Monday, June 30, 2008

The Internet is Fixed Part 2

Update: My roommate is currently reading a book while standing up next to his desks and doing low and then high karate style kicks.

I decided to share some pictures to show you what the octopus and ye xiao look like.



And as an added bonus, here is a fun painting we found on the way into the men's locker room at the gym we bought a membership to. We think that bulge looks suspicious, it is a bit too low to be a hip...





Okay, my roomate has started playing some type of flute. Will the random activities ever cease?

The Internet is Fixed

The internet is fixed, yet still moderately slow.

First things first, as per a few requests I will teach you how to pronounce Hangzhou. The hang is pronounced with the vowel sound of long, but with an H instead of an L. The zhou is pronounced like the name Joe. Hong-joe.

The first day of class was today, and it was fantastic. One of my teachers has a thick northern accent, which means that when he speaks it sounds like he is swallowing on his sentence. I don't have any good classroom stories. Yet.

I did, however, eat some awesome food in the last few days. I've been in charge of ordering food for the most part since my Chinese is the best in the circle of friends I go out to eat with. I have been searching for this green bean dish I used to eat all the time in Beijing, and though I have not had luck with finding it yet I have gotten very close. Tonight we ate 'mian', or basically a bowl of noodles in broth with meat and cilantro. I opted to eat the whole bowl and then drink the broth so I could take a picture of my accomplishment, and if I may recommend: don't drink all the broth. My stomach is battling me viciously right now. In any case, I found some excellent beer which translates best as "Redstone Beer". It was actually quite tasty, I bought it at a small store before we went into the restaurant and brought it in to drink with dinner. I offered some to my friend Bob, who upon drinking it demanded to know how much it cost because it was far too good to not be expensive. I told him it was 2.5 kuai (for conversion, divide that by 6.5 to get to dollars). Upon hearing how cheap it was, Bob accidentally broke the language pledge and yelled "No fucking way!" in a large, crowded Chinese restaurant. Now Chinese people in Hangzhou don't speak any English beyond what they learn in movies. This means they can say "Hello", "Goodbye", and the F word. Thus they heard one of the key words of English they knew being yelled from a table of foreigners, and thus we got some fantastic attention.

I am fairly certain Chinese people go crazy after 10pm, or at least my roommate does. He is extremely spastic right now. He will slap at mosquitoes in a very animated fashion, or rub his face vigorously while making "oooh woo woo" noises, or rummage in his desk while making "waa waa waa" noises with his mouth, and he just finished eating what he insists is a peach in a pace that was far too fast and crazed to be safe. He offered me this 'peach', and I ate, but I am not certain what it is. For one thing it is green, and starting to turn red on parts, so I don't even know if it is ripe. My experience with peaches and their colors tells me that this is not a peach, and the taste is unlike any peach or any fruit I've ever eaten. The weirdest yet is that he just came at me asking if I want to go eat 'ye xiao', or the local night food. The stuff is fantastic to eat, but I don't want to go at 11 when I have class early in the morning. After I said no, he said it was too bad and ran around the room yelling "YE XIAO YE XIAO YE XIAO, WO AI YE XIAO" (I LOVE YE XIAO). I don't know if it is the radio or the peach or if this is just how he gets on monday nights, but I am a little bit nervous right now.

To elaborate on the ye xiao, the translation is 'late night snack' or 'midnight snack', and the stuff is fantastic. They have all sorts of things. There are all sorts of omelette type concoctions, all sorts of odd sandwiches, dumplings, stir fried bean sprouts or rice, and kabob style food. The trick is that it is all made the moment you order it right in front of you. The ingredients are all laid out, and you point to what you want or don't want added and watch as it all comes together. One example is this fantastic sandwich type thing this one man makes. He ladles what looks like pancake batter onto a hot flat circular grill top. He thins it out and it quickly becomes what is best described as bread, it has the consistency of thin noodles or dumpling wrappers. He then starts adding things, asking if you want them along the way. He throws out a handful of green onions, followed by sweet sauce, then a spicy one, then he peels the bread off the grill and folds it over once. Next he adds another sauce, some wafer like substance, bean sprouts, and then folds it again and again. He cuts it in half and puts it in a little plastic bag for you. It tastes fantastic. They also can and do put everything they can onto a stick and grill out. I love the lamb meat that is grilled on the street, but they also have green beans, peppers, bananas, and even octopus, and a host of other things on skewers that you can ask to have grilled. All the things I've listed I've tried and taken pictures of the eating process, and there are some things I've eaten that I don't to this day know what they were. It is fantastic though, if it can be put on a skewer you can find it to get grilled Chinese style.

All this food talk is making me hungry. Perhaps I will go for some ye xiao after all...

