How do you know when you are at a Beijing Wal-mart?

The duck at the meat counter still has his head, while the jerky-fish two aisles down still has the majority of its scales.  And the low, low prices.   Always.

It's Christmas All-Year Round in Beijing

I have seen over five restaurants now that have multiple pictures of Santa Claus hung up in their windows or inside.  This is at the end of March.  Can someone please explain it to me?  

Tourist Countermeasures

My throat is sore…from pretending to be from Spain.  

Yesterday I went to Tian’anmen via the subway and walked around for a few hours.  No less than twenty times, testing the limits of my politeness, I had the following conversation:

“Hi!  Hi!  You speak English?”

“No, no hablo inglés.”  

(Confused.)  “You understand English?  You speak French.  Where you from?  I’m student….Hola!” (Proceeds to try to sell me on retaining their tour guide services or visiting special art gallery.)

“No me entendí.”  (Walking/looking other direction…Three other touts smell laowai [foreigner] in the water…Surrounded by faux friendliness…must…escape.)

I was caught in my lie at one point, though.  I was in front of the National Museum, and I had hoped the touts had gone away already, but one in their group saw me reading the English near the ticket counter and laughed: “Hey, you don’t know English. You’re reading it!”  “Una mentira,” sez I. (Attempting to stay in character, nevertheless smiling at being found out.)

Communication by Other Means

“I have electric brain.”  Gesturing towards outlet.  “I want.”

“Er low.”  2nd Floor.  

I got me my surge protector.  

Day 2: Baby Steps

(My postings are out of order and not the correct date because I don’t have direct access to my blog.)

Today was the (kilometer) Long March (to save two bucks).  I backpacked from the Ritz to my temporary digs on campus and I definitely can’t wait to find my longer-term dwelling to fully unpack the burden on my back.  With my one way ticket, I had to think more about what I would need to land a job, which has added about twenty pounds to what I’m carrying.  Ugh.

It seems premature to say where I will start looking for a job, but safe to say that Beijing is far from the first choice.   I guess I value my lungs more than I thought.  I’ve been drinking lots of fluids because my mucus is working overtime in this place.  I don’t think I’ll take any drugs to suppress my allergies because it’s probably a good thing to hack up whatever my lungs would otherwise absorb.  

But I know what you are all really wondering.  Has Comrade Lulu found true love with Comrade Momo?  I’m trying to imagine what the title of the soap opera must be.  “Love’s Army:  They Fight for the Motherland, and for Each Other.”  Seems like it’s on every time I turn on the set.  Oh wait, just had a title scroll across: “Happiness Like Flowers.”  Jeez, I’ve watched ten minutes, and the character I’ll name Lulu, seems to alternatively pout and look longingly into Comrade Momo’s eyes, before tearful incident number 30.  There are soap opera universals.    

The first funny English signage that I’ve come across in my walks around the neighborhood: “Hump Café.”   Maybe it’s a jab against the predominant puritanical culture?   Or a really bad dictionary?   Or they were looking to recreate the Dutch coffeehouse experience, but had to substitute “u” for “e” to run not afoul of the authorities?

I’m not running out to the tourist sights because I vaguely know where I am right now (Northwestern sector of Beijing), and I have so much time my emphasis is in making getting around routine and cutting down on spending.  Not being able to communicate well is a definite expense here or anywhere.  

I’m still trying to figure out how to use my phone card!  Being illiterate has its demerits.  It shows me how much I rely on written information, whereas here I have to find ways to guess.  And it’s a frustration I’m not used to, so I give up for the time.  

I decided to take today and really do nothing but take naps and read, to stay relaxed and try to adjust to the time change.   And have my bottle of Cipro at the ready.  I ate a buffet breakfast today, and learned the difficulties of eating pancakes and triangle hash browns with chopsticks.   Noodles are great for breakfast too.  

But I love my Cha.  Chai.  Shayy.  AKA Tea.  

For $3.50 I had a big heap of salad and a king’s helping of rice, beef, and veggies for dinner.  Looks like I better rethink the exercise plan.

Tonight I’m tasking myself with learning the phrases at the back of my travel guide, so I get the frequently used phrases at my disposal.  Tomorrow I need to look into a place for Monday, when I will also need to pay for classes (and whatever else, I’m not sure because the visa place lost the English version of the letter I was sent.)

Name the Price

20 oz. Pepsi Twist – 3 yuan = 40 cents

Fried Pita Smothered with Some Sort of Bean Curd Concoction & Sesame Seeds – 2.5 yuan = 30 cents

Figuring out how to get from point A to point B without a map, without help from anybody, in the vastness of Beijing - priceless (or 2 bucks if I could figure out how to communicate  the address to a taxista).  

Navigating by MickyD’s today I located the long-term digs I was looking for just by walking for twenty minutes in one direction and walking back to try the other direction, and repeating this three times until I finally found the sign for the road I was looking for.  My map of Beijing occludes the part of the city I am in with the legend.  

