Archive for the ‘Stories’ Category

CNY fireworks show puts Fourth of July to shame

February 14th, 2010 by Johanna | No Comments | Filed in China, Stories

The Chinese are so different so often that sometimes it’s easy to forget they still are fundamentally like the rest of us.* Enter the Lunar New Year. The atmosphere leading up to the big day is something akin to the end of the year for us Christians/Westerners. The warm holiday spirit infuses everybody and everything. People are happy, animated and generous; there is an electricity and excitement that even a complete hermit or someone who had just come out from under a rock would be hard pressed to miss.

And then, when the clock strikes midnight, something really magical happens. Or it did last night. There was no 10-second countdown. The Chinese countdown lasts much longer and builds up for days. Fireworks, firecrackers and sparklers go off randomly during the day and night the week before, gradually more and more often in anticipation. And then–

Up on the 32nd floor of a downtown Tianjin hotel, we got a fantastic view of the city from our room. And as far as our eyes could see, there were fireworks going off in every corner, every street. Imagine! — this was happening all across the country!** It was near-spiritual to witness. We’ve never seen anything like it. The Chinese went crazy! More gunpowder was used that night than in the two World Wars combined! We watched for about 15 minutes, crawled back into bed and fell asleep to the blasts, which died down within an hour but lasted into the night.

* I don’t mean to imply that they’re not people — just that they’re really different.

**Granted, Tianjin is a relatively big city, so perhaps in the little villages, the show wasn’t so spectacular.

More on snow

January 9th, 2010 by Johanna | No Comments | Filed in China, Stories

Last week, I was wondering where the snow was. Shortly after I posted, the snow cometh. And it didn’t stop coming for almost an entire day. And then I learned how awful snow is. Consider:

  • My birthday, last Monday, was probably one of the coldest day on record for Beijing — it was definitely the coldest day of my life. That night (early Tuesday morning), it dipped down to minus 16 degrees Celsius, the coldest temperature in almost 30 years.
  • The clouds dumped about 30 centimeters (almost a foot) of snow on Beijing, the most in almost 60 years. This completely crippled transportation — I have never seen the streets so empty here. It was nearly impossible to get a taxi. We probably waited close to an hour before getting one at a hotel. It did, however, make my morning commute relatively smooth.
  • What China lacks in technology, it makes up for in manpower. This may have never been more obvious. About 300,000 workers were mobilized in Beijing to shovel and sweep (only in China) snow from the streets and sidewalks. Also, sand (?!) was dumped on the roads to make them less slippery. It works, but it also makes everything gross and muddy.

Needless to say, I’m not a big fan of snow anymore. For once, I am glad it didn’t snow, as it was forecasted to yesterday. I kind of wonder if the government had something to do with it. (The Chinese government loves messing with the clouds. They caused the snow on Halloween.) Instead, temperatures are warming up! It might rise above freezing this week! What a twist!

Wondering if the snow is going to remain on the sidewalks and ground all winter…

Where is the snow?!??

January 3rd, 2010 by Johanna | No Comments | Filed in China, Stories

It’s not snowing! It’s supposed to be. Weather.com says it’s snowing. And the Central Meteorological Station says we’re supposed to see heavy snow or a whole blizzard. It is NOT white outside my window AT ALL.

But it snowed while I was out last night =D Less than a millimeter, but it was enough to blanket the ground and roads.

First snow of the new year (and my winter). The Village at Sanlitun.

First foreign Christmas off to an un-Christmasy start

December 25th, 2009 by Johanna | No Comments | Filed in China, Stories, Work

This year, I get to celebrate Christmas a whole 13 hours earlier! But all that excitement was negated by the perils of the Beijing work commute.

1) It’s 12 degrees outside, with a very brutal wind blowing, which makes it feel like -7 degrees.

2) I ended up having to wait in this -7-degree wind for 20 minutes for the bus.

3) For absolutely no reason other than the sheer inability of Beijing drivers to drive non-haphazardly and in way that would ensure a smoother flow of traffic, it took 45 minutes for the bus to go three stops down Xisanhuan Beilu, or about 3 kilometers.

