Wednesday, October 13, 2010

Clueless in China

One problem I keep running into here is that the restaurants, markets, cafes and snack shops don't work they way they do back home. It's rare to be able to just walk up to a counter, point at whatever looks good and hand over the cash. I never know how, where and when to order things (点菜,diǎncài) or pay for them (付钱,fùqián). It's never as straightforward as it looks. I’ve been here over a month already and I still haven’t gotten used to it. In restaurants I never know whether there's table service or counter service and whether I have to pay before or after the meal. When buying food at a canteen or particular items at a store you might have to go to a cashier, tell them what you want to buy, pay for it and then bring the receipt back with you to get your stuff. Sometimes stores have separate tills for different products scattered through the store and you have to go hunting for the right one. Even buying bulk food at the market can be a challenge because you need to get it weighed and priced before you go to the cashier and you need to find the right station to get each item weighed. Sometimes when buying bulk you need to buy a certain amount - I'll start filling a bag with something and the staff will start jabbering at me in Chinese about weight and prices and I just get totally rattled and don’t know what to do. It's hard because my Chinese is really not strong enough for some of the complicated explanations I run into and I end up looking like an idiot a lot of the time.

But I'm gradually starting to figure out how to order in restaurants and cafes, or at least how to ask the staff where and how to pay. Today, for the first time since I arrived, I managed to go to the canteen (食堂, shítáng), order a meal and pay for it all by myself, with no help from a Chinese-speaking friend and no confusion or trouble at all. Well, they gave me hot soymilk when I specifically asked for cold, but it was still delicious, so whatever. For lunch I got the 4.9 Yuan combo with rice, crunchy stirfried lotus root (one of my new favourite veggies) and tomato fried eggs (番茄炒蛋, fānqié chǎodàn). Chinese tomato fried eggs are a super tasty dish that I can usually rely on as a vegetarian option when I eat out here. The ones I got at the canteen today were cold, clumsily made, and actually pretty terrible, but they tasted of sweet, sweet victory.

Chinese word of the day:
开心
Kāixīn
Happiness; to feel happy (lit. start/open heart)

Sunday, October 10, 2010

The art of learning Chinese

After a week of hanging around on the campus, I was kind of relieved to resume classes again on Friday. I was also stoked to start my Chinese calligraphy class! It’s one of my two electives this semester. The other is Kung Fu, which I’m super excited about. So far I’ve attended each class once and we just covered the basics – we learned about the history and various styles and implements of calligraphy, and in Kung Fu we did some stretching and strength exercises and learned the basic stances.

Calligraphy is a lot harder than it looks, and I never thought it looked easy. You need to simultaneously pay attention to the style, position, proportion, thickness, energy, and order of each stroke as you try to compose them all into a balanced and well-constructed character, and one wrong stroke can ruin the whole thing. I love how calligraphy manages to be both a strict discipline and highly expressive art form, combining the symbolic meanings of the words and the aesthetic appearance of the characters with the artistic expression of painting. A character is never painted the same way twice. I’ve also found it to be very meditative; focusing so many energies on a single brushstroke, it’s really easy to push every other thought out of your mind and just lose yourself in it. Actually, I’ve found it’s pretty much impossible to do it with something else on your mind. The first few times I tried it I found it kind of exhausting. After about an hour of copying characters I just couldn’t concentrate. Every time I try, though, I get a little more into it and feel a little more relaxed after. Last time Benson took me to the art room to practice, we were there until closing.

Hanging out in the art room is an experience in itself. Chongqing isn’t a tourist destination and the few tourists it does draw are Chinese; very few foreigners come here. Almost nobody I’ve talked to has travelled outside of the country, and I’m getting the impression that most people haven’t ever met a westerner in person and some have never even seen one. But western music, movies, TV shows and celebrities are popular here, and English studies are compulsory from middle school through high school, so they’re all very curious to meet us. Whenever I practice calligraphy in the art room with Benson, the other students do a double take and start whispering among themselves when they see me walk in. When I sit down and start painting they all crowd around to watch, and assuming I don’t understand any Chinese, they all start asking Benson questions about me – where am I from, am I his girlfriend, etc. It’s pretty intense and can be kind of uncomfortable, but it’s great practice and everyone’s friendly. Once they find out I speak some Chinese they start complimenting me and asking questions – how do I like China, can I eat Chinese food, have I been to any other cities in China – and then they’ll say “let’s be friends!” and give me their phone number. A girl I met there the other night is taking me to an art show on Sunday; I have no idea if it’s classical or contemporary, but I’m really looking forward to it and I’ll be sure to take lots of pictures.

By the way, I’ve started uploading all my pictures to Facebook instead of Windows Live because it’s just way more practical and I can write more in the captions, so for anyone who wants to check out the visual counterpart to this blog just go to my Facebook photo album. Maybe someday I’ll be able to load photos on Blogger, but for now this is just easier.

Chinese word of the day:
书法
Shūfǎ
Calligraphy

Friday, October 8, 2010

Happy birthday to me!

As if I need more excuses to shop and party here, Sunday was my birthday, and with all my friends and family on the other side of the planet it was entirely up to me to make my own fun. I had originally planned to go see the Dazu rock carvings, a UNESCO world heritage site and one of Chongqing's top tourist destinations, but after my sightseeing experience the other day I thought better of it. Instead I had a lovely shopping spree financed by various family members (many thanks to you) and bought myself some cute new clothes and hair accessories. I also succeeded in locating a western-style café and tasted my first cup of real coffee in almost a month - hard to find, confusing to order, and it cost me 30 Yuan, but it was a perfect cup of coffee. Totally worth it.

