What I've Learned: October

It's crazy that another month has gone by.  As long as those first few days felt, when I was running around from apartment to apartment, trying to get settled -- the subsequent eight weeks seem to have flown by.  The weather is finally starting to cool down here, after over a month of pleasant temperatures and sun.  I'm told I should be dreading the winter, but I think I can take it.

WIL in October:

• The same diaspora rule that applies to sports, applies to natural disasters.  Spent the past three days following the news, tweets, status updates, and really breathtaking images that Hurricane Sandy left behind.  I hope everyone is doing well back home.
• I think that Chinese fluency may be a pipe dream -- or something I'd need about a decade living somewhere other than Shanghai to achieve.
• Taiji (tai-chee) isn't restricted to big groups, a la the old folks on the Bund.  People do it on their own all over the place, including in my apartment courtyard.
• Some Chinese people are surreptitiously interested in the American election.  My colleague snuck peeks at the debate videos, even though his English probably isn't good enough to understand most of it.
• Chinese food at its best (my friend Huck's, for example), may be the best tasting homemade food in the world.
• Chinese food at its worst, or even approaching its worst, is inedible (though this may be true of everything).
• My Chinese handwriting is better than most Chinese peoples'.
• Chinese clementines are greenish, and much more sour than American ones.  But they're still good.

• Taiwan is a sensitive subject here.  I suppose I knew this already, but I didn't think it'd be a real problem for "regular" Chinese people.  Here's the story: a Chinese colleague asked me whether my Chinese teacher from college was Chinese.  I replied that he was Taiwanese.  Nonplussed, he told me that "Taiwan is part of China."  I just nodded, realizing my mistake, and took the next opportunity to drop the subject.  A few days later, on my way to lunch with the same colleague, he asked, cautiously, "you know that Taiwan is part of China, right?"  I said yes, and then added "it's complicated."  As soon as I said it, I realized I should've just stuck with yes.  "No it isn't," he responded.  "It's simple.  Taiwan is in China."
• Chinese elevators are the slowest elevators in the world.  It's not just speed.  There must be something wrong with their programming, because they take forever to come.
• People still use Polaroid cameras.  Exhibit A:

That's a Polaroid shot of me, volunteering at the Xinzhuang Elderly Care Center, where we built paper flowers with the patients.  By "we" I mean everyone other than me.  I was incapable of doing it.  My flower looked like a crumpled up paper airplane.

• I am very good at hitting "doubles" in darts.  I'm very bad at hitting everything else.  It should be pointed out that the doubles are the farthest away from the bull's eye without being off the board, so I don't think it's necessarily a good thing that I'm good at hitting them.
• Badminton is a funky sport.  It's ridiculous to watch.  And it requires surprisingly few of the skills associated with tennis.

Buzz

Should I end up losing my marbles (this assumes a fact not in evidence that I have not done so already), my biographers may ultimately point to this blog post as the first signs of my pending insanity.  So I'll just get right down to it:

I'm having trouble sleeping.  And it's a mosquito's fault.

Okay, so that doesn't sound all THAT crazy.  I've gotten mosquito bites before -- a lot of them -- so many, in fact, that my mother used to claim that my blood was just sweeter than anyone else's in the family (she did not make this gem of a line up, I can assure you).  So I'm pretty used to dealing with the itching.  I'm pretty good at sleeping through it at night, and grinning and bearing it during the day.

This is different.

This is, as far as I can tell, just one mosquito.  A super mosquito.  With stealth powers.  And camoflage.  And invincibility.

Let me try to explain.  Over the past two weeks, I've woken up in the middle of the night with mosquito bites.  This happened when I initially moved into my apartment -- it was still summer, it was humid out, and I frequently left my window open during the day while I was at work to let some air (and, it turns out, mosquitos) into my room.  As the weather started to cool down, I started keeping my window closed so as to keep the mosquitos out, convinced as I was that I had managed to kill all of the ones that had infested my room during weeks of open-window-policy.  It's been a few weeks since I've seen a mosquito in our apartment, so I think it's safe to say that mosquito season is finally coming to an end.

Except, it seems, in my room, and except, it seems, after I go to bed.  At first, evidence of SuperSkeeter's existence manifested itself in those middle-of-the-night bite discoveries.  I would wake up, feel the bites, get pissed off, eventually get back to sleep, and then -- wierdest thing -- wake up with no evidence that the bites ever existed.  They were, well....vanishing bites.

Now, bored of simply disturbing my slumber after the REM cycle has begun, SuperSkeeter has decided to up the ante.  He doesn't wait for me to fully enter the REM cycle.  In an apparent game of mosquito Chicken, SuperSkeeter has started to test the limits.  He waits until I'm lying in bed, lights off, eyes closed, and then BUZZ! right in my ear, and up I get, lights on, hands at the ready, eager to clap the fucker out of existence.  If I'm lucky, I see him for about a second and then, like Kaiser Soze, poof, he's gone.  In the past two nights, convinced that I've had him dead to rights, I've smacked the air vigorously, leaving nothing but ringing hands to show for my efforts.  Sometimes, I'm so close to sleep by the time he BUZZ!es that I just flail about, smacking myself in the face in the hopes that I'll get him out of literal blind luck.

And yet he endures, like the Energizer Bunny, his appetite for the destruction of my night's sleep (and my blood) as endless as my accuracy as a mosquito slapper is poor.  I used to have a rep with these guys.  My reputation as a mosquito killer rivaled that of the blue zappy thing.  SuperSkeeter has shattered that in a matter of weeks.

Last night, I tried setting a trap for him.  After several cycles of lights off, BUZZ!, slap, lights on, see him sort of, slap, miss, rinse and reapeat, I decided to lie down without turning the lights off so as to not have to waste precious time hitting the switch before leaping to attention when he made his fly-by.  Several hours, even more missed slaps, and many bites (none of which, of course, were still there) later, I woke up to the sound of my alarm.  I had finally fallen asleep, exhausted from my failed mission against SuperSkeeter.  The light had remained on the whole time.

I promise he's real.  I'm reminded of the episode of SportsNight when Casey is plagued by a metaphorical fly that nobody else can see, even on tape.  Let me remind all of you naysayers that in the end, the fly turns out to be real.  Many of you are probably grappling with the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy, and therefore have little sympathy for me.  That's understandable.  But let me tell you.  SuperSkeeter is no slouch.

Hurricane!

To the East-Coast-dwelling readers of this blog (who make up at least 80% of the readership): stay safe this week!  I've been reading about fierce Ms. Sandy (a NY Times reader posted that given the collective hysteria that the storm has induced, they should consider replacing its somewhat docile-sounding name with something more formidable, like Brunhilde).  Mostly, I'm just jealous that so many of you don't have work today (and possibly Tuesday as well).  Though I can't imagine either New York or DC is much fun without any public transportation.