I’m very surprised at how much I have to try to express myself in Chinese or more often in gestures, even at hotels or at the International Student Center where I’m moving.  And all this time I was hoping to use my Pig Latin.  It’s a good thing, but it makes me wonder how difficult it will be to teach English well (since with the exception of the fluent speaker at the Ritz, my English conversations have been more pidgin than Standard English).  But perhaps I’m overestimating how many English speakers the hoteliers would come across (since it would be out of the reach for most to travel to an English-speaking country to study).  I’ve seen more signs in Korean than in English not surprisingly.  

Globalize This!

Watching Chinese music videos, it’s interesting to see the world dissemination of American rap and pop culture in the mannerisms and style, even if I don’t understand a word.

It reminded me of the time I was by Lake Nicaragua and amidst the throngs a heavily tattooed guy stepped up to me and said, “What’s up my N*****?!”  He followed this up  with some sort of Marshall Mather’s handshake.   What do you say to that?!

Put that on the list of things I never expected to hear from anybody.  

An Update (And then I got to find me cheap Accomodations)

Infomercials are the same everywhere.

First Impressions Filtered Through a Time(zone) Traveler

Wow.  Today was a commute.  A disorienting commute to the Orient.  Taking off from San Fran to Beijing, I saw in passing the iconic Golden Gate.  But what I wasn’t expecting was to glimpse Superman’s ice cavern.  
You see, to fly to Beijing, they fly through Alaska and over the Bering Strait and down through Russian airspace.  It was a sight to see mountains of solid ice, and ice flows.  My retinas seem to have managed to burn even from 30000 feet.  

Hey, and I upgraded my flight service, or figured out a way to “cut in line.”  I guess I’m too impatient to wait for the stewardesses to go down the rows…it makes my stomach grumble.  So I feigned dietary needs, and asked for Kosher meals when I bought my ticket and I got served before everybody else.  Only drawback was the meals were hermetically-sealed, so I spent ten minutes opening them.  Maybe next time I try “Vegetarian” or “Vegan” and see if I can get some better eats.  Because I do think the Chicken Ziti I got was better than the usual grub.  

Landing in Beijing, the air looks smoggy at 10,000 feet (and I think I might have already gotten a pack’s worth of cigs without having a cig).  Going through customs and passport was a breeze, didn’t even check anyone’s bags that I could see.  After that, you have to fend off the usual taxi hustlers.  A good thing is that at the lines to wait for the official taxi cabs, they give you a brochure that explains the rules for what taxi cabs can charge, and where to complain.    


  The thoughts in my jet-lagged brain at this moment are that of pinball machine, bouncing all over the place at the sight of the set of Blade Runner. And every other building is lit up like a pinball machine.  Vegas ain’t got nothing on gaudiness.  But what a sight t’is the strange gaudiness juxtaposed with Soviet-style industrial ugliness mixed with “American dream” style billboards showing suburban American-style upper-middle class houses.  [Insert Thomas Freidman balderdash here.]


For once I got a congenial cabbie, but I really was being too chill when I thought that I could go without a phrasebook.   I broke out into Spanish and a little Arabic (!)  as I was searching for the right word in my one-hundred word Mandarin vocabulary.    I was planning to go the Convention Center at the BLCU, and for all I know we passed it since we did get to the campus (just not that particular building which I tried to point at five times).  But I couldn’t figure out what the hell he was trying to say about whether I had to walk to get there or what, so I finally said to go to another nearby hotel.  

And not sure if it is a clueless“Waiguoren” tax, but magically the cheapest rooms aren’t available, but they can get me a “discounted room” for $100, that probably is worth $80 in America, and really I shouldn’t have paid more than fifty if I had my senses about.  I’m still trying to figure out if rock-hard cushions are custom here.  

My logical brain was telling me to go get another hotel, but was overridden by weariness and this interesting state of mind I get after not sleeping for over twenty-four hours. I’m not complaining, after 16 hours in an airplane I’d buy a freaking room at the Waldorf if it shrunk my net worth by half.  (Now that I’m officially an unemployed bum it’s not so far off.)

Well, I’m tempted to collapse and sleep, but I hear they have a bowling alley and a jacuzzi, and I have free net access until checkout.  I really need to organize what I need to do tomorrow so as not to burn cash like this and move to a long term place.  

Oh, and what you’re all wondering….what’s on the tube on the other side of the earth?  The first thing I seem to have come across is a soap opera where half the characters are in the People’s Army.  And a “Chinese Idol.”   I’ll keep on flipping and update y’all.  But this sleep thing seems like a good idea, even if I’m in the giddy mode at the moment.  

And I’ve confirmed that this very webblog is blocked by the Great Firewall of China, as I assume all other blogs hosted at blogspot.   But luckily, blogger itself isn’t blocked so I should be able to continue to post.  

