Happy Thanksgiving; I’m going to Xian

Happy Thanksgiving, everybody! I hope you all enjoyed your turkey, potatoes, stuffing, and pumpkin pie.

I improvised in something hacked together to resemble a Thanksgiving feast with the other White People(tm) in Baoding, but it involved a lot Chinese dishes and KFC. Although Kim, a teacher at Hebei University and exemplar of social prowess that I can only dream of—probably because I regularly use words like "exemplar"–managed to save Stove Top since June for the meal. So, you know, go Kim.

I’m departing for a long weekend in Xian today, home of Terra Cotta warriors. Kim, having recently returned from there, says that the town is really cool, so that’s something to look forward to.

Adam and I have gone to great trouble to secure our soft-sleeper class train tickets for the 12 hour ride, but we have no idea how we’re getting back. Despite the entire train ticket purchasing system being digitized and networked, the powers of China have deigned that ticket sales are limited to certain regions. That is to say that we can’t buy train tickets from Xian back to Baoding until we’re in Xian; we can’t buy them in Baoding. Well, technically we can, but we went to the ticket office on the first day of sales, and over four trains, only 1 bed was available. I like Adam, but I’m not playing spoons with the guy, especially now that he’s grown a beard.

When this regional ticketing system was being explained to me, the justification for it was that it wouldn’t be fair to the residents of Xian if the rest of the country bought them out of "their" train tickets.

o.0

What?

If a person is taking a twelve hour train ride somewhere, it stands to reason that, what, 95% of the time, they will want to come back from that place. I mean, has there been a huge problem where people have cornered the ticket market of Xian, effectively sieging the locals?

I doubt it, but then again, I’ve seen things in this country that I never would have imagined. Ultimately, all one can do is look up to the sky, sigh, and say, "Oh, China."

See you in a few days. (I hope.)

Chinese Facades

Adam and I have a long weekend coming up so we’ve decided to go to Xian, home of the famous Terra Cotta Warriors. We were led to believe that train tickets are available up to ten days in advance, so we headed into Baoding proper to wrangle us up a pair.

It would turn out that we were misled; you can only buy train tickets five days in advance. I was curious to know how this was supposed to work, given that most trains that you would want advance tickets for are overnight trains anyways, i.e. you are already spending about three days in transit alone. But it took Adam and I about five minutes to figure out that the nice lady was telling us we couldn’t buy train tickets today, so having a discussion on the wisdom of the purchasing policy–knowing that she couldn’t fix it if she wanted to–seemed out of the question.

Train fare burning a hole in our pocket and recognizing that we weren’t going to make it back to school in time for lunch, we decided to buy something on the street, eventually settling on a Chinese version of a philly cheese steak. Except there was no cheese; the Chinese don’t really do dairy. Oh, sure, they’ve got yogurt and DHT treated milk–in bags–but cheeses and what not are expensive items relegated to the darkest and loneliest corners of the grocery. So no cheese, and pork instead of beef. But there were peppers and bread and grease. It was delicious.

What better to supplement our 25 cent sandwich than a dime’s worth of sweet potato grilled to within two standard deviations of perfection in a barrel? Exactly: nothing. So I meander up to the sweet old lady and ask her, expecting an answer of 1 cat, what’s the going rate? She looks at the woman next to her and then says 2.5 cats. The woman so kindly corrects her: 3 cats. Okay. Thanks. I’ll pass.

Returning to school, I make an observation about the trash. You see, the trash here appears to work like it does in America. You have a trashcan. When it’s full, you throw the trash down a chute. But the chute doesn’t empty into a dumpster or anything, it just dumps onto the ground, where the groundskeepers collect it and move it to a campus-wide garbage area. Then the garbage is collected and disposed of, by which I mean it’s carted about 100 meters away from the school and set on fire.

Seems like a lot of work just to cast the fumes from the garbage all over the school. But then again, the smog in this country is spectacular; literally, it’s a spectacle; you should see it. During the day it’s a haze that reduces visibility in some sort of mockery of the idyllic China of yore, where people had this veneration of nature. At night, I have actually been confused by a lone lit window in an apartment building because the smog was so bad that the apartment appeared to be floating. After spending a day in Beijing, I had a smoker’s cough.

