen is just too much.

At some point, I checked my BlackBerry. Tim had written back—he had gotten my email, and the bus station mix-up was no problem, we could meet at this other station. He was also turning his phone off, since it was about to run out of batteries. We were caught in traffic, so wrote him back, telling him not to come for at least half an hour, probably forty-five minutes after the time we had originally told him to expect us.

Half an hour quickly became an hour and a half as we hit gridlock. I emailed Tim again, but I knew he wouldn't get the message in time. I would have called him, at whatever expense it was to use the BlackBerry overseas, but he had said his phone was off.

Eventually, the traffic broke, and it became clear we were approaching a big city. Still, we were still clearly on the outskirts of the city when the bus veered off the highway and into the bus stop. As we rolled into the station, we passed a sign—I assumed it was the name of the station, but it didn't match the words on my ticket.

“This can't be it,” Jett said. I concurred. A few people disembarked, but not everybody—we were clearly still going somewhere else. As we rolled out of the bus station, I was pretty comfortable that we'd made the right choice.

Sure enough, fifteen minutes later, we passed the train station, where we were originally planning to meet Tim. There were also many more big buildings around. Perhaps 300 yards down the road, the bus turned into a narrow alley, pulled into a small courtyard, and stopped. This time, everyone stood up to leave.

Considering I had just been sitting for three and half hours, I was exhausted. Jett was in a foul mood about the traffic, too—he doesn't like long rides like that. We both just wanted to get home, take a shower, and decompress. Emily had told Jett that there was a gigantic Shenzhen beach party every Saturday, and Jett wanted to go check it out. Provided I was welcome to go with them, I still wasn't sure I make it to the 9:00 PM starting time, let alone whatever ungodly hour it finished at.

We weary travelers must have caught the eye of some cruel, ironic god that day. We stepped off the bus. I somehow retrieved my big bag. The bus was parked in a tiny courtyard, not dissimilar from the one in Zhuhai. The people waiting to board the bus were waiting under an overhang, behind a metal fence. Jett and I plunged through the crowd. After we had cleared the throngs of people, we had a look around. If we were going to find Tim, we figured we might as well start here. Really, we had no reason to believe he wouldn't be there. Jett went back in to comb the crowds for Tim, and I stood guard at the entrance to the bus station alleyway, the choke-point through which all comers and goers would have to pass.

Ten minutes later, Jett returned. No luck. The bus station's ticket office and waiting room was upstairs in a nearby building, and Tim was neither there or in the crowd.

We walked out of the bus station courtyard, out onto a long street. To the left was the train station. To the right, an elevated walkway went over the road, and disappeared into a building across the street. Behind us was the bus station. In front, there was an elevated road, beneath which was what appeared to be another bus station. We found a low wall near the sidewalk, and put our bags down. Then, we peeled our eyes for Tim.

After perhaps fifteen minutes of waiting, Jett struck out again to search the bus station. While he was gone, it started to rain. He came back just as the rain was beginning to intensify, and we relocated to a place under a hotel awning, where a dozen other people were waiting. Another half hour of waiting. I bit the bullet and tried calling Tim on the BlackBerry, but of course, there was no answer. Jett found a pay phone, and tried his calling card, but again, there was of course no answer. Tim's phone was off, no doubt about it. I sent Tim an email describing, to the best of my ability, our surroundings—of course, there were no distinctive landmarks—what we were wearing, and what we were carrying.

Jett was beginning to get frustrated. I thought maybe there was more to the bus station than we had initially seen; I had to go back and make sure for myself. I looked every person in that station straight in the eyes. Nothing. I went back to Jett.

I still had a hunch that this tiny little station wasn't the extent of the Shenzhen bus station. I asked some Chinese ladies who were vending drinks if this was, indeed, Luohu station. They affirmed that it was. But there was that other bus station right across the street. . . I figured it was probably a municipal bus stop, but Tim wasn't anywhere to be found; maybe he had made a mistake. I left my bags with Jett, and took off to investigate. We had barely spoken that day, apart from matters of business. Now, he looked at me somberly.

“It's getting late, you know. If we can't find him soon, we're going to have to start looking for a hotel for the night.” That thought made my stomach drop. I just wanted to sleep. But I affirmed what Jett had said, and jogged across the street to the other bus station.

It felt good to run, especially after the long bus trip. So good, in fact, that for the next hour, I would only stop running if there were too many people to move; I figured it would help draw attention to myself—a tall, gangly ghost-face sprinting around in a bus station. There were relatively few people around here, though, and none of them were Tim. But a distant queue of people caught my eye. I crossed beneath the elevated sidewalk, and arrived at the Luohu taxi stand. No Tim.

There was an entrance staircase onto the elevated walkway, and I went up it. There were an awful lot of people coming back and forth. Where were they coming from? I decided to see. Still running, I came took the walkway to the end, where there was a staircase down, and a jam-packed escalator coming up. This is another thing you see a lot in China—the use of single escalators as a marketing device. You will often see an escalator leading up into a store, but almost never see one going down. It's like the store is saying, “Welcome! Welcome!” on the way in, and “How dare you leave!” on your way out.

Anyway, I took the stairs down. I ran against the flow of people, towards what I imagined would be the source.

The source, as it turned out, was another bus station. A sprawling, gigantic, 4-storey bus station, full of thousands upon thousands of people, all jostling or loitering or walking importantly or stumbling confusedly in one direction or another. And slowly, I realized. There was not one, not two, but three bus stations in Shenzhen that went by the name of Luohu. And Tim was probably somewhere in this one.

There was no time to lose. I kept running, searching the station as systematically as I could. I made myself as tall as possible, and occasionally worked up the nerve to wave my hands around in the air, to draw attention to myself. Would he be in a waiting area? Would he be getting food? Where did that glass tunnel lead to, and should I take it? If he was moving around, looking for us, it was hopeless. I tried to find the buses arriving from and departing to Zhuhai, but of course, I couldn't, because that was where Jett and my bus came in. Would he be in the bus station outside, or the one underground? Was there more that I still didn't see?

I had the vague notion he was wearing an orange shirt. He was always wearing something orange, as I recalled.

It didn't seem like an hour, but my watch revealed that that's how long I'd been gone by the time I returned to Jett. He, thank God, was right where I left him, under the awning. While I was gone,

he had called Emily. She was coming over now; we were supposed to meet her at a certain subway station. I didn't like that idea—it seemed like leaving the frying pan for the fire. Anyway, we couldn't just leave Tim waiting for us at the station. Still, we were desperate for options.

In the throes of said desperation, I checked my BlackBerry again, not truly expecting Tim to have found an internet cafe and emailed us. So imagine my surprise when there in my inbox was an email from Tim. Or not really Tim, as it turned out, but one of his roommates using his account. The email read as follows:

Hi,Charles,i'm Tim's friend, he is in Luohu station now, his cell is power off, pls call him via : 82338993,

Stella

I was overjoyed. I called the number right away—$4 per minute, be damned. A woman picked up.

“Wei?”

“Uh, hi, is Tim there?” It was a bad connection, and I could barely hear. I was yelling into the receiver.

“What?”

“Is Tim there? This is Charles!”

“Who?”

“Charles!” A few more exchanges like that, and she hung up. Dammit. I tried calling again—the same thing happened. The next time I called, it rang, then jumped to an automated message in Chinese. She had to know Tim; I double-checked the number, and she seemed to know English pretty well.

I sent another email to Stella:

Stella, the person who picks up at that number always hangs up on me when I ask for Tim. If you're with Tim or if you can call him, tell him to call me right now.

Thanks,

Charles

But really, we didn't expect her to get back to us in any sort of timely manner. It was getting late, and we didn't want to be stuck out on the streets of Shenzhen for the whole night. So we got on the end of the extremely long taxi queue. There was no other choice.

Not ten minutes had we been waiting when my phone buzzed. I fumbled to get it. It was another email from Stella:

Charles,sorry,I'm not stay with Tim.now, i can't reach him..... my cell is 13510217299,pls call me, i will go to station to meet you.

That was too bad; they were already being so generous with their time, I didn't want to waste another persons, no less one who I didn't even know. I began to compose a lengthy email to Stella, though, with details of how to meet us.

Midway through, I got a phone call. I fumbled to pick it up.

It was Tim. A rush of relief.

“Tim! Where are you?”

“I'm at the bus station. I can't find you.”

“Yeah, Tim, there are actually three Luohu bus stations! Do you understand? Three bus stations called—never mind, what should we do?”

Jett said, “Put him on with a Chinese person. Put him on with a Chinese person.” It was sound advice, and I should have taken it.

“Where are you two?”

“We're at the Luohu taxi stand. The Luohu station taxi stand, okay? You need to go under a covered sidewalk with a blue roof.”

Jett: “Put him on the phone with a Chinese person.”

“Okay, the Luohu taxi stand. I will come find you.”

“Okay. See you in a minute, Tim.”

I hung up. Stupid mistake. I didn't realize until afterwards that I didn't get the number he called from.

I climbed up the stairs to the elevated, covered walkway to scan for Tim. I was still within the visual range of Jett, who was standing at the foot of the stairs, in the middle of a big, empty concrete space, looking conspicuous with with all of our bags around his feet.

Twenty minutes later, there was no sign of Tim. Somehow, I knew that that call wouldn't be the end. But this sucked. This was being tormented, teased. I tried the other number again; the woman who didn't know me or Tim picked up, then hung up on me again. I called again—automated message. I emailed Stella. I waited some more. Perhaps forty more minutes went by, just waiting. It was getting dark.

My BlackBerry buzzed. Email:

Charles, Tim just called me, he is on the side of telephone, No. is : 61360153.

pls call again....

I came down and showed Jett the email.

“Okay, you see that man? Give the phone to him.

He pointed to a train station worker on the other side of a chain-link fence.

“Um, I would, but then there would be a fence between me and my phone. Here, I'll just ask these people.”

I went up to a cluster of people waiting at the taxi stand, and hit “send” on the number.

Tim picked up.

“Tim, where are you?”

“I still can't find you.”

“Okay, Tim, I'm going to put you on with some Chinese people, so find out from them where we are, okay?

“Okay”

I got the cluster's attention. In Chinese:

“Excuse me! Can you talk to my friend, and tell him where we are?” I thrust the phone at them. They looked at me curiously for a moment. Then fast as lightning, an old woman reached out and snatched the phone from my hand.

Immediately, a loud, rapid-fire conversation began. The woman was walking around, looking for signs and landmarks. A policeman walked past, and Jett wanted me to put him on the phone with Tim, but I wasn't about to rip it out of this old woman's hands. The old woman passed it off to a middle-aged woman. The middle-aged woman handed it off to a precocious 10-year-old girl, who actually ended up doing most of the talking. The girl then gave the phone back to the old woman, who said a few more words, and hung up.

She made it clear she wanted us to follow her. We walked perhaps 40 feet, and she instructed us to wait at a concrete staircase at a building near the municipal bus station, or as I had come to think of it, Luohu #2. We got comfortable; we found a clean-ish patch of sidewalk to place our bags, and sat down for the first time in four hours. The ordeal was finally drawing to a close, I could feel it.

Ten minutes later, I saw a man. I only saw him from behind. He was wearing a shirt with orange stripes. And he was looking for somebody.

I saw so many people that day. I remember saying to myself, “I hope never to see this many Chinese people in a day ever again.” I saw so many faces, I found myself having difficulty visualizing other peoples' faces when I thought about them. And as I scanned the teeming crowds, crossing the street, streaming past on the sidewalk, queued up for buses in hordes so dense they looked more an ink blot than a group of humans, and otherwise bustling around the area, it was obvious that not one among them was looking for someone. There is such a distinctive gait and posture that is acquired by the searching person—head craned and swiveling, strides too long and too careful. And it was was actually by this “searcher's” gait that I was finally able to recognize Tim.

“Tim!” I called out. The man with the orange-striped shirt turned around. It was him. I didn't even get a rush of relief—my mind immediately shifted its priorities to getting home and getting some food. Specifically, Jett and I had been hankering for some Subway sandwiches; he'd scored one in Hong Kong, and unlike at other Subways in China, it hadn't been made with Kraft singles. We figured Shenzhen was close enough to HK that we'd be able to get a decent sandwich here, too.

To this day, I don't know from whose phone he was calling me, nor do I know who was picking up the phone when I dialed the other number.

In my ample time waiting that afternoon, I had wondered how I would greet Tim. Would I shake his hand? Would I clap him on the back? Should I be cold, or warm? It came down, I decided, to how angry I should be about this whole escapade. I decided in the end that I shouldn't be angry at all—Tim wasn't trying to jerk me around. It was bad luck that his phone ran out of batteries. I don't know what he was doing for the four hours he was looking for us, but I imagine he wasn't doing much besides trying to find us. This seems obvious, in retrospect, but at the time, frustration and exhaustion were clouding my judgment.

Anyway, the greetings just happened, as they are wont to do. Then, we were off to catch a taxi. I didn't want to talk. First, we walked back over to the taxi stand. It would have taken an hour to get through the line. So we cut through some bushes, and crossed a street, in an attempt to snag a taxi before it got to the taxi stand. None of them would stop. We began to walk down the road towards the train station. It was dark by now, and the cars streaked by, too close and too fast for comfort. Tim was making me nervous, stepping out into the road in an attempt to flag down one of the too-few taxis.

Out of nowhere, a woman came up behind us, and said something to Tim. They said a few words. Then, we began to follow the woman. She tried to take my bag for me, but there was just no way I was going to let her.

She led us to another taxi stand. Some strange bartering, the exact nature of which I am unsure about, took place in Chinese. I didn't care; I was too tired. It ended up with me and Jett throwing our bags into the trunk of a taxi, and getting in.

Tim asked us if we wanted to eat at home, or go out for dinner. I let myself sink into the seat of the taxi. I didn't want to have to make a single decision.

“Let's have dinner at home tonight, if it's not too much trouble.”

Tim explained that they had just moved in, and that they didn't really have any food in the house.

“Okay, let's go out to eat tonight, shall we?”

In fact, Jett and I were still hankering for a Subway sandwich. We asked Tim if he knew of any Subways in Shenzhen, but he did not. I kept my eyes peeled for the duration of the 20-minute drive, but I didn't see one. They were out there, though, I'm sure of it.

Shenzhen was simply huge; that much I could tell, looking out of the taxi window from the highway. It sprawled. I couldn't imagine such a huge place having a city center, per se—it was just to spread out and disparate. We spent most of the drive on a smooth, new-looking highway. Taxis in Shenzhen are some of the most expensive in China; in Zhuhai, flagfall was 12 kuai. Here they started at 13 or 14, I believe. For comparison, cabs in Changchun meter up at 5 kuai.

Eventually, the cab pulled to a stop. I was a bit disoriented for some reason. We got our bags, and Tim led us to a gate in a wall that was the sort of thing your eye would tend to glance off, seeing it as just background clutter. We walked down an outdoor corridor of sorts, between some white-walled apartment buildings, and a low wall covered in vines. Near the end of the corridor, Tim punched in a long series of numbers on a keypad next to a door, and it clicked open.

Naturally, he was on the sixth floor. I picked up my big bag, and began walking. The lights in the stairwells were sound-activated, and the flicked on as we ascended. As I took the stairs, I tried to work my quads, a habit I had developed in the past couple of months—steady, explosive leg extensions, without any 'bounce' or momentum carry-over from the previous stride. It was hard—it was essentially the upward part of a one-legged squat, with a heavy weight in my hands.

Tim's apartment looked like many I had seen before. The front door opened into a living room. I kicked my shoes off, dropped my bags, and walked in. There was a water cooler, and an unpadded darkwood “couch” facing a TV. Off the living room was a kitchen; off the kitchen was a small bathroom. There was no distinct shower in the bathroom, just a drain hole on the floor and a hand-held shower head. When I first encountered one of these, I thought it was the dumbest idea ever. After all, every time you take a shower, the floor gets all wet, along with the toilet seat, and any other stuff that happens to be in the room. At least, I thought, they could put a ridged divider on the floor, so the entire thing didn't have to get wet. I didn't have any slippers at the time, so every time I wanted to use the bathroom, I had to peel my socks off, then get them wet anyway trying to putting them back on over my wet feet. However, as Jett correctly pointed out when I first made this complaint, it makes the bathroom a cinch to clean—you can just hose the whole thing down. All you need is a decent pair of slippers and a bathmat, and the system works fine.

Also off the living room was a bedroom. Stella sat in this room, on the computer. Off of this bedroom was another bedroom, where Jett and I would be staying. Tim was staying with three other people in the apartment—his fiancée, and two friends.

It was fairly early. My greatest desire would have been to take a nap, write for my blog for a little while (yes, I was fretting about it even then), then go out and eat something. But of course, I didn't really expect that to happen. After all, we were only going to be in Shenzhen for, at this point, just over a day. The night was still young.

I'd say that within half an hour of arriving, we were back out the door. We continued down the same direction in the outdoor corridor, went around a bend, and left the apartment complex on the opposite side. The street looked ever so slightly different from anything I had seen in Zhuhai. It seemed slightly richer, slightly better-built, slightly less tarnished. Tim had a restaurant in mind, just a few minutes walk down the street.

As we walked, we passed a building under construction. Tim began to get antsy.

“Be careful around these buildings,” he said. I took it as a somewhat quaint word of warning. We crossed to the other side of the street.

“You see this building?” Tim gestured. “A girl died here last month.” I looked up at the building. It was maybe 15 storeys tall, covered in scaffolding and green netting.

“They were working, and one of these poles fell off the top of the building.” He gestured at some iron rebar.

“And it came right down and sp—, mmm, sk—” he was thumping the top of his head with his fist.

“Skewered her?” I ventured.

“Yeah.”

Woah. I shuddered at the thought. Still, I just sort of assumed it was an urban legend. Then Tim continued:

“I saw it. She was standing right, there.” He pointed to a spot not fifty feet away from us. “And I was standing right here. For, maybe, a month, I was so afraid. I kept thinking about it. I had so many dreams about it. So now I do not like to go near these construction sites.”

And let me tell you, these days, I, too, keep my distance. Which is difficult, given the amount of construction going on in China.

The restaurant was indeed close. It was Hunan food. Jett was determined to get the full load of spicy peppers, unlike our rather weak Hunan experience in Zhuhai. When we arrived, there turned out to be a half-hour wait. Tim put our name on the list. I was feeling pretty low. Jett was in a great mood, on the other hand, and he and Tim were chatting away. That was fine; I just wanted to base-line exist for a while. We walked back out onto the street to find a snack to tide us over. I was parched; Jett and Tim waited outside for me while I ducked into a convenience store and bought some tea. Or maybe it was ginger ale, I can't remember. Not that it's at all relevant.

Or is it? My entries have become almost mind-numbingly detailed of late; I'm sure it's kind of a drag to read, knowing every nuance of every decision I made, the flavor of every morsel of food I consumed, the little nothings of thoughts I had. Writing this, almost a full month after the fact, I am taking glee in dredging up these memories. It's like being there again. When I stand up from a few hours of writing about sticky-hot, sunny Zhuhai or Shenzhen, and I find myself in my dark, chilly Changchun apartment, I feel totally disoriented, as if I had just stepped through a time portal and the two moments—the one I had been writing about, and the present—had been completely juxtaposed. Moreover, in writing this, I am emptying my brain of the old thoughts and memories and emotions I used to have. I was making a conscious effort to remember all of these things as they happened to me. When I enter a place, I write the blog entry in my head. My inner monologue has become a speech, of sorts. Once these are down on paper, I will most likely forget; indeed, re-reading some of what I have already written, I had completely forgotten ever doing some of the things I [supposedly] did. Now, deep within the thousandth iteration of my Shenzhen-memory fractal, I feel like I could write one hundred pages on these 48 hours alone. Where do I stop? After tonight, anything I failed to write down is as good as gone. How precious are these memories?