Friday, June 27, 2008

The Internet Is Slow

I finally managed to find a decent place for my computer to use to connect to the internet. Until monday I can sit in the room next to the office and connect to their wireless. It is however, a very weak signal and very slow, so I don't think I can get on Skype or anything else. Posting these entries takes a long time.

In any case, that is how I posted these, and here is my mailing address in China both in English and in Chinese characters:

CET Academic Programs
Zhejiang University of Technology
Number 6, Zhaohui District
Box # 1026 CET
Hangzhou, P.R.C. 310032

310032 中国浙江省杭州市
朝晖 6 区浙江工业大学
1026 信箱
CET 项目 学员班"

Zhejiang Gongye Daxue is a college.

I discovered today that I won't get internet until Monday. Apparently to get internet service in our rooms we must first have our passports processed. From what I'm told, it seems that due to the olympics everyone is checking passports for everything these days. When I went to get a gym membership I had to have my passport, to get an internet connection approved they first want to see your passport and check your visa, to get a hotel room or do pretty much anything it seems you must have a passport. I guess it is safe and a good move on China's part with the Olympics coming, but it sure slows things down.

I have a steadily growing collections of cards; it seems everything in China has a certain card for it. I know have a gym membership card, a card for the dining hall, a program insurance card, and soon I will be getting a bus card, a student identification card (not to be mistaken with my international student identification card I had to get before leaving), and who knows what else. The abundance of cards I carry around with me almost requires a second wallet at this point.

Today was a fulfilling day though, I finally got to get the green bean dish I've been searching for in America for 6 months. I hope that grammar is correct, I am already losing some of my English and writing long sentences is becoming increasingly difficult. They keep seeming like run on sentences of some of the grammar seems awkward. But I digress. Aside form that dish, we also got to go get full body massages afterwards.

It did, however, rain all day today. It has rained every day since I got here, and currently it is Hangzhou's rainy season so it should keep raining every day for another few weeks. The rain itself isn't that bad, I learned how to say umbrella and subsequently bought one, the problem is the humidity that results. It is about as hot as Houston but much, much more humid. All of us white people are sweating everywhere we go, inside or outside we are constantly being besieged by the humidity and sweating. The only place this is a benefit is in the gym. Not only do you think you are getting a better workout than you normally do, but you also get that nice glisten that makes you look like you are oiled up for a bodybuilding competition. Hmmm, on second thought that is just gross.

We took our placement tests today. That is all on that topic, more tomorrow after we find out where we ended up.

I don't have any embarassing stories that come to mind, but I can say it is fun being a leader everywhere we go. I am always the one chosen to figure out how to get somewhere, or who and how to ask certain questions. Additionaly, my room has become the cool hangout. Last year in Beijing Blake's room was the cool place to be, he was on the first floor and his roommate was cool and it was just convenient to all meet there and discuss our plans for the day or the weekend or whatever. This time I got placed on the first floor right near the stairs, so I have the convenient room that we all gather in to plan and hang out in between excursions. I leave my door unlocked as people come and go, and it is really fun to be Mr. Popular until you need to shower or change clothes. Then it gets kinda weird, especially if someone doesn't understand the vocabulary for shower and change and doesn't realize I'm trying to ask them to leave for a moment.

Ooh, and to end on a good note, I forgot to write that yesterday I finally found and bought the "Black Man Toothpaste". I had seen the brand in America after my teacher showed it to me, but apparently they changed the English name to avoid racial stereotyping. That, however, is all they changed. Fantastically enough the cartoon picture of the smiling black man in a top hat and suit is still there, and the "Black Person Toothpaste" is stll written on the box in Chinese. And as an added bonus, a snoopy mug came with my toothpaste. Chinese grocery storse have this fantastic policies of giving away a lot of free things with items that are on special, but it seems the free item always has nothing to do with the product. For example, the snoopy mug taped to the box of toothpaste, or the folding laundry hamper taped to a small vacuum.

WOOO CHINA.

Hangzhou is a city.

As of this writing on this wednesday the 26th of June I still am without internets. I finally got my computer plugged in and charging, so at least I can type these up and create a cascade of blog entries for super happy fun time reading whenever I get my internet fixed. They tell me this should be tomorrow. We shall see.