Later I went with the roommate and some friends for a somewhat surreal hotpot experience at a large franchise Hotpot restaurant. Halfway through dinner, some loud Chinese ballad started pouring from the speakers and the staff all assembled in the dining room to show their gratitude and respect for the customers with an excruciating dance routine. Afterward we had cake, cookies and bad Great Wall Cabernet from paper cups in the lobby of the foreign students’ dormitory, and then we checked out the Blue Bar, a crowded, beer-soaked little smoke pit just off campus that all the foreign students go to. I disobeyed any shouts of "ganbei" and went to bed with my dignity intact.

I got some pretty sweet loot, too. Along with the coffee and clothes I bought on my shopping spree, my roommate bought me a hat, and Paul gave me a couple of badass reproduction Cultural Revolution propaganda posters which I’ve been coveting forever. My awesome new friend Benson, who’s been helping me lots with my Chinese and teaching me calligraphy, made me a seal with my Chinese name inscribed on it. Overall, a very successful birthday was had!

Chinese lesson of the day:
祝你生日快乐!
Zhù nǐ shēngrì kuàilè!
Happy birthday! (lit. "wish you birthday happy")

Monday, October 4, 2010

Touring China 101

Oh boy. This is gonna be a long post.

So. One of my priorities on this holiday was to see a little more of the city, and on Saturday my roommate Bridget and I went with our Chinese friend, Paul, to visit Jiefangbei, Chongqing’s central district, for a little shopping and sightseeing. Being a holiday weekend, we were expecting crowds, so we caught an early bus. When we arrived in the downtown core, most of the stores still hadn’t opened, so we wandered the streets a bit and ended up in a large open square full of people and vendors hawking all kinds of goods. Several people handed us flyers advertising bus tours to several tourist attractions in Chongqing, and although I’m generally not a tourist attraction kind of person, it seemed like a fun and spontaneous way to spend the afternoon and get the touristy stuff out of the way, so we decided to go with one that hit three or four different spots in six hours for 50 Yuan (about $8.50) per person.

We told the guy we were interested and he led us out of the square and down a busy street to a parking lot full of bored-looking people to wait for the bus. In typical Chinese fashion, they didn’t give us any information about when the tour started or how to pay, and nobody else seemed to know, either. We asked around and eventually someone informed us that we had to pay at the tour company office, which we’d passed just up the street, so we doubled back, gave them our money, and returned to the parking lot to wait some more. Twenty minutes later there was still no bus, so Paul went asking around again. He started talking to a woman who turned out to be the tour guide, a very bad-tempered looking lady who talked very fast and very loud until people started crowding around them. He eventually came back to tell us that, due to the legal risks, the tour wouldn’t take foreigners. We went back to the office to get our money back and there was another loud, fast conversation which I couldn’t follow save for frequent utterances of “laowai”; foreigner. Across the street was another tour company, so we went there instead. Originally we were turned away there, too, but something must have changed their mind, because we were informed that if we came back at 12:30 we’d be able to go on a tour.

Somehow, in the confusion, we’d gotten hooked up with a Chinese family who seemed to want to hang out with us, and we still had two hours to kill before the tour started, so they took charge and marched us through the various nearby tourist spots. We took pictures in the square, sped through a museum of famous Chinese historical figures, and took a half-hour boat cruise a few hundred metres down the Yangzi river and back. We returned to the tour company office at 12:30 and, after more shouting and confusion, they must have told us that the bus would pick us up somewhere else, because the family whisked us out of the office and took us down the street. We walked for a good 20 minutes or more before flagging down a seemingly random bus as it passed by. And that, apparently, is how bus tours work in China.

The bus was hot and crowded, and, after getting up so early and having such a strange morning, I was exhausted and quickly fell asleep in my seat. I was immediately woken up by screeching voices and Chinese music punctuated by a laugh track; they’d put a comedy tape on the TV at the front of the bus and were apparently playing it at full volume for the comfort and amusement of their guests.

I drifted in and out of sleep all the way to the first destination, a quaint old-fashioned Chinese village called Ciqikou (tseh-chee-ko). The tour guide told us to be back in 45 minutes and we headed to the main gate of the village, where we were funnelled into the dense stream of people that swelled into the narrow lanes and alleys of the village. With bodies pressed against us on all sides, we were swept along in the river of tourists, helpless to stop and look at anything. Once in a while the crowd would shout and flatten against the walls as an overflowing garbage cart bristling with discarded meat skewers would rumble through, taking up nearly the entire alley. A couple of times we managed to break out of the crush and duck into a less-crowded shop to take a breather and quickly peruse the goods before resuming our slow shuffle toward the exit. By the time we made it back to the bus we were 20 minutes late and about half of the people still hadn’t come back, so we hung around the main gate eating whatever snacks we’d managed to buy in the village.

Eventually, when everyone was safely back on the bus, we set off about an hour behind schedule for our second destination. Once again, I quickly fell asleep to the sound of the screeching Chinese variety show. When I woke up, we were in gridlock traffic, slowly cooking under the hot Chongqing sun. When it became clear that we weren’t going to get any further, they opened the doors and we all got out of the bus to walk the last kilometre or so to our destination, which I think was some kind of scenic natural spot – I never actually found out. When we finally got there, we took one look at the front gate and decided not to bother; it was clogged with even more bodies than Ciqikou. We bought some snacks from the street vendors in the parking lot, checked out a couple of tacky tourist shops, got photographed with some amused locals, and waited for the braver people to return before turning around and walking back to the bus.

By the time we were ready to leave the second destination it was clear that the tour was over. We crawled back to Jiefangbei to the sound of the comedy tape and the apologies of the tour guide and got downtown just in time to catch one of the last buses back to campus. So, in the end, I may not have seen much in the way of quaint villages and local scenery, but the cultural experience was a hell of a lot more authentic than any tourist attraction.

Chinese word of the day:
拥挤
yōngjǐ
Crowded