We went back to the restaurant, and waited the last few minutes. I sipped my tea/ginger ale/[does it matter?] greedily. While I was in the convenience store, Jett had bought some street food. Horrifyingly, I don't remember what this was, either. I remember that it was in thin plastic bag, ubiquitous for foodstuff-transportation in China. But was it bread? Meat? A fruit or a vegetable? I remember that it was slightly sweet, and perhaps warm. But I have no idea what it was. I just remember eating a few bites. I was so hungry, and it was so warm and sweet and delicious, that it literally brought tears to my eyes. I took a deep sigh, and thought, “everything's going to be alright.” It was almost comical, how much of an effect just these few pieces of [fill-in-the-blank] had on my mood, and I realized the comedy at the time. And yet still, I can't remember what it was. It must have been a bread of some sort, torn into small pieces. I think maybe that was it, bread.

We were seated. Waitresses brought us some cups and some Kingway beer, to be sipped from Tsingdao glasses. To this day, I've never had beer out of a cup with the same brand name. Ironically, at the street bar, it was always Tsingdao beer in Kingway glasses. It was the first beer I'd had in a week, and it was still utterly repulsive. I couldn't take more than a sip or two, for toasts.

For some reason, our table was unsatisfactory—too small, I believe. As soon as one was available, they moved us to a bigger table, one with a gigantic lazy Susan in the middle. They began to bring food—fish, some meats in pickled vegetables (very spicy), a dish with a fire burning under it, boiling the broth. Sure enough, my lips were soon burning, my eyes watering, and the back of my throat constricting. It was some hot stuff. It was only later in the meal that we got some bowls of rice, which, when mixed with the ingredients, cooled them off a bit. Again, I put away practically a whole teapot of tea washing the food down.

Tim's fiancée and two friends were with us. Half way through the meal, another man joined us. Tim introduced him as Mars. He looked like a Mars—he was wearing a red Polo shirt, and he had a very mischievous look in his eye, an eye that matched the mind behind it. He spoke barley any English, and so he spent most of the meal in a good-natured silence, sipping his beer and eating what was left of the food. I don't know when Tim explained this to us, but “Mars” wasn't his real English name. It was a joke—the Chinese word for “freckle,” ma.zi, sounds very much like Mars. Still, Mars would have been the perfect name for him—very cool, and always wearing red.

After a long meal, someone called for the bill. Of course, I had no intention of letting any of our hosts pay it. I still owed Tim a dinner from Zhuhai, and I owed Jett for the bus ticket. I figured I'd just get the whole meal, and we could call it even. Again, I was not prepared for the resistance I met; I ended up on my feet, thrusting my money at the poor waiter, while all of our hosts were telling him to walk away and ignore me. This was getting ridiculous. It's okay to refuse someone's gift once, out of politeness, but this was really off-putting. I didn't want to have to walk around feeling like I was in perma-debt to Tim & Co.

After dinner, we walked out of the restaurant and began to talk about what the evening might have in store for us. Jett wanted to go to this beach party; it was unclear to me whether or not I was invited, or if Emily just wanted Jett to be there. Jett said I was coming, no questions. Then, he called Emily.

I guess there was some rain rolling in, or there was rain in another part of the city, because the beach party was canceled. Jett handed the phone to Tim for a while, and they decided upon a meeting place. Tim and Mars said they'd come with us that evening.

We jumped in a cab, then, and in another twenty minutes, we were out standing in front of a Haggen-Daaz ice cream store, in an upscale commercial part of town. On the way over, I had been trying to glimpse the tallest building in Shenzhen, which was built so quickly—something like three stories per day—that it was held up as a model for all Chinese construction. So famous was it that there is even a Chinese expression about it. On the ride over, I also caught a glimpse of a green flash in the sky. As it turned out, there were green lasers all over town, which panned around the night sky like the searchlights they always put at stadiums and car dealerships.

Tim called Emily again, and we walked down the street and met her at the corner of the next block. Every time I saw her, she was always wearing so little clothing that it made me uncomfortable, and this night was no different—her shirt looked like a bandanna held to her chest with dental floss. We went into a mall which looked like it could have been in Europe, and indeed had been designed by French architects, as Tim told me. We went into a Starbucks. There were a lot of foreigners around. I was thirsty, but I didn't want to get anything there. So I just sat outside with everyone, ignoring the “Tables are for Starbucks Patrons Only” placard and listening to the conversation.

When people had finished their drinks, we went out. Emily had a few places she wanted to bring us. The first one was a subway-ride away. We found an entrance, went downstairs, and bought ourselves tokens out of the token machines. Shenzhen uses little plastic tokens with some sort of chip inside; you drop it in through a hole in the turnstyle, and the machine gives it back to you on the other side. Then, to get out, you drop it into another slot, and the machine keeps it. Longer rides on the subway cost more money—you can't leave a station farther along than what you'd paid for at the machine. And if your pocket gets picked on the train and you lose your token, then I guess that's just tough luck.

Apart from the token system, Shenzhen has some of the nicest subways I've ever seen. They're like something out of a sci-fi movie—a glass wall with sliding doors between the train and the platform, so the train has to stop perfectly in line with the doors every time; countdown clocks for the train's arrival time; inside the train, sterile white light, low ceilings, concave walls, everything very clean-looking. We rode the subway to the end of the line. Jett was teaching Tim some Ebonics, in exchange for a few Chinese swears and insults.

As we ascended from the subway, I realized the staircase was covered by a giant glass pyramid.

“Hey!” I said. “I feel like we're in the Louvre!”

And sure enough, we were in the Louvre. The subway exit was at the entrance to some sort of World Park. We emerged in a garden full of gigantic replicas of famous buildings—Notre Dame, the Statue of Liberty, and the Great Pyramids were visible over the high wall that separated the street from the park. We walked around the exterior gardens for a few minutes. Then we headed across the street. Our destination, it turned out, was a hotel that was all but visible from the exit of the subway station. It seemed like a nice place—a modern black-marble entrance way, over a tastefully lighted water garden and pond. We went upstairs, and found ourselves in the club.

There was a live band, many of them foreigners, doing covers of American songs. The place was packed with ex-pats, in fact. I don't like seeing foreigners these days, and I don't like going where they go, and I don't like doing what they do. I'll speak in more detail about this later, but it you only find a certain kind of foreigner in ex-pat bars, and I don't like that kind of foreigner. The stage protruded into the center of the room, and the bar formed the perimeter of the stage. Jett sat down, and quickly found yet another reason we didn't want to be there—a small bottle of beer cost 50 kuai. Again, for comparison, the same size beer at the street bar in Zhuhai was 10 kuai, and a bottle twice as big from a convenience store was 3.50.

The music left much to be desired as well, although I coudn't help but smile when they started playing “Hips Don't Lie.” It was awful, but it reminded me of the summer. Outside the bar was a concrete deck with tables all around a beautiful pool. I had suggested going for a swim earlier that day; in fact, I had really been hoping to find a pool ever since we were in Zhuhai. The whole pool deck and the pool were underneath an extremely futuristic white canopy, perhaps 50 feet above our heads. Here Jett and Tim and I sat, munching the complimentary popcorn. Jett had succumbed and bought a single beer, and we resolved to leave when he finished it. Emily was inside dancing. Mars joined us perhaps twenty minutes after we sat down. This was okay with me. I practiced speaking Chinese with Mars; from what I could hear, Jett and Tim were having a passionate conversation about their respective generations, and their places in the world.

We ended up being there for about an hour, I think. Tim had a good disco in mind, but Emily was quite adamant about visiting a place called the Yu-bar [sic?]. The first cab that stopped for us wouldn't take us for a reasonable price, so we sent him along, and got in the next one. Tim said we still were overpaying. The Yu-bar – Tim's disco fight continued for a few minutes, and Emily won out in the end. Off we went.

The Yu-bar, too, was full of foreigners. There were two separate bars, one with a lot of dance, hip-hop, and techno music, and another one with more pop, etc. There weren't enough seats at the bar, so I just stole a seat from a neighboring table and protruded into the aisle a bit.. I didn't want to dance. I didn't want to be there at all, really, but I wasn't going to spoil anyone's evening. I decided to just watch. Mars bought me a beer before I could refuse, and I sipped it sporadically.

One of the most uncomfortable things on my trip thus so far happened that night. A girl came up to me and started asking questions. I figured she was probably a whore, and I didn't answer. But she would not leave me alone. When she leaned in to yell into my ear over the music, she let too much of herself touch me. It made my skin crawl. I had no idea what she was doing. I kept answering her questions in information-less, dismissive parcels. But still she would not leave me alone.

Finally, following one mumbled, meaningless answer to a small-talk question, and after a long pause, she asked me to dance. In retrospect, it's now blindingly obvious that that was what she wanted all along; it wasn't going to happen naturally, so she was going to have to make it happen. She grabbed my wrist and all but dragged me off my bar stool. On our way to the packed dance floor, she leaned in and said something to an enormously fat man at the bar. Still more alarm bells were going off in my head. What was going on? I made the decision to just keep a hand on my wallet, dance for a few minutes, and then, regardless of what else she tried to do, sit down.

Which is exactly what I did. I didn't touch her, although she clearly wanted me to. After the song changed, I told her I had to go find my friend (I hoped to God that Jett hadn't seen me), and walked off to the bathroom.

There was an extremely long line at the bathroom, so I headed back for my bar stool. Before I could get back into the room, I was intercepted by Jett and Tim in the hallway.

“What the hell were you doing, dancing with that girl?” I couldn't help but smile. I was in sooo far over my head.

“You're guess is as good as mine, baby.”

It turned out that the fat man in the bar was talking trash about me to Mars. The girl was his girlfriend, and she was trying to make him jealous. The best part of all was that he was Lebanese. How did this keep happening? The girl had gone and said something to him before she hauled me out onto the floor; she had probably just whispered, “He's American!” before disappearing with me in tow.

“Anyway, it's probably going to be alright,” said Jett. “If he tries to fight you, though, take a bottle from the bar by the neck, and smash it off. And just don't mess around.” The rest of this pep talk will be censored, for our younger viewers. To summarize: if it came to a fight, I was to destroy his testicles, testicles which he probably hadn't seen in years, but for the mountainous rolls of fat spilling off of his torso.

Nothing ended up happening. I went back in and found my seat. I bought Mars a drink. And I just sat there for an hour. It was interesting enough, to watch this base, dishonest, lonely slice of life go on around me. They really are lonely, clubs. I had a pretty good guess that they would be before I ever even set foot in one. All of these people dancing, thinking they're hot stuff, when who are they? Nobody. They're just one of a million dancing nobodies. They have their fashion, they have their moves, they have their pickup lines, and whatever else, but at the end of the day, it's just a bunch of people looking for sex. Noah was once talking to a girl at Exeter about why she liked dances, and after peeling back layer upon layer of rationalization, he got her to admit point blank that yeah, it really just felt good, in the basest, most animal way possible. There's nothing glamorous about that.

Then, there's the dancing itself. Sometimes, you can tell people are self conscious about their dancing. Sometimes, you can they think they're the greatest. To me, it all looks pretty ridiculous. In America, most of what's acceptable for men is grinding and nodding to the beat. In China, there is no right way to dance—the Europeans are out there going wild and making finger guns, the Americans are out there nodding, and the Europeans think the Americans look stupid, and the Americans think the Europeans look stupid, and the Chinese either can't tell or don't give a damn, but end up doing something in between. It's isolating, because you can't talk without yelling. It stinks, because everyone is sweating through their cologne, and many people, Chinese women in particular, are not accustomed to wearing deodorant. It's painfully loud. Perhaps I just haven't been to a good club yet, but I have yet to leave one without feeling like I'd just wasted time.

Tim took a break with me, to get some water. Mars came along. We took our time, crossing the street, walking to a convenience store. Then we walked back. It was a nice night. We sat on a bench in front of the flickering neon of the Pacific Lie Fallow Agora. Isn't that just an awesome name? I think “lie fallow” translates to something else in Chinese, because that night wasn't the last time I saw those words. In Yanji, we walked past a health club featuring services such as “exercise,” “swimming,” and “lie fallow.” In any case, we stayed out there for maybe half an hour. Mars went back into the club. Eventually, so did Tim and I.

Jett looked extremely relieved to see us—we had forgotten to tell him we were going out. Once again, I found a seat at the bar, and waited for the night to end. I was tired. My brain felt like pudding—thick and bland. Despite the pounding music, I found myself nodding off. This is how I passed the better part of two hours. Finally, everyone called it a night, and we went downstairs and got a cab. It was probably getting close to 4 AM.

I don't even remember getting home. Jett and I were sharing a bed, and he fell asleep with no blanket, before I had even finished brushing my teeth. I found a sheet to drape over myself, and followed suit, careful not to wake him.

We probably got up at 1:00 that afternoon Tim was already up; we had plans to meet the rest of his flat-mates for lunch in one of the most famous commercial districts of the city. Again, we went outside and hopped a cab.

We made it most of the way before hitting gridlock traffic. After a few minutes of watching the meter click up while we were at a standstill, we paid the driver and waded through the river of cars to the sidewalk. The streets were simply teeming with people. We crossed over a crosswalk-bridge, back onto the sidewalk, and shortly, through the doors of a restaurant. We were seated upstairs.

It was a huo.guo restaurant which put the one in Zhuhai to shame. Never have I had such delicious, tender beef. Nothing of any particular note happened during our long repast, except for another fight over the check. Jett and I had been scheming. I planned to sneak out in the middle of the meal and pay before they could bring the check to the table. Amazingly, Mars had out-snuck me; he slipped away from the table without anyone noticing, and paid the bill. I had been told to expect fights over who paid the check, but I never expected all-out war. This called for drastic measures. I would have to have a little chat with Jett later.

The restaurant was smack in the middle of the largest commercial district in Shenzhen. Jett and I were looking for a few DVDs (I Ang-Bak, he 2046), and Mars wanted to find a suit for his upcoming marriage, so we swam through the people across the bridge, and into the 10-storey shopping mall across the road. There was some putzing around; I didn't really know, but I was just enjoying the sights. Jett seemed really uncomfortable in the mall. I was happily noticing that, despite the fact that there were so many people you couldn't see the floor, I stood a head above all of them, as if I were standing in a lake of black hair that came up to my chest. A brief search for an in-mall DVD store yielded no fruit, so we went back onto the street.

A few more feet of walking brought me to the quintessential “New China” scene. We turned onto a wide, stone-paved, pedestrian-only street. And there we stood, on the most famous street of the biggest commercial district, on one of the four busiest shopping weeks of the year, in the richest city in China. There were so damned many people. I have lots of pictures of this, and some video, too. The street was bedecked with Chinese flags and red lanterns. People bustled by, talking on their cell phones and typing on their PDAs. The shops were brand-named and rich. Were it not for all of the Chinese people, I felt like I could have been in any globalized city in the entire world. The street might just as well have been lined with French or British or American flags.

We walked the length of this road. Of the two DVD shops we happened across, neither had 2046, and the only copy of Ang-Bak had no subtitles. I was a bit surprised about 2046, since it was from Hong Kong; then again, if I've learned one thing, it's that nobody in China likes Hong Kong films. I've polled many of my classes about this. Nobody can explain why, they just don't. Now, I'm okay with that; there's no accounting for taste, as Noah likes to say. But then, nobody likes Zhang Zhiyi either, and that is simply unforgivable. She's just so hot. I think it's because they're jealous.

Near the end of the road, we walked past the very first McDonalds to have been built in China. It was a moving moment.

The long pedestrian street terminated in a crossroad. We had decided to head back to the apartment. Of course, there was more to be seen in the city, but you can't 'do' Shenzhen in 36 hours. I was grateful, because I was mind-numbingly tired. All of the cabs had somehow vanished, and we waited for one for perhaps twenty minutes. Then Jett announced that he was going to light a cigarette, and as soon as he did, a cab would roll around the corner, forcing him to crush it out. When he finished making this announcement, he lit one up. Sure enough, not thirty seconds later, a cab came alone. And that, my friends, is using Murphy's Law to one's own advantage.

The cab dropped us off down the road from Tim's apartment. Over the course of the ride, I had been thinking of a tongue twister, using the word “para.” I had gotten as far as, “A pair of paranormal paratroops preformed a paradigmatic paradrop into Paraguay. . .”. I knew who'd be able to help, though. I sent it out to Robyn a few days later, and she owned that little tongue twister: “A pair of paranormal paramedics preformed a paradigmatic paradrop into Paraguay, thus paralyzing that paragon of paralegals, Paretti, who once pilfered a paraffin parrot from a paraplegic and who perchance didn't perceive the proximate parables parading down upon his pernicious pilgrimage on Post-Pangaea until the pulchritude of a paraphyletic position of his place in life.” Thank you, Robyn.

It seemed like it would be a good night to just watch a movie and go to bed. Tim was a member at a video rental store, so we walked over there. They, too, were fresh out of 2046 and Ang-Bak, and pretty much everything else we might want to see. I saw a strange little 3D-animated film; the main character looked exactly like Shrek from the neck down, but had a different head. He was surrounded by other knock-off Disney characters. Something about it made me feel almost sick to my stomach. I moved on. Most of the films were either Chinese, or B-rate American movies that you'd either never heard of, or only heard mentioned in passing.

We spent an incredibly long time in that video rental store. I think Tim may have even had to run back and return some old movies before taking out new ones. I was barely conscious, I was so tired.

We settled on The Gremlins, one of Jett's childhood favorites, and something else. We got home, I showered off, and we watched The Gremlins. It was lovely to see how far movies have come in the past few decades. I didn't like the message the movie delivered, but especially having done so much screenplay-writing research, it was interesting to see such an old, formulaic film. I couldn't really decide who the audience was supposed to be—perhaps too scary for kids, too childish for adults, and not quite appropriate for anyone in between.

The next morning, we were to wake up at 5:30, I believe. We were to catch a bus from near Tim's house to the airport shuttle bus. Jett was not comfortable with that; it was true, if we got caught in traffic, or if the bus wasn't running on time, we were screwed. But that was the plan when we went to bed that night.

Jett an my payback scheme came to fruition that night. While everyone was out in the living room, I slipped a few hundred kuai under Tim's keyboard. Later, Jett did the same. As soon as he was gone, we decided, we'd write him an email on the BlackBerry, telling him to look under his keyboard. And that would be that. Soon, we went to bed.

I awoke to my watch alarm. I pulled on whatever clothes I wasn't wearing, and awoke Tim. Shortly, we were ready to go. I slipped my shoes on by the door, and lugged my suitcase down the stairs again. My shoulders were aching from the long travel days—the backpack straps on the medium-sized suitcase were convenient, but far from comfortable.

The bus stop was not twenty steps from the exit of Tim's apartment complex. We waited. No bus arrived. The streets were deserted, and slightly misty; it was still cool. No bus. No bus. Our early-morning advantage was rapidly slipping away. Finally, we gave up and hired a cab.

He gave us a very reasonable flat rate to get to the airport, a lot less than I'd been expecting to pay. The drive took perhaps 40 minutes; by bus, it would have taken us more than an hour to get there. The airport was smaller than I expected. We checked in, and said goodbye to Tim. He said he might be coming up north in a few months, and that he'd contact us. And off we went.