The weather in Shanghai is as it has been for much of the last month -- partly sunny, partly hazy, high in the low 70s.  Can't complain.  Though as Yogi would say, it sure does get late early out here.  Thanks to China's single time zone (yes, that's right, the whole "one China" thing extends to things like time, even though China is about as wide as the US), the sun has already set here, and it's not even 5pm in October.  The sun also rises (apologies to Hemingway) at around 5am, which is bad news for me and my fairly transparent curtains.

In further proof that there are, in fact, Jews in Shanghai, I will be attending a free screening of the American movie Munich this evening as part of the Jewish Film Festival here.  It's free, very convenient to my office, and supposedly a very good movie to boot.

Anyway, stay dry and safe, everyone!  Please send me cool storm photos or stories, I'm kinda bummed to be missing the action.  Bonus points for windswept shots of Anderson Cooper in a yellow zonker.

Roomies

After two months, yesterday marked the first time that my three roommates and I went out as a group.  We've all got pretty divergent schedules, so it's a noteworthy occurrence when we're all in the apartment together (while awake), let alone actually being able to go out together.  It's sort of how life in Shanghai is for expats, I think -- people bounce around between work, various commitments, and friends.  So it was nice to be able to actually spend time with the three roommates at once, underlining how different we all are and how swimmingly we get along.

We decided to capture the occasion with a group picture at the bar, in case it never happens again:

So there you have it, Team 539 Xinhua Road #3A.  From left to right: me, Serge, Pam, and Franco.  I imagine that Serge probably wouldn't be too pleased that I'm sharing this picture with the world, given his shit-eating grin and the remnants of what I would imagine is some of his beer.  In fairness to him, we had all had our fair share of refreshments at this point.  The night would end with some street barbecue.  These guys park big carts of food outside bars and clubs, await the hordes of drink-saturated revelers, and cook up skewers of chicken, mushrooms, asparagus, bread, you name it.... it's cheap and delicious.

Anyway, I feel like this picture may prove to be one of those shots that I can look back on in ten or twenty years and smile.

Happy (belated) birthday to the one and only Judith Aisen, and happy almost-Halloween to everyone else.

A Visual Addendum on Commuting in China

This video comes via my friend Matt's Facebook page:

As the notes on the video suggest, this is in Beijing, not Shanghai.  (For those wondering...yes, I think I know what stop it is, despite having only spent about 8 days in Beijing in my life).  And because Beijing's metro system is far less comprehensive than Shanghai's is, I assume that rush hour is even more crowded there than it is here.  But we have this kind of chaos here too.  I've missed a stop before because of this madness.  It starts with the Chinese refusal to wait for people to get off the train before they push their way on.  This happens regardless of how crowded a train is -- I've had people push past me on relatively empty trains as I try to disembark.  (Incidentally, this behavior isn't relegated to the metro.  It happens on elevators too.  People swarm the elevators in my office building in droves, making it very annoying to get on and off).  Combine impatience with an immense critical mass, and you're bound to have situations like what befalls the poor girl in the grey coat.  It's prettys surprising to me that more people don't get hurt or, even worse, pushed inadvertently into the tracks amidst the jockeying that invariably takes place before the train arrives.

In other news, my darts team, Raging Bullseye**, had its first real match on Tuesday.  We tied (the scoring system is complicated, and involves various matches, both team and individual), and I am not exaggerating when I say that I was the star of the match.  I am also not exaggerating when I say that I am terrible at darts, a fact I don't lose too much sleep over because it's something I've done maybe twice in my life before joining this team.  Still, I somehow managed to win all three matches I played, hitting the final dart in all three.  See, the way darts works is this: you chuck the darts at the board, and score points according to the sum of your three darts.  You get triple points for hitting the inner ring, double points for hitting the outer ring.  The catch is, you can only win on a double (so, for example, if you have 9 points left to win, you need to hit a 1, say, and then a double-4.  You can't just hit a single-9).  My team consists primarily of British guys who are very good at darts in general, but very bad at hitting doubles.  I am very bad at darts in general, but somehow have a knack for hitting the doubles.  This probably has something to do with the fact that the doubles are farthest away from the center of the board.... In any event, it was an evening of projectile glory for lil ol' me.

**Our team captain chose this name after taking suggestions for clever darts team names.  I think it's pretty weak, to be honest.  I much prefer my suggestion: Projectile Dysfunction.

Umbrella Warfare

I fancy myself a rather seasoned urban commuter.  Having grown up in a city full of hustle and bustle, spending my formative mornings with Mom and Noah, pushing our way onto the M104 bus en route to the Ethical Culture School, crowded commutes have never fazed me.  My penchant for subways has already been documented here.  I'm often perplexed when people eschew a subway commute for a cab simply because they want to avoid the crowds and chaos of rush hour (I suppose sitting by oneself in a car in traffic is preferable to some than the thought of forced physical contact with random strangers).

I've survived morning commutes in New York and Washington, so it's not as if I was totally daunted by the prospect of going to and from work on the subway every day here in Shanghai.  I even had ample preparation from my 10 weeks working here in 2008.  The commute in Shanghai isn't categorically different from the other cities I've lived in.  It's just, like everything in China....bigger.  The crowds are often comical, particularly when two metro trains going in opposite directions arrive at a station simultaneously.  But, aside from some frustrating gridlock due to Chinese laziness (remember the escalator picture?), and the even more frustrating tendency to refuse to move in to the subway car rather than just camping out right by the door (many Americans share this habit with the Chinese), my commute to and from work in Shanghai is pretty manageable indeed.

With one notable exception.  If there weren't already a classic riddle with the answer of "when it's raining"**, the question of "under what specific circumstances is commuting in Shanghai consistently and objectively more difficult than normal?" would make for a pretty good quiz.  For some reason, people in this city are far better prepared for the weather than people in other cities in which I've lived.  In other words, everyone carries an umbrella when it's raining, and everyone has it out at the same time.  The result: a maze of umbrellas with Chinese people underneath the navigation of which (particularly when you're carrying an umbrella of your own) is incredibly difficult.  This morning, the first rainy day in about a month, I must of snagged my umbrella on at least 4 passersby on my way to work.  Nobody seems to mind getting conked on the head with flying umbrellas -- it's just part of a rainy commute.

There is one saving grace though.  After weaving in and out of opposing umbrellas for half an hour, I was greeted at my office building by yet another example of a Chinese job-for-the-sake-of-having-a-job.  Three (yes...THREE) people were standing at the entrance of my office building with plastic bags, waiting eagerly to take my then-closed umbrella and slip it inside, thereby eliminating the rainy umbrella drip.  What innovation!  Of course, by the time one is ready to take the umbrella out of the plastic bag, one has forgotten why it was in there in the first place, and the puddle of water that has collected drips over one's pants and shoes anyway.  Oh well.

(I defy anyone to try going up that staircase with any sort of efficiency and not take out any Chinese along the way...)

**That riddle, for those who don't know it, is as follows: Murgatroyd works at a tall office building.  In the mornings when he arrives at work, he usually gets into the elevator, presses 12, and walks up several flights of stairs to the 29th floor where he works.  Sometimes, however, he goes straight up to 29 on the elevator.  In the evenings, he always, without fail, takes the elevator straight down to 1.  What could possibly account for such bizarre behavior?

