home again!

Just a note to anyone who has followed my blog--Erin and I are back in the U.S. We are in Seattle visiting my parents and will be heading back to Kansas soon. This thing has been woefully without updates, but only because the Chinese government started blocking all blogger access in April. I'll try to make some kind of final post and put up some pictures here before I start updating my other, non-travel blog.

Factory 798

I've been wanting to visit the Factory 798 district of Beijing since we first arrived in China, but we didn't really have a good time to explore the place until last week. The galleries were on par with the Great Wall for me. That's not my characteristic hyperbole, either.

Liking 798 shouldn't be too much of a surprise for me, since I'm a sucker for a good gallery, and a giant sucker for an entire conflagration of good galleries. One of my favorite things was this gigantic installation we saw. I don't even know if installation is an appropriate word--it filled a room the size of a small auditorium. All of the parts of the room tied into the piece. The artist used the existing girders and beams in the room, all of the floor, and every part of the wall space. There was also a sculptor Erin and I were into named Li Chen. It's hard to get across the scale of his sculptures. They're gigantic. They make you feel dwarfed by them in the best possible way.

The good thing is that the gallery district exceeded all of my expectations about what we'd actually find. The bad thing is, I now want to go back there about 8 more times before we leave in the first week of July. Wait, do I even have eight weeks left? That's a strange realization. I can't believe we've already lived in China for almost 8 months. It doesn't seem possible. In any case, here are some pictures from our trip. Erin and I are both excited to go back to Beijing this weekend and get a chance to hang out with a friend of hers from Lawrence.

picture day

Apparently, Chinese High Schools have something that's sort of like a Yearbook. The book is only for the graduating seniors, though. The teachers asked me if I would get my picture taken so that I could be in the yearbook. The flurry of activity surrounding picture day has been very interesting. The teachers fixing their hair, the students being fascinated by the teachers fixing their hair, etc. One of these pictures is of some students who were, ostensibly, visiting the restroom, peeking into the room where the pictures were being taken.

Mysterious Chinese Fruit, Part 1

One of the most amazing things about living in China is the low cost of fruits and vegetables here. We buy them all the time from the open market area in our neighborhood. Chinese pomellos are the most amazing fruit I've discovered so far. They're different than the pomellos you can buy back in the states--I think they're a little sweeter, and taste a little more like your average grapefruit. Also, they're juicier and not quite so mealy. I love them. You can buy whole pineapples on the street here too, and the people selling them will peel them and core them for you, while you stand there. Sadly, it's no longer pomello season, so I figured I should try all of the fruits I can't eat, or have never eaten, back in the states. I pantomimed to the woman selling this first one, asking her if I eat it like an apple, or if I should cut into it. She conveyed that I should cut into it. I don't know what the names of these are, but they're starting to come into season here. They're little melons. They taste like a cantelope to me. It's kind of cool that they're small enough for one person to have their own little melon. Using the asian Pomello as a perfect 10, on a 1 to 10 scale, I give these little yellow melons about an 8.

This is what happens when all of the heat, in all of the apartment buildings in an entire country is turned off on March 15th...

Ninjas!

"lost" bikes never gonna break in my stride...ain't never gonna hold me down, oh no, I got to keep on mooooooooovin'

I can't remember the last time I posted something about our bicycles. I remember for awhile we were posting a lot of things. It really bugged us when Erin "lost" her first bicycle. (Cultural note: if your bicycle gets stolen in China, when you tell people about it in Chinese, the phrase you use translates roughly to "I lost my bike" and not "someone stole my bike.") I've since mellowed out. Bikes get stolen over here. It still saves a lot of money to ride them places, and riding bikes in a pack of Chinese bicyclists is one of the most exhilarating things I've ever experienced.

As a recap to our current bicycle situation, Erin's new bike got stolen last semester, so then she used my bicycle to go to school, which was actually a bicycle we inherited from an American guy named Chase who went back to the states. Eventually, we saw some guys on a street by Nankai selling super, super cheap bikes. We went and bought one for Erin, so that we could both have bikes, only to discover about a week later that the reason these bicycles were so cheap was because the gear and the pedals were actually slightly BEHIND where your body is positioned on the seat. I want you to stop for a moment and imagine pedaling a bicycle with the pedals very slightly behind your center of gravity. It was horrible. You get a good crosswind hitting you and it felt like you were moving backwards. Not having functional bikes for both of us was no huge loss, at the time, since it was the middle of winter and my school is a ways away, and Nankai is really close. I just took taxis to school and Erin rode our one good bike. The taxis sound like a ridiculous thing to do, I know, but you must keep in mind that the cost of a 20 minutes taxi ride translates to a little over two U.S. dollars here. The real loss was that I just missed riding my bike, particularly riding around to places with Erin on the weekends.