As a result, I am frozen and 45 minutes late* for work. Still, it’s Christmas, and I’m determined to make merry. Turning on the Christmas music now and opening my lone present.

Merry Christmas, everyone!

(NB: Work starts at 8:30 a.m. I leave the apartment by 7:45, and the bus ride usually takes less than 20 minutes.)

I love my dad

December 24th, 2009 by Johanna | No Comments | Filed in Stories

A Christmas Eve conversation over instant messaging:

Daddy (9:44:51 PM) god idea
Daddy (9:44:56 PM) good
Daddy (9:45:24 PM) god is good also
Me  (9:45:38 PM) it’s his son’s birthday tomorrow
Daddy (9:45:38 PM) either one good
Daddy (9:45:55 PM no
Daddy (9:46:52 PM) I don’t know when, but sure not is tomorrow
Daddy (9:47:06 PM) 12-25 is man made
Daddy (9:48:08 PM) Jew even say Jesus not born yet
Me (9:50:05 PM) haha
Me (9:50:11 PM) i heard his real birthday is in march
Daddy (9:50:37 PM) something like that

The long road home

August 13th, 2009 by Johanna | No Comments | Filed in China, Stories

0023 Beijing time

Beijing Capital International Airport — Less than an hour until my flight. I think I might even be boarding soon! But I’m in a small cafe in the corner of the gate, which is tucked in the basement below all of the other terminals. My return to the U.S. has not begun well. Air China overbooked Flight 981, so I got stuck with an aisle seat. For 13 hours. Oy.

Then I had to walk probably a mile and half with all of my stuff (there’s a lot of it) to Gate E52, which ended up being in the basement. Now I’m sipping a latte, which is actually a cappuccino, and it’s really small, and I paid 29 kuai for it. I wanted to use the Internet, but it’s not working. I guess I already have spent 229 kuai today, charged to my debit card, which I hope won’t rack up huge conversion costs. Please, Wachovia, spare me.

This is my first coffee I’ve had since I left the States. I can’t believe I’m leaving still…

Goodbyes were short and sweet but otherwise anti-climactic, as goodbyes usually are. Shouldn’t there be something to mark my leave? I barely notice that I’m gone.

I miss Beijing already. My last picture of Beijing is one of my breakfast, a shao bing jia jidan.

Byebye, Beijing =(

0048 Beijing time

Aboard CA Flight 981 — It gets worse. After walking for a mile and half, I then had to be transported to the airplane via bus, a ride that lasted about five minutes. Then I had to climb stairs to the door of a Boeing 747-400 in the blazing Beijing heat that struck a couple of days ago, under a sun that isn’t being blocked by the usual Beijing smog. Just to be clear: I’m carrying the maximum-size carry-on suitcase, a large bookbag and a huge purse that weighs even more. Everything is stuffed full. Thanks, China Air, for being too cheap to rent a real terminal. Oh, and I’m also in heels, which I decided to wear because they took up more room in my suitcase than my flip-flops. I realize I am a bit excessive and have completely dressed and packed wrong for the occasion, but don’t they realize that some people have three months worth of luggage? I paid 200 RMB for my overweight luggage, which if it had been 2 kilograms more would be triple that price. Actually, it was 2 kilograms more. I had to repack my luggage and cram things into my carry-ons and other checked bag. Oy.

Please, please, Wachovia, do not make me pay a ridiculous amount for paying in a different currency.

Less than 10 minutes until scheduled takeoff. Half of the people aren’t even seated, yet, so we’ll see.

1608 EST

New York — Off the plane, which wasn’t too bad, except I had an aisle seat in the center. There were several annoying little boys running around, but in the grand scheme of things, it wasn’t ire-inducing. I actually didn’t sleep that much or feel all that tired. Now I’m through customs and checked in, just waiting at the gate. I was put in the line with the slowest customs official, and every person who got off the plane after me that got to go ahead made me more sour. Then of course, my gate is at the very end of a different terminal, so I had to walk for forever to get there again. Flight’s a little after 7 p.m. Of course, my phone is dying and I checked the luggage my charger was in. I’m thinking about buying Internet for $7.95.