The answer is (of course) that Murgatroyd is a dwarf, and can't reach the 29th floor by himself.  So under normal circumstances he just pushes the highest floor he can reach (12) and then walks the rest of the way up.  But when it's raining, and he has an umbrella, he can use it as added height to reach the 29th floor button.  Before anyone asks: a) you can pick any name you want.  I picked Murgatroyd thank you very much and b) I know, I know, the riddle falls apart when you assume that any decent person sharing the elevator with Murgatroyd would just push the 29th floor button for him.

A Random Saturday in Shanghai

Part of the transition from "settling in" to "real life" is the appreciation that there are times at which things aren't happening.  Much of real life is the negative space, the moments, hours, and days in between plans and obligations that make up the more substantive parts of our lives on which we report back to friends and family.  It is the process of filling that negative space productively and enjoyably, while at the same time not putting undue pressure on one's self to fill it, that has always been an area of difficulty for me.  I often consider time spent without "a plan" to be time wasted, and this leads to an unhealthy and cyclical inability to fully enjoy free time.  It has started to be especially true here, where I put even more pressure on myself to "get the most" out of my experience.  I'm in China, I shouldn't be spending my days doing what I do when I'm in New York or Washington, D.C., right?  I should be out there, living it up, soaking in the language and culture that brought me here.  It's sort of an unrealistic goal -- that language and culture consumption happens most effectively when it is done through osmosis, not actively.  There is a balance out there, between filling my free time with productive and fun things to do while also being able to enjoy it when all the music stops and I'm just here, in Shanghai, spending a Sunday afternoon doing relatively little of note.

Yesterday began as one of those days, essentially devoid of plans, and me feeling slightly disappointed that I didn't have anything "worth doing" to do.  I did some laundry, went to the gym, and remembered that a free weekend in Shanghai didn't have to be, by default, different from a free weekend in the US.  I then dragged myself out, and went to the Shanghai International Beer Festival on the Bund.  I had assumed this was going to be a corporate, over-priced, expat-trap, and so I had some misgivings about making the schlep out to the river.  And it was indeed chock full of expats.  I had the bizarre sensation, very common in Shanghai, of seeing many familiar faces, people I had met once before or maybe not at all.  Expats flock like sheep to the same spots here; it's part of the reason I've tried to limit my exposure to "the scene."

Still, the setting of the festival alone was worth the trip:

Not pictured here are the three tables that were lined up on the riverside, set up for beer pong.  Franco and I ended up playing a game with two of his friends -- I think it has to go down as the most scenic game of beer pong I have ever played.

After the festival, I joined Franco at our local music dive, where he and his band had a gig.  They playing in a celebration of Mongolian arts and music that was being put on by a friend of theirs.  As part of the celebration, two Mongolian musicians were in town, and The Horde (Franco's band) actually played a few songs with them.  Anyone with a general appreciation for music would have been pretty impressed with the result.  Having never heard any of the songs before, the two Mongolians sat down with Franco and Tom, and, purely by ear, started playing with them.  As band-groupie and unofficial manager, I got to sit in on the 10-minute practice session (the only chance the Mongolians had to get to know Franco, Tom, and their music).

I'm going to embarrassingly butcher the spelling of their names, but it was something along the lines of Hongar (who went by Hoggie for short) and Ogdu.  Hoggie is the guy in the second picture - he's playing a horse-head violin.  It's basically a long, two-stringed violin.  The strings are apparently made out of horse-hair, and there's a carved horse head at the top which you can sort of see in the picture.  It makes a sort of sitar-y sound, but Hoggie was able to make it harmonize beautifully with Tom's guitar and Franco's mandolin.  Ogdu is in the last picture.  He's throat singing.  For those who haven't heard throat singing before, it's fairly impossible to explain with words.  The best description would be the look on the audience's faces when they realized that some of the music was coming from his throat, and not the three string instruments next to him.  His range of pitch was outrageous, from incredibly high to the lowest of bass.  One probably doesn't associate Mongolia with its music (or really anything, if you're me, having never been there).  But if these two dudes are at all representative of Mongolian music, it's something worth getting into.

All in all, a fun and unplanned Saturday in Shanghai.

Nanjing Judge

Every Seinfeld fan remembers this scene from the pantheon of great Seinfeld scenes:

Viewer's digest: the gang witnesses a fat guy getting robbed, doesn't do anything about it (except for make fun of him), and then gets arrested for violating the Good Samaritan Law.  "It's new," the cop explains.  The arrest sets up the famous final episode of the series, when Jerry, George, Kramer, and Elaine are all put on trial for their 9 seasons of exhibiting poor examples of basic human decency.  As it happens, the Good Samaritan Law, which does exist in the US in various forms, is not new, nor does it require that bystanders intervene to assist people in peril.  That would make criminals out of a lot of people.  It also makes no logical sense.  Good Samaritan laws actually provide protection for people who do choose to help out -- the classic example is if you give someone the Heimlich Maneuver, you aren't liable if you inadvertently break his ribs.  (Reader's Note: you would, however, be liable for calling it the Heimlich Maneuver.  Apparently, years back, Mr. Heimlich -- yes, there's a Mr. Heimlich...did you think that maneuver just happened? -- got persnickety when CPR training manuals used his name without compensating him.  So now we're supposed to just call it "chest compressions."  Public service announcement over).  Anyway, one should assume that the Seinfeld writers were aware of this when they wrote the scene.

All of this is by way of introducing another video.  Before I post the link, I should caution all readers that it's somewhat graphic.  Basically, it's a video of a dude eating another dude.  Like, almost literally.  So just consider yourself warned, and keep in mind that while the video is pretty outrageous and worth a watch, it isn't totally necessary for the rest of the post.

Yummy

So, yeah, it's gross.  When I first saw it, I immediately thought the assailant was on Bath Salts.  In fact, it's just a sixty year old dude getting made a 28 year old dude over a seat on the Guangzhou Metro.  After getting over the initial shock, one might notice the second most disturbing part of the video: that everyone is just standing there and staring (or, in at least one case, filming).  Nobody seems at all interested in intervening to save the poor guy from getting, well, eaten.  And while you would think that if this were to happen on a crowded New York City subway train, after the initial diffusion of responsibility wore out, someone would eventually help out.  It wouldn't take much (unless of course the attacker was on Bath Salts after all, in which case he'd have superhuman strength) for a few people to wrestle a sixty year old away from his prey.  And yet, nobody did.

As it turns out, there's an explanation for all this.  And it's not particularly comforting.  In 2006, a man in Nanjing stopped to help an injured woman on the street.  She asked him to take her to the hospital, which he did.  Upon their arrival, she accused the man of pushing her down, thereby causing her injuries.  The dispute somehow made it to court where, even more absurdly, a Nanjing judge ruled that common sense dictates that only someone who was guilty would have brought the woman to the hospital.  The man was ordered to pay the woman's medical costs.