So, now that it's thawing out in Tianjin (I type, as I'm wearing my red long underwear), I decided that I wanted to get a working bike and start riding it to school. Last week I asked Sam, Erin's brother, to show me the place where he got Chase's bike, and also his own bicycle. Actually, it's the same bike Erin is using. Also, the week before last, Sam got a bicycle from the same place for a Canadian guy named Scott. Scott's wife Olga already has one of these bikes. While Sam was helping me he joked around about all of us having the same bicycles. There was one moment when Sam and I were riding together past a group of people, and he looked down at our matching bicycles and said "Riders of ROHAN!" Before Erin and I leave China I want to take a picture of everyone who owns this same bicycle riding them together at the same time. I think this can be done. Also, the guy who owns this little bicycle shop loves Sam. I think Sam should be getting some kind of kickback, or percentage from this guy. Sam Billing is the Tianjin bicycle connection.

Yesterday Erin and I rode to my school together, so that I could time the ride and not arrive late once I start bicycling there next week. It's about an eight mile ride. I'm looking forward to it. I'll try to remember to take my camera with me and get some shots of things I pass on the way. The picture I'm posting with this is from our friend Miguel's birthday party last week. Miguel is from Columbia and is one of our good friends here in Tianjin. He had his party in one of the local little park areas by some apartment buildings. I think what you see in the background of this picture looks very Tianjin to me. Miguel cooked Columbian BBQ for a bunch of international students on these little charcoal grills and we had a really nice time.

P.S.: I almost forgot! The cheap bike that was so horrible to ride was parked in the big pile of bicycles in front of our apartment all winter, with a little lock on it. I took off this lock so that I could use it, along with a massive, heavy-duty chain lock I bought, on my new bike. Estimated time before the crappy bike with the horrible center-of-gravity was stolen? 12 hours.

haha. Take that, thieves! I hope you hit a crosswind.

Day 219 in China: The photo shoot

Today is my two hundred and nineteenth day in China. In honor of this momentous occasion, I accosted Erin where she was sitting and studying on the couch and forced her into an impromptu photo shoot. Some of the phrases I blurted out as emotional instructions for the shoot included "look confused!" "Okay, now look angry!" "Okay, now you just finished a marathon!"

I will sneak in under the wire and post before a month has gone by.

Many of my friends are currently enjoying spring break. I hope everyone is having a fabulous time. Without further adieu, here are five things about China:

1. The Chinese word for road is "Lu." One of my earliest cabbie-jokes involves the word "lu." "Cabbie-jokes" are my largest category of social interaction in China. Functioning as a mute, I've developed an entire series of discreet, non-verbal, or barely verbal, interactions with people. These interactions tend to involve several hand gestures and sounds that I've perfected. For example, there is a displeased sort of smacking noise Chinese people make when something is happening that shouldn't be happening. When I catch a cab to go to my school in the morning, traffic is usually unholy in a special kind of unholy way that does not exist in cities in the United States. It amazes me that people in the U.S., a country that prides itself on automotive aptitude, know so little about what is possible when driving. For example, on an average-sized, busy street, it is in fact possible for five, sometimes even six cars to travel side by side around a corner after a light changes. It is also possible for a fleet of bicyclists to weave in and out between these cars during the same light change. While this is all going on, it is also supremely possible for an octagenarian man carrying a tin cup full of dry rice home from the local market in his pajamas to make his way across the afformentioned intersection. On rare occasions, it is also possible for a city bus to T a bicyclist at this intersection and for there to be blood on the street for several days before someone washes it off. But I digress. All these things are possible.

One "cabbie-joke" that is a favorite of mine involves a very busy street in Tianjin called "Fukang Lu." Taxi-drivers hate this street. I noticed after a month or so of being here that Fukang Lu gets really busy at about the same time each morning. My cab-drivers all start to make the smacking sound about a half a block before we arrive at Fukang Lu. So, I've started making the smacking sound along with them. Happily, the actual name "Fukang Lu" sound awfully close to an English explitive of displeasure. One of the moments in my daily life when I feel the closest connection to a Chinese person is when my taxi approaches Fukang Lu and the driver makes the smacking noise and mutters "Fukang Lu!" This muttering is my cue. I nod my head vigorously, make the smacking noise myself and then mutter "Fu**ing Lu!" along with him. He laughs, and then pats me on the back. We are together in our mutual shared experience at this moment. Last week, after this exchange with a taxi driver, the driver reached with one hand (he was driving with the other) behind his seat and pulled out a loaf of bread. As every Chinese citizen knows, Westerners eat bread constantly all day and night. It is one of our oddities, like having blue eyes and trying to force capitalism on the unwilling. The cabbie was so pleased with our feeling of togetherness that he offered me some of his bread. We ate the bread and he drove me to school. I then made exact change for him, an action that is sometimes met with an extreme degree of surprise by some taxi drivers. It is common knowledge that a bread-eating Westerner, much like a horse that has been trained to count by stomping its hoof, has only a rudimentary grasp of numbers; he may be able to give you money, but not the correct amount of money. When one of these bread-eaters does so, it is a wonder.