At Logan Airport, you can get just about anything through the metal detector. I've become increasingly sloppy through the years—belt buckles, change in pockets, my watch still on—and I never get beeped. So I felt like a complete tool getting beeped at, hauled aside and wanded down at the Shenzhen airport security checkpoint. This was the first of a rash of un-savvy travel mistakes I was to make over the course of the next few days. It was particularly embarrassing to be doing this with Jett; I already felt like he was doing me a favor by traveling with me, and the last thing I wanted to be was dead weight.

After we'd gotten through security, we set off in search of something to eat. Their was a McDonalds, which was to be our fallback. Fortunately, we found another restaurant, on an open, elevated “balcony” of sorts looking out over a large, high-ceilinged, glass-walled waiting area. I had something with eggs, I believe. They took almost the entire meal to bring Jett's coffee to him, and it was overpriced, but I just didn't care. We hung out there for a while after we paid the bill. I wanted to find our terminal. An automate voice was coming over the loudspeaker incessantly, announcing which flights were “now boarding,” and I couldn't help but listen to her slow, robotic voice read out each flight number to make sure it wasn't ours.

Our terminal was downstairs; it would be a bus ride to get to the plane. Somehow, we still had time to kill, so we walked back up and tried to find a bookstore with English books. Many books teased us with English titles, but nothing but characters on the inside. In fact, there was not an English book to be had. Even GQ and Rolling Stone were translated in to Chinese.

Finally, we headed back to our gate, clambered aboard a bus jam-packed with people and rode out to the plane.

The flight was uneventful, at best. Jett and I, completely independently of one another, had booked seats only one row apart; it made for an easy switch. The announcements bilingual, for our convenience, but between the crackle of the loudspeaker and the accent of the flight attendant, it was nigh impossible to tell what she was saying, or even that she was speaking English. There were some annoying things—music over the plane stereo, for example, but aside from that, it was fine. Almost as soon as we'd taken off, I leaned back, and fell into an uncomfortable sleep.

And so, after having arrived on the bus fewer than 48 hours previously, it was in this way that we departed Shenzhen. Ahead lay Changchun.

More Pictures

2006-11-09T09:15:00.000-05:00

Our last dinner in Zhuhai. We're at an Indian restaurant. A Native American Indian restaurant, that is. My account of this, um, experience, is not in the blog right now, so don't look for it. NingXi Road at night. Michael, Jenny and me, in the TEFL classroom. Look carefully at the board in the background, and you'll see a picture of Michael's Chicken-Beer-Evaporating-Device. Sex; it went that way. The late-night vegetable market between the GLV and our apartments. In a few hours, all that will be left of this is a courtyard full of tattered, muddy lettuce leaves on the ground, and some foul-smelling puddles of water. In the morning the street cleaners will come by and sweep the whole place down. The Culture Plaza, bedecked for the National Day. Zhuhai and the Culture Plaza, as seen from the GLV's roof garden. My beloved TEFL classroom. The other half of my beloved TEFL classroom. Robyn in the doorway, Michael and Jenny at the table. The GLV dining room, looking a lot more interesting than it deserves to look. It's so strange--the first meal I had there was simply fantastic. Really, I wouldn't have expected more from a restaurant. After that day, the quality of the food went sharply downhill. View out the window of the GLV dining room. Some funky-lookin' hedges. You'll notice that the entire side of the building on the left is covered with bathroom tile. The roof garden, where students come to smoke between classes. Robyn, lining up a shot. Cropped a little differently, I feel like this could be a camera ad. The rear of the GLV. Not nearly as pretty as the front, especially when people are randomly arc-welding things in the parking lot. Me, dancing in the dance room. Me, about to fling myself into the air. Robyn, dancing in the dance room. The GLV. It was the end of a term, so students were making speeches, and the whole school was in attendance. This room was the first place you entered after going through reception. Usually, it was pitched in darkness, and the shadowy forms of students could be seen napping, sprawled across the chairs. In the afternoons, they'd play movies here, too. Be afraid. The canary-yellow uniforms of No. 11 Primary School GLV reception. If you're wondering why Robyn is in so many of these photos, we were just walking around together on the last day documenting the GLV building. Note the open-air hallways going between the buildings. I was getting echoes of "Harry Potter! Harry Potter!" from four floors as I walked across this courtyard. Our final requirements for TEFL graduation. A stretch of sidewalk along NingXi Road, which, every time I walked down it, invariably made me pine for Florida or the Carribean. Beset by hoardes of identically-clad, overzealous second-graders in No. 11. They all wanted my autograph. Given the number of notebooks I've signed during my time here, if I ever do become famous, my signature will arleady be hopelessly devalued. Strangely, despite having written my signature so many hundreds of times in such a small time span, it still doesn't come out consistently. Eye excersises, done 2-3 times a day, to music and cadence coming over the school loudspeaker. Again, these have been done at every school I've been to in China. Diana kindly agreed to take some photos of me teaching. The problem with kids is that they're so short. I'm going to have a hunched back by the time I come home. Note the huge-screen TV in the background. It's the Magic Greeting Ball! (In retrospect, I can't believe they bought that). I don't know what that kid was saying to deserve my facial expression in this picture. Hello, and welcome to the Happy Sex Convenience Store! On sale today: Happy Sex Q-Tips. An older class at No. 11 Primary School, if my memory serves me. The teaching platform, the Chinese flag, and the Brobdingnagian television are ubiquitious. Ambuj, scoring apoint for Team Education. More eye exercises. One little girl was abusolutely incredulous when somebody told her we didn't have them in America. She was like, "So then how do your eyes get exercise?" Ambuj. Teaching. About festivals. Not much else to explain here. The ref about to get it in the jaw, on kickboxing night. Our delightful little meal after the kickboxing match. Sorry these are so blurry. This is why it's called kickboxing. Vyktori! Those cats are fast as lightning. There was a lot of throwing. Figure (a). Can't we just talk this out? Believe it or not, the guy on the left was the winner of that match. He had nerve, wearing pink ankle guards. The arena. Packed to the gills, as you can see, and yet disturbingly silent and unenthusiastic. One of the round-announcement girls, doing her job. Those pants still make me cringe. Gotta love those robes. Bow to Korea. No comment. The pre-show "entertainer". Watching and listening to him was every bit as painful as you might able to guess by looking at this picture. The singer and his poor son, dressed in a matching suit, and with a matching haircut. Talk about hubris. Robyn and me, amidst the crowds. We got there really early. Down the line--Jett, Marie, Nick, Mandi, Robyn, Michael. Just waiting for the kickboxing to begin. The arena. Robyn and Michael. You can see the judges panel, etc. I don't know who the rest of the folks down there were. "VIPs", I guess. I was so thirsty, and down on the floor seats (as you can see) there were all of these VIP seats with complimentary bottles of water, which just sat there smiling and winking at me from five feet away. The arena. Striking a pose at the entrance to the Zhuhai sports complex. There were probably half a dozen futuristic, domed buildings across the compound. It was kind of cool to see them setting up. We had a beautiful, fiery sunset that night. Between-class shuffle at the infamous Nanping Middle School. Going out to do exercises. Nanping. Pretty nice, right? I mean, that's quite a landscaping budget for a public school. . . I like this picture. I think it kind of sums things up.

Chapter 1: Zhuhai

2006-11-08T11:37:00.000-05:00

So, I left off at the end of week two, and, as I'm sure you're able to imagine, a heck of a lot has happened. I'd say there have been six chapters of my journey— six distinct emotional, geographical, shifts—so I will write these entries accordingly. I have only written in starts and fits over the past few weeks, so much of the older stuff is already quite hazy; forgive me for any mix-ups or back-tracking. Also, a caveat: some of this is going to be mind-numbingly detailed; I tried to intersperse “what I was thinking” (in my opinion, the interesting part) with “what I was doing” (usually less interesting), but sometimes, I wasn't thinking anything, just trying to get by. For this, I apologize. Now that I'm settled in Changchun, entries will probably become more philosophical in nature, and once I'm fully caught up, hopefully just consisting of a short daily or weekly entry.

Below is the first of the six chapters. I have written two more, but I need to look them over one more time before I hit "post". Chapters four and five, and six will be coming shortly thereafter.

Chapter 1: Teaching Practice

Following the first two weeks of classroom instruction, all of the TEFL trainees began the teaching practice (TP) section of the course (the initialism they used was “TP,” but I could never say it with a straight face). This meant that, instead of all meeting at 8:50 AM every morning in the TEFL room, all of the people teaching on a given day would meet at KFC at 7:25 AM to catch a bus to Nanping Middle School, or in front of Min Run at 8:20 to walk to No. 11 Primary School, etc. We were required to plan and teach six classes, observe 12 officially, and 8 unofficially. The classes were all over Zhuhai—some at the GLV, some across town, some withing walking distance. The ages ranged from 8 -year-olds in public school to working adults trying to learn English for their careers, and everything between.

Sunday night, I was nervous. I was the first one teaching the next morning at the GLV. My students were a group of adults, supposedly from the Zhuhai press. I had a lovely time making my materials, though, just sitting on my bed, listening to music on my laptop (really, the first time I'd listened to music on the trip), and coloring vocabulary posters at my desk. A lovely time, that is, until a gigantic cockroach landed with a 'thwit' on the floor, and scuttled under the bed. I remember sitting there, thinking to myself, “okay, that's cool. As long as it doesn't touch me, I am totally down with peaceful cohabitation with this cockroach.” And I returned to my coloring. It takes a damned long time to think up and color a truly good vocabulary poster (henceforth, “flash card”). Have you ever tried illustrating a dinner party? It ain't easy. My topic the next day was Western eating culture, at the request of the Zhuhai Press. I was happy with the topic—I knew a fair bit about it, and it was a fine opportunity to put a plug in for “chewing with one's mouth closed”, on Jett's behalf. Hell, if anyone's going to start the Mouth-Closed Revolution, it might as well be the Zhuhai Press. My lesson plan was to be a Core dialogueue (which I will explain later), and I had only the roughest of ideas about the students' skill levels. This ignorance about the students' English abilities would become a theme for the teaching practices, and I quickly learned to plan three lessons for every class—the “Zero English Ability” lesson, the “Hello, How Are You, What's Your Favorite Fill-In-The-Blank” lesson, and the “Practically Speaks Better English Than I Do” lesson). Fortunately, dinner parties are filled with all sorts of idioms and jargon that even a fairly well-educated student of English might not know, so that day I was safe.

So there I was, coloring away, when like lightening, I felt something scuttling up my leg, brushing past my leg hairs. I never saw it, but I'm sure it was that damned cockroach. If they can survive long enough to procreate, headless, during a nuclear winter, I see no reason why they shouldn't be able to read minds. The only place that was off limits for that cockroach was my leg, and where did it choose to go?

In any case, my impulse was to do a flying quadruple back-flip onto the bed, and swat at my legs for a while; I did nothing to contain said impulse. After a few moments of getting myself together (feeling both embarrassed for being so startled, and at the same time impressed with myself about the quadruple back-flip), I got the rest of my materials and did the rest of my coloring lying on my bed.

That night, I learned a valuable skill. As I lay in bed, looking at the ceiling, I decided I'd run through the class in my head. It was a silly idea, I thought at the time, because who knows how a class will really go? And one little change in the beginning of a lesson effects the course of whole thing, chaos theory style. Still, I went through with it. I walked in and greeted my imaginary students. I introduced the vocabulary, coming up with alternative explanations in case my intended one didn't work, figuring out where I was unprepared or where they might get hung up. I rehearsed the core dialogue in my head. I thought of a wrap-up, and a few backup activities. Then I fell asleep. Of course, my imaginary class didn't go anything like the real thing, as I had expected. But I could imagine the class, right through, start to finish. And the real class went off with nary a hitch. In the future, I would have classes that I couldn't imagine, and then I knew I was in trouble, because without fail, those during those classesI was at my worst.

I got to the TEFL classroom about an hour early. It was dark, but I didn't turn the lights on. I just stood at the head of the classroom and rehearsed. Over and over again, the impossible millions of permutations running through my head. I was dressed up in the finest clothes I had—earth-green dress pants, a green button-down shirt with silver cuff links, a leather belt, and leather dress shoes. I had a few bites of rice in the GLV dining hall, but I didn't want to eat too much. My first student came in an hour early, while I was still standing at the head of the darkened TEFL classroom. Especially with a new class, early students create one of the most awkward situations, because you don't want to launch into the introductions you're about to do with the rest of the class, but you don't want to ignore them, either.

Class started at 8:00. Apparently there had been some confusion about the starting time, since some students were half an hour early, and a few didn't arrive until ten or fifteen minutes into the class. People just kept showing up at a trickle. By 7:55, perhaps 6 of my 8 students were there, sitting at the table. Normally, the TEFL-room table was huge—enough to seat twenty or so TEFL students. But it was made out of many segmented desks; since my class this morning was so small, we split the uber-table into two pieces – a bit less than half of the table for my small class, and the remaining segments for the three other TEFL trainees who were observing me from the back of the classroom. Since we had five minutes until 8:00, I thought I'd use the time to feel the class out a bit. So we started to chat.

It was a lovely and very enlightening conversation. It turned out that only three of them worked for the press. There was one girl who didn't look more than 15 years old, who was moving to Canada with her parents. There was a businessman. One woman just wanted to learn English. They were of very different skill levels, too – the businessman had a great vocabulary, while the one who just wanted English could barely speak at all. I was extremely worried about the Canada girl at first, because she was so quiet, but she knew a lot more English than she let on.

The TEFL-instructed class goes like this: you begin with the 'warmer'. This can be anything – a game, introductions, just asking about the weather. It's just to focus the class and get them, well, warmed up. Then comes the 'context-setting'. I didn't understand how important this was when I first learned about it in class, but now I realize it is the entire key to learning language. I have watched a great many teachers teach, at this point, and I now realize that most teachers don't know to, or don't know how to do it. Context-setting is exactly what it sounds like – it is giving parameters to the language that will be used and taught that day. It eliminates the the need for explanations – a verbal explanation is the worst enemy of a student of English. The key to context-setting is examples. This very day in Changchun, I was explaining the concept of 'formal' and 'informal'. If I had stood at the head of the classroom and said, “formal speech is what you use in polite or fancy situations, and informal speech is the opposite” I would have drawn a classroom full of blank stares. Instead, I went about it from all sides. I elicited some greetings from the students, then categorized them as formal or informal. I gave situations – if you're talking to your friend, you use informal speech. If you're talking to a police officer, you use formal speech. If you own a store, you use formal speech to talk to your customers.” Then, you check for comprehension—I showed them pictures of formal and informal situations, and asked them to tell me which each picture was. And by the end, they all understood. I kept asking throughout class:

“Are these people friends or strangers?”

“Strangers!”

“Good, and where are they?”

“At a company, in an office!”

“Good! So, is this formal or informal?”

“Formal!”

And so on.

So in context setting, you set the scene (for my first class, “a dinner party”), and introduce the day's vocabulary. After context setting comes the 'core content'. The main form of core content taught at TEFL is the 'Core dialogueue' (CD). Ah, Core dialogue! Thou broker of discontent! Thy insipid breath doth blunt the keenest minds, and at thy touch doth even ruddy Creativity become a pallid corpse! Like churlish mist upon a windowpane do you bedim clear virgin Acumen, and sully Perspicacity's sweet fragrance!

Okay, so CD isn't as bad as all that. But it does get a bit tedious. And we did spend a lot of time making fun of it. The way Core dialogueue works is this: the teacher prepares a six-line dialogue. He reads the dialogue aloud twice for the whole class, jumping back and forth to represent the two different people (who were introduced in the 'context setting', and who, for the purposes of example, I will name Amy and Bob). That stage is called Teacher/Teacher, or T/T. Then, he reads the first two lines twice. He takes the role of Amy, and instructs a student to take the role of Bob. And they recite the first two lines of the dialogue. This is called Teacher/Student, or T/S. This he does with two different students. Then comes Student/Teacher (S/T) – a student becomes Amy, and the teacher, Bob. S/T happens twice, with two different students. Then, a student takes the role of Amy, and the teacher becomes Bob, and again, they rehearse the first two lines. Finally comes Student/Student (S/S). I'm sure you can guess. Then you write the first two lines on the board.

That was for the first two lines. This is also done for the second pair of lines, and the third pair of lines, and then for the whole thing.

Then comes substitution. You replace three words within Amy's three lines of the dialogue. For example, if Amy were saying, “I like eating soup,” you might replace “soup” with “hamburgers.”

Then, you repeat the entire process.

Then, you make another round of substitutions. Repeat.

The point of a core dialogue is to make the students memorize speech in a natural pattern, and to that end, it is effective – by the end of a CD lesson, you can say the dialogue in your sleep. In fact, you probably will – you'll be having dreams about it.

As I mentioned, the Core dialogue became the butt of many of our jokes. Every simple conversation became a CD.

Trainee 1: “Hey, Mitch, where are you going for dinner tonight?”

Trainee 2: “I-am-going-to-the-restaurant.”

Trainee 1 (getting it): “Why- are- you- going- to- the- restaurant?”

Trainee 2: “Because- I- want- to- eat.”

Trainee 1: “What-do- you- want- to-eat?”

Trainee 2: “I- want- to- eat-some-celery.”

And so on.

At the end of a class, you are supposed to review the vocabulary, and perhaps play a game. That is the TEFL-taught method. And that is what I was supposed to do with this first class of mine, on that fine Monday morning.

I figured the schmoozing I did with the students counted as the warmer, so shortly after 8:00 AM, I began to model the vocabulary – context setting. That went fine. Almost all of the Chinese students I have ever taught have a shockingly complete food-related vocabulary, and this class was no different. After context-setting came my core dialogue. Most of the students had no trouble with it.

After we had done the CD with all of the variables, we still had about ten minutes left. They were too old for a game. The lesson was too simple to review. And so, I opened it up to questions. This was a wonderful idea (if I don't say so myself): the more advanced students, especially, had a lot of questions. They asked about etiquette. They asked about what Westerners ate at various meals, and what the English words were for certain foods. One woman kept asking me about wine. I declined to answer her, though – I just don't know enough about wine. I taught them about the various forks and spoons, plates and glasses that got laid out at a dinner, and even managed to get my “chew with your mouth closed” plug in. By the end, the lesson had shifted it's focus from being an English lesson to being an etiquette lesson, which was ideal—incidental learning is usually the best type. I had done a good job. After class, one of my students invited me out to dinner. Another told me that I was the best teacher he had had that morning. I felt great.

So that was my Monday lesson. I had brought a plate of Oreos with with which to model “passing” food at a table, and now, I sat at the back of the classroom, eating the cookies and drinking water (water/tea and Oreos is the new milk and cookies in China), and decompressing. I stuck around for the next three lessons to watch my classmates teach. The topic for the day was 'Food Culture,' so I watched Priya do a class on Indian food, Michael talk about various things you can put on “the barbie,” and Marie discuss the finer points of the Cornish pasty. “Pasty” is a wretched word, by the way.

As I mentioned before, there was a certain amount of required peer observation. This fact had been more or less sprung on us the previous Friday, which led to an hour of pandemonium as we all tried to figure out who would be observing who. For every class we taught, we needed two official peer observers, to whom we would hand our Official Peer Observation sheet. I spent a long time making complicated lists of who I would use to fill my required slots, and hunting down people to observe me, making sure not to have any one person observe me more than twice, and to not observe anyone twice myself. Then, half a dozen people had to switch their schedules around, to fill Endy's time slots, or to make sure that we taught at least one lesson in every school, or in my case, both. I had agreed to take on a double-lesson day on Tuesday, which gave me an extra free day later in the week. It was only after a frantic hour planning that I learned there had been a change in the rules – you had to stay in whatever classroom you were teaching in and watch the other people teaching there, regardless of whether you ended up never officially observing someone, or whether you observed someone three or four times. As a result, I got to see a lot of Marie and Diana's teaching, and almost none of some other people's (although I think I observed everyone in the end, either officially or unofficially). The schedule continued to change around throughout the next two weeks.