Finally we came to the gate of the school, where the gatekeepers had us sign in and took our temperature. This is standard procedure since the Chinese are terrified of H1N1. I hear we’re pretty scared in America as well(?) but I still don’t get the big deal. Regardless, the gatekeepers have a little thermometer gun that they are supposed to point at your forehead to make sure you’re not bringing disease into the school. But if your temperature is high, they just make you stand around for 90 seconds then let you in. After a while, they started pointing the gun at people’s hands instead of their foreheads. Finally, the batteries have started to run out on the gun, causing it to just read "Lo" every time instead of a number. I noticed this last night. The gatekeepers just make up a number now, but the thermometer always says "Lo."

It’s a magical country.

A Scene for You

Imagine the following, if you would:

A fourth grade classroom in China, perhaps much like the one you remember from childhood, except without heating–everyone is wearing winter coat–and with more Chinese people.

I’m teaching a lesson that involves making sentences with prepositions, sentences like, "The book is in the desk." To this end, I put things in, on, or under other things while the kids have their heads down–although they are all blatantly peeking–and then having them raise their hands as quickly as possible for a chance to compete for the golden currency of childhood: points. Points evaporate at the end of class and you usually can’t redeem them for anything; they’re pretty much like credit card rewards.

The class is split up into teams, and most of them seem to enjoy the game. Two boys in particular, on different teams, mind you, need to play this game. They will get out of their chairs. They will grimace and strain their body to the utmost to raise their hand as high as possible. They’re the kinds of students you like having as a teacher, but they never quite grasp that after you’ve called on them a few times, you’ve got to call on other kids.

So pretty soon they start to complain, I think. It was in Chinese, so, you know, but as a veteran complainer, I recognize the tell-tale signs of dissatisfaction. I call on students who haven’t had a chance to go and the two boys collapse into their chairs, their spirits dashed, frustrated that even though they knew–they knew–the answer, Meiguolaoshi, i.e. American teacher, i.e. me, skipped them. Again.

Well, as much as I love crushing spirits and quaffing tears–oh, and that reminds me: my current record for most students reduced to tears in one class period? Three. Technically, I didn’t make the third one cry, that was the Chinese teacher who was assisting me, but I’m still counting it, dammit; I’ve got a reputation to maintain.

What? Right, I’d rather keep my students interested in participating rather than defeated and solemn; it makes class go more quickly and more enjoyably for all.

So I call on the two boys at the same time. They blitz up to the front of the classroom, and start to shove each other to prevent the other from finishing first while both haltingly yell, "The orange is on the desk!" The orange was indeed on the desk, so they were both right, but I wasn’t sure who was quicker. It was hard to listen for mistakes between all the panting and shouting and shoving and what not. Usually I have the kids turn around, I make a new setup, and they go again, but the guys were beyond listening to me at that point; they just kept yelling, "The orange is on the desk!"

Obviously, the only thing that would stop them was my declaration of victor, so naturally, I didn’t give one. Instead, I picked up my cartoon wolf bat and my smiley face ball, walked to the far side of the room, and started playing baseball with the kids in the first few rows. Everybody started laughing except for the two boys, who were still shouting. And I mean everybody: the students on the left, the students on the right, me, the assisting teacher, hell, even that crazy old man from Taishan showed up and started crowing, "You’ve got three more hours!"

That was a good class.

In other news, I found out that I weigh about 62 kg with my clothes on when I got the H1N1 vaccine for freebies. (From a shady woman in a garage who also sold cigarettes and fortunes—why would I make such a blatant lie?)

Flush with Rage

I haven’t been having very good luck with toilets in this country.

In most public places, they don’t have toilets as we quaint American’s know them—big, porcelain thrones upon which to relax and do business across a wide spectrum of import. Instead, they have small porcelain or stainless steel depressions in the ground that have a little hole in them: squatters. Most of the time the squatters are as clean as any other public toilet you might see, i.e. not very, but about one in ten just has a nice, foul-smelling pile telling you that perhaps you should try the next stall.