2. Last week I, an American, taught my Korean World History students at a public, Communist Chinese High School the five pillars of Islam while we studied the history of Islamic civilizations.

Anything is possible.

3. There are at least six or seven distinct kinds of Kim Chi. I have eaten them all.

4. If my students think the clothes I'm wearing are good, they flash me a thumbs up when I arrive to class and yell "Ben-teacher! Fashion very good today!!" This perplexes me, as I only have about five outfits I cycle through, since I could only bring two suitcases with me, and one was full of books. I will, however, miss this when I'm back teaching at KU next year. I can't imagine a jaded, Johnson County freshman who is being forced to take composition flashing me anything as positive as a thumbs up.

5. The lyrics "whisper words of wisdom" from the Beatles song "Let It Be" are difficult for Korean students to say, which is unfortunate, since this is one of their favorite songs to sing in the singing rooms at KTV karaoke centers. Even their English teachers have difficulty helping them learn how to pronounce it.

feeling better and some pictures

I'm feeling a lot better after taking the medicine Erin and I got from the pharmacy in our neighborhood. It doesn't really matter to me whether it was the Eastern medicine or the Western medicine that fixed me up. I think it was both, working in conjunction. The best part was that there was this ancient, ancient looking Chinese woman who was in the pharmacy at the same time we were. She kept coming over and watching what the pharmacists were going to give me, and asking them questions. On the way out of the pharmacy she explained to Erin and I that she's a doctor, and she wanted to make sure they were giving me the right medicine. Then she got on her bicycle and went on her merry way. Sometimes I love China. She was really nice. But on to more interesting business than me being sick.

I've been wanting to post some of these pictures for a long time now on ye olde blogge. During all of our travels I felt compelled to take pictures of door-knockers, rain-gutters, paving stones and other smaller details. I think this stemmed from a frustration with the grandiose, tourist-shots I was taking at the beginning of our travels. It's essentially impossible to convey the scope, or beauty of most of the places we've traveled in any kind of landscape shot. Or rather, grandiose beauty is far less interesting to me than idiosyncratic details. I think it's a little bit pointless to take shot after shot of places like, say, Tienanmen Square, or even the Forbidden City. I still took plenty of these pictures, but the photos I like most are the ones that focus on minutia, or on the people in my neighborhood. This is all, of course, my completely subjective, personal opinion. Without further adieu, I present to you some of the pictures I took on our trip that I think are interesting:

I think I might actually just be allergic to China.

So, we've been back home for about three days from our travels, and I'm still sick. This is a little distressing to me. I was sick for about the last week and a half of our trip. I'm starting to forget what it was actually like to be able to breath out of my nose, or to not wake up each morning hacking up...well, we won't go into that. When I was pondering this, I realized that I was actually quite ill at the beginning of our trip, when we met up with our friend Jen in Beijing. Then I remembered that I was sick when I was grading all of my students final examinations, before that trip. Thinking about grading those finals caused me to remember the different colds I had last semester (about 4 or 5). My new, tentative hypothesis is that I am, in fact, completely allergic to China. This is not an impossible theory, given that Tianjin has some of the highest air pollution levels of any city in the world. My new plan is to never leave my apartment. Does this seem like a plausible idea? I mean, teaching might be a little difficult, and buying food, but I figure I can use Skype to teach my students and then rig up some kind of magic tube to have food "beamed" into our kitchen. Until I get better, this is the imaginary world I will be living in. When we return to the states, I will breath in the sweet, sweet, Barak-odored air of freedom.

photo-editing and bronchial spasms

We've finally made our way back to Tianjin. I'm in the process of a giant photo-editing extravaganza, punctuated by what I assume is bronchitis. My goal is to make coherent, organized posts about each of the places we've traveled with a few specific photos. I do want to post one picture I tried to take, though. When we were in Xi'an, at the Terra Cotta warriors dig site/museum, I tried to take a panoramic picture using three shots, one after another. Then I used a photo-editing program to kind of cobble them together. I didn't have a tripod, but I think my dad would be proud. The actual size of the dig was the most impressive thing to me. I think if you click on the photo you can view the larger version.

curious celebrations in People's park

Erin, Nathan and I wandered around Chengdu a few days ago and went to the People's Park near our hotel. It was a little unclear what exactly was going on (which is the norm), but it seemed like there was a celebration underway specifically for older people in Tianjin. There were a number of different bands performing, and older Chinese citizens dancing and doing their exercises (those two things sometimes go hand in hand). I took a few videos, but these don't do the situation justice. I've decided I like the Sichuan people. I've been trying to learn more about the history of this province, and what I've learned so far only increases my affection for this part of China.

pandas like to eat

Here are some pictures/film-clips of pandas doing what they do best. Erin and I kept speculating just what our cat, JBJ, would do if he were to encounter a panda. Perhaps they could have an eating contest. Ah, JBJ. There is nothing quite as fluffy as you in this part of the world, but pandas are a close second.