This schedule-rearranging was not helped by the high number of TEFL casualties. Before our class, I believe Shireen told us that the China branch had never lost or ejected more than one or two people in a term. On the first day of class, I listed the names and nationalities of all of my classmates on the first page of my notebook book – there were 18 of us. One person who was registered for the course never showed up, so there should have been 19. First Sterling left – he was doing a 2-week PELT course, which was just the TEFL course without teaching practice. He returned to the school he had been working at in Korea, I believe. Then James left for the States unexpectedly – marriage problems. Actually, I was under the impression he was divorced; he had certainly told us enough about his Chinese girlfriends. Frankly, I think that he just realized that he was not well-liked among the TEFL trainees, and that perhaps teaching was not for him – “marriage problems” may have been an attempt to claim the course refund. (He was denied it anyway). Larry suddenly started having vision problems one weekend, and had to be hospitalized in Hong Kong – he was refunded, and I believe he is re-taking the course this month. Greg got a call saying his father was about to die, followed up by his son being in a car accident. He planned to go back home to take care of things, but his father recovered, and his son was okay. He had missed a bunch of teaching practice, though, so he stuck around in Zhuhai to take the course again in October or November.

Then there was Endy, a short, nearly-inaudible man from Nigeria. He had gotten a 90-day business visa for this course, but had arrived in Zhuhai at the beginning of the summer – thus, his visa was set to expire midway through the course. This did not make sense to any of us – how could you ever make that miscalculation? The TEFL course, ostensibly, is the main reason for coming to Zhuhai. But this, we learned, was typical of his behavior – almost childishly un-thoughtful, as if he expected things to just happen without him doing anything. He was always asking for other trainees' help on assignments, always asking for explanations (i.e. of phonetics). People invariably told him to go right to the source, and ask one of the teachers. But he never did. Another time, a representative of a school in Zhuhai came by to talk about his school and collect CV's. At the end of his spiel, he had a Q&A; a few people asked questions. Then, he left. No sooner had he set foot out the door did Endy walk up to one of the TEFL teachers and begin asking questions that the representative would have been better suited to answer.

Anyway, as he had known it would for the past three months, Endy's visa expired, right smack in the middle of the course, and thus, at the beginning of Teaching Practice. He disappeared off the face of the earth for almost a week – no contact whatsoever; I don't think the teachers even knew what was going on. I remember, he asked Jenny to tape one of our classes for him, but that was it. Apparently he was in Guangzhou, trying to straighten his visa out. The rest of us were left teaching double-shifts to fill ups his time slots.

He came back at the end of the first week of TP, I believe. We were sitting at lunch, and he walked by and said hello nervously. For the rest of the day, we saw him talking to people – Shireen, Jenny. Apparently, he hauled a few people off to the side individually and asked if he could take their classes for them. But by the end of the day, it was clear – he was a-goner.

So, from an original pool of 19, we were left with 13 students at the end. I felt like I was on “Survivor: TEFL.” The remaining group was extremely tight-knit, though. Priya was married and lived in Hong Kong, so she kind of did her own thing. Alma worked at the GLV regularly, and was just taking this course for some new Chinese law requirement, so she continued with her normal life. Sumit lived in a hotel a bit of a ways from the GLV – he was an engineer. Actually, many of the foreigners I met in Zhuhai were engineers of some sort, there was so much construction going on there. Sumit's story is very interesting, actually. He didn't really like engineering that much. He wanted to be a teacher, full-time. And he was a fantastic teacher. He has such a loud, full, voice, and he was so funny and exuberant. He was used to teaching training sessions for his company in front of 400 people, so he had to be like that, large and animated. And he was so nice after class. He would talk with absolute passion on any number of subjects, and whenever you were talking, he adopted an expression of absolute wonderment; always, he did whatever he was doing with an almost un-containable energy. If there were one reason I wish I smoked, it would be because of Sumit – Jett got to be very close friends with him and Ambuj on their rooftop smoke-breaks. Anyway, Sumit happened to be in Zhuhai on business, and he had a month off while some parts he needed got shipped in. So without missing a beat, he found this TEFL course online, and signed up.

Day two of Teaching Practice was The Big Day, with two classes. It would be my first class outside of the GLV. First, I would be teaching a class of forty or so 8- to 10-year-olds – another core dialogue. If I was nervous about my first lesson, I was terrified about this one. (Writing this, I can't even imagine being nervous – isn't that funny?) Then, in the afternoon, I would be teaching some GLV level 2 students. I wasn't worried about that at all – I had watched Mei Ling teach two GLV 2 classes as part of our observation unit, and they seemed like good, smart, inquisitive students.

As it turned out, things did not go as expected. I woke up early that morning. Finding the GLV locked (too early), and no restaurants or shops open, I was forced to eat at KFC. In American dollars, KFC costs the same in China and in the US, so it is actually very upscale dining in China. You would take your girlfriend to KFC on your first date, for example. That morning, I walked in the door, and was greeted by the traditional “good morning!” and the Nazi salute. They say “good morning!” allllllll day long. This is not just a KFC thing – in every Western establishment, at all times of the day, it's always “good morning!”— when you enter, and when you leave. I went to the counter, and over-paid for a scrawny, soggy, gamy chicken-and-egg breakfast sandwich. The food costs the same in China, but you get less of it. I was sitting there, the only person in the restaurant, when Jett walked in. It was his day off, but he had woken up to see me teach, since the crazy observation schedule otherwise precluded that possibility. I was not expecting to see him. He got some coffee and sat down. Mandi came in, too, and got some breakfast, but declined to sit with us. She became more and more distant from everyone for the remainder of the course, finally leaving on the last day without saying a single goodbye.

We were supposed to meet in front of KFC at 7:40 to walk to No. 5 Primary School. Some combination of nervousness and that terrible KFC roll-up was making me feel extremely ill. I was the first one teaching again, and I just hoped I felt better by the time I stood up at the head of the class. It was a short walk, perhaps ten minutes, and it took us down a road I had never been down, despite its close proximity to the GLV. I was excited by the prospect of finding new restaurants here. (Indeed, the dinner club staked out a beef noodle place within the next few days, which I thought was one of the most filling, satisfying meals I'd had in Zhuhai, but which left Jett hungry. A few days later, we ate at a low-scale Korean restaurant near the GLV, which Jett thought was great, but which left me wanting another meal. That probably just goes to show you something, but I have no idea what that 'something' might be).

And so we arrived, and I saw my first Chinese public school. In Zhuhai, and I would imagine, in most of the schools down south, the schools have extremely open architecture. The halls are open-air; the staircases are open-air. The two side walls of all of the classrooms are made of windows, so you can see into the classrooms from the hall, and straight through to the other side. There is usually a courtyard, too, and a parade ground.

That morning, what I saw on the school's parade ground (and what I was to see on dozens of parade grounds at dozens of Chinese schools after that) took my breath away. When we walked into the school, past the ubiquitous 'slinky-gate' (I'll try to get a picture of one) and security checkpoint, it was deserted. We were too early. So Jenny led us through the school, out back, to the parade ground. There, the entire school – at least a thousand kids – was lined up in military formation, doing morning exercises. They were all in the school uniform. They could see us standing there, watching them. I had a 'dictator moment'; I could have been Mao, reviewing the troops. Over the loudspeaker came what I call the March — a triumphant song, (not dissimilar from the Monty Python theme song [which is actually a real song called The Liberty Bell march, by John Philip Sousa]; originally, I suspected it was the Chinese national anthem, but it wasn't), played by a full marching band. And afterwards, the Exercise Song, with a variety of music setting the backdrop for a man chanting: “Yi, er, san, si, wu, liu, qi, ba! Er, er, san, si, wu, liu, qi, ba! San, er, san, si, wu, liu, qi, ba!” and so on. These are the Chinese numbers one through eight. Translated: “1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8! 2, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8! 3, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8!” over and over again. These songs, to the best of my understanding, are played at every school across China during exercises. I've recorded them since then; if you have any interest in hearing them, email me, and I'll send you the mp3s. They will never leave my head, I've heard them so many times in just two months. If you're a foreign teacher in China, try as hard as you like to not learn any Chinese, you WILL learn the numbers one through eight.

I was feeling slightly less ill after the walk. The group broke in half—one half was going to be videotaped in the school's Dance Room; and a few others were going to teach in a classroom. Students were flooding into the building. I saw almost no teachers. This has also remained true for almost every school I've been to. There are no lines, no teachers monitoring the hallways – the students are responsible for getting themselves around, not killing each other, etc. (In fact, students break into random, playful wrestling matches on a regular basis). I felt like I was in Never-Never land, there were so few adults around. My classroom was a cramped, dark affair – the only light was what was coming through the shaded windows, and the desks were all very close together. There was a platform for the teacher to stand on at the head of the room, and a big blackboard with a little Chinese flag hanging above it. Apart from that, the room was bare.

The lesson went well enough, I thought. Apparently, some of my drawings were hard to see/understand, and I deviated a bit from the Core dialogue paradigm. That, in and of itself, wouldn't have been a problem were Jenny not my observer. I tried explaining that I didn't think they were ready for S/S without it written on the board first, but she would have none of it. She is so by-the-book, it almost blows my mind. I also learned that day not to judge the quality of your lesson on the facial expressions of your peer observers. People (myself included) tend to adopt a facial expression somewhere between “practically comatose with boredom” and “I'm so angry I could kill someone right now” while observing classes, but it doesn't actually mean anything. It's best to just ignore your observers, anyway.

After my class, I let down a bit. I still had another class that afternoon, but I assumed it would be a piece of cake after the morning. I watched Mandi give a class. I watched Diana (actually, I fell asleep in her class, which I felt terrible about. I was tired straight through to the bone, though. After class, she was like, “I looked to the back of the room, and I noticed you were either praying, or sleeping. . .”). She's an exceedingly motherly and gentle teacher though—very slow and patient. Sumit stepped in to cover one of Endy's classes – his class was wonderful, as usual, although as testament to how tired I was, I found myself nodding off in that one, too. Again, never look at your peer observers for a gage of how well you're doing.

After the first batch of classes, we walked back to the GLV. I spent the afternoon just tooling around inside, killing time until my class at 2:45. At 1:30, I went to observe Marie – she was teaching the same class I was about to teach. We were both to teach on the topic 'Sports & Hobbies' – she was to do a core dialogue, and I was to do a communicative activity. I had a great lesson planned. She inadvertently undid part of my lesson, by treating 'sports' and 'hobbies' as synonyms; I was going to make a distinction. Still, I was able to make corrections to all my worksheets by the end of her class. Watching her, I thought I had acquired a pretty good read on the students. Marie's lesson seemed a bit to easy for them, so I thought I'd go just a little bit harder.

After Marie's lesson, there was a 15-minute break. I didn't want to be in the classroom—the awkward thing again. I've since become very good at standing at the head of the classroom, waiting for the bell to ring, but at the time, I just wanted to get out of there. I filled my water bottle. I checked my email for the millionth time. Finally, I walked back in.

I was greeted by the usual chorus of “Harry Potter! Harry Potter!”.

“Yes,” I said, “I know I look like Harry Potter. But the only magic I know is the magic of the English language.”

That drew a roomful of silence and blank stares. Okay, perhaps that was a bit too advanced. Not to mention awful.

That was the second-worst class I've ever had, I think. Thankfully, at least this time, it wasn't my fault. It was the students. First of all, many of them were young, and realized I was very young. Second: the GLV is extraordinarily expensive, and so most of the students there are very dedicated students of English. But because these kids were so young—most of them 19-22—many of them were being financed by their parents. It wasn't their own money they were wasting. Then, there was the environment—it was a long table, and a small classroom, so I couldn't move around and police easily. A certain boy, whose name I will change to Barracuda, was the biggest troublemaker of them all – he was sitting in the back talking the entire time. The entire rear quarter of the table was either distracted by him, or couldn't hear me because he was talking. (I forgive him, though – a few days later, Jett and I went out for huo.guo with a bunch of GLV students, and he picked up the tab at the end of the meal and refused payment). It was a miserable class, just barely under control, and certainly not the piece of cake I'd expected it to be. Shireen was my observer that day, and she was very sympathetic, and gave me a good evaluation.

Wednesday was my first day off. I woke up at at 8:45 or so, and arived at the GLV just in time to catch the first class of the day—Marie teaching the Zhuhai Press again. Today, the theme was 'Festivals and Holidays'. Marie taught about Guy Fawkes Day in Britain, and went through the “Remember, Remember, the Fifth of November” poem. Ambuj taught briefly about India's 'Festival of Colors', then switched to Christmas, I believe. I have no idea why. There were one or two more classes, but I don't remember them. That afternoon, I have no recollection of what happened. Nothing too exciting, evidently. I prepared for my lesson the next day, which was at Nanping Middle School

I was dreading Nanping Middle School. The people who came back from it on Wednesday afternoon had all sort of horror stories. It was a vocational school, meaning the kids who went there were ostensibly too dumb or unmotivated for regular middle school. They were surly, sulky, hormone-filled teenagers, 13-17 years old – old enough to know that they didn't have to learn if they didn't want to, and smart enough to know that there would be no punishment for sleeping through the foreign teacher's class. We were told to expect levels of English comparable to the 8-year-olds at No. 5 Middle School. (Please, don't ask me why Nanping and No. 5 are both considered “Middle School” when there is such a huge age discrepancy—I just don't know). And of course, I had not one, but two classes to teach there over the next two days.

So at 7:25, we all met at KFC. The school dispatched a van to come collect us. As we walked through the open halls, I continued to get the choruses of “Harry Potter! Harry Potter!” I don't remember the exact schedule, but I think we arrived just as the students were taking a break. On came the music again—“Yi, er, san, si, wu, liu, qi, ba!” I actually got video of it this time with my camera. I'll try to find a way to post that online. Otherwise, if you want to see it, just email me, and I'll send it over. Rows and rows of kids were jumping rope, as we waited on a a balcony overlooking them. It was yet another 'dictator moment'.

I had the third class that day. I believe Robyn had the first class. Her students were, as reported, completely disinterested. There was a kid sitting right in front of me with an earbud, the wire snaking down his neck, out of Robyn's sight. He and the four people around him were just talking for the entire lesson. It was driving me crazy, but I made the judgment call not to interfere with Robyn's lesson at all. After her class, I was accosted by half a dozen students for autographs and photos, something I would soon become accustomed to.

The next lesson was Alma's. This was the first lesson of hers that I had seen, and it was amazing. When she had taught the TEFL trainees in class, I didn't really think anything of her style. But now, she established such instant, easy rapport with the students, it made me almost jealous. Her lesson was so good, it didn't even feel like a lesson. There was no stop-and-go, no distinct lines between planned activities—everything just melted seamlessly into everything else. She was helped by the fact that her class was very small (only perhaps 15 kids), and all girls (those boys, always causing trouble). They had incredible names, those students of hers—Manly, Moon, Kitty, etc. That Alma was such a good teacher surprised me – I admit, I thought she was a bit of a know-it-all in class, but hey! As it turned out, she really did know it all!

At that point, I had pretty much decided that the best teachers were Sumit, Jett, and Alma. As soon as I figured that out, I began watching every one of their classes that I could. They all had very different styles, and thus different methods of classroom control. Sumit was so intense, so loud, so massive and energetic that you could not help but pay attention. Disrupting his class would be like standing in front of a freight train. Alma was so sweet, so gentle, so friendly, that you wanted nothing more than to return the favor, and make her happy. Jett is not as boisterous or charismatic as Sumit, but he is very patient, and very good at the actual act of teaching. He is friendly with the students, but has firm ground rules, and he enforces those rules swiftly and without exception.

My class that day was awful, and this time it was largely my fault. I couldn't go through the class in my head the night before. The students were, once again, very close to me in age—by some cruel twist of fate, I had the oldest class that day. And like Robyn's class, they wanted to be anywhere but in the classroom with me. It wasn't even a real classroom—it was an auditorium, with chairs instead of desks. The whiteboard was a spindly piece of crap; you had to grip the top of the board whenever you erased to keep from knocking it over. The front of the room was covered with, and the whiteboard was surrounded by, giant potted plants. The whiteboard also did not erase well—you basically couldn't erase during class without making a gigantic fool out of yourself and wasting time. The icing on the cake was that I was being taped that day and the next day, so after I spent forty-five minutes embarrassing myself, I got to go back, fiddle with the video playback equipment for half an hour (the camera power cut out if you looked at it funny, so rewinding was always a task), then watch myself for another forty-five minutes.

I don't even remember what happened, really; I just remember finishing the lesson, waving goodbye to my students, and sitting down on the floor at the head of the class. I was not happy. Alma had stuck around for my lesson, as had Robyn, and now Robyn helped me clean the blackboard. Neither of us was particularly pleased with our class that day, so it felt good to commiserate.

The next day was a similar drill—same school, same classroom, still being videotaped. Again, I was the last person to go. Michael managed to put a plug in for his old company's product: there is a way of preparing barbecue chicken which essentially involves sticking a can of beer up the chicken's butt, and grilling it, letting the beer evaporate into the chicken. The problem is, the chicken doesn't balance very well on just a beer can. His old company made a device—essentially a cinder block—which helped balance the beer-can-stuffed chicken. I actually have a picture of it—if you look carefully at the picture of Michael, Jenny, and I, you can see it hanging on the blackboard. After Michael came poor Marie, who had been misinformed about the skill level of her students, and thus ran out of material at the end of her lesson. Quickly, she got a tic-tac-toe game going—it's a wonderful filler for the end of a class, and a good ESL review game to boot.

Finally, it was my turn. It had somehow worked out that there was an hour-and-fifteen-minute lunch break between Marie's and my class, so I had plenty of time to think things over. Jenny (nor anybody else) had any idea where we could get food. The school had a snack shop, but it was all junk food in plastic bags. Eventually, some people went on an expedition to find some lunch. I decided to stay at the school, but midway through the break, Jenny brought us a bag of bao.zi, a dumpling-like roll stuffed with pork or bean paste. Also during the break, while I was scrubbing at the whiteboard, trying to get it clean, I noticed a tear in the surface. It looked like the whole surface of the whiteboard was covered in a thin layer of plastic. I ran to get the custodian. We made the tear a little bigger, then wrote on the surface underneath. It seemed fine, and it erased easily. So we tore away the rest of the plastic. Evidently, nobody had taken the protective plastic coating off of the whiteboard after it had been bought. I had a brand new board to work on, and I could erase! Perhaps I find this a little more exciting than any of you will.

So, with a new board, the potted plants moved out of the way, and a non-core dialogue lesson plan, I began my class. It went much better—still not my best class, but definitely decent. We were supposed to do a reading activity, but it turned out that none of the kids could really read. As I said, I always prepared three lessons after the first day, so I made some on-the-fly adjustments and carried on. Half of being a foreign language teacher (and perhaps any teacher) is improvisation—being able to pull things out of your butt if you run out of material, adapting existing materials to meet unforeseen needs, etc. I had learned a lot of this from Jett. During our one-on-one teaching practice the week before, it became clear that our three students didn't know the alphabet. Jett turned to me, and was like, “They don't know the alphabet. We've got to work on the alphabet.” And so we stopped the lesson right then and there, and we began to write and drill the alphabet.