Even New York can’t cheer me up. It doesn’t help that it’s overcast and grey. What a welcome home.

I suppose it was time to leave anyway. My electricity was at 10 (kilowatts? megawatts?). My bathroom drain is clogged (the shower has been flooding the entire bathroom these past couple of days). My proxy has stopped working. My public transit card is all out of money. I’m all out of money.

There are two goddamn fucking annoying babies sitting right behind me and their mothers seem to be incompetent at shutting them the hell up. Time to change seats…

2326 EST

Chapel Hill, N.C. — Back in C.Hill.

Cat and Joh’s Great Datong Ice Cream Adventure

August 11th, 2009 by Johanna | No Comments | Filed in China, Food, Shenanigans, Stories

After coming back from our big adventure to the Hanging Monastery, we rested for a bit at our hotel. We decided we weren’t very hungry but should eat anyway around 8 p.m., so we went to the hotel next door. It had a pretty nice restaurant (we had eaten there the night before). We ordered some vegetables, xiao chi and dao xiao mian (knife-cut noodleds), a regional specialty. It was very good and a lot of food. You may recall that we weren’t hungry. We stuffed ourselves silly. At the end of the meal, Catherine starts telling me about how southern Chinese people traditionally believe that there are compartments in our stomachs for each flavor and that her sweet compartment is still hungry. I told her mine was, too. It was bingqilin time.

See, the night before, Catherine and I had asked one of the waitresses at the restaurant if there was any bingqilin around the area. She said no. We walked down a few streets, and after half an hour, we decided the waitress was telling the truth and we had to settle for store-bought ice cream. We wandered into the little convenience shop on the other side of our hotel (i.e., not the side with the restaurant). All they had were the individual popsicles/ice-cream-on-sticks that are in freezers everywhere around China. Sigh. OK. I picked what I thought was a chocolate/vanilla swirl thing on a cone, which turned out to be taro and white. But Catherine hit jackpot: she got a popsicle called Strawberry Empress. Pink strawberry popsicle with vanilla cream on the inside–it looked and smelled like ice cream royalty.

Anyway, after our big dinner, we decided to go back to that shop and get us some Strawberry Empress. Except–it wasn’t there! We were like, WTF? Luckily, the side street next to our hotel was a row of little convenience stores, one after the other. We started at the first store and checked every single freezer. Shopkeepers stared and looked confused. Some of them asked what we were looking for. “You bingqilin ma?” I asked to save time. Some of them said no. Some said yes, and we were shown their stock. But no Strawberry Empress.

After 10 stores or so, we wandered into a shop with an upright refrigerator (like a normal home refrigerator instead of the industrial rectangular boxes). Catherine hesitated. “This can’t be good,” she said.

That’s when I noticed the duck! It was just waddling around outside the shop on the sidewalk. I got really excited and whipped out my camera. I started snapping pictures. The shopkeeper started making noises to try to get it to come over. “Na shi shei de ya?” I asked him.

“Wo de,” he answered.

I squealed with delight. “Jiao ta guo lai!”

He tried, but the duck was hungry and looking for food, he said. It was the cutest thing ever. Then I remembered our mission. “You bingqilin ma?”

He opened his refrigerator and pulled out a drawer. “Yao shenme zhong de bingqilin?” he asked as he started showing us his bingqilin.

“You mei you caomei de?”

He pulls one out. No, not it. Another one. We peer at it. Wait–this was it!

“Yes, zhei ge! Zai lai yi ge!”

He searches and searches. No more.

Because I hadn’t yet had the greatness of Strawberry Empress, Catherine let me buy the popsicle. It was delicious. We wandered down the street, now asking the shopkeepers if they had “this kind” of popsicle. No.

Finally, we saw another store with an upright refrigerator. It was a sign. What kind do you want? Strawberry flavored. Oh, here are some. No, this kind. But this is also strawberry. No, yiding yao shi zhei zhong de.

