Being in Beijing

the 24-hour train to turpan was an experience. at the end of our hall was a wildly rowdy bunch of 30-something people who, when boarding, brought cases and cases of beer to keep themselves company. our bunks weren’t in the same “rooms”, and we got yelled at when we were chatting in the hallways outside our “rooms”. otherwise, the train was fine. when we arrived in turpan, we met up with this random american guy that made friends with us at the sunday market in kashgar. with our xin pengyou, we set our day’s agenda to see the flaming mountains, a really cool mosque, and some ancient ruins.

the flaming mountains, obviously, spurred a whole lot of ridiculous jokes. we spent a really, really long time taking jumping pictures together, trespassed beyond this silly little sign, and then proceed to climb the mountain and CONQUER. well, we got bored and didn’t quite get to conquering, but the boys did jump off small cliffs into the gullies and take videos of their hilarious attempts at being stuntmen. the mosque was next, and it was gorgeous in the geometry and the simplicity of its architecture. we got to the ruins by sunset, and ben and i got lost while the other 3 wandered around the really well-preserved ancient city.

we got back and were determined to find some food. for the 25 minutes that we were walking, however, we found nothing. nothing! not a restaurant. we finally settled for this one hole-in-the-wall that had little cute mice scurrying around the back and a really sketchy looking fridge propped up against the wall. also, to make the meal more weird, everyone but erik and i decided to try what looked like testicles. on a stick. they said it tasted fine, but i wasn’t convinced. we think (hope) it was a kidney. but we’re not sure. we tried to go to a bar afterwards and first got into a black cab that refused to turn on its little meter or let us out until we started shouting, and then got into a cab where the cabbie assured us he knew where this one bar was, then proceeded to get seriously lost and ended up asking 2 other cab drivers and a random lady crossing the street. when we turned the corner, someone said, “hey, isn’t that the bar we’re looking for?” and then we told the clueless driver to stop there.

the bar was empty. since we had a small ordeal getting there, we really didn’t care. xin pengyou argued with the waiters to give us a deal, and then we just relaxed. i sweet-talked my way into the DJ’s booth so that i could change his horrible eurotrash music, but once i got in there, i realized that he had absolutely no hip-hop or cool songs that we were familiar with. so i left, in a hurry. we decided to dance regardless of the music, and were going crazy on the dance floor as the other chinese businessmen and businessmen’s wives stared. my favorite moment of that night (besides the wedding) was when we were playing this imaginary-ball dancing game and, in an effort to punt the imaginary ball, i completely wiped out. almost slow-motion, cartoon-style. and in front of the growing crowd of people watching the insane american kids. we took a break after that (to save my shrinking dignity) until the older chinese group beckoned us back to the dance floor. we danced with them, doing the whole circle-up-and-push-someone-in-the-middle-to-perform thing. i got pushed in continuously, and whenever you pushed in one of the chinese people, they would get so sensationally embarrassed that they would actually fight you to get back out.

and then the wedding. walking back to our hotel, ben and our new friend matt spotted a wedding reception with a live band. we could see people dancing and smoking cigarettes from the opened doors. ben and matt drag us in there and dance us right into the crowd of happy celebrating kashgar people who immediately got confused by these dirty (we had been hiking, remember?) foreign kids. mariel, spinning around with ben, and i, spinning around with matt and STILL WEARING MY BACKPACK, were embarrassed beyond reason. the people didn’t kill us, and erik even got offered cigarettes while he was waiting for us at the door! i think everyone was pretty chill about us crashing their party… except the bride. i don’t think she was too pleased.

after our sunday market, we drove up to karakul lake to stay in a yurt for the night.  we arrived at about 11 and had to wake up the yurt people to be allowed in. It was freezing cold, since karakul lake is in the mountains and the weather is a lot like what desert weather would be: hot in the day, freezing at night.  since we arrived so late, they had no fire to heat our little yurt. we decided to improvise and make a giant nest out of every single comforter they had stacked up, which was close to 20.  i’ve never seen such stars as i had there.  we even saw the milky way!  like, not a hazy faded version but all of it.  it was gorgeous.  and then we woke up stiff and frozen.  the blankets were so heavy that it was a mental struggle to decide whether going to outhouse was worth braving the cold, and then a physical struggle to move from underneath the heavy comforters.  we woke up well before sunrise, since xinjiang is (stupidly) on beijing time even though that means that the sun rises at 8:30am or so.  the lake, surrounded by snow-covered mountains, is one of the most beautiful places i’ve ever seen.  as the sun comes over the mountains, it also reflects in the glassy lake below and looks unreal. simply unreal. we were just tooling around the lake, waiting for sunrise and taking levitation pictures with each other, when this little wizened woman came up to us and beckoned us into her little hut. there, in the early dawn, we hung out in this amazing woman’s yurt that she’s lived in for forever while she made us an authentic kirghiz breakfast of hot yak’s milk chai tea and homemade kashgar-style bagels. it was the coolest, most 地道 experience ever! we got to chatting with our yurt man and the woman’s son as we ate our leisurely breakfast, then saw the sunrise and hopped in the car.