And so concluded our first week of teaching practice. And so also began our last weekend together. There are a whole number of dinners and events which are a completely hopeless jumble in my head. I will do my best to recount them chronologically, but no promises. We had a lot planned—we wanted to have another Indian dinner. Jing Yi had been on vacation all that week, so we hadn't been to the street bar; that night (Friday) would be one of our last chances to see her. Sumit was telling us about the Zhuhai Hot Springs—for 60 kuai, you got a locker for your clothes and some swim trunks, 24 hours of swimming in the multitudinous baths (swimming pool, hot tub, cold tub, tea tub, rose-scened tub, etc.), movies at the in-house theater, a meal or two, and a night's stay. We wanted to give that a try. I hadn't seen the Zhuhai fisher lady, nor the nearby park.

Earlier that week, Jett and I had stayed late at the GLV, and we decided to go out to the Dumpling King for dinner. Who should we run into there but, like magic, most of the rest of our dinner club—Robyn, Michael, Nick, and Marie. Jett and I pulled up chairs and ordered a few dishes for ourselves. I was sitting down at one end with Jett and Nick, who spent most of the meal reminiscing about WWF, and talking about various fighting leagues. Nick actually used to fight in cage matches for a few extra bucks, so he was really into the whole fighting thing. All of his tee shirts had the logos of various fighting leagues. That evening, we were walking away from the restaurant, when what should Nick spot but a poster for a kick-boxing fight happening that weekend. A quick poll showed that most of us would be interested in going to see it. So it was resolved. For some reason, it came to be understood that the fight was on Friday.

So Friday, after we got back from Nanping Middle School, we tried to get some tickets. Jett and I had been hanging out with Tim (my roommate) a lot lately. We ran into him in the GLV, and asked him to come with us to get the tickets. He happily obliged. The tickets were being sold out of a glasses shop, of all places. Jett and I stood around and tried to look imposing while Tim bargained with the salespeople. The final deal was this—if we could round up eight people to come, the store would sell the tickets to us for 70 per ticket, a 30-kuai drop from the asking price. On our way out of the store, we looked at the sign again—the fight was for Saturday night. We hoped nobody would have other plans.

Jett, Tim, and I then all trooped over to the DVD shop nearby. The store owner had sold Jett a copy of Wong Kar-Wai's 2046 without English subtitles. This we only found out as Jett and I had settled down to watch it earlier that week. As soon as we walked into the store and held up the disk, the shopkeeper seemed to know what was going on, and refunded Jett.

Tim had to run off to class. Jett and I spent the rest of the afternoon doing who-knows-what. We probably worked some CS in there, though. At 7:00, everyone rendezvoused at the Culture Plaza. Jett had invited Emily, a girl from Singapore whom he had met at the bar the previous weekend. First, we had to break the bad news—no fight until tomorrow. Everyone was fine with it. Everyone, that is, except Tim. To the best of my understanding (for it was not very well explained to me), Tim had gotten a sudden call from his employer in Shenzhen, and was leaving the next morning. Still, we had eight takers, so we set to meet at the same time and same place the next night.

In the meantime, we needed something to do that night. Jett and I brought up the idea of going out for Korean barbecue. This would be ideal for me—I owed Jett a dinner. A Korean barbecue, to be exact. It seemed like so much longer than a scant three weeks ago that Jett and I had found A Li Lang, and he had paid for my meal, explaining that things were done in rounds here in Asia. Moreover, I owed Tim a big meal, for taking me out to the seafood restaurant and karaoke. So it was decided – A Li Lang or bust.

We quickly ran into trouble. By some act of incredible stupidity, the Zhuhai taxi drivers all changed shifts right in the middle of rush hour. We were twenty minutes away from the end of the shift, but every taxi we stopped simply refused to take passengers. After about ten minutes and as many taxis, we realized that we would either have to wait for a while, or find alternative transportation.

It ended up being the latter. On our seafood night, we had hired a van to take us back to the GLV. It had pulled up to the bus stop, so I assumed that there were a number of these vans, just sort of acting like large taxis. I suggested to Tim that we just find one of those. One of the smaller streets behind the GLV was complete gridlock, and Tim managed to accost a man driving a white van. It was one of the more amazing transactions I have ever witnessed—within a minute of rapid-fire talking and bargaining, just standing in the middle of traffic, Tim had scored us a ride to A-Li-Lang, for only 30 kuai. I believe we were ten people, traveling half way across the city, in rush hour, for 30 kuai. It was a dream come true. We all scurried into the van, just as traffic began to move.

It was a fun ride. There was the incredulous conversation—did we really just hop into a complete stranger's unmarked white van in the middle of China? It was also then that I learned that we weren't in an actual taxi, and that the driver's job description wasn't actually “taxi driver”; Tim explained that unlicensed taxiing was very illegal, and that the driver had taken us on at great personal risk. For just thirty kuai. I still couldn't get over that. I chatted with Robyn and Jett most of the way there. I knew where we were going pretty much the entire way there, so well had I gotten to know that part of Gongbei. As we hopped out, the driver gave Tim his cell phone number, and told us to call him if we ever needed to get back. And that was that. We trooped into A Li Lang.

The restaurant had private rooms for large parties, and we were shown into one such room. Dinner was ordered in a mixture of Korean and Chinese. Jett was back in his element—he knew all of the food, and he hooked us up with all the good stuff. We also got a few bottles of soju for the table. As before, dozens of small side dishes were brought out. Then waitresses came out, primed the stoves, and put the pork on for us. And we ate. It was a fun meal. There table was actually much too big for ten people, and there was a split between us for the two stoves. Somehow, the Americans—myself, Nick, Mandi, and Robyn—had all ended up sitting at one end, and all of the others—Jett, Tim, Emily, and Marie at the other. Humorously, Team America had licked their plates clean before the other group had even gotten half way through. When the others were finished, Team America liberated their leftovers.

The meal only came out to be 60 kuai per person—still expensive, but not as expensive as my meal with Jett. As I expected, Tim tried to pay for his own meal. But much to my surprise, he absolutely insisted on paying when I forced the issue. I felt almost slighted, that he would not let me repay him for his kindness. I pushed it as far as I was comfortable pushing it, but when he still refused to let me pay, I dropped it.

It was a beautiful night, so we decided to walk to Bar Street. For twenty minutes, we walked along the meandering road, enjoying the breeze coming off the ocean only a few hundred yards away. The sidewalk was only big enough for people to walk two abreast, and I paired up with Robyn. I don't remember what we talked about, but I remember how content I was on that walk. Soon, we came across the neon sidewalks of Bar Street, and settled once again on the Cabana. I don't even remember how long we stayed for. I taught Robyn how to play the dice game, and she was quickly kicking my butt. We had ordered a bucket of Heineken for the table. It tasted god-awful, and I didn't have another sip of beer for a week, until we arrived in Shenzhen and it would have been rude not to. But we'll get there when we get there.

I was tired. After we finished at the Cabana, we all headed over to Walking Bar Street. I sat for maybe half an hour, but I really just wanted to go home and get some sleep, which is what I did. A few people came with me—I don't remember exactly who. The rest of the group went clubbing, including Tim.

I woke up at noon the next day with a note on my door from Tim. I had told him to wake me up before I left, but in his note, he said he didn't want to. He also invited me, again, to stay with him if I was ever in Shenzhen. Now, I don't actually know what the social rules are concerning inviting someone to sleep at your house in America. But Tim had invited me to stay verbally before, and had just written it in his note. I was inclined to take him seriously.

Normally, I would have spent such a lazy Saturday in bed, writing in my blog. Obviously, that did not happen on this particular Saturday, or I would have posted sooner. Instead, I went out to eat. I think I went to McMinarettes for one final time. I met Nick there, and we talked a bit about his experiences with/knowledge about college, learning, careers, the military, politics, etc. I mentioned that I might want to go into business, and he took a very genuine interest in helping me out. Nick, if you're reading this, thanks again. Anyway, when I got the bill, there was an unexpected 3-kuai add-on. This was maybe the third or fourth time this had happened to me there—I ordered one dish on the menu, and as I was about to pay, they either crossed out the price and wrote a new one on the menu, or charged me for something they couldn't explain. Who knows, maybe it was just my bad luck. Jett loved the place. But as I've come to learn about myself over the course of this trip, there is really only one thing in this world that makes me angry, and that is feeling like I've been ripped off. I'll return to this idea later, once I've told you a bit more. Anyway, I resolved not to eat at that particular restaurant ever again.

After that, I have no idea what happened. But somehow, it ended up being Saturday night. At 6:50, I arrived at the Culture Plaza. A few people were there already. There was a big, complicated thing with the tickets which I don't even want to go into, it was so damned frustrating. It was one of these headless chicken situations, where nobody knew where who's ticket was, and who had paid for whom, and nobody could give me a straight answer about how many tickets we actually had. At first, I went into the glasses shop and picked up my ticket for 70 kuai. The lady there tried telling me something in Chinese about the other two tickets—I assumed she wanted me to buy up her remaining two tickets, and I tried to assure her that my friends were coming over in a few minutes to pick them up. When I got back to the Culture Plaza, Jett told me that we already had all the tickets, and that I had just wasted my money on an extra. Then the lady at the glasses shop called Jett on his cell phone, which she had apparently been doing all day, and Jett handed me the phone. I had no idea what she was trying to say, but she was nearly hysterical. Didn't she know not to make things complicated with a bunch of people who couldn't speak Chinese? I mean, what was she trying to accomplish? I was very stressed at this point. I still had that “stupid! stupid! stupid!” knot in my stomach, thinking I had bought an extra ticket. Anyway, in the end, we didn't have enough tickets, and some people went over to the shop to pick up the remaining two, and everything was fine.

It was late enough by that point that it was easy to find a cab. I'm sitting here in Changchun, at 5:00 PM, and it's completely dark outside; in Zhuhai, the sun was just setting over the horizon. The cab ride was barely ten minutes, and cost the bare minimum12 kuai. The fight was being held at Zhuhai's Olympic complex, as we learned when we stepped out of the cab and saw the many new buildings and giant Olympic rings hanging beneath an arch.

We—Jett, Marie, Mandi, and I— took some pictures of each other beneath the gorgeous sunset and in front of these futuristic, domed buildings while we waited for the cab containing Michael, Nick, and Robyn to arrive. Ten minutes later, there was still no sign of them. I borrowed Jett's cell phone and called Michael. They had been dropped off at another entrance, and they were waiting for us at the correct building. We were to look for some Olympic rings and a giant bowling pin as landmarks. The bowling pin was easy to find, and thus, so were our compatriots. We walked up the stairs and into the arena.

The arena building was large and domed and circular. Inside, there was stadium seating, with a large, deep circular area cut into the middle. In the very center of that room was the boxing ring. Arranged all around it were seats (for VIPs, I would imagine), and a table for the judges. Huge pennants dangled from the ceiling. According to our tickets, our seats were pretty far from the action, but we took a chance and sat in the first non-VIP row. Nobody bothered us, not even an entire precinct of green-uniformed policemen who walked, in unison, around the room, and into their seats in a back corner. I think they were just there to watch the fight, not actually enforce the law—kind of a 'company outing'.

The fight, it seemed, started at 9:00, and the doors just opened at 8:00 (which was the time printed on the ticket). So we sat and talked for an hour. Slowly, the room filled. By 9:00, there wasn't a seat left in the house.

First came some pre-show entertainment. The lights in the stadium dropped. A white-suited man, and his identically-clad and -groomed son got up and sang, terribly. Then, there was some Queen—'We Will Rock You'. Then, there was some more singing. Overall, there was a lot more singing that night than I'd bargained for. Finally, the first two fighters, who had been warming up on the darkened fringes of the inner circle, came into the ring and shed their robes.

The announcer said some things. The ref said a few things to the boxers. Then, they fought. This was real kick boxing. Michael had seen a kick boxing tournament in Thailand, I believe, but it had been all rigged like the WWF. I had come prepared for either—the real thing, or the wholesale entertainment. There was a lot of kicking, which was to be expected, but also a surprising amount of throwing. They fought each other for two rounds, which I inferred were timed, since there was no other discernible reason for them to have stopped. Between rounds, a girl in leather pants and a fishnet shirt stepped into the ring and strutted around it once, holding a sign with the round number above her head. There were actually two identically-clad girls who alternated. Jett speculates that they just picked them up off the street, since they didn't seem very sure of themselves at first. Much to my surprise, their signs had “Round 1” or “Round 2” written in English on the back; as far as I could tell, we were the only foreigners in the room. I felt bad for the girls, though—they had to bend over to get between the ropes of the ring, something I would never want to do in such very tight leather pants.

After the second round, quite unexpectedly, the ref summoned both boxers to the center, grabbed their hands, and raised one man's hand high in the air. There had been a winner. Where had that come from? Was that really it? They hadn't been up there for very long. Nick suspected that one person just had to win two rounds out of three to take the fight, and that the winner of a round was determined by a panel of judges. Then there was a big hullabaloo, with the guy posing for pictures, receiving a big ol' trophy and some flowers, and so on. The most surprising thing was this—nobody in the auditorium was getting into it. There was no cheering, no applause, no standing up—everyone just sat there, in darkness and silence. I was expecting something much rowdier—a small, crowed room, probably without seating; lots of sweating men, jumping up and crying out and gambling.

The silence of the crowds only added to a growing feeling of pity I had for the fighters. Nick explained the situation to me—none of these men were educated. The winner's purse was usually just enough to get them by. And sooner or later—but usually sooner—they hurt themselves—or more likely, got hurt—and were left with nothing to fall back on. They had to train constantly. At least it wasn't like in Thailand, where sometimes, the winner's purse was in a commodity, like gasoline, which the winner then had to go re-sell. The poorer you were, the more often you had to fight, and thus, the more likely you were to get injured.

As the fight went on, the men got bigger and bigger. There was only one KO, and it was a pretty big deal. Being kicked unconscious is not high on my list of things to do in this life. The idea of someone's toenails against my cheek just does not appeal to me.

There was a bit of an intermission. Unlike at American sporting events, there was not a bite to eat or a drop to drink anywhere around. Nobody was selling hot dogs or throwing boxes of peanuts. I was parched; by some luck, Jett and I found a few guys giving out free water as a promotion by one of the doors, for a glance at your ticket. We went back to our seats. After we told the rest of the group where to get water, Michael somehow scored two bottles for himself, by getting the first, putting it down around the corner, then going back for another—you'd think they would have recognized a six-foot-five white guy coming back for seconds, but hey. A few more people got up and talked or sang. We had no idea who any of them were supposed to be. The announcer was speaking an awful lot. It was cool, to be at a kick-boxing match in China, but I wouldn't leap up to do it again.

After the heaviest-weights, a few of the losers fought re-matches. We ducked out before the last fight, to see if we could beat the rush out of there and get a taxi.

A few people—Nick, I think, and Marie, and Michael—decided to detach and go home. The rest of us wanted to get some food. We had almost no idea where we were in the city of Zhuhai, but we figured Gongbei would be as good a place as any to grab a bite. Somehow, there were no taxis around. In fact, there were no cars around whatsoever. We waited at the corner of a giant intersection for perhaps ten minutes. Then Jett sprang into action. He led us for about fifteen minutes down the road to another, more heavily trafficked street, where we caught a cab to Gongbei.

We got out, found a little hole-in-the-wall restaurant, and sat down outside at a sidewalk table. In America, you avoid little hole-in-the-wall restaurants like they're the plague, right? Well, that's where you get a good meal in China. If the tables are dirty, all the better—someone was probably chowing down with so much zeal that he spilled the soy sauce. I knew that this restaurant was gonna be good, because it was one of the filthiest bathrooms I had seen yet. If it's a nice restaurant by Western standards, they will overcharge you, and the food will be the same as, if not worse than, the stuff you get at the other restaurants. God help you if they go so far as to have decor.

It was a nice little dinner. We blundered our way through the menu in Chinese:

“Do you have any beef soup?”

“Yes, spicy or not spicy?”

“Spicy. Do you have any vegetables?”

“Yes, what do you want?”

“Your decision. . .”

And so on. We ended up with a lovely repast, on a lovely evening, on a neon-lit street after a kick boxing match in China.

After dinner, we walked to the street bar. I can't remember if Mandi came with us. I figured I could just chat with Robyn; Jett would be talking to Jing Yi, making the most of his last weekend with her.

One night, we were sitting at the street bar. By this point, the bar had all but completely lost its allure for me. I could no longer stand the taste of beer. I couldn't even finish a single glass at a meal. Robyn had observed that Tsingtao, to her, tasted like cheeseburger. Once she said it, I could taste it, too. And I had always felt that it had an acidic aftertaste, like vomit. Once I had put those two images together, I could no longer take a sip without feeling like I had just vomited up a cheeseburger. Meanwhile, Jett held that it was one of the best beers out there, and I had to agree, it beats the pants off of almost everything else I've tried. Meanwhile, the flower-selling boys were becoming more and more persistent, getting up close to my face with so I could feel their breath, and grabbing my shoulders. I hated that. The music repertoire was becoming quite tired. And on this particular night, this British boor was sitting across the bar from us. He was just plowing through the beer, speaking heavily accented – and increasingly slurred – intro-level Chinese. He was yelling at the bar girls. One of the flower boys was trying to sell him a flower, and he grabbed a handful and dashed them across the table. He never paid for them. Nobody – not me, not Jing Yi – was in the mood for speaking Chinese. I just sat there. Had we not already been in the neighborhood, this would not have been worth the 15-kuai taxi ride; possibly not even worth the 2-kuai bus ride. Once again, I just sat there talkin' until it was time to go home.

So that was Saturday. Sunday, it was decided, was time for one last meal at the Indian restaurant. I think it was Sunday, anyway. I'm going to say it was, since I have not the slightest recollection of what else happened on Sunday. This restaurant is an exception to my previous admonition about nice, clean restaurants, since it was operated by actual Indian people. We had learned our lesson about trying to get taxis at certain times of the day, and we headed out very early in the evening. Sadly, Sumit was unable to join us this time. I had the best cab driver I think I've ever had—I don't know how, but I could just tell he was a good, friendly guy. He spoke nice and slowly for me, and answered all of my questions about the names of various streets. When we arrived, we were seated immediately. Robyn wanted some more saag panier [sic?], so we put in a request for that, and I wanted a mango lassi—aside from that, Ambuj did the ordering. It was a little more toned-down from the first meal we had there, but still very enjoyable (not to mention delicious). Every half hour, one of the waitresses stepped up on a little stage near the door and did a traditional Indian dance. They also brought us a complementary bottle of wine. After we had all been given a glass, they handed out a little survey, asking our opinion of the wine, what we would pay for it, what we thought it would go with, how it compared to our favorite wine, etc. Once again, I was almost completely at a loss—how was all this wine stuff coming up in China?

After dinner, once again, some people went straight back home, and some people hit Bar Street. I went to Bar Street, but only for a short time. I was tired, for some reason, and as I said, rather sick of the place.

Not long after I got home, I was lying in bed, when I heard a car crash: SCREEEEEEEEEEE—thump! I hit the lights in my room, and looked out the window. It was a surreal half-hour. I couldn't really see anything. There were no sirens, no noises except for the occasional other car coming up or down the road. And slowly, over a long time, all of these people just began to drift out into the street, where I imagine the accident had happened. It was almost too far away for me to see, but there was just one intersection with all of these people in it, standing eerily still in the yellow street-light.