As I expected, sleeping on the plane was impossible. I think of the twelve and a half long hours on the plane to Shanghai I slept for about 45 minutes of it total. The three of us all traveling from UT all got to sit together, and I was the aisle seat for both flights. The flight from Shanghai was especially interesting, since white people were in extremely short supply the three of us sitting together were a bit of an oddity, and the people around us chose to talk to me about it. I was the most accessible and thus became the liason for our group, and I must admit it helped the time pass. The flight wasn't too bad, the old lady sitting in the row in front of us got cut off - it was hilarious. In addition to that we had a child behind us, who wasn't much of a problem with the exception of 20 minutes during the middle of the flight. The child slept the rest of the time, but those 20 minutes were brutal. The child woke up, and the only speaking it had mastered were how to say mom and dad in Chinese. The child said this nonstop in the 20 minutes she wasn't sleeping, and at one point the parents had her raised up behind my sit to let her look at me. All 3 of us had moments where we nearly struck an infant. "Baba...mama...baba...mama" for 20 minutes without pause and a constant tempo of baba's and mama's as it annoyingly struggled to dominate its parents attention.

After getting off the plane we met 3 of the Chinese roommates. Oddly enough, not our roommates but some random ones that came to meet us. They were nice, and the ride on the public bus to Hangzhou gave me a chance to catch 3 hours of sleep. The only thing eventful and worth mention is that at some point in time during my sleep on the bus my phone escaped my pocket without my knowledge. Thus today I had to buy a new phone. I was not thrilled.

My roommate is fantastic, we get along well and I'm sure I will have some great stories from interacting with this guy. When I first met him in the room I was so sleep deprived that I shook his hand literally 4 times. I introduced myself and shook his hand. After he asked me where I was from, I told him I was from Texas and shook his hand. I asked him to write his Chinese name for him, and after he wrote his I chose to write mine, then I gave him back then pen and shook his hand. But wait, there is still the best of the four handshake setups. Following this I gave him his gift, told him I was going to go shower...and shook his hand. I apologized before going to bed for being a bit happy with the handshaking and that I was just nervous and tired. Each time I shook his hand I didn't realize I was doing it until I saw the weird, awkward look on his face and noticed we were shaking hands. Apparently after I hit the 30 hour mark of no sleep I start shaking everyone's hand. Who knew? On a side note, the gift he gave me was a Pabst Blue Ribbon, which I think is a fantastically random if horribly tasting gift.

The shower is by far the thing I have most enjoyed so far in Hangzhou. It is glorious, not only do I have my own shower and bathroom, but the bathroom has this fancy little fan that you turn on when you shower. When this is activated it blows hot air and turns the bathroom into a sauna, effectively letting me shower in a steam room. If it weren't for the faint smell of mildew that slowly gnaws away at sanity I probably wouldn't ever leave the shower. So at the top of the list of things I enjoy we have the shower, and after that comes the food. My roommate chose some crazy food for me for lunch and dinner, things which I will get pictures of tomorrow, and they were almost all fantastic. The one exception was the water that had seaweed floating in it that tasted like how a fish market smells. I love how China has this weird ability to take the oddest smells and put them into food. The fish market smell water ranks up there with the milkshake that tasted like a bike tire smells and tofu that tasted like how a barn smells. It is so fascinating you almost don't mind the taste as you try to figure out how they did it. Almost. For dinner we had some spicy mian (noodles), and oh the goodness. I finally found some spicy food in Hangzhou, and this stuff knocked my pants off. In classic Marco family style the spicier it got the faster I ate, and as I write this 2 hours after dinner my lips are still feeling the slight painful tingle from the mian. Perfection.

The most exciting thing that has happened so far is the roommates' and teachers' response to my Chinese. I must admit, it is really inflating my ego. I won't tell all the stories of how I've surprised people at restaurants and bars by understanding everything they say (something that I couldn't do completely in Beijing, but the accent is so much easier here). I think learning how to understand the intelligible people in Beijing really helped me, that and the last semester of Chinese I took with rapid Chinese speaking in a southern accent every day. The most important and exciting result of this is that I got a special interview just now with the program director and the academic diretor. They were impressed from some of the things I had helped them explain and in Chinese and act out to students earlier, and when I walked into the office (which was apparently a zone where we could speak English and ask questions, something I didn't know) and asked all my questions in Chinese, they were impressed and asked me to sit and talk awhile. Hence, the interview. They asked me if I feared new words, and then asked if I feared being in the top level. I said I didn't fear either, but the way she chuckled and smiled as she asked, I had this feling that whether I said I was afraid or not she was going to put me in the highest level. I got the feeling they weren't sure yet what textbook I was going to be using, but I am quite sure they are going to try and kick my butt and I am going to really enjoy it.

Challenge time. Hoo ha.

Sunday, June 22, 2008

China is a country

Last year when I went to China I was a bit lax in communicating with those left behind stateside. My mother, needless to say, freaked out trying to understand what I was going through. As a result, she began reading random blogs about other students studying in China to try and understand me.

I figure this time, the least I can do is provide her a sporadically updated blog that actually has pictures of her son on it. If you end up reading this, I am sorry.