The Nanjing Judge case, as it has come to be known here, has quite a profound legacy.  The judge's decision has left in its wake a citizenry that is hesitant to help each other out.  In 2009, an old man fell down while getting off a bus, again in Nanjing, and wasn't helped back up again until bystanders received his firm assurances that he would take responsibility if anything happened.  In other words, Nanjing Judge has created a sort of backwards Good Samaritan law here.  Not only do you not have to help a fat guy getting robbed, but you could in theory be found guilty as an accomplice to the robbery if you do.  Had Jerry and his friends been on that Guangzhou subway, as you can see from that video, they wouldn't have been the only ones standing, watching, and filming.

****

In other news, I played badminton for the first time in my life yesterday.  It's a national obsession here, played perhaps even more widely than ping pong.  My Chinese colleagues play during lunch every Friday, and they invited me to join them yesterday.  It is a very peculiar sport.  It requires a lot of dexterity and quick reflexes, and really is nothing like tennis or ping pong, as you might assume.  It also has the distinction of making anyone who plays it, regardless of how good they are, look like a complete idiot.  But it was fun, and I'll probably head back out for another round of humiliation next week.

Gesundheit!

For over a month now, I've been absentmindedly saying "bless you" when any of my colleagues sneeze at work.  It's just second nature to me to do so.  It has become increasingly clear to me that they don't understand what I'm saying.  Most of them don't even appear to understand that I'm talking to them -- leading me to wonder what they think their weird American colleague keeps saying at seemingly random points throughout the day.  Yesterday, I decided to investigate.  I asked one of my colleagues what the Chinese equivalent for "bless you" was.  He looked at me, nonplussed.  I tried again, explaining to him that in English, when someone sneezes, we tend to say "bless you" to them.  He still didn't seem to quite get it, but acknowledged that such an expression doesn't exist in Chinese.  I confirmed this with a few of my friends, both Chinese and Mandarin-speaking expats.  The basic consensus is that Chinese people don't have a traditional linguistic response to a sneeze a la "bless you," "salud," or "gesundheit."

This fits pretty well with my general impression that the Chinese are just culturally devoid of what Westerners would consider everyday manners.  Their concept of mianzi, or "face," apparently doesn't include ideas like personal space, and common niceties.  People generally don't say "excuse me" when they bump into each other.  The Chinese spitting habit is gross, and it is a rare pleasure when you come across someone who will at least look before he spits, to minimize any expectoral shrapnel hitting passersby.  Even the word "please" (请 or qing) isn't used nearly as often as it is in the West.  So it shouldn't come as much of a surprise to learn that when someone sneezes here, the proper thing to do in response is, well, nothing at all.

One of my Chinese friends did give me two things she has heard people say, though she prefaced them by saying that she never does either of these things, and rarely if ever hears other people say them.  But they're still fun, from a cultural and linguistic perspective if nothing else.  First, she told me that people sometimes say baisui (百岁), which means "100 years old."  Chinese culture is obsessed with longevity, so if there is a Mandarin corollary to "bless you," it seems like it must be baisui, the idea being that you wish 100 years of life on the person who had the misfortune of sneezing.

She also said that in some more rural parts of China, she has heard that when someone sneezes, witnesses tend to tap the sneezer so as to superstitiously avoid the misfortune of sneezing.  Call me crazy, but if I wanted to avoid the misfortune of sneezing, superstitious or not, my first instinct would be to get as far away from the sneezer as possible.  Touching him would be the last thing I would want to do.  Then again, it's already been pretty well documented here that my cultural instincts tend to diverge from those of my Chinese hosts, so what do I know.

It's All About the Ivy

Yesterday afternoon, I went to Shanghai Children's Hospital to volunteer as part of an organization I joined called HandsOn Shanghai.  I've been trying to find worthwhile ways of filling up some of my free time, and this struck me as a perfect combination of doing good while also forcing myself to use my Chinese.  The staff and volunteers are almost all Chinese (which I didn't realize until I showed up to the orientation meeting last month only to discover that the entire presentation was to be conducted in Chinese).  The events are scattered throughout the week but are primarily on nights and weekends, to accommodate day jobs.  They primarily consist of assisting two groups of people: sick children, and elderly in nursing homes.

The event yesterday was simply to sit with the kids and help them play games, draw in coloring books, do puzzles, and the like.  The kids were all very cheerful, if not a little shy (remember, I apparently look like a monster to most of them), and most of them were quite eager to get on with the puzzles, drawing, and toys, without much assistance from little old me.  In fact, the group of people most interested in my presence were the families, all of whom were just floored by my ability to communicate with them.  One of the available toys was a sort of Etch-a-Sketch with a stylus instead of knobs.  After several parents asked me if I could write characters, in addition to speaking, I started using the thing to write simple sentences like "I am an American," and "I am 24 years old," which received loud ooohs and ahhhs.  As it turned out, I was just as much of a distraction for the parents as I was for the kids -- an unintended benefit, I think.  It was...cool, I guess, to do something that normally leaves me frustrated and discouraged, and have a bunch of people express pleasure in it instead.

As it happens, my fellow volunteers also appeared more interested in me than the kids were.  Similarly excited to meet a foreigner with competent Chinese skills, my three co-volunteers went through the standard getting-to-know-you questions (these are the same in both Chinese and English, except some people ask "你属什么?" ("Ni shu shenme?") which means "What sign of the Chinese Zodiac do you belong to?").  The conversation was quickly sidetracked when I was asked where I went to school, to which I replied, "Bin Da," the Chinese name for Penn.

All three of the girls made noticeable facial gestures suggesting amazement if not a little awe.  One of them gasped, audibly.  After she gathered herself, the gasper, who turns out was a senior in high school, told me that she was DESPERATE to go to an Ivy League school in the US but didn't think she would get in.  After the other two explained that they want to go to Cornell for graduate study after they finish at their current university in Shanghai, the conversation sort of moved on (for which I was grateful), until several minutes later, when I noticed the gasper sort of staring at me.  I turned from the little boy whom I was helping assemble a particularly difficult 10 piece puzzle, and looked at her.

"What did you get on your SATs?" she asked?

Pretty sure that's the first time I've been asked that question since my best friends in high school asked (we were a competitive bunch).  "Um...I did well," I said.

"Like.  Over 2000?"

"Um....yeah."

"Like.  2400?"  She was relentless.

"Um...Not quite."

This seemed to make her happy, so I took the opportunity to turn away from her and focus my undivided attention on congratulating the boy, who had just finished his puzzle.  The conversation left me thinking, though.  I wasn't really sure how I was supposed to feel.  A small part of me was not-so-secretly pleased to actually have someone recognize my alma mater and not assume it's Penn State, or in Harrisburg.  On the other hand, I felt as if I had stumbled upon evidence of the "Tiger Mom" culture in East Asia.  The poor girl had her sights set on the Ivy League, and based on her questioning it seemed as if not much else mattered to her.  There are surely high school students like that in the States as well.  But it strikes me as unfortunate for anyone who grew up here, to set their sights so firmly high, and I found myself assuming that it was due at least in small part to the influence of her parents.  As I found out from her, the SAT isn't even offered in mainland China, so Chinese kids wishing to take it must travel at least as far as Hong Kong to sit for the test.  This naturally suggests that those who do take the test and apply to go to US universities, are doing so at their parents behest, and with significant monetary support, something that most Chinese families obviously can't provide.