Monday was another day off for me. I decided I'd join the first expedition to No. 11 Primary School, to knock out some more observation, and to scout things out for when I had to teach there the next day. We were supposed to meet at Min Run, a nearby supermarket. I got up early and bought a sack of freshly-baked muffin from a little stall down the street. It was actually pretty funny—I had no idea how much the muffins cost, but I eyeballed them, and estimated that 6 kuai ought to be enough for one man's breakfast. So I handed him six. The vendor proceeded to take out this enormous plastic bag, and fill it with perhaps 25 muffins, enough for two or three breakfasts. I couldn't help but smile as I walked back to Min Run, imagining what I must look like walking around with enough muffins to feed a small army.

No. 11 was within walking distance. Our group finished assembling a little bit late, so Jenny was walking on full afterburner. She is one hell of a walker, Jenny is. Some people dubbed it the “Jane Fonda power-walk”—strides long enough to make you worry about her tearing her clothing. We got there in under ten minutes. Like every other school, it had a slinky-gate, a security checkpoint, and open hallways. At this school, the uniforms of the students were canary yellow.

We arrived in the middle of some sort of morning exercise. These were the youngest students we would be teaching—second through sixth grades, I believe, or 7 to 12 years old. When we entered the school compound, the students were standing in lines all across the parade ground, listening to a man on a platform give a speech beneath a streeling Chinese flag [that's for you, Noah]. A little shudder ran down my spine.

I don't remember whose classes I observed that day. I could look it up. But I'm not going to. You see, I'm getting bored of writing about this. I promised myself, when I began this, that I would write only for myself, and not for those reading. [That's been less and less possible, because frankly, it helps me write if I know someone's actually going to be reading. Also, I have to carefully regulate what I say about people]. I promised that I wouldn't drop details or alter facts to make my story faster-paced or more easily digested. But I never expected to just get bored of writing about any one topic. Anyway, on that first day at No. 11, I watched some people teach, and that was that. I remember being shocked by the poor quality of some of lessons I watched that day. I remember snacking on my giant bag of muffins at the back of the classroom, being incredibly glad that I could just relax and observe, and not have to worry about teaching; I remember Sumit coming and getting some muffins from me for breakfast. I remember being astounded by the size of the televisions in the classrooms—they CRT monitors, perhaps 3 to 4 feet across. Where did the school get that kind of money? And what could they possibly be using such large TVs for?

The next day, Tuesday, I taught at No. 11. I think I was the last class that day. I also managed to write a bit for the blog, so I'll just insert that here:

“Today was pretty awesome. So awesome, in fact, that I'm up at 1:30 AM with a 7:30 wake-up call, starting my blog – that's how badly I don't want it to end. First of all, it was my last day of teaching practice. The class went great – I taught a bunch of eight- and nine-year-olds a modified version of “One, Two, Buckle My Shoe.” Jenny, who is a very stiff, by-the-book grader, gave me a 'Very Good +', just shy of 'Excellent.' Apparently, she wanted to give me an 'Excellent,' but the primary school teacher whose class I had taken over wanted me to teach them how to introduce themselves and their age in my unexpectedly shortened 35-minute class full of 25 rambunctious children. When I say Jenny is by the book, I mean she is by the book. I even had the age thing in my lesson plan; they just cut my class short by fifteen minutes for 'eye exercises.' Not that I'm bitter.

“So, anyway, I had a good performance review. I observed two more classes in the afternoon: Alma's and Jett's. Their topic was “problems.” I was falling asleep in Alma's class, because I was tired, and it was hot. I ended up keeping myself awake by translating one of her worksheets into Ebonics. Jett's class was great, as usual, and after class, he wrangled up a group of students to go have another huo.guo dinner. I had a nice chat with Shireen up in the roof garden about the differences between different age groups of students. Then I went home, dropped my bag, probably dozed off for a few minutes, then went to meet Jett and the other studs for dinner.

“We certainly got some different ingredients with native Chinese speakers ordering. Tonight, I had the pleasure of eating bull testicles (not as good as they might sound), eel, and a strange, layered kind of tofu. We taught each other little bits of our respective languages, and we all sweat and cried and hollered with bites of food from the spicy broth. It's amazing what people put up with in their cuisine. Here you are, eating boiling-temperature meat in a slice almost too big to fit in your mouth, soaked with one of the spiciest peppers known to mankind, and all you have to drink is boiling-hot tea, and sometimes a lukewarm carbonated beverage such as Coke. There's just no way to stop the pain of the spice. What's more, you're already pouring sweat from the heat and the spice. Too top it off, not just once, but twice throughout the meal they bring you a scalding hot towel, pretty much too hot to touch, and probably utilizing some resold NASA equipment to attain such high temperatures.

“After dinner, a few of us struck out to play CS. That rocked, too. The internet café hadn't been running its dedicated server of late, so we'd been having to venture online, which could be a real pain. But with six people, we could start our own game. We could physically see everyone we were playing with. I had nervous jitters worse than I had in months, I was so geared up. God, I'm a loser.

“After an hour and a half of that, Robyn and Marie dropped by and invited us to come over to Robyn's apartment for some beer (or BEE-ah, as Aussie Michael says it). This we did, and spend about four hours just sitting around on the couches, talking, swapping stories (most of which are not repeatable), and playing version of 'Never Have I Ever'. I really suck at that sort of event; I never remember jokes or stories, and I haven't done anything exciting or renegade. I guess that's why I'm here, right?”

Still more wine stuff came up on that night—Michael had picked up a bottle of 1998 Great Wall. We all sat around sipping it from these little plastic cups that were so flimsy, you couldn't pick them up without them deforming. The wine was just awful. So awful that Michael cut his with Sprite. I know enough to know that you just don't do that with wine—if it's so bad you have to mix it with soda, you simply don't drink it.

So, that was the end of my teaching practice. Now that I've been teaching for a few weeks, I can tell you that it it much easier to teach six classes in day than it is to teach six classes over the course of two weeks. Having such huge time lapses between classes, and having the pressure of having to do so well on each one, is really stressful. Of course, with TEFL, we taught a different class, age group, and skill level every day, at a different location; moreover, we had to prepare complete lesson plans and materials. Doing that for six classes in a day would be hell on earth. Here in Changchun, I usually do not have to make my own materials. Since I see the students on a regular basis, I do not need an encapsulated lesson plan, just a grammar focus and loose schedule of activities; then, we work at whatever pace the students require.

I wrote an additional 12 pages about Friday, my last full day in Zhuhai. I did not write them with the intention of anyone besides myself reading them, which was a surprisingly refreshing experience—surprising since I've been writing with pretty much complete candor the entire time. Nothing crucial to my story happens on that day, I don't believe; maybe, when I'm finished catching up the rest of this blog, I'll publish and edited version. For now, here are some tidbits which I couldn't find another place for:

All throughout the last week, the city was preparing for the National Day Golden Week. There are three Golden Weeks throughout the year in China, for the Spring Festival (Chinese Lunar New Year), Labor Day (starting May 1^st), and National Day (starting October 1^st). The Culture Plaza, as well as many other buildings, were all bedecked with red lanterns (see the pictures—the CP hung this really cool grid of lanterns across the colonnade). They also set up a stage, and had concerts of some form or another almost every night. Most of the performers were amateur pop singers, and were simply god-awful.

My TV was broken for most of the time I was there. Towards the end, someone came in and put in a new cable box, so we could get CCTV9, the international (read: English) TV channel. One day, I flipped it on, just for the heck of it. It was a program about Mao Zedong—that day was the 30th anniversary of his death. Nobody had mentioned anything about it to me; from what I can tell, he's really not such a big deal anymore.

Speaking of things that don't work properly, the LCD numbers on the elevators in our building were truly funny. Every morning, I would watch the elevator come down to my floor: 20, 19, 18, 19—then the doors opened. Perhaps every fourth number would be a misprint (or a 'mis-light', if we're getting technical). Jett lived on the 13^th floor, and his was even worse. Being able to read his numbers would be like learning a numeral system in another language: 14, 9, E, 22, -|, 0, 3—and so on.

When Jett and I didn't want to be understood by Chinese people who spoke/might have spoken English, we would speak in Ebonics, with a very heavy accent. It was a running debate, whether Ebonics or Pig Latin would be more effective—I was much better at PL, but Jett was much better at Ebonics.

I planned most of my post-TEFL travel within the last week in Zhuhai. The first consideration was whether I wanted to try to get my working visa before I left Zhuhai or not. If I did, I would have to go to Hong Kong to get my papers processed. I ended up deciding against that. Since Jett and I were both heading up north, we decided it would be fun to spend the week together traveling. Besides, I was heading for Yanji, which is a bilingual city (Korean and Chinese), and very close to a sacred Korean mountain; Jett, who speaks Korean and is very interested in Korean culture, wanted to go see it. Since Tim had offered us a place to stay in Shenzhen, we decided to leave from there. When I first went online to book plane tickets, I went to Orbitz.com; tickets from Shenzhen to Changchun were almost USD $950 there. Jett was convinced we could get them more cheaply. Indeed, using eLong.com, we managed to find tickets for just over USD $200. Jett and I booked onto the same flight.

Then, Jett got his work papers. These required that he have his work visa processed in Hong Kong. There was a big “uh-oh” couple of hours, before it was resolved that he would take a day trip to Hong Kong, and have his visa 1-day processed. That ended up working out fine; in fact, it was better than fine. He got to see HK, and it took less time and cost less than he expected.

A correction: I began my last entry with a description of a “northern food” restaurant, featuring “Over the Bridge Noodles.” It was not actually a Northern restaurant, nor were the attendants Northerners. It was Yunnan food, and I can only imagine the people were Yunnanese. To this day, I don't know why they spoke such pure Mandarin.

One day, during perhaps the second week in Zhuhai, a trainee was demoing something, and was asking the class for likes and dislikes. The trainee called on Ambuj: “what do you like?”

“Smoking.”

The trainee wrote it on the board, in the column “likes”. Then, she went on: “Okay, who can tell me something you dislike? How about you, Diana?”

“Smoking.”

I think only Diana could have carried that off without it sounding offensive or rude.

At some point, I forced myself to watch the video of my first day teaching, the day I taught the Chinese class. I was the quintessential absent-minded professor. The back of my shirt was untucked. I kept checking my books, pushing my glasses up my nose, darting back and forth. The only thing that was missing was a crooked bow tie.

Crossing the street in China is like playing Human Frogger. There is simply no better way of putting it. You hop between lanes, one lane at a time. Sometimes, you have to hop back a lane to avoid getting smooshed. Sometimes, you think you've cleared a level, but there's a boss waiting for you at the end—a herd of bicycles, perhaps, or an SUV driving on the sidewalk. Yet despite all of these street dangers—speeding cars, people driving literally two inches away from one another, etc—you see surprisingly little car damage or scraped paint (less true up here in the North). And you hear about remarkably few toe fatalities, which is the thing I always worry about when I'm standing on the double yellow line. This could mean one of two things—people are exceptionally good drivers, or almost every accident is lethal, and the cars (and the people) involved are totaled, thus reducing the incidence of such minor problems as paint scrapes and missing bumpers.

On the way to No. 11 Primary School, there was a little cluster of restaurants, one of which we decided to try out for dinner one day. Diana spoke enough Chinese to discover that it was Hunan food.

“That's supposed to be incredibly spicy,” Said Jett. “I wonder which food is spicier, Hunan or Sichuan?”

Diana translated this question for the waitress. She rolled her eyes.

“Hunan, dummy. Like, puh-lease! Those Sichuan wussies ain't got nuthin' on us!”

That may not be exactly what she said, but that was the gist of it. This made Jett, a great aficionado

of spicy food, very excited. The waitress asked,

“Do you want your food spicy?”

“Yes!” said Jett.

“Maybe just a little bit less that usual,” said Nick. Diana conveyed that yes, we would like spicy—almost the full burn, but not quite. The waitress looked at us, like, “you're sure? I don't think can handle it. . .” But she kept on taking our order. Diana spoke for us, consulting us on which of the various dishes we would like.

A while later, the first dish came out. It was a fish, I believe, in a metal bowl. It was soaking in a broth which was absolutely full of spicy peppers. The bowl was on an iron rack, which kept it above a little pan with a white solid inside of it. The waitress leaned over and lit this solid on fire with a lighter. This was going to be delicious

We couldn't tell if the meat was cooked or not, so we decided to let the broth boil first. Unfortunately, it never got to that point; the waitress came back a few minutes later and whisked the bowl away from us. It was replaced with an identical bowl, except this time, there were no peppers in the broth. Not a one.

I can only infer that they really didn't think we could handle the amount of spice they were going to throw at us. If that is truly the case, I am deeply insulted. How condescending is it, to have a dish taken off your table, because the restaurant doesn't think your weak Western taste buds can take the heat? The dish, unadorned with peppers, was rather bland. The rest of the food wasn't quite so bland, but it was far from spicy; I can only guess that they neutered all of our dishes that evening.

There are two types of busses in Zhuhai—those with air conditioning, and those without. Those with cost 2 kuai, and those without cost 1, so the no-A/C busses are usually less crowded. All of this has nothing to do with what I originally planned on saying, which was this: the non-A/C busses all have forward-facing vents on the roofs, which make them look like spiny-backed dragons.

Okay, if you read nothing else, read this. I have done too good a job explaining what I did, and a poor job explaining what I planned on doing. The situation was this: I wanted to teach English in a school in China. A later blog entry will document the process I went through of getting in touch with schools, but at this point in time, in Zhuhai, I had narrowed it down to two. Both had offered me a job, with comparable salaries, hours, benefits, etc. Both were also up north, in Jilin Province. Despite the fact that it would have been awesome to have a snow-less winter, I wanted to be up north because they speak a purer dialect of Mandarin. During the upcoming National Week, I decided to visit both of them. The first school was called the Sino-American Denver Foreign Language School, based in Changchun, Jilin Province. I had very low hopes for this school; my main correspondent was a Chinese woman named Diana; her English was good, but not flawless, and my emails had been responded to a bit spottily. I had talked with her on the phone briefly, but it was a very strange conversation. It was supposed to be an interview, according to her most recent email. I received her call on my cell phone one evening in the middle of dinner. I left the room and picked it up.

“Hello, this is Diana from the Sino-American Language School.”

“Hello, this is Charles Cushing.”

“Yes, is this Charles?”

“Uh, yes, yes it is.”

A long pause.

“So, do you have any questions for us?”

That was unexpected. She had said there was to be an interview; she didn't mention that I was going to be interviewing her. I pulled a few questions out of my butt, nothing substantial. She answered them.

“Okay, it was good to talk to you, goodbye.”

And that was it. I returned to dinner, perplexed.

In the last month of our correspondence, I had been transferred to a woman named Tracey, a Westerner. This was a bit of a comfort—at least now I had proof that there were other foreign teachers working there—I still couldn't get all the info I wanted. There are many disreputable Chinese schools out there, and I had heard and read dozens of horror stories about people being exploited by their schools. My primary concern was with being able to get a working visa—if the school couldn't answer my questions about those point-blank, then it was instantly struck from the list.

The other school was called Paul's English, based in Yanji, an hour from the North Korean border, and capital of the Korean Autonomous Prefecture. I all but assumed I would end up at Paul's—I had been in contact with Donna, a foreign teacher there, practically all summer. She was from Montana, and she seemed very friendly. Incidentally, she had gotten her start teaching in China in Zhuhai, too. When I first contacted them, Paul's English didn't have any room for me, so my first couple rounds of emails with Donna were sent under the conception that I was not actually about to be offered a job. This game me a chance to ask many direct questions about China and Chinese schools without fear of a biased answer. Donna shot very straight with me, and gave thorough, detailed answers to my questions. A few weeks before I left for China, Donna emailed me saying that a slot had just opened up, and I was welcome to come work with them in Yanji.

Despite my strong leaning towards Paul's, I declined to give either school an affirmative answer. I almost went ahead and signed on with Paul's from Zhuhai, so I could have my visa in-hand when I got there; in retrospect, that would have been a terrible mistake. Anyway, my ticketing situation was such that I had to go through Changchun to get to Yanji anyway, so I thought I might as well stop at the Sino-American Denver School while I was there. It was the middle of a national holiday, so nobody had class, but I hoped someone would at least be able to show me around.

The authoritative plan ended up being like this: Jett and I would go to Shenzhen and spend the weekend with Tim, whom I had contacted earlier in the week, and who had graciously offered us his home for a few days. Our plane to Changchun departed the following Monday. We would stay in Changchun through Wednesday, and see what happened with Sino-American. Regardless, after that we would get on a train and spend Thursday, Friday, and Saturday in Yanji, with Paul's. [I had been having trouble getting in touch with Paul's of late, and up until just a few days before we boarded the train to Yanji, they didn't know we were going to be coming]. If I liked Paul's and Yanji, I'd stay there; if not, I'd get right back on the train and go back to Changchun.

So that was that. It was a flexible plan. We had hotels booked in both cities (although we had limited information on them; 9 times out of 10, the internet censorship software blocked the website we wanted to use, so I called my dad and asked him to pick a hotel and a hotel in Changchun, and make reservations for us. He kindly obliged),

In the forefront of my mind during all of this was the comforting fact that this was my year, and I could do whatever I ding-dang well pleased with it. If I ever didn't like where I was, I could just hop a plane back to America. And with an easy exit so close at hand, I've never had to worry about using it. On late Friday night/early Saturday morning, I put my head on my pillow and went to sleep for the last time in Zhuhai.

Apologies

2006-11-02T02:59:00.000-05:00

I would like to apologize; I realize my blog has become a bit stale, of late. My second two weeks in Zhuhai were extremely busy, to the point where I had to choose between writing for the blog, and doing things worth writing about for the blog. Right now, I'm finally settled in Changchun, Jilin Province, as an English teacher. I'm writing feverishly, whenever I have free time each day; my next entry will probably be close to 100 pages long, and have nearly as many pictures. Thank you for your patience; the day of new material is coming!

Week 2 Pictures

2006-09-23T05:10:00.000-04:00

One of the flower-selling boys.

Playing cahds at deh street bah. Nick in the background, Jett in the foreground.

More cards. We were playing "President" with no giving or taking cards, among other sucky rules.

Jett and myself.

Our bar girl, brandishing a giant spoon. Note the distinctive pink neon underlighting.

Bar girl again. Her name is Jing Yi.

'The Local'. Our little bar, with a view down Walking Bar Street.

Walking Bar Street, still a-bustle at 1 AM.

Three or four bar girls somehow move around eachother in that tiny space.

Walking Bar Street; the sidewalk.

The internet cafe nextdoor.

Inside Club Tomorrow. The man in red is the bartender; he's just finished pouring vodka all over the countertop, and now he's lighting it on fire.

The Cabana, on regular ol' Bar Street.

Lights in the trees on Bar Street. I wish I had a picture of the neon-underlit sidewalks. . . Anyway, I hope you get the idea -- it's a colorful place.

Boys versus girls at the huoguo restaurant. Clockwise from the left: Robyn, Marie, Mandi, Diana, Nick, Michael, Jett. This is our little dinner club; we go somewhere new almost every night. It rocks.

At McMinarete's. Top to bottom: Jet, Michael. Yeah, sorry it's sideways.

McMinarete's. From the left: Nick, Diana, Mandi.

It's all phonetics to me. . .