straight from the mountains of karakul, we sped off (and nearly died, with the crazy driver we had) to a completely different environment, the desert that’s close to kashgar in the other direction. in the desert, we got to ride sand-buggies at crazy high speeds in the sand dunes. the sand and wind was so bad that for the great majority that i drove back, i had my eyes closed. also, i had never driven stick before. since you couldn’t see over some of the high dunes, we’d just gun the buggy straight up and then free-fall down the other side of the dune for however far down it was. ben was a great driver, but i managed to completely mangle the flags we were supposed to drive between, not on top of. after that, we climbed up on some extremely docile and boring camels for a great camel ride around the desert edge. as we drove back to kashgar, we were exhausted and chock-full of sand in places we hadn’t even imagined sand could have gone. i swear, even with scrubbing and scrubbing, we still had sand in our ears weeks afterwards. went back to our bedbug hotel (the same room, by our request) to battle our “little friends” and readied ourselves mentally for the 24-hour train ride to turpan the next day.

for my fall break, 3 friends and i decided to pay no heed to the current economic crisis or our savings accounts in order to see something we’ll probably never get the chance to do again in our lives.  my friend mariel had been enticing me with the prospect of going to this magical place called xinjiang, which is as far west as you can go in china. it’s close to the -stans (ex. paki-stan), and there aren’t many han chinese there. the xinjiang culture is heavily influenced by the islamic religion, and xinjiang is even its own autonomous region! for its relationship with the chinese govt, you’ll have to find that on your own non-sensored internet.  anyways, we went for it.  first we flew into urumqi, the capital of the region, and then took another plane to kashgar, our fist stop.

kashgar is awesome.  and the first night we were there, we found our hotel, wandered around, and found an internet cafe.  half the guys in that cafe were playing WOW or something that my untrained eye thought looked like WOW; the other half kept having their cell phones go off with really loud usher ringtones (why?).  outside, every 10 minutes or so a pickup truck with a bunch of rowdy guys playing instruments and banging drums would drive past.  we found out later that it’s a wedding tradition, to have a band in the back of someone’s truck to drive around the city and be rowdy. awesome!  we had dinner near the mosque area, where it took us forever to explain what chuanr (meat on sticks that are super popular street food) was when the waiter drags erik over to point at it and just asks, “shish kebab?” duh.  shish kebab.  why didn’t we know that?  we then wandered into the night market where this amazing machine was squeezing fresh pomegranate juice and, for a kuai, you could take a shot of pomegranate juice like a real didao local. 

the next morning was the famous sunday market, the biggest market in asia. we spent a long time looking at giant furry hats, then spent a long time looking at scarves, then tea, then carpets… it’s funny that the two boys were more shopaholic than mariel and i.  we all bought tea, but the boys bought carpets and musical instruments and… the list goes on.  we hopped in a cab from there to go to the animal market, where you can pick your lovely dinner or new hat from the hundreds of animals milling around with their owners. there were sheep and cows and horses and goats and.. camels?  yup, camels. one old guy went up to mariel and ben, looked at mariel, and then made the chinese hand gesture to ben for “10 kuai”.  meaning, he was itchin’ to buy mar for 10 kuai.  then he giggled and just walked away. 

oh, and i mustn’t forget our lovely hotel.  we got the cheapest room there, what’s called a dorm room that houses 6 people and costs the equivalent of 4 dollars a night.  the night we got there, we found out that “xiao pengyous” or “little friends” could be found crawling inside our beds and on the walls and in the creepy bathroom.  that was great.  so the first night we were all standing on the tops of our beds, the boys shouting for us girls to check their beds for small roaches and us shouting back that we can’t even look at our own.  ben’s pillow felt like a head loosely wrapped in a sheet, and he spent the night freaking out about it, whilst the rest of us tried our hardest not to use the giant bathroom because it looked exactly like the kind of bathroom that people get slashed and murdered in.  our deadbolt also didn’t work, so we made an elaborate alarm system involving a rickety coffee table and two precariously-placed teapots.  we woke up, surprisingly refreshed… and then i had the revelation just before going to brush my teeth that i had woken up without my pants. this was hilarious/peculiar because a) i was wearing tight long underwear when i fell asleep, b) i don’t remember taking my pants off at all, and c) MY SOCKS WERE STILL ON. i’m hoping it was me that did it, not our dear xiao pengyous.