The conversation reminded me of Mark, the Chinese college freshman whom I met in Nanjing.  He had a similar reaction when I told him that I went to Penn, his mouth opening in surprised recognition.  "You mean...Ivy??" he asked, in broken and incredulous English.  It isn't so much about Penn, I realized, but the Ivy League, which seems to exist at mythic heights in the eyes of Chinese students.  I suppose this isn't breaking news, or even specific to China.  After all, there are overachieving high school students in the US who, partially if not primarily because of their helicopter parents, cultivate a Harvard-or-bust mentality.  It just struck me as a bit odd to be discussing SAT scores in the middle of a children's hospital.

The Settlers of Shanghai

I knew that moving to Shanghai would invariably mean leaving behind certain aspects of my life in the US; aspects of my life that I wouldn't be able to replace here.  This blog has often been a venue to note the absence of those things, as recently as my last post about sports.  I certainly expected Settlers of Catan -- my favorite board game and frequent friendly (or not-so-friendly, when Sam would keep badgering Eric to trade him two brick so he can cut off my longest road goddammit) pastime dating back to when I was in ninth grade -- to be included in that universe of life's joys that I'd be simply unable to replicate in Shanghai.

Boy was I wrong.

It all started about a month ago, when I stumbled across this picture on the Internet:

This obviously has nothing to do with China, but it's awesome nonetheless for anyone who has played Settlers before, or even if you haven't but know what it looks like.  Fear not -- for those luddites out there who haven't ever seen a Settlers of Catan board, you can below, and will then be able to appreciate this....The Pizza of Catan.  In other words, it's a Settlers board made out of mini pizza muffins.  The pieces are made of red, yellow, and orange bell peppers.  I have no idea who is responsible for this masterpiece, but it's amazing, and I certainly hope they ate it after finishing the game.

Anyway, seeing this picture got me reminiscing fondly about Settlers.  I sent the picture to virtually everyone I know who plays the game (so the only people who will be seeing it for the first time here will likely be unimpressed, and, perhaps, have cause for doubting my sanity).  After mentioning it in passing to a new friend here, she lit up, exclaiming excitedly that she not only loves Settlers, but has a set with her in Shanghai.  A few nights later, less than three weeks into my new life in China, I was sitting at her dining room table, with two other friends, playing Settlers and eating (I kid you not) pizza bagels.

Flash forward to last night.  A Chinese friend whom I met through Serge (my Canadian/Armenian roommate) invited me over to his house for some home-cooked dinner, and to play cards.  I've played cards with this group before -- in addition to just enjoying a friendly card game every now and then, I'm also eager to take advantage of any opportunity to hang out with Chinese folks, so spending time with this bunch is a win-win.  To top it all off, they're a really great group of people, guys and girls, ranging in age from about my age to probably 30 or so.

A few minutes after getting to Huck's place, I saw the unmistakable big red box, sitting on his bookshelf.  Who knew Settlers was produced in China, of all places?  After grabbing it and shoving it in Huck's face saying, "HOLY SHIT YOU PLAY SETTLERS?!", I learned that not only is it his favorite game as well, but most of his friends love it as well, AND Huck once played in a Settlers tournament (yes, they exist) in Australia and won several hundred bucks!  After that, there really wasn't any question that we'd take a brief detour from the evening's original agenda to play a game.  We didn't end up finishing it, for reasons of time and the inability to include the whole group, but below you'll see evidence of my second career Settlers game in China, and the first ever playing with a Chinese set.  For those interested, the game is called 卡坦岛 (ka tan dao, which basically means "Catan Island").

Despite the excitement from playing Settlers, the game wasn't the most noteworthy part of the evening. Nor were the poker game, the great company, or the fact that the majority of conversation for the entire night was in Mandarin -- all of which individually would otherwise have been reasons enough to convince me to come to Huck's house.  I arrived expecting a simple, home-cooked meal for dinner, looking forward to seeing what "normal" Chinese people cook for themselves and their friends when they're at home.  What I got was by a long margin the best food I've had since coming to China.  Huck has apparently been cooking since he was five, and boy does it show.  Dish after dish came streaming out of his tiny kitchen, from eggplant in vinegar sauce, to bitter cabbage with garlic and oil, to double cooked pork, to spicy crusted seafood with sichuan pepper, to bullfrog stew.  Yes... I ate bullfrog.  I'd be lying if I said it was my new favorite source of protein, but literally everything Huck threw at us was delicious, including the frog.  Looking around the room as I stuffed as much food into my mouth as my poor-chopsticks skills would allow, I realized that none of the other guests were nearly as impressed as I was.  It was just normal.  Huck cooks for them all the time, and they're all just used to how good his food is.  After dinner, Huck told me they do this at least once a week, and that I was always welcome to return.

To top it all off, one of the guys brought his wife and toddler to the meal.  The kid, Tony, was probably around 3 or 4, and I don't think he stopped making noise for more than the time it took him to swallow his food (and sometimes not even then).  At one point, he started hiding behind a couch and giggling every time I peered around it to look at him (I've already come to terms with the fact that I'm funny-looking in general, but particularly to Chinese people, and even more particularly to Chinese children).  Here's a quick shapshot of young Tony, one that I was lucky to capture because he never was standing in one place for very long.

All in all, a great night of cards, company, Chinese, and Catan -- one that I think and hope will happen again very soon.

The Diaspora of Fandom

I have mentioned here before that beyond the obvious family and friends, whom I miss dearly, the aspect of life that I have longed for the most here has been sports.  Back home, sports was a constant presence in my life, almost to the point where it went unnoticed.  Access to sports games, news, and analysis was ubiquitous, and while I don't think I ever took it for granted (I've always been very conscious of how much I love sports), days and weeks would pass without me thinking about Sports-with-a-capital-S.  Instead, I'd be watching the Ryder Cup and marveling at the spectacular United States collapse on Sunday, or desparately hoping my fantasy football running back didn't get his touchdown poached by his bruising oaf of a backup, or watching Dick Vitale get larangytis shrieking about college basketball even though the season is still months away, or standing in front of the television scoffing at the notion that baseball is a boring sport as two consecutive playoff games featured 8 total runs in 25 innings.  Sports as an idea has always been the sum of its parts -- the teams I root for, the physics-defying displays of athleticism, the camaraderie of watching a good game with good friends.