This kind? Oh, yes!–a Strawberry Empress for Catherine.

So we asked the shopkeeper to take a picture of us with our popsicles. We are still pretty certain we bought the last two Strawberry Empresses in Datong that night.

Qingdao ahoy!

August 8th, 2009 by Johanna | 1 Comment | Filed in China, Shenanigans, Stories

Actually, there isn’t anything ! about Qingdao. Wait, no, there is one thing, and here it is:

The one good thing about Qingdao: I found an ice cream place that serves ice cream on a waffle cone—three delicious scoops for only six kuai! And on our last night, I tried to get some for dessert, but the place had already closed. Devastated, I loitered around for a few moments. The really sweet guy who worked there noticed me, and perhaps even remembered me from a couple of days before, and said he can still get me some ice cream on a waffle cone if I wanted it. He was all smiley and happy to serve me, too. It was the cutest thing ever, and it made my night.

Besides that, Qingdao was full of potential greatness, but we were let down repeatedly. Perhaps it was because we had absolutely no idea where Qingdao was, what it looked like or what to do there, no plans and no time to think about any of these things. But I was still expecting something exciting.

The road to Qingdao: It started with the bullet train. After the 14-hour ride back from Dandong on a hard seat, Chris and I were looking forward to the clean, modern and sleek bullet train. And it delivered: the backs of the seats reclined a good bit and even the seats themselves could be adjusted forward. We settled down in comfort until we realized how many people kept walking back and forth, rustling in the aisle, talking loudly and generally doing annoying things. And then the kids! Some stupid little girl kept running up and down the aisle all the way to Qingdao. It was a miserable six hours. I just wanted to sleep!

The hotel search: Then, we arrived in Qingdao, ready to find us a hotel. We had no idea where in Qingdao we were, nor where a good hotel might be. The nice hotels close to the beach front were pricey ($120 or more a night). We started looking for hotels farther away from the shore; they seemed a little dicey. This guy started hassling us, trying to get us to look at hotels. We could not shake him off! It didn’t help that a lot of the more reasonably priced places wouldn’t take foreigners (not exactly because of local racism, but because a place needs to get government permission to house foreigners). A lot of times they would see Chris and say, No rooms available. After looking at four or five places, someone flagged us down on the road and told us her hotel had rooms available for 220 kuai a night. We thought it was worth a shot and went to look at the room.

The Qingdao Tian Cheng Hotel: Our room was tiny. The beds were wooden. The bathroom was the size of a large shower and doubled as one. There were no slippers. Our air condition broke our last night. The Qingdao Tian Cheng Hotel is no Crowne Plaza.

The bathing beaches of Qingdao: So we put on our bathing suits and headed down to the beach. Bathing Beach No. 1 was so crowded that crowded seems inadequate to describe it. There were no free spaces available on the sand. There was no free space in the water. The water was dirty with litter and seaweed. People didn’t lay out on towels; they just buried themselves and each other in the sand. I did not see a single bikini on a girl, but I saw men in tight shorts or Speedos and naked babies everywhere. Bathing Beach No. 2, which was a ways down the shoreline, was an exact replica.

Qingdao redeems itself: Qingdao is actually a cute little city that reminded me somewhat of San Francisco because it has a lot of one-way streets and hills. The German influence did not seem German, but the architecture was not Chinese, either. It is definitely one of the Chinese cities being revolutionized by the Chinese economic miracle. Run-down apartment buildings are being demolished so modern high rises can take their place. On the other hand, decent-looking facades line the sidewalks, but breaks in the walls reveal dismal living conditions on the other side.