if this gets controlled by the chinese govt, i won’t be surprised.  a bunch of friends and i got tickets to see kanye in concert in beijing, and we were psyched!  we rolled up to the worker’s stadium in sanlitun, where the concert was held, and found our extremely cheap and far-away seats in the indoor stadium.  and then there was kanye… he played a good show. but it was quiet.  someone must have put some audio control on the loudness, because i could play his music louder on my computer than he was in that medium-sized stadium.  the loudness was a bummer, and the little area our seats were in were also kind of a downer.  we 3 girls were surrounded by attentive (note: not ridiculously excited or wildly active, but ATTENTIVE) high school kids and young chinese kids, with the occasional clump of other americans that were standing up and singing along.  to sit quietly while kanye’s just pumpin’ out the freestyle is a shame. an absolute shame.  so me, mariel, and rebecca were enjoying kanye in the only way that he should: singing loudly to everything, standing, dancing, and being generally ridiculous. we had a great time.  i suspect the reason why our audience wasn’t as lively and fun was because a lot of the chinese kids simply weren’t able to sing along. and that’s fine. he raps fast, and rapping along takes some practice.  but it just wasn’t the same.  kanye was playing to a fairly dead crowd, not counting all the clumps of americans that were being super ridiculous and pretending to their chinese friends that they were as gangsta as can be. 

after the concert was over, kanye walks off the stage.. and all the lights go on. and then everyone, EVERYONE, grabs their things and runs out the door like the entire stadium was about to combust.  so weird.  it wasn’t like they were trying to avoid traffic, because there’s always traffic in beijing. and none of these people had cars, i’m sure.  well, while we were trying to contemplate it/plan our post-kanye party, some guards come up to us and kick us out of our seats. it’s literally 5 minutes after kanye’s walked off, and as we grudgingly walk out, we notice that the elaborate stage’s already half torn down.  like the stadium’s trying to erase any sign of a great hip-hop performance before anyone else finds out.  we’re hanging out on the steps of the workers stadium, surrounded by hundreds of other chinese and foreign kids milling around… AND THEN THEY TURN ALL THE LIGHTS OFF ON US. every single light illuminating the stadium’s entrance.  ok, zhongguo. we get it. we’re supposed to leave.  but it’s not like we were rioters or anything doing anything wrong or embarrassing. we’re just a bunch of kids trying to see kanye.

the weekend after shanhaiguan, we did a weekend camping trip on the great wall. that section of the wall was an hour or two outside of beijing, and we spent the entire saturday afternoon climbing up and down the great wall, from one point to another. since the wall runs up and down mountains, we were almost never walking on level ground. it was all uphill or downhill. i had some ridiculous impression that we were going for a little picnic that afternoon, and that the next day was our intense 4hour hike- i was wrong. and fairly unprepared. on the way there, we were behind a bunch of korean guys that were blasting techno music from their phones, so we tried to follow them (stealthily) and have techno dance parties to their cell phones (also stealthily). we also had races up the mountains (horrible, horrible idea), photoshoots, and ranting sessions about how out of shape we were. after showering at the hotel, some of us went back up for a gorgeous sunset on the wall. that night, we had a bonfire where we americans tried to explain the goodness of s’mores to our skeptical chinese tongwus (roommates) and then grabbed our pillows before trekking up to the great wall. my group decided to sleep on a guardtower, so that we could see the stars. and so that we could say that we slept in a guardtower on the great wall. i slept outside so that the tents wouldn’t be so crowded, and …. it was cold. but tolerable. we watched the sunrise while folding up our tents and devoured our warm breakfast back at the hotel. some decided to go do some more hiking, but i decided to be not so masochistic and do yoga back up on the wall. it was a great weekend, all in all.

about a month ago, 7 friends and i went to shanhaiguan, a city about 4 or 5 hours outside of beijing where the great wall (meaning the Great Wall of china, not just some cool wall) and the ocean meet.  we took a midnight train there and tried unsuccessfully to sleep on each others’ shoulders, but ended up getting into shanhaiguan at 5 in the morning bleary-eyed and irritable.  some went to go see the sunset, but andy and i ended up passing out, fully clothed, in our cheap hotel rooms that we rented for the morning.  by the time we all woke up, it was already past lunchtime.  it was somewhat miserable weather-wise, but we still got to see a really cool part of the great wall that overlooked the pacific ocean. 