Week 2

2006-09-18T05:11:00.000-04:00

I would like to apologize right now for the lack of formatting in these dispatches. There are supposed to be paragraphs and line breaks, and the captions are supposed to match the pictures. I don't know why the editing screen and the actual published blog look different from each other, but I'll do what I can to fix things up. In the meantime, thank you for your patience. And now, our feature presentation. . . We ate at a nifty Northern food place across the street from the GLV on Monday. The restaurant was open to the air on both ends, with a little bridge over a tiny pool in the middle of the room (the specialty was over-the-bridge noodles). You could tell it was run by real Northerners -- when they spoke Mandarin, it was incredibly pure and easy to understand. I didn't really realize the extent of the accent I had been dealing with. I mean, this was just beautiful. (Of late, I have actually noticed myself picking some sort of southern accent -- (my 'sh' is becoming an 's', and I've been dropping 'r' endings). You could also tell they were Northerners by the way they looked -- darker, and with broader, less rounded faces. Not having spent much time there, I think I'm going to prefer the North to the South; I prefer the Northern food, the Northern physique, and just the whole Northern atmosphere. Down here, everything is just slow. I mean, it has to be, because of the heat. Even now, as the weather becomes cooler and less humid, it's not hard to break a sweat. In the evening, I went to the internet café and kicked serious butt in Counter-Strike for a short while, before returning to the business of sorting out my job situation. Machi came on on the radio, which made me happy. However, it was part of what couldn't have been more than a 10-track playlist that got repeated over and over and over again each night, and that did NOT make me happy. As I think I've mentioned, most of the music I've heard here has been incredibly sappy. At 8:40, Jett went onto the CNN website; they were streaming CNN's broadcast in equivalent real-time (i.e. at 8:39 or thereabouts, they were doing a segment on fashion, then interrupted everything to show the first tower hit). The internet gummed up after about five minutes, but it was amazing to see how light-heartedly the newspeople were taking the first hit. They just had no idea. I also had my first one-one-one teaching session, with a seven-year-old girl named Kitty. For some reason, while everyone else got a private classroom in which to teach their adult student, they put three teachers with young students in the same classroom. What gives? I don't know, but I vowed to get my own room the next day, because Kitty could not stop looking at the other groups. One of the groups was playing a game that involved lots of running around the room, which was, obviously, not helpful. She was a pretty good girl, though; she didn't get out of her seat without being asked, and she wasn't too shy. She just didn't know that much English. I could never tell if she understood me or not, and I was tempted to give up and speak Chinese, but that is forbidden by the GLV. After our teaching sessions, we had some time before the next lesson, so Jett and I went down to the fantastic little bar down in the culture plaza (I believe I described it in my last entry). He had some espresso, and they made it up for him right there, straight from the whole coffee beans. I myself found Black Pearl Milk Tea, which I had been craving since my first and only glass of it in Taiwan. It is very much what it sounds like; sweet, black milk tea, with tapioca 'pearls' at the bottom. You drink it through a wide straw, so you get a gulp of tea, then chew on the pearls for a while. It is cool, and extremely refreshing. We went back to the bar every afternoon that week. It was also there that we ran into Ken and a few of his female classmates. We suspected he was drunk, but then, he's kind of a strange dude to begin with. He and his friends immediately struck up a chorus I'd been hearing more and more of late -- "You look just like Harry Potter!" Jett turned to me. "You know, you could probably make some serious money off of this. Go into a club, and charge extra to see you dance, you know?" I was struck by the mortifying image of Harry Potter, standing up on a platform in a techno bar, throwing away his cloak to be wearing nothing but a man-thong. I shuddered. "Yeah, I'm not sure how well that would work. . ." "No, really, watch." And he turned to Ken and his entourage. "Would you pay extra to see Harry Potter dancing in a club?" "Yes! Yes!" came the reply. "Can we have his signature?" "That'll be 500 kuai," I said. Anyway, Jett and I played that one out for a while. Someone had a stirrer with a star on top of it in his drink, and we ended up charging a kuai for me to say "kazaam!" On Tuesday, wince Jett and I both had young-ish children of similar skill levels, we decided to team-teach. It worked well enough, although 1 hour is just to long for any class with kids of that age. Jett had been teaching two sisters, Polly and Tina. They were truly a handful. They were both clearly spoiled, used to lots of attention. Polly was older, perhaps seven, so she could contain herself better, but she was also the smartest of the group, and much of what we were doing was too easy for her. And Tina was a plain nightmare. The previous day, she had walked in and started crying. And that was just her grand entrance. The rest of the time, it was as if we were running a day care. She would stand up, run around, scream, throw things, scribble on clothing with markers, sulk and refuse to speak, and so on. To boot, she was clearly a gymnast (she kept doing her stretches and exercises), and so when you tried to pick her up, she would just lift her foot above her head and use it to push off against your face. I don't know what kids are thinking when they do that; if I ever succumbed to such a face-smashing, and let go of her, she would just break her head on the floor. Tina was also a scary little girl -- every once in a while, she would start muttering to herself in Chinese, and it was usually about killing me or ending class. Later in the week, we gave the kids cookies (for asking in English), and every time Tina got one, she would laugh this shrill, maniacal little laugh that sent shivers up my spine. Anyway, the result of all this was that one of us would usually entertain Kitty and Polly, and the other would deal with Tina. Friday was especially tough; Jett and I were both exhausted -- there had just been a shooting in his brother's old school in Montreal, and I had been waking up early and staying up late to work -- and somehow, we hadn't planned entertaining enough material. And of course, the girls knew it was their last day, and they could get away with anything. Even Polly, the most obedient of the group, was acting up. Tina was pretty much on time-out. As subtly as she could with two teachers looking straight at her, she called Tina over. Jett said, "Polly, no talking to Tina right now." Polly kinda-sorta turned back to her work. We both were still looking straight at her. A few seconds later, she leaned close to Tina's ear. Then, she looked at me guiltily, straight in the eyes -- and began to whisper anyway. It was dumbfounding. It's been an important learning experience, though. I don't think I'm cut out for kindergarten. It's too dumbed-down. I vastly prefer a class that does not have to be entertained and pandered to at every moment in time in order to not lose focus, to not cry. If we had had three Pollys, it would have been a great class, but I really feel like the best way to teach someone like Tina is to hire an English-speaking housekeeper, or lock her in a padded room with a TV that plays nothing but Teletubbies. On Wednesday, I went for round one of trying to get vaccinated. I met Amy (Mei Ling's new assistant) in front of the GLV. We went to the roadside to get a taxi, but there was none to be had -- it was rush hour. So we decided to take the bus. The buses in Zhuhai are operated privately, so no two are really alike (they do run a standard route, though, and that morning we were waiting for No. 55). There are two main types of buses -- air conditioned, and non-air conditioned. The air conditioned ones cost an extra yuan to ride, and are therefore often less crowded. It's often worth the money; at rush hour, there can be 50-70 people on the bus, which means standing-room only. That's when the pickpockets come out. Zhuhai buses are notorious for pickpockets. In any case, it started to rain, and we stood at the station until our bus came. It was packed. I had to stand on the stair that led up to the main floor of the bus, there were so many people. After perhaps twenty minutes, we got to the hospital. I was a bit dismayed -- it was dark and vaguely dirty-looking, like so much of China. We walked into a small room, where a man in a white lab coat sat behind a desk. He was writing someone a prescription and talking to him, but we walked in anyway; my guess is that medical confidentiality isn't a big deal here. Anyway, I withdrew my prescription, and Amy said some things in Chinese. They talked for a while, then Amy asked me which brand I wanted. Which brand? I was not expecting a choice in this matter. I stuttered a bit, and she turned away and spoke some more. Somehow, between some pointing to posters and broken explanation, I came to understand that there was an international brand and a Chinese brand. I figured I'd play it safe, if more expensive, and go for the international one. The doctor handed me a sheet of paper. At first, I was shocked by the price. Then, I realized that the price was for a 5-shot series of vaccinations. My brief sense of relief was followed closely by another round of dismay -- there were only supposed to be three shots in the series of the medication I was taking, so clearly this was a less potent dose. I explained all this to Amy. She called Mei Ling. Mei Ling told us to come back, and that we would sort it out later that day. As it turned out, the doctor was trying to swindle us. The rabies shot he insisted was the only one the hospital had wasn't a vaccination, but an antidote for people who had already been bitten. We decided to try going back the next day. That evening, we went out to the Arabic noodle place with a few other people from class (Michael, Jett, Diana, Mandi, and Nick). There's a crappy (or so I've heard), too-expensive restaurant right around the corner from my building that has the words 'we speak English' stenciled in the window, and that's where a lot of people from our class had been eating and drinking (because they speak 'English'). There was a bit of a dinner-seeking group forming after class that day day, and it sounded like they wanted to go to We Speak English, but we convinced them that there was better stuff on the strip between the building and school (and there was; almost every single meal I've eaten out has been outstandingly tasty, and if I spend more than $1 - $2 American dollars then I'm eating lavishly). So we decided to go to the noodle place (I've been trying to think of something to call it; it's a pan-Chinese chain, and there's a mosque on the sign, and the best I've come up with is McMinaret's). Everyone liked it, and I felt like I had done my good deed for the day. On Thursday, I was supposed to meet Amy to try again with the immunizations. Again, I woke up early, bought breakfast, and went to meet her. But somehow, we missed each other, and by the time we met up, it was too late to go. We rescheduled for Saturday. That evening, I had a craving for dumplings. I hadn't had anything so thick and filling as a dumpling in a long time. The TEFL office suggested Dumpling King, which, as I learned, was the name of the first restaurant we had eaten at, on the day of the TEFL orientation. Jett and I walked up the stairs into the restaurant, where, lo and behold, several of our classmates, including a number of the people from our McMinaret's excursion the night before. We added another table to theirs and sat down. What a delicious meal. The dumplings were everything I had hoped for. Then, someone had ordered what was essentially fried, sugared bread dough for desert. I hadn't had desert in almost two weeks; the Chinese don't really like sweet things the way Westerners do. A true baller and his wife sat down at the table next to us halfway through the meal. The man withdrew his own bottle of Baijiu, the traditional Chinese hard liquor, from his jacket, and poured it into his glass. The drink is traditionally served at feasts and banquets, but there he was, drinking it by himself. His wife was eating a burrito-like food with vigor one does not often see outside of the animal kingdom. Together, they were quite a sight to behold. We also had some interesting conversations. I mentioned that I had been getting tired very quickly of late, almost narcoleptic-ly so. Nick, the ex-Air Force engineer, said that he'd been getting tired quickly, too, and that he thought it was because he hadn't been getting any exercise. And it all came together. I haven't had any sort of regular workout since late May; in fact, it's probably the longest sustained period in my life in which I haven't had regular exercise since seventh grade. Nick went on to suggest taking the stairs up and down in the apartment building. 17 stories, up and back, probably four times a day, and no more waiting for the infuriating elevators -- this seemed like a great idea. Seemed was the operative word, because fire code in China is not like fire code in America. The stairwell spends most of the day pitched in darkness. There are no lights. Occasionally there are small windows, but they all face the wrong way, and are usually covered in boards or dirt or both. The best source of light is that spilling through the doorways on each floor, but when these are closed, you'd better have a tight grip on that handrail. My first time taking the stairs, I stumbled out at the first floor, happy to be alive. I've instead taken to running everywhere for exercise, and only done the stairs in full sunlight. On Friday, we were all finished with 1-on-1 teaching. We had a few light-ish classes in the morning. Then, in the afternoon, we began gearing up for our classes on Monday. Monday, of course, being our first day of Teaching Practice (TP), in which we put what we've learned into practice. The requirements are 6 45-minute lessons to be taught by oneself, 12 of other peoples' lessons observed in an official capacity, and 8 in an unofficial capacity. During this time, we must also develop our "Grab Bag," a list of 70 - 100 activities we can use in future classes (which I personally think is a great idea). Then, there was our crazy Friday night. For us here in Zhuhai, Friday is the new Saturday. We kicked off the evening with some huoguo, a hotpot meal. Marie, Robyn, Jett, Michael, Mandi, Diana, and Nick all went to the Over the Hill restaurant, right across the street from the GLV. We sat at a big table by the doorway. I was happy to see some gigantic, ugly fish swimming around in a big tank, just like the Chinese places at home. The way dinner worked was this: we ordered a dozen small dishes -- pork, beef, chicken, cabbage, these little sprout-like mushrooms, etc. Then, the waitresses brought a giant, divided bowl out and put it on a grill in the center of the table. There were two types of broth, one on each side of the bowl -- red, spicy one seasoned with Sichuan hot peppers, and a white, mild one filled with tomatoes and spinach. The red broth began to boil almost immediately, and continued to for the rest of the meal, which made me uncomfortable for some reason. I can think of a few possibilities why -- first, my inner conversationalist likes to bring things down from a boil as soon as he can. My inner OC was worried about my clothes -- it was a violent, spitting boil, and broth was spattering everywhere. And then there was my inner I-don't-even-know-what, which just didn't like seeing anything so tortured as the surface of that water. Next week, the Metaphysics of Broccoli with me, your host, Charles Cushing. The meal worked like this: waitresses brought the strips raw meat and vegetables to the table on little plates. Then, you threw them into the boiling brews, and they cooked within minutes. Then, you fished bits of meat and veggie out with your chopsticks. The meal would not pass for sanitary in the west, but as least one's chopsticks got a little bit clean in the scalding sauces. Both broths were delicious. The spicy broth actually got hotter over time, as the Sichuan peppers seasoned it. It was downright painful by the end. There was an amazing garlic sauce that you could soak your meat in, and that usually took the edge off. After dinner, we dropped our bags and lost Robyn, which was a shame, and Diana, who was going home to Macau for the weekend. Poor Robyn didn't even want to come out to dinner, because she's on a budget, and she wanted to get some things done that night. We all went back to the apartments to drop our things off. We decided to rendezvous at 9:00 PM, which gave us about two hours. Jett and I went to the internet café and played a bit of CS to kill the time. At 9:00, after a few delays (Michael was late; I went up to get him, and the door was opened by his roommate, a GLV teacher who was completely blazed), we set out. We decided to start out on Bar Street. There were six of us, too many for one taxi, so I suggested we take the bus. Jett was extremely opposed to the idea for some reason, but everyone else was willing to give it a go. We walked to the bus station in front of Dumpling King; unbeknownst to us, it would just be the beginning of our walking that evening. We all piled into the bus, and I was relieved when we drove through the tunnel, because it meant we were close. In fact, I was a bit too relieved; I didn't know when the next bus stop was, and, terrified of the bus taking some turn off the main street, thus miring us hopelessly in the spider's web of the Zhuhai streets (or, if not that dire, at least reqiring a taxi ride to Bar Street), I suggested we get out. So, what goes by in just a few minutes in a taxi ended up being perhaps twenty-five minutes of walking. We could have gone another two stops on the bus, too. I was embarrassed, but I feel it was all for the best. If I had been alone, I would have had no regrets, it was just that I had dragged the rest of the group with me that was the problem. It was a lovely night, though, and it felt good to walk, and see the people. There was a small park-like area of grass and gravel next to an apartment building, and the area was bathed in green lights. There were children playing amidst the grass and the low hedges, and you could tell that this strange, green nether-place was completely safe for them, and infinitely mysterious. Zhuhai bustled all around them, but here, it was dark and calm and quiet. There were no adults to speak of. Finally, we got to Bar Street, with it's neon-underlighted sidewalks, the flashing blue Christmas lights in the trees, the music thumping from every building. We chose one of the first bar/restaurant/dance clubs we came across. There was a large, open outdoor terrace draped with what could best be described as tropical willow trees; the place had an almost Cuban feeling about it. We took what appeared to be the only open table, tucked in a corner. The music was easy to hear from inside the building, but not overpowering (as it was inside). And there we spent the better part of two hours. I spent the first hour playing dice with Nick and Mandi. This is the game that so confounded me on my first night in Zhuhai. Nick taught me how to play -- it's a bit like the card game BS, except with dice. Everyone has a shaker with five dice. The person who lost the last round begins the bidding; they say (or, more frequently, use hand signals) the sum total of the number of dice of a certain denomination are beneath everyone's dice-shakers. For example, if I were to say "four fives," then I would be speculating that, if all of us were to reveal our dice, there would be at least four fives between us (also, ones are considered wild). After the first person bids, the next person in sequence must offer a new bid, but it must be higher than the previous one, in either the number of dice, or the number on the dice. For example, the next person could say "five twos," because the number of dice has gone up, or he could say "four sixes," because the number on the dice has gone up. Anyway, the game goes up and up until someone makes a bid that the next person in sequence believes they cannot sustain. That person can 'challenge' the maker of the last bid -- everyone lifts their dice shakers, and the dice are counted. If the person who was challenged fell short on his bid, he lost; if he could sustain his bid, then the challenger lost. Anyway, I did pretty well. Halfway through the meal, we shuffled seats, and I ended up talking to Marie and Michael. That was a lot of fun, and the time flew. At 11:30 or so, we decided to try another place. We crossed the street to check out the clubs where we had started out the previous Friday, but they were all but dead. I had one funny experience, though. At the second club, I stopped in the bathroom. The urinal was one of those tubs that ran the whole length of the wall, with water flowing constantly down the back. When I walked in, there was a Chinese guy standing there, relieving himself. He waved to me, and I waved back. I didn't know anything about the local toilet culture, but I guessed it was pretty lose. No sooner had I unzipped my fly, though, then the bathroom attendant walked up behind me and began massaging my shoulders vigorously. I think he wanted a tip. I told him thank you, but that I was quite alright without the massage. Realizing that the club scene wasn't going to be better anywhere on Bar Street, we decided to go to the Tomorrow club, where those people had brought us last time. I don't know how much detail I went into last time about the people who showed us the club, but there was a Chinese girl from Zhuhai and her boyfriend from I don't know where (but somewhere in Europe, I think), and an Ivory Coast-al girl, and her Lebanese boyfriend. He was a lithe, bald-shaved man with an intricate tattoo on the back of his head. Later that night, I had a curious exchange with the Lebanese guy. We were in the Tomorrow club, and he walked up to me, and said, "You're from Britain, is that right?!" And I said, "No, I'm American!" Instantly, I remembered who I was talking to, and my stomach dropped. Sure enough, he leaned in again, and over the din of the music, said, "I don't like Americans!" I didn't really know what to say. I just didn't want a fight, so said, "I'm sorry about that!" And he threw back his head and laughed. And that was it. He danced away. I spent the rest of the night thinking of more intelligent things to say, next time someone told me that he didn't like Americans. But we weren't at the club yet. To get to Tomorrow club, you must first walk by the Today club, which is on Bar Street. It was deserted -- after all, who wants to be in today? We stopped briefly by a 7-11; a few people bought beer, and I bought a Snickers bar. I had had a few beers at the outdoor restaurant, but I had to wake up early for Immunizations, Part Deux the next morning, so I resolved no to drink any more. We took a right onto a street whose name I don't know, and came out in front of the Yesterday club. We didn't go in, but from what I could tell, it was moderately crowded. But Club Tomorrow was packed, and probably would be until it closed at 8:00 in the morning. Jett ordered these heinous rainbow-colored test tube shots that glowed in the blacklight. Michael got up on one of the dancing platforms again and went at it for a while, his lit cigarette dragging a streak of light in the air. I danced, too, for a little while -- my, flailing, uncoordinated dance. I had the most fun when I got really into it, and forgot about everyone, and just felt the music. On a creative level, dancing is really draining, trying to think of new things for your body to do. It's draining on a physical level, too, once you've gone on for long enough, but tonight, it was mental exhaustion that hit me first. Suddenly, the