Most of that is unattainable for me in Shanghai.  Sure, there are expat sports bars that will air some of the biggest games in the major leagues.  But NFL football games start at 1AM Monday morning here.  Baseball playoff games begin as I make my morning commute to work.  These aren't exactly ideal times to be sitting back and watching a game.  So my sports fandom, inherently a shared experience in the US not only with my equally-obsessed friends but with the population as a whole, has become an individual experience.  As that has occurred, as my consciousness of how far removed I am from the centers of my sports universe, my fascination with it -- with my teams, the games, the stories, the leagues, Sports in general -- has grown exponentially.  The same way the political diaspora has been shown to create more passionate (and often extreme) views on a situation (the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a good example of this), so too does the sports diaspora create a more avid fan.

In the recent weeks, I have desparately followed my Yankees as they held off the Baltimore Orioles in a gripping September race for the American League East Division title.  The importance of winning one's division was increased this year by baseball's new playoff format, and so it felt as if they playoffs started a month early.  (Point of clarification -- this should not be read as an implicit endorsement of the new system.  The jury's still out on that, I think.  At the very least, the jury feels really bad for the Rangers and Braves, and their fans, and the jury isn't sure boiling down 162 games into 1 do-or-die game is the best way to decide the playoff fate of four teams.  Anyway, I digress).

As the real playoffs began this week, and the Yankees started their first-round series with (who else?) the Orioles, I made my single greatest discovery since coming to Shanghai.  I found a viable, if not finicky, streaming host of the playoff games on the Internet.  With the exception of some of the early innings, when I'm en route to work, I've been able to watch each of the games in the series.  Needless to say, this has not done wonders for my productivity at the office.  But given the fact that I'm not really being asked to be that productive (or, really, to do anything at all), I don't feel too bad.

While it might not be as fun as watching a game in a bar, or at home over some beers with a bunch of friends, being able to watch the games this week has been one of the more intense and memorable sports experience of my life.  Nonsense, you say -- how could watching a frequently-delayed and occasionally-Spanish Internet feed of a playoff baseball game in a little cubicle at J.D. Power and Associates compare to, say, being at a playoff baseball game, or, say, watching the Giants win their first Super Bowl in a room packed with fraternity brothers all of whom were rooting either for the Giants or against the then-undefeated Patriots.  And by certain measures, you'd be right.  But precisely because I'm not there, because I'm so far away and have nobody here through whom I can channel my fandom, I'm left to soak all of it in on my own.  I can assure you that my heart was pumping just as loudly as, if not louder than, any of yours were when Raul Ibanez hit his first -- and then his second -- home run last night.

It has been an incredibly frustrating series for a Yankees fan.  Cry me a river, I hear all of the non-Yankee fans yell.  And they're right.  That's part of what makes it so frustrating.  The Yankees hitters are choking, seemingly under the weight of their gaudy career statistics and accolades which ought to make it a foregone conclusion that they'd beat up on an Orioles starting staff led by only the second most successful major-league pitcher named Chen (whouda thunk that Bruce Chen would get a shout-out on this blog?!).  There have been times during this series when I secretly wished I hated the Yankees.  It'd be so much fun after a game like tonight's.  There have also been times when I wished I loved the Orioles.  They're a young team, that has no business being in the playoffs and yet expects to win anyway, with a manager (Buck Showalter -- former Yankee manager) that has turned the laughing stock of the American League into the second coming of the Tampa Bay Rays, in only a little over a year.  But I love the Yankees.  And I hate the Orioles (at least for now...that might change in about 24 hours).  This is Sports, at its best, from halfway around the world.

The two teams are tied, 2-2, heading into a pivotal game 5 tomorrow.  CC Sabathia will be pitching for the Yankees against Jason Hammel for the Orioles.  Everyone will say that, on paper, the Yankees, at home with their ace on the mound, are the clear favorites to win.  If you think that makes me feel any more confident about the game, you're crazy.  The sports world will be chattering about how Curtis Granderson has looked like a deer in the headlights, how pinch-hitting for Alex Rodriguez in Game 4 didn't work out quite so well as it did in Game 3, how the Yankees can't expect their starters to keep pitching such great games and will need to actually start hitting if they want to beat the Orioles.  The sports blogosphere will be brimming tonight with dissections and analysis of a series that has been as exciting and nerve-wracking as any series featuring only 27 runs scored in 43 innings can be.  The writer of this blog, for one, is happy to be able to be along for the ride, pulling for his Yankees, and captivated by the power of sports that, like the heart, grows stronger with distance.

See you all at 5:07 AM China time tomorrow.

China, Japan, the Islands, and a Really Crowded Memorial

For those unfamiliar with the great old comedic singer (and former Harvard mathematics professor) Tom Lehrer, here's one of my favorite of his songs, "National Brotherhood Week":

I think if Lehrer wanted to revist this song, and add a few updated verses, one of them might go like this:

Oh the Chinese hate the Japanese

And the Japanese hate the Chinese

They're both angry at the Taiwanese

And to the US, they're all just Asian

But during National Brotherhood Week

National Brotherhood Week

Watch Jackie Chan and Ichiro play some hide-and-seek

...and so on.

The Sino-Japanese conflict has roots deep-seeded in history.  The current complicated dispute over the Diaoyu/Senkaku Islands (more on the names later) is just the most recent (though it has been going on for a long time) on a long list of geo-political, cultural, and economic tension between the two countries.  The First Sino-Japanese War in the 1890s brought to an international scale what was previously a regional conflict.  The Japanese invasion of Manchuria in the 1930s, and the subsequent atrocities committed upon Chinese citizens over the course of Japanese occupation here still stings at the core of the proud Chinese national ego.  And then you have these islands.  I don't profess to be an expert on Sino-Japanese relations.  In fact, I know very little about it.  But having arrived here at the very peak of the tensions surrounding the islands, it has been impossible not to notice how the conflict has affected the individual Chinese, in addition to all of the external noise from the anti-Japanese demonstrations and the vehement stance taken by the various governments involved.  Beyond the politics and the extremists, the conflcit has had a noticeable impact on the silent majority here as well, bringing to the forefront the poweful, and inherently nationalist, anti-Japanese ethos that dates back to the 1930s and beyond.

By way of brief background, the islands are eight tiny specks of land in the East China Sea that lie in the middle of the triangle formed by Japan, Taiwan, and mainland China.  When I say tiny, I mean tiny -- the largest one is 4.5 square kilometers (slightly bigger than Central Park in Manhattan).  There is no evidence to suggest that any of the islands have ever been inhabited.  They are called the Senkaku Islands in Japanese, and the Diaoyu Islands in Mandarin.  Language, as always, is inherently political, and by choosing which title to give the islands one inherently, if not actively, gives currency to that side of the controversy.  (For example, Wikipedia uses "Senkaku" as the header for  this page on the dispute, and I think the article itself betrays a slight leaning toward the Japanese position).

The basis for the dispute itself is complicated and, for the purposes of this post, not entirely relevant.  For my money, deciding on the sovreign "ownership" of eight islands where nobody has ever lived is never going to be simple.  To make a very long story short, two things happened in the early 1970s: the United States terminated its post-WWII administration of Okinawa and the Ryukyu Islands, and potential oil and gas reserves were thought to be found on the Senkaku/Diaoyu islands.  The result: a drawn out custody battle, with three potential parents.  The dispute has many subcurrents beneath the larger issue of Sino-Japanese relations.  The PRC's strained relationship with Taiwan, for example is a huge factor; the two governments have generally acted separately, and often at-odds, despite the fact that they essentially agree about the "correct" geopolitical position of the islands.