The Second Installment

The Second Installment Begins

I’m the true-to-life Mr. Bean thank you very much.  I had just gotten my boarding passes at DIA and went to the bathroom, when no sooner do I drop my passport and tickets into the sink, at which point the motion detectors decided to start auto-splash my identity papers.  (Just because they have the shelf there, don’t mean it’s going to stay there.) Luckily, I had a hot-stove reflex and caught them from the side (otherwise, I would’ve had the joy of getting a new passport and visa and paying United to get a new ticket).   Doh!  The journey of a thousand miles begins with me nearly scuttling the whole venture.   They really need to get e-Passport Retina ID so we could dispense with all these paper tokens subject to loss and theft.

On the bright-side my reflexes are good -- I can learn to catch flies with chopsticks no prob at this rate.  

I went to Park Meadows Mall in search for some sort of steel-case waterproof case last night, but there was only leather junk.  I can say for sure that’s not enough protection against my absentminded nature.  

My flight to San Fran went faster than any I’ve ever been on.  So I’m hoping this twelve hour junket I’m facing goes as smooth.   Hardy-har-har.  

Although I’ve never seen San Fran, I can tell from the airport that it prides itself on unrivaled trendy-ness.  Even the food court has about 9 gourmet options, while the lone fast food restaurant is hidden away in some dark corridor.  

I brought my Chinese study books, but I don’t think I’m going to study on the plane.  There will be enough of that soon enough.  I’m just trying to keep relaxed, and see if it would be possible for me to sleep on this flight.

What did I bring to read?   De rerum naturem by Lucretius.  Phiac Tan (goofy mock South-East Asia travel guide, should be interesting to see if it’s confiscated).   The Jungle by Upton Sinclair.  Cien Años de Soledad.  Mags:  Muy Interesante, National Geographic, Skeptical Inquirer.  

Man, How Many Graduation Speechs Has Waldo Been Quoted At.

"Do not go where the path may lead. Go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.." -Ralph Waldo Emerson    

(Props Mike!  Y’all hear from me once I get settled.)

Body Worlds 2: Giving a Whole New Meaning to Body Art

I spent Saturday morning looking at splayed-out corpses.  Or alternatively I spent Saturday morning looking at “plastinates” – specially-preserved human bodies variously sliced-and-diced to illustrate anatomy.  

My reaction is ambivalence.  There was an educational element to the exhibit.  There was a drop of science.  

However, I found it on the grotesque-side that the bodies were treated like artwork, posed with sporting equipment, each titled and dated in tribute to coroner creativity (not to say I could claim surprise from how the exhibit has been advertised). Is the point of the exhibit to show how many ways to skin a human?  

I can’t say it doesn’t make sense for an anatomical exhibit to show different cross sections and different perspectives to illustrate a biological concept.  However, the more educational aspects of the exhibit were the tissue samples and organ groups shown in isolation, as well as samples illustrating various disease pathologies.    It does aid understanding to see a brain damaged by a stroke or lungs blackened by miner’s lung.    

But I did not see any educational benefit to placing skis on the feet of a corpse cut bilaterally, in an echo of what might happen were a cartoon character to ski through a tree.  

Now, this feeling is tapered by my libertarian leanings.  Assuming there’s no health code violations, if people want to sign up to be cremated and shot-up into space or displayed as body art, well that’s their prerogative.   But what am I saying.   If the pretense of science was dropped altogether, and some whacked-out artist wanted to make her final work be Plastinated Marie Antoinette No. 2, wouldn’t that be beyond the pale?  

The Last (American-Chinese Food) Supper

Fortune cookie say: "The Near Future Holds a Gift of Contentment." Thank you fortune cookie makers of the world for being rosy optimists.

And if anyone wants to win Powerball, the lucky numbers are: 02-08-38-39-44-50.

Diet Plan

It's enough to make me happy to eat Toufu for the rest of my life. The plan is that if there's nothing on any menu within 2,000 miles that I want to eat, the scale starts tipping to the left. If this plan works for you too please send $29.99 or the price of a Dr. Phil book, whichever is greater, for my miracle diet secret. It's such short reading I can put it on the back of a fortune cookie.

Two Fishies, One Stone

"Float like a jellyfish, sting like a jellyfish."

Doesn't have quite the same ring as "Float like a butterfly, strike like a bee," but I was just thinking that Muhammad Ali didn't need to emulate two creatures to float and sting.

I was thinking about inventing a counterpart to Drunken Monkey Kung-Fu. I will have to invent some new aquatic style of GongFu while I'm in China living among the Shaolin and learning the ancient mysteries. The electric eel: pretend with your fighting stance that you are going to fight with your hands, then pull a taser from under your sleeve, and shout "Ha, ha, ha you old-school fool. Zap!" The manatee move: look at your opponent with sad, sad eyes that say "I'm endangered please don't hurt me."