the best part of the weekend, by far, was that night.  being the cheap college students we are, we found a hotel room with four beds. perfect!  it fit all 8 of us, providing that we all shared beds, and then we wouldn’t have to spend for 2 rooms.  we came back early that night, exhausted from walking around all day, and figured out the bed situation.  it worked out that all three girls were sharing a bed with a guy (friend, obviously) so that it would be easier to share the tiny beds. the other two guys who had to share a bed were andy and his roommate, and andy offered to make a nest on the floor so that his chinese roommate could have to bed all to himself.  the boys got excited with the idea of nests, so we asked the hotel staff for more blankets and pillows.  they came by and gave us tons!  andy was exhilarated, because with 3 or 4 fluffy comforters and about 3 pillows, his nest was ridiculously comfortable.  all of a sudden, the manager bursts into the room to charge us with pillow-snatching (from the other empty rooms?) stops….. and then just stares.  i was reading in bed, fully clothed because it’s cold, and my good friend erik was about as far away from he as he can be while still sharing the bed.  he was listening to music and had his back turned towards  me.  we were all in bed, texting friends back at school, reading, listening to our ipods: basically, ignoring each other as we get ready to sleep.  and the manager was shocked.  she starts taking our pillows and our blankets, saying that we aren’t allowed to go past our regulated pillow/blanket limit, and that we are absolutely not allowed to be sleeping in such a (i couldn’t hear this part) somethingsomething situation.  scandalous?  abhorrent?  i’m not sure.  our best chinese student went into the hall to reason with her, and this is what we gleaned from their heated chinese discussion:

manager:  you cannot have boys and girls in the same room!  it’s terrible! not allowed!

edith:  but we’re college students! we paid for this room, and we refuse to pay for two rooms. they’re much more expensive.

manager: but you can’t all stay in the same room!  WHERE ARE YOUR MARRIAGE LICENSES?

edith:  huh?

(confused silence on edith’s part)

edith:  we don’t have them… (manager interrupts with an indignant noise) but we’re not doing anything wrong!  we’re all just friends!  this is just how it’s done in america.  and we’re not paying for two rooms.  so if you must, take our pillows away. we’re not moving.

she ended up leaving us alone, but first closed our blinds in case our risqué behavior corrupted the eyes of every chinese person peering into our 4th-floor room. and we slept. like we promised. i’m curious to know what that manager thought we’d all do, since we would have seriously disappointed her imagination. at least now we know that next time we want to all sleep in the same room, we’ll have to buy some forged marriage licenses in order to prevent another ridiculous cultural exchange.

last friday night, we left the dorm at around 7 and didn’t come back until 8ish the next morning.  we planned a whole night of going out so that we could end up at tian’anmen square at sunrise for their flag-raising ceremony. in beijing, lots of people wake up at 4:30 to patiently stand in line and pay respects to their glorious country. i thought it was really cool, and we convinced all of the other kids who wanted to party to last all night.

first, we went to a french restaurant. i tried to speak french to the french owner, and it was a complete bust.  i’d say, “je suis 很 高興。no, that’s chinese.  je ne peux parle français 因為。。。” and then i stopped because it was completely useless to try. anytime we tried to speak french, chinese would pop out.  it was rough. next semester in paris is going to be terrible, since i’ll just speak horrible zhongçais.  after the dinner, we went to a really classy bar and mingled with the after-work crowd.  no one there was our age, so we went barhopping to other places where we could dance.  at 3:30, we walked over to a club to go dance some more, but there was a cover charge that we weren’t willing to pay.  so, we decided to power through and to a mcdonald’s near tian’anmen and wait for sunrise.  the trouble with big groups is that one cab or one small huddle of people will invariably get lost.  while three of our cabs made it safely to the mcdonald’s, one cab got lost and its four passengers wandered around a cold, dark tian’anmen until they found the stoop of a closed KFC to rest.  i bought the lost cab kids food and took another cab back to tian’anmen, where we found a giant line of people waiting to walk into the square and get “good spots”.  the guard yells at me in chinese, and after a lot of bickering and “wo bu mingbai! (i don’t understand!)”, i figure out that i’m at the front of the line, and i need to go all the way in the back of the people-with-bags line, because they’re making me put my bags full of hamburgers through the x-ray.  remember, this is still 5 in the morning.  i walk pass a giant line of silent, staring chinese people in a rumpled party dress, knee-high leather boots, and four massive mcdonald’s take-out bags.  it was the most embarrassing thing of the weekend, for sure.  at the end of the line where i took my place, the lost cab kids come and couldn’t have been happier, eating their fries and burgers.