Chinese consternation surrounding the islands was piqued most recently, when the Japanese government formally purchased the islands from their private (Japanese) family owner, formally putting them under Japanese state control in September.  Or, at least, so argued the Japanese.  The Chinese have responded with consistent political jabs from both Beijing and Taipei.  The PRC has gone so far as to include the islands in its state-published meteorological report, as if reporting the weather equated to territorial control.  Much has been written, denouncing the Japanese position as categorically untrue, like this one, which, despite its headline, does little to convince me of anything.  And, perhaps most famously, anti-Japanese demonstrations have cropped up throughout the world (including some in the US), a few of which have turned violent.

Beneath all of this, there is a quiet rumbling, a reawakening of something that all Chinese -- not just the most extreme activists or most powerful politicians -- were reared to feel.  Since arriving here, I have noticed on several occasions a subtle yet powerful distrust of Japan.  The feeling isn't, fortunately, I think, directed specifically at Japanese people.  But there's something about the idea of Japan that seems to make the Chinese national blood boil, just a little bit.

So we return to this picture, of the scene outside the Nanjing Massacre Memorial on October 1, the Chinese National Day:

As I've whined several times here, the Chinese aren't known for their patience.  They push, honk, and ignore personal space, as long as it suits their interests in getting from point A to point B.  They frequently cut in line.  But in Nanjing at the memorial, everyone stood quietly, waiting their turn (which, for these folks, was probably at least 90 minutes away).  I didn't see any shoving.  Everyone just waited.

Now, it's possible that everyone was just in a good mood, happy to be on holiday.  Many of these people probably traveled from far-away Chinese towns, and were resigned to see the memorial at all costs, lest they never have another opportunity to return to Nanjing.  But I sensed something different, a concentration shared by everyone.  Very few of them were alive for the Rape of Nanjing in 1937, but it seems national memory of the event is more powerful perhaps than the event itself.  The recent islands spat appears to have stregnthened this shared national ethos that has pitted China against Japan for so long.  The notion that all Chinese people just don't like Japan is, obviously, an absurd generalization.  But to be there outside that memorial on Chinese National Day, there was no question that on this day, there was something substantially more powerful than simple sightseeing going.

After deciding that I wasn't going to get anywhere near the memorial, I turned to leave.  As I walked back down the throng of people, I stopped to ask one man towards the end of the massive line why he was willing to wait for so long.  "Because I have to," he replied.  "Because it's our national history." 

Three Chinese Acquaintances

My trip to Nanjing and Beijing saw a continuation of the inconsistent, sinusoidal trajectory that my Chinese skills have followed since arriving here.  北京人 (Beijing ren, natives of Beijing) are famously difficult to understand for those used to speaking to people from Shanghai, and I experienced this first hand while there.  Directing taxi drivers proved almost impossible (this is partially because the street names in Beijing are confusingly similar, and Beijing cabbies are known for being ornery). Several times, upon ordering some food or otherwise letting on that I spoke Chinese, people assumed that I could keep up with the native, slurred, r-heavy Beijing accent, which I can't.  So I spent a good portion of several conversations nodding stupidly, until folks either gave up, or my food was mercifully ready.

Looking on the bright side, however, this week away saw me meet and get along with several Chinese people based primarily on my not-so-awful Mandarin speaking skills.  Three people stand out in particular:

As I was waiting for my train from Shanghai to Nanjing, I noticed a middle-aged woman pointing at various parts of my body, and saying color words in English.  She was practicing, checking herself with her two children as she pointed at my shirt and said "black," and pointed at my shorts and said "brown."  After realizing what she was doing, I started helping out by quizzing her on some of the less common colors like orange and grey, helping to explain the difference between the colors using Chinese.  As luck would have it, the woman and her family were sitting directly next to me on the train (N.B. trains in China operate on an assigned-seat basis, so one can't choose his/her seat mate).  I spent the 90 minute trip northwest to Nanjing basically giving her a free English lesson, with her interjecting some helpful Chinese tidbits along the way.  Every 10 minutes or so she'd stop me to tell me how good my Chinese was, which is a very common Chinese thing to do even if your Chinese sucks, but it's still nice to hear.

It turns out that the train gods were smiling on me, because the next day, en route from Nanjing to Beijing, I again struck up a conversation with my neighbor, this time a congenial old man.  Mr. Jin is a filmmaker and teacher, with schools in both Beijing and Shanghai though he spends most of his time in Beijing.  He has traveled substantially through the US (though he speaks no English), and has a daughter who spends about half her time working in Boston.  My conversation with Mr. Jin was far more in depth than with the nice lady the day before, and I'd be lying if I said I understood everything he said.  But I got the gist of it, included in which was the strong advice that I get out of the big cities and travel to Western China, where the "real Chinese life," as he put it, is.  Upon asking him the best way to get to Tibet, he advised me that even though a flight is exponentially more efficient, by taking the train you ascend the mountains gradually, as opposed to all at once on a plane, allowing for a far easier acclimation process to the altitude.  Good advice, I thought.  Mr. Jin and I exchanged business cards, and then text messages (in Chinese) a few days later.  On Friday, his son-in-law, who speaks English, called me to tell me how much Jin enjoyed meeting me.  I'll try to connect with the daughter and her husband in Shanghai at some point soon.

Last but not least, is Mark, the 18 year old college student I met at the Sun Yat-sen Mausoleum in Nanjing.  We spent a couple of hours together, speaking a combination of English and Chinese (Mark's English is quite good).  He's an excitable, interesting fellow, who says it's his dream to go to Hollywood, and who loves the Dallas Mavericks (the Chinese love the NBA).  Upon parting ways, Mark asked for my phone number, asking if he could text me every now and then to practice his English.  Of course, I said.  He has since texted me at least once every day.  Truth be told, it's getting a little annoying (today he asked me to help him with a paper he's writing), but he certainly means well.

So there you go -- three friends made, that probably wouldn't have been made had I not been able to at least acquit myself marginally well in Mandarin.  Brimming with confidence from last week's successes, I strode into work this morning confident that I'd not only be able to pick up on some of the office chatter, but also converse with people in Chinese.  Alas, today was an off day: two conversations butchered, and very little chatter understood.  Guess I'll just get back on the horse tomorrow.

Funny Signs!

It's been a while since we had some good old Chinglish, so here we go, courtesy of a few signs I saw on my travels this week:

This is sort of hard to see, but at the end of the fourth line, you'll notice that the translator of this sign describing my hotel in Beijing either had a serious order of magnitude problem, or he was under the impression that the Temple of Heaven Hotel was about the size of Denmark.  China's big, but not that big (Beijing is about 16,000 sq km which is still, you know, fucking huge).