music was just too loud, and I couldn't bring myself to dance. I wanted some water, but it was ludicrously expensive. So I just leaned against the bar for a little while, and people watched. It was comforting to see that, in addition to myself, nobody there really knew how to dance. I liked Michael's style, which was very casual and sort of old-style. Aside from that, there wasn't much that appealed to me. At 3:00 or 3:30, Mandi, Nick, Marie and myself decided to call it quits. We taxied home (with the first female cab driver I'd ever seen). She had tweaked her meter; tenths of a mile were going by faster than was humanly possible, and indeed it was the most expensive ride from Gongbei I had ever taken. It was also a strange walk from the GLV to the apartments. The large squares and strips which were usually a-bustle with people were nearly empty. Nearly empty. But a bus driver sat in his bus, smoking a cigarette. A few people slept in lawn chairs in front of the indoor market. The dough-maker at McMinaret's was stretching away at his dough as if it weren't three in the morning, and a customer could walk in at any minute. Eventually, I got home, bit my compatriots farewell, showered off, and hit the sack. The next morning, I was up early to meet Amy. We had agreed to meet at 8:10 in the Culture Plaza. I got there fifteen minutes early, and watched the fifty or sixty elderly people on the square do their calisthenics -- Tai Chi, dancing, some elegant rituals with fans and swords. It began to rain, and they broke up hastily. At 8:17, I was just about to call it quits when Amy waved to me from across the plaza. We caught another bus to the hospital, walked straight into the same room, and saw the same doctor. No waiting room, no appointment, no anything -- just walked straight in. He and Amy began to speak, and I could actually understand much of what was being said. He asked for my name, and Amy gave him "Charles", which came out on the receipt, Chineseified, as "Char Les." So from now on, those of you who wish to call me Lester Char may do so. This time around, the doctor didn't even ask to see my prescription -- he just wrote something down on a piece of paper. Then, Amy left to have it processed, telling me to wait in the room. I sat down on a metal bench. It was just me and the doctor, sitting there in complete silence. I realized what I privilege I was receiving -- most of the time, when a person as in the room with him, there was a loud conversation taking place. But here I was, another person in the room, but not speaking. Eventually, a man and his son walked in, and his son stared at me wide-eyed the whole time. I smiled at him, and he smiled back. Then Amy popped her head in the doorway, and beckoned me. We walked into an examination room. Again, to my surprise, there was already a person inside, getting a shot from a nurse. I walked up just in time to see the nurse wind up and slam the shot into the patient's arm. Then, she dipped a swab in alcohol, handed it to the patient, and all but shooed her from the room. I sat down and watched the nurse carefully as she prepped the shot. She swabbed my arm with alcohol, took the syringe out of a hermetically sealed bag (which boded well), loaded it, and plunged it into my arm. And it didn't hurt -- not one bit. I thanked her, took my swab, and walked out. It wasn't even bleeding. We took the bus back. Amy told me she was going to visit some friends, and that she would be staying on the bus once I got off. At my stop, I disembarked, walked home, and went straight back to bed. The whole process had taken about two hours; it was 10:20 or so when I fell asleep. I didn't rise until 4:00 PM, and I didn't so much as stir in my sleep until then. It was wonderful. I woke up refreshed. One of my goals was to work on my blog, which I did for about ten minutes. But I hadn't really listened to music in a while, and songs kept getting stuck in my head. So I sat on my bed and listened to music for an hour. Then, back to the blog for half an hour. I was pretty sure the GLV had dinner on Saturday nights between 5:00 and 6:00, or 5:30 and 6:30 (I couldn't remember), so I decided to play it safe and get there at 5:40 PM. On my way out the door, one of my roommates stopped me. His name was Tim, and he was quite smart. We had had a long discussion about college in America one night while we were both doing laundry. He wants to go to graduate school at Boston University, and every time I mention to someone that I'm from Boston and he's around, he chimes in, "good city, good city!" That conversation was actually almost completely out of the ordinary -- almost. You see, most of the contact I have with GLV students is at mealtimes; we are obligated to sit with them, as payment for our otherwise free meals there. And the conversation starts out the same way, every time. Truly, the same questions are repeated, word for word, with such alarming accuracy that I'm sure there's a cult movement behind the whole thing. I am not joking. The following meal will begin like this. "Hi. What's your name?" "I my name is . . (holding up his nametag) . . . Bleen." "(Scrutinizing the nametag). You mean, 'Bill'?" "Ah, yes, yes, Beel. What is your name?" "Charles." (I hold up my nametag). "Chahls." Beat. "Do you like China?" "Yes. The food is very cheap.""How you think of Chinese food? "I like it very much." or, alternatively, "Do you like any Chinese food?" "Yes, I think Chinese food is very good." "How you learn use Chinese chopsticks?" "Oh, well, we have lots of Chinese restaurants where I live, so I learned to use them there." "Where you from?" "America. And you?" "Hunan" (or wherever, but it is almost invariably Hunan). "And what do you do there?" "I am in (finance/engineering/marketing)." "Oh, cool. Do you like (finance/engineering/marketing)? "Eh. . . no, not really." From there, sometimes the conversation goes uphill, and we find something to talk about, or it goes downhill, and we just eat. But every time, it begins with the same questions. At this point, I sit down at a table, and I say, "Hi, my name is Charles. I'm from America, and I learned to use chopsticks years ago at a Chinese restaurant. I like Chinese food very much. What's your name, and where are you from?" One day a group of us (Jett, Robyn, Sumit and myself) were sitting at a table, talking about our mealtime conversations. We were going around, having fun being completely intolerant, asking the stock questions and saying what we only wished we could in response. "Do you like China? "No, I think it pretty much sucks. I mean, the whole country, just, sucks, y'know?" "How do you think of Chinese food?" "Well, first, first my eyes and nose are stimulated by the sight and smell of the food. These organs send neural impulses to my brain, which processes the input, an action which we have come to know as 'thinking'. "How you learn to use Chinese chopsticks?" "At a Japanese restaurant." "Do you like any Chinese food?" "Nope, only hamburgers. I’m American, remember?" And so on. We were all sitting there, having a good, un-PC laugh, when a few GLV students come to sit down with us. And sure enough, off went the battery of questions. It was all we could do to contain ourselves. I've also been developing the bad habit of making Chinese mistakes when talking to Chinese people -- dropping articles, failing to conjugate verbs, using a Chinese accent, etc. It makes it much easier for them to understand, but they're there tto learn English, so I stop whenever I catch myself doing it. Anyway, all of this brings me back to Tim. Tim and I had been having this lofty-minded discussion about American university (his English is quite good), when out of the blue comes, "do you like any Chinese food?" I almost laughed. There really was no escape. "Yes," I said. "I do." And we returned to our conversation about college. On Saturday, though, as I was walking out the door, he mentioned that he and his friends were going out for seafood and KTV that night, and he invited me to come. On the one hand, this was tempting. It would mean I was going someplace local, with real Chinese people who knew what they were doing. It also meant I would be getting a free dinner. In China, if you invite someone out, you pay. On the other hand, I was worried. I didn't want to be out late, and I had work I needed to do. I was extremely wary of eating seafood. Moreover, it put me in a bind -- I assumed they would be drinking, especially at KTV, and it was considered very rude to refuse a drink, but it was GLV policy that TEFL trainees and GLV teachers were not allowed to drink with students. Technically, I could be thrown out for it, although in practice, GLV teachers went drinking with their students all the time. Still, I didn't want to take the risk. I told Tim my reservations, and he assured me that there would be no drinking, and that we would be back by 10 or 11 PM. I decided I'd play it by ear. He was meeting his friends at the GLV, where I was headed for dinner anyway. On the way over, we had a conversation about corruption with drivers licenses -- apparently, for about USD $45, you could have your license in China. We got there, and the place was nearly empty. I got Tim's cell phone number, and left it with him that perhaps I would join him later, if I thought I could handle it. As I was about to go upstairs, out of nowhere, a girl ran up to me and said, "I have a question. You look exactly like--" "Harry Potter, I know." "Yes!" Then she ran off. "That wasn't a question! Oh, whatever." I turned back to Tim. "See you soon." I would be seeing him sooner than I expected. On my way upstairs, a white-shirted GLV employee informed me that the building would be closing in 20 minutes. Alarm bells began to go off in my head. There wasn't going to be dinner that night for some reason, I could feel it. Sure enough, the dining hall was empty. And the TEFL classroom was locked. That just about decided it. I ran downstairs, and, to my relief, Tim was still there. "Hey, everything is locked here, so if it's alright, I'd like to come with you guys." "Oh, sure, sure!" And Tim began introducing me to everyone. Someone said, "you know who you look like? Harry Potter!". "I asked the same question!" And I looked up to see the girl who had called me Harry Potter not five minutes ago. There was only one other person I knew, a man named Chase. In the end, I believe there were ten of us. We decided to take the bus to wherever it was we were going -- Chace was the only one who I knew. He'd gotten the name of the place from a local. It was a long ride, probably between half and hour and forty-five minutes. I spent it talking to Tim. He was in finance, but he didn't like it. His goal, like mine, was to one day start a school. It was a wonderful conversation. I taught him some English (the nuances of the word 'cute', and there really are nuances), and he taught me some Chinese. He was astounded when I correctly identified where he was from based on his accent (it was luck, mainly). He also was the first of several people that evening to tell me that my accent and speech were extremely easy to understand. I figured that boded well for teaching. I kept looking out the window for landmarks, but after half an hour, I knew it was hopeless. Tim didn't even know what district we were in. I just hoped I had enough cash to get myself back home, if it came to that. I had been feeling worried about going on this excursion before. My conversation with Tim on the bus had alleviated some of that worry. But the experience I was about to have made the rest of my reservations fly right out the window. We took a side road away from the bus stop. Immediately, things became gritty, close together. Then, we rounded the corner, and found ourselves facing down a long street. This, I realized with a jolt, was China. The street was strung over with red lanterns. On both sides were seemingly endless lines of table, upon which were tubs of live seafood. There was nothing old or rotten on this street. It did not have the stench of a fishery. People bustled about, haggling, hawking. Most of them, I learned, didn't even speak very well, only Cantonese. This was total immersion. This was the advantage of eating with the locals. It took me a while to figure out how dinner was going to work. The restaurant we entered didn't look like a restaurant. The street was lined with other such completely non-descript dining rooms. It didn't seem to matter which one you chose; there was no 'atmosphere' to speak of. The floors and the lower half of each wall was made of white bathroom tile. The rest of the wall and the ceiling was painted white. We sat in white chairs, at a table with a white table cloth. Why this place? As it turned out, it was not the eating area that mattered, but the seafood that was sold in proximity to it. I gathered that here, the the food and the cooking of the food were completely separate enterprises. You bought your seafood on the street. Then, you brought it into this 'restaurant' and told them how you wanted it prepared, and they cooked it for you. I was instructed to sit. All but two or three people then disappeared. One woman I had been talking to said that she and her roommate had been elected to bargain with the seafood-mongers, since they were the only ones who spoke Cantonese. I have no idea where the rest of the group went. They tricked back slowly over the next twenty minutes. A delicious, tangy root vegetable that looked like garlic (but wasn't), and some peanuts were brought to the table for starters. I chatted with the people around me -- about America, about China, about anything, really. One woman was leaving for Chicago the next month, to be with her [Chinese] husband who was working there, so she had lots of questions for me. None of them could get over how young I was. The next youngest person in the group was Isaac, who was incredibly handsome -- he could have been a movie star. He had a very rascally look about him. Anyway, I believe he was 24 years old. Dinner came out in courses. First, there was some shrimp of the variety we typically see in the States. Most of the seafood was eaten with the hands, ripping heads and shells off like tissue paper. I've developed tolerances for food I never knew I could. Next came another type of shrimp, bigger (perhaps six inches long), and much spinier, with a segmented shell. You picked this shrimp up by the head and the tail, and 'massaged' it by rolling it a wave down the shell a few times. Then, you peeled the shell off, starting from the tail. There was a strip of meat that you could pull right out and eat. Following this was crab, which was delicious, some very flat shellfish, some noodles, a fish, bowls of rice, and a soup that was the only thing I didn't like -- it was more bone than anything else. There was another astounding garlic sauce for dipping food, too. I spent most of the night talking to the woman who is going to Chicago, whose name I never did actually learn. We raised a toast with these tiny glasses of white wine, (which was defensible based on what Meiling had told me about the GLV policy). I have no idea to what we were toasting, because it was in Chinese, but I trust it was something good. Dinner was long and enjoyable. Afterwards, we walked back out onto the streets. My hands were feeling sticky, but I opted not to wash in a tub of live lobster, as some people had. We were still in the gritty neighborhood when Tim told me to stand and wait on a door stoop. Then, he disappeared. For about twenty minutes, I had no idea what was happening. Somehow, a contingent of our group gathered around me, and I found myself standing there above them on this stoop, as if it were a soapbox, giving a lecture on the double-edged sword of legal gun ownership in America. I explained that in a country where you couldn't buy guns legally, only the bad people had guns. They nodded in agreement; apparently, there was a bit of a gangster problem in the region. Tim re-appeared out of nowhere to chime in that, if he ever went to America, the first thing he would do is buy a gun. "Why?" I asked. "I don't know. I just like guns." They also had lots of questions about what I was allowed to do as an 18-year-old. Pretty much spontaneously, as far as I could tell, the group mobilized again. We went back to the bus stop from which we had come before. It wasn't long before a 10-seater van-taxi pulled up. After a round of haggling, the driver agreed to take all of us back to the GLV for about 50 kuai. I was shocked by how cheap it was. Everyone else was shocked by how expensive it was. I guess that's just the way things are. We didn't actually go back to the GLV, but a little bit past it. There was a karaoke bar called the V-Club that Jett and I walked past many times without knowing it. It was on the side of a large office-looking building. At night, a group of kids liked to out and breakdance to rap music on the smooth plaza out front; that's how I knew where we were. We entered the club -- there was a main room with a bar, a DJ and a dance floor, with all of the usual smoke, lasers,and TV screens (although it was lighter than usual). But we went to a private room off to the side, where there was a big TV and an elaborate karaoke machine. A few other people were there already, and I later learned that they, too were from the GLV. I watched for a few songs -- there was some very strange filler video playing behind the words to the songs. They were big on Holland and windmills. There was also a strange video that somehow was trying to tell a story about a boxer who is exuberant about his haircut from a manic-depressive but beautiful young hairdresser, who dies in a freak explosion within the last five seconds of the video. It was entertaining, if not coherent. Tim convinced me to sing "Yesterday" by the Beatles. The karaoke machine was amazing at masking peoples' wretched voices, but even it couldn't save me on a few occasions. Still, I'm glad I did it. I mean, how lame would it have been to go to my first karaoke bar, and not get up and sing? There were very few English songs, unfortunately, and fewer of those still were made after 1970. Instead, I struck up a conversation with a businessman from Hunan. His company printed business documents. He told me all about the most beautiful places in his province, and gave me a card and invited me to come see them if I had a chance. He also said my accent was extremely easy to understand. I was feelin' pretty good about that. A V-club waitress kept bringing in drinks and snacks. I had an iced drink for the first time in two weeks, and it was extraordinarily refreshing (apparently the ice was okay there; everyone else was drinking iced drinks as well). I didn't realize how much I missed ice. After a while, the karaoke became intolerable. A few of our number had gone outside, and were playing the dice game at a table. I went and joined them. It was a lot more difficult with six people. Usually, when you lose, you have to take a sip of beer, but I just ate barsnacks instead. There were bread-y chips, and cucumbers which you dipped into soy sauce. Needless to say, it wasn't much of a punishment. I played this for perhaps half an hour. My voice was getting hoarse from calling out over the music, so I went back into the karaoke room. Someone handed me a glass of iced orange juice, and I sat down next to Tim. He offered me a plate which looked like it was covered with a root of some sort, and which had a little depression for a brown sauce. The sauce turned out to be soy sauce with the most potent wasabi I have ever tasted. The 'roots' were dried squid. It was really quite good, but it made your breath smell horrible. At 11 or 11:30 PM, I began to worry about the time. I told Tim that I needed to get back, and thanked him for the evening. I chanced to see him again at 2 AM when he walked in. All in all, it was a pretty fantastic evening. And here it is, Sunday afternoon. I will wrap up with a few random tidbits. They burn incense in a corner of the upstairs men's room at the GLV. There's just a coil of it in a little metal tray, it it burns and ashes away all day. Downstairs, there's a urinal that flushes twice, once when you walk up to it, and once when you walk away. I can't help but admire its exuberance. One of the nights this past week, Jett and I were in his room, talking to hill. We were asking about Chinese law. It is very much illegal to hit someone. Even if someone breaks into your house, you are only allowed to restrain him until police arrive. If he attacks you, you are allowed to defend yourself, though. If you kill someone, you usually get the death penalty. We told Hill that in America, it took a long time to get the death penalty, and asked if it was the same in China. He said, "oh, yes, a very long time." "How long?" we asked. "Oh, maybe six months or a year," he said. I didn't go back to our little street bar this week, but there was an anecdote I meant to recount last week. It must have been Friday night. There were two other Chinese men sitting at the bar. They were both gigantic boors. One of them was wiry and obnoxious, and the other was heavyset and oh-so-loud. They were playing a drinking game, something like Rock, Paper, Scissors, with the bar girl we like, the one who knows a bit of English. And there she was, playing this game against to men. The went on and on -- I can't believe how much beer any of them were drinking, but most of all the girl. At one point, the girl leaned over to me, holding a cup of beer, and said, "if I drink this, I'm going to be drunk." Then she slugged it and went back to the boors. "They're not going to stop," Jett said. "And she's not either. And neither will her boss. It's her job to keep them entertained, and they won't stop until she's passed out." Before long, the girl was falling every time she moved. She took a short break, and fell asleep with her head on the bar. Then, it was back to that repulsive game and those repulsive men. Every time she had to drink, she looked at the cup, and it was a look of such disgust it made me want to cry, it really did. But she kept on going. Eventually, she went home. But there was so much poison in her blood, and she must have to do that so often. On top of that, she smokes. She's nineteen now, but I can't imagine her life will be a very long one. Jett is a gentleman. He serves the ladies and everyone else around him first, and pours everyone's tea. Some of you, I'm sure, are worried about my safety. To comfort you, I've compiled a sheet of statistics regarding the danger of injury or death in Zhuhai. Odds of coming to injury or death due to: Slipping and falling in the bathtub - 2:1 Heart attack in taxi - 4:1 Heart attack at the head of a class of 40 screaming 8-year-olds - 6:1 Bad mojo - 9:1 Slain at dance club for atrocious dancing - 14:1 Suicide induced by repetitive mealtime conversation - 20:1 Mobbed by Harry Potter fans - 50:1 Sky falling - 200:1 Homicide victim - 400:1 Godzilla – 900:1 Okay, I haven't left my room yet today, so I'm going to get me some tucker (that's Aussie for 'food', or so Michael tells us). I hope you've enjoyed reading this. Please forgive any and all grammatical mistakes; I don't have time to edit. Wish me luck teaching, and hopefully, I'll have another one of these ready for you next week. Charles

Pictures

2006-09-13T08:49:00.000-04:00

I'm just going to skip to the cream of the crop, since it's such a pain to put pictures online. A DVD cover. The best part is that the translation matches the characters exactly. Hopefully, one day, this will make sense. . . The view from my room in Zhuhai. Mist-covered mountains pop rather nonchalantly out of cities around here, and nobody seems to mind. They just sort of go around them. My room in Zhuhai. That gravity bill again. . . A rather haggard me on the ferry to Zhuhai. This one's just for Emma. Excuse me, waiter, there's a foot in my soup! My hotel room in HK. I got the "gravity optional" discount. The nighttime view from my hotel room in Hong Kong (Bishop Lei International House) Hong Kong, seconds after touchdown. My first glimpse of China, from 35,000 feet. A very colorful (and long) tunnel in Chicago O'Hare. Chicago O'Hare. Pretty nice airport. I even got a glimpse of the Sears Tower out of the window of the airplane. The thing is freakin' huge. Bears! My last view of Boston for 10 months.