we stood in the crowd, waiting for the sun to rise. at around 6, guards from nowhere march out in front of the flag and stand, with their perfect posture, to attention as the flag is slowly raised and the chinese national anthem blares from somewhere behind us.  it was really cool, especially seeing so many people taking time out of their early saturday morning to honor the flag.  we slowly made the trek back home and, at 7:30 or 8, fell into bed, and didn’t wake up until the sun went back down.

note: this adventure is a couple of weeks old.

a handful of us went to beihai park, a beautiful giant park + lake in the middle of beijing proper.  it was nice, wandering around and seeing all the families dragging their small children around.  chinese parks are always really fun, lively places to visit early in the morning, nice afternoons, and at night.  there’s always a ton of people just milling around. anyways, we explored the entire middle island and were getting ready to leave when we passed by the large map at the front of the behai entrance.  up in the northwest corner (our entrance, where we were, is at the southern part of the map) is “the place of extreme happiness”.  well, of COURSE we changed our plans and decided to search for this place.  who would pass up the opportunity to have extreme happiness? and this isn’t just your average happiness.  here, in this northwest corner of beihai, you’ll be granted EXTREME happiness.  so we went.

and that’s the irony.  because we spent the first 45 minutes arguing over how to get there, since half of us were tired from the first 2 hours of exploring.  there was a confusion over some mysterious ferry at the other side of the island that could cross the lake and land right at the feet of the 非常高興的地方 (our literal translation of “place of extreme happiness”), but that ferry didn’t actually exist.  then we tried to rent a boat, but you can’t just rent a boat and park it wherever you want, then come back when you were done looking around.  you had to go for a joyride and return it where you got it.  after too much bickering and apathetic “i don’t care what we do but someone should decide” comments, we decided to go by foot.  we walked all the way up to the north part of the lake, where extreme happiness can be achieved, and then we checked another giant tourist map to make sure we were going the right way. when we checked the map, THE PLACE OF EXTREME HAPPINESS DIDN’T EXIST!

we were dumbfounded.  and then we started laughing. it’s only appropriate that extreme happiness doesn’t exist.  when we looked closer at the map, we saw that the place of extreme happiness was renamed something like “the hall of pleasure and apprehension”.  in beihai, apparently, any effort to reach extreme happiness will be thwarted, and you’ll just have to settle for apprehension.  we never found our happiness, but we did have an excellent time lying in the grass near the hall of apprehension.  what a metaphorical odyssey.

so, i haven’t been terribly diligent about this blog thing.  i’m here in beijing, studying mandarin and only mandarin for the next 4 months.  since this is a fantastic new place to explore, i’ve been making a point of working hard and playing hard à la cmc style.  so, here’s a quick summary of latest adventures:

the first weekend, we went to a little bar/live music venue called yugong yishan to see a chinese rap-battle.  the long room was filled with chinese gangsta-thugs, their sultry gangsta girls, and swaggering skater boys.  the dj was spinning great beats to an empty dance floor, so we 外國人 (foreigners) decided to tear it up.  none of the other chinese joined us, so we danced like fool for at least 45 minutes.  when it came time for the battle, the dance floor filled up with intense hip-hop listeners.  the first couple of guys were decent, all homegrown chinese boys with attitude.  as the night went on, we could tell who were the favorites and who were the newbies with no street cred.  unfortunately, we couldn’t figure out what they were saying, since (obviously) it was all in chinese and our classes don’t teach us the kind of vocab they were using.

on the weekends, we go out to bars and clubs.  coming from cmc, the nightlife scene here’s something i’m not used to.  the great bars ad clubs in beijing cater mostly to 外國人, because chinese kids are more inclined to go karaoke at KTV or drink outside of a small shop.  we tried to find some 地道 (authentic) chinese scenes, but haven’t quite found them yet.  the ones we have found, however, have been fabulous for dancing, drinking, and/or hanging out.  since all the foreign students go to the same bar streets (wudaokou and sanlituan), we ended up running into people we’ve met from other programs, friends who happened to also be studying in china, and even cmc/pomona grads!  weird.

on saturday, i went with a couple of CET kids to the paralympic track and field finals, in the bird’s nest. it was great!  the bird’s nest is a magnificent example of architecture, and both the bird’s nest and the water cube are lit up at night. totally surreal. we saw people running with one or two blade-like “legs” or racing around the track on intense-looking wheelchairs.  tomorrow, i’m off to see the finals of wheelchair rugby or “murderball”, the gruesome sport that involves players being flipped out of their wheelchairs.

and aside from that, we’ve been running errands, checking out all the restaurants in our little neighborhood, and seeing the sights on the weekend.  andy, will, and wyatt are also on this program, so we spend a good amount of time together.  next weekend is a 3-way birthday weekend, so it should be fabulous.