Sorry for the potty talk, but this was too funny to pass up.  I found this at one of the venues at which Franco's band was playing.  It'd be pretty funny even if the English was correct, but "bliss only" (instead of "piss only") just takes it over the edge.  The Chinese also contributes to the hilarity of the sign -- I won't translate it here to keep things PG-13, but let's just say it involves suggestions of Oepidal relations with one's mother, should one decide to soil the bathroom.

I should point out that the reason for all of this stems from what can't be seen here -- that is, that there is no toilet.  For those that haven't been to China, public restrooms often eschew toilets in favor of toilet-seat-shaped holes in the ground.  No problem for us men, should we want to urinate (er, I should say, bliss), but it causes serious problems with good ol' number two (flushing being one of them).

Okay, enough of this shit....

The signs protecting grass always seem to be pretty funny here.  These are two examples.  

This may be the funniest sign I've ever seen in China.  It's at a Chinese food court at the Olympic Center in Beijing, full of sixty or so different stands with various dumplings, noodles, and other less appetizing delicacies, such as this one.  The funny thing is, the translation is accurate!  撒尿 (sa niao) quite literally means "to urinate".  My guess, and strong hope, is that the food offered here does not contain cow urine, but rather is a beef bun with soup inside it (a la the Shanghainese xiaolongbao of which I am quite fond).  Given the abundance of other options, however, I opted against testing my theory.

Vacation Highlights

After exploring the two ancient capitals of China (Beijing, 北京, literally means Northern Capital, and Nanjing,南京, means Southern Capital), I returned to Shanghai this afternoon after five days, marking the end of my first official vacation as a resident of China.  I'm exhausted -- it wasn't exactly a "relaxing" vacation -- but other than that in high spirits after a fun week of travel.  There's a lot to report, so rather than try to fit it all into one massive and incoherent post, I figure I'll spread it out over the course of the next few days.  This one will just cover the highlights, primarily in picture form, of what I saw and did.  Before the photographic evidence, a few quick overall thoughts:

It couldn't have been a better mix of tourist/sightseeing/alone time on the one hand, and social time on the other.  A few people I met last weekend in Shanghai happened to be in Nanjing at the same time as me, so we met up for dinner and drinks on Monday night.  Franco (my roommate) was in Beijing with his band-mate Tom, and so we met up with their friends for dinner each night, after which I accompanied the band to their three gigs.  So while I managed to fit in a good chunk of sightseeing, as you'll see below, I felt like I got a taste of the nightlife in both cities, particularly Beijing -- something I probably wouldn't have done if I were totally on my own.  Also, five days is a long time to be totally on one's own.  Some people enjoy it, and I'm generally pretty good by myself, but I was grateful for the camaraderie at night to ensure that I wasn't lonely during the trip.

This will come as a surprise to nobody, but China is BIG.  The train rides to and from Beijing were enlightening evidence of this -- I took the high-speed train which hurtles through the Chinese countryside at an average speed of about 300 kilometers per hour (maxing out at about 350).  About 5 hours south of Beijing this afternoon, I was marveling to myself that we were still not in Shanghai (the high-speed train does the trip in about 5 and a half hours, whereas the 'slow' train takes as long as 12 hours), and we're talking the length of a pinky on any reasonably detailed map of China.

Speaking of maps, both Beijing and Nanjing were good reminders of China's sheer size.  I frequently made the mistake of assuming that destinations about half an inch from a subway stop were close to the station.  Wrong.  China's concept of city blocks is quite different from the US.  Imagine getting off the NYC subway at Times Square to get to Union Square.  That's about how far I'd find myself walking, wondering when the street that looked so close on my map would appear.  I guess that's what happens when you try to map out a city that's as big as all of Belgium.

Onward to the pictures.  I've tried picking out the highlights, so there are more where these come from. Brief descriptive captions below each picture or set of pictures...

Downtown Nanjing.  I had actually expected Nanjing, a city of several million people, to feel like a bigger metropolis, but this is the about the extent of the skyscraper action in the city.

The view from the bottom of Dr. Sun Yat Sen's Mausoleum on Purple Mountain in Nanjing.  I went on October 1st, China's National Day, so it's no wonder that Sun, the founder of China's Nationalist Party and the father of Modern China, had so many guests at his mausoleum.

The hike up the steps to the crest of the mausoleum was worth it.  Great panoramic views of the mountain, and the city, which also provide a good example of classic Chinese haze.  The picture of me was taken by a freshman at a Nanjing university.  We spent most of the afternoon on the mountain together, speaking in a combination of English and Chinese.  He took down my cell number and has been texting me occasionally, asking me English questions.  Kind of a cool chance encounter, for someone eager to make Chinese friends as well as expat ones. 

The man himself, Sun Yat-sen.

Nanjing's old city wall, built over 600 years ago in the Ming Dynasty.

Some views from the parapets atop the city wall.

There's probably a whole post here, so I won't say much now, but this is the memorial hall of the 1937 Nanjing Massacre (familiarly known as the Rape of Nanking), from the outside.  I find the statue particularly moving The bottom picture is my best attempt to capture why I couldn't get inside -- the crowds were so massive, I would've had to wait two hours just to get in.  You think the Chinese care about the controversy with Japan over the islands?  You could see it on their faces, these pilgrims perfectly content to wait hours to see evidence of Japanese atrocities committed on Chinese soil, as if to bolster their indignation at the current kerfuffle.

On to Beijing.  This is the Wangfujing Pedestrian Street, famous for it's street food mall.  I remember I was here four years ago, and I tried eating starfish.  No such gallantry this time around - I just had a veggie roll of some kind that wasn't very good.

Just thought this was a cool picture of the CCTV television tower, perfectly wedged between two apartment buildings in Western Beijing.

The 798 Art District is a cool little bohemian ghetto carved out of a neighborhood formerly home to factories and warehouses.  This is one of the many galleries in the hood.  There is a rumor that there are no pigeons in China, but at least here someone chose to attract some pigeons and doves with some feed.

I made the trek north of the city center to the Olympic Green, site of the 2008 Summer Olympics.  It was a pretty impressive facility -- this is the famous "Birds Nest" National Stadium.  Let's just say it does China justice with its size.

Probably the highlight of the trip from a sightseeing perspective was Jingshan Park (景山公园).  Directly north of the Forbidden City, it used to serve as a personal garden for the emperor.  There are several pavilions that you can climb up to, and the views from the apex of Jingshan Hill are quite breathtaking.  I think the last one is my favorite -- looking down into the Forbidden City, at the crowds gathering at its northern entrance.  The Forbidden City is aptly named -- with the exception of a few buildings and a hill in the far background of the picture, what you're looking at is all part of the ancient Emperor's palatial city.

And last but not least: Franco and Tom, also known as the Horde.  Franco is on the right, picking away at his mandolin.  They do a great bluegrass show, playing primarily original material written by both of them.  Their harmonies are twangy and fun, Franco's mando strumming is great, and I found myself singing along to some of the songs by the third show.  They've officially made a fan in me.

More to come!