Also, toilet paper isn’t something that’s publically available except in the classiest of establishments; you bring your own or you go without. As it happens, the Chinese don’t have social stigmas against things coming out of your nose, so picking your nose and shooting snot rockets is perfectly okay. Hell, it’s necessary given that almost every male over the age of 16 smokes. With their powers combined, these two facts have resulted in an interesting phenomena: people sell tissue packets as toilet paper, and they look at me like I’m crazy when I use them to blow my nose.

It took me a long time to use a squatter for anything but number one, but I’m getting ahead of myself.

The toilet in my room is in the Western style. I greatly appreciated that when I got here and I still do. However, I’ve never seen a flush mechanism like the one’s in China before. Instead of having an easy-to-maintain handle and chain setup, they’ve got some sort of strange, pneumatic, alchemical button thing that makes the toilet flush. But you don’t push the button directly, instead, the lid of the tank has another button, and you press that button, which presses the button in the tank. At least, that’s the idea, but the button on the lid isn’t quite long enough to reach the button in the tank, so really, it’s just for show, a symbol of functionality that is utterly without function. In other words, I have to take off the lid to flush the toilet.

That’s not really a big deal, but apparently some plumbing under my room is creating torrential downpours on the first floor. In order to allow maintenance to fix this, I moved to a room across the hall about a week ago. Well, that’s partially true: my Internet connection was not moved, so I have my computer on a small desk in my old room and everything else in this new room.

The new room is similar to the old room, as you might expect. However, the toilet is completely broken. It leaks into the bowl, which means that it never fills up, which means that it never turns off, which means that it is always using water. And it doesn’t have a lid, which means all this fresh but slow moving water is open to the air. Which means that the first time I walked into my new bathroom, a cloud of mosquitos erupted from the toilet area. My scream only reached the halfway point of its crescendo before my mouth and nose was filled with the hungry critters.

I beat a hasty retreat. It was clear that I would have to lead a military campaign if I wanted this new room. And I did want it. Because all of my stuff (except my computer) was in it. So I grabbed my book from orientation—the one I haven’t looked at since orientation—and put on some death metal. And then I mosquito after mosquito after mosquito. It was very much like Independance Day, except without Jeff Goldbloom or Will Smith, the mosquitos had no chance.

Things would get worse in my new room before they got better. The next day I awoke to find that the room I was to use to hang my laundry was instead home to about four of the big ass wasps I put up a picture of a few posts ago. "Oh, teehee, one big wasp; I’ll never go in that room again." F that. I just conquered an entire nation of mosquitos and my orientation book was hungry for more blood. More death metal, and I took it to the limit.

A few days ago, Adam and I went up to Datong, which has some Buddhist grottos and a hanging monastery. We took a sleeper train both ways, which, let me tell you, is far and away the best way to get long distances. However, before I closed my eyes for the night, I was enjoying some Ben Folds when the fancy took me to use the bathroom. Down the narrow hallway I went. Into the bathroom, closed the door. I untucked my shirt and the cable to my iPod snagged. Ben’s mellow voice was silenced so abruptly. Then a slight jerk on my head as the iPod reached the end of the headphone cable and slipped off. Clang. Clong. Down the squatter it went.

I blinked. It had all happened so quickly. I peered down into the toilet. Could I retrieve it? Hmm. Hmm. I couldn’t see it. Did I dare reach my hand into a poop chute that almost certainly hadn’t been cleaned since the train car was put into service?

No. No, I didn’t.

And I still had to pee. Would I piss on my iPod, still patiently, unsuspectingly waiting to resume Ben Folds in its new, terrible grave?

Yes. Yes, I did.

And during my day in Datong, Adam and I came upon a Wal-mart. Having some hours to kill, we walked around it for a while, but lunch didn’t agree with me. I had to use the toilet, squatter or no. I approached an employee. "Ce suo," I said. She looked confused. I repeated myself, with more urgency, but to no avail. I made a gesture of washing my hands. Her eyes lit up in recognition.

She led me to the hand cream aisle. I didn’t hand cream. I needed to not poop my pants. She brought over a coworker who spoke slightly more English. Adam found the key with "WC." Hooray.

I was led to the bathroom. There was a western style toilet, but it was covered in filth. I used the squatter, and I would visit that stall another five times that night. It was a magical, cathartic night.