Friends-turned-extortionists: Chris and I got lost wandering around the city, and just when we were about to hail a taxi back to our hotel, a guy sitting outside a small corner restaurant shouted at us: “Hello! Welcome!” He was waving us over. It was 5 in the afternoon, so Chris and I decided what the hell and joined him. He seemed to be friends with the restaurant owner, who brought us some cold bottles of Tsingtao and peanuts. This guy knew about 10 words in English and had no idea how to form English sentences, so there was a lot of pointing and gesturing. “You! Mah firrriend-a! Look-a look-a! Ship-a! Tomorrow! OK!!!!” “You! Tsingtao beer! OK!!! Me, Laoshan beer.” Somehow, I gathered from him that there was a shipyard in the direction behind the restaurant, and this guy was saying he and the restaurant owner had the pass to enter it so they could take us to go look around. A couple of beers later, the restaurant owner pulls up his SUV, and we are on our merry way to what turned out to be the Port of Qingdao. It was the coolest tour ever. There were billboards with these Communist slogans everywhere. There was a “butterfly garden,” which had statues of butterflies, giraffes and zebras. The restaurant owner drove us around the port and then back to town, straight to the heart of the tourist area. Finally, we were back at a familiar place. Chris and I say thanks and hop out of the car, but restaurant owner and mah fiiirrriend-a guy starts saying something about 200 yuan. I look at them quizzically, and it sounded like they said something about how other people would charge us 500 kuai.

“Wait, you want us to pay you 200 kuai?” I asked, not sure if I was understanding them through their Shandong dialect. And with perfectly serious faces, they were like, Yes!

I told them we had no money, and of course, they didn’t believe me. After this back-and-forth a few times, they popped the door open and told us to get back in the car because they will take us to an ATM. I was like, No, we’ve already caused you so much inconvenience, and Chris and I walked away. We watched our shadows just in case they were to hop out of their car and chase after us. I’ve never been so glad to be near a crowded Chinese tourist area.

The Americans: Chris and I walked along the tourist walks and then went to McDonald’s to recover over some fries and soft serve ice cream. On our way out, we ran into a couple of white guys, one of whom had been drinking a lot since that morning. They turned out to be part of some program at OSU and were studying at Qingdao University for the summer. We decided to get a beer, and I tried really hard to like the drunkard, but he was too pushy and borderline violent. He started an argument about Afghanistan and the Iraq War when Chris said he had been in the army. Then he kept trying to get us to go to a disco club called Feelings, which even his friend didn’t want to go to. His friend went home, and he kept saying how it would be awkward to end the night without going somewhere. Chris and I said we could have one more beer, but we didn’t want to go anywhere. He ended up wandering away randomly, and I couldn’t have been more relieved.

In a way, Chris and I have come full circle. We got into trouble the first weekend we were in China, so it figures we would get ourselves into trouble again on our last weekend together in China. Miraculously, we managed to stay out of it the whole time in between.

The JFK story

May 26th, 2009 by Johanna | No Comments | Filed in Stories

So airports actually don’t have all the stores you could ever possibly want or need. I learned this the hard way. There I was, in Terminal 1 at JFK (after landing at Terminal 2), settling down at my gate during a layover. Where’s a post office? Shouldn’t there be a gajillion of them scattered between the Puma and Clinique and Salvatore Ferragamo shops? In my rush to leave the country, I had forgotten to turn in my apartment keys. Naturally, I wanted to mail them back ASAP. But there is no post office. At least, not one that anyone was aware of. Finally, a food lady tells me there is one in Terminal 4. Terminal 4! I had to catch the Air Train over there, which means I would have to go through security again.

After arriving at Terminal 4, I realized I didn’t actually know where the post office was. I asked some airline guy, who didn’t know of any post office. But I’d be damned if I had wandered all the way out there for nothing! Plus I really needed to mail my keys. He sent me to Traveler’s Aid, a really dark and lonely shop in a corner of the terminal. There was an Asian guy sitting behind a glass window. Luckily, he knew where the alleged post office was! He gave me an envelope and stamp free of charge and sent me on my happy way. To make me feel better, a lady asked me at the post office if I also had some last minute mail I needed to post. Indeed I did! We both handed our mail over to the postal worker and I set off for Terminal 1 and China with a big sigh of relief.

Until I got to the security check, where the line had grown exponentially since the first time I went through.