Muay Thai

The other evening I went to a boxing match at Ratchadamneon Stadium and watched several pairs of tiny Thai men go at it no holds barred. The matches would start slow and build; the soundtrack was a live percussion band. Before the brutal carnage began both fighters would perform a prayer dance simultaneously. The crowd was like the stock exchange floor, everyone calling out odds and flashing all sorts of hand signals to place bets. The punches and kicks to the face, the knee jabs to the abdomen, all were accented by a resounding roar coming from the spectators, growing louder and more unified with each one, until a single blow of several hundred knocked one boxer to the ground, rendering him unable to get up again. The crowd exploded in fanfare, bills of cash like butterflies fluttered into and away from people's hands as the man was taken off on a stretcher.
Then today I played 2 hours of badminton with 9 middle-aged women, wives of very wealthy business men who live in Bangkok and join all sorts of wive's clubs to keep from getting bored and feeling isolated in the city. Afterward we went out for Mexican food and margaritas, which was interesting. I remember one particular bit of conversation that I thought was funny. Imagine one of these in an Australian accent and the other in British:
"I've been bad... Today I bought fruit from a street vendor."
"Oh, no, I've been bad: lately I've been eating lunch off the street!"
So that was a slice of life I did not expect to see while I was here... haha
As a sort of addendum I'd like to note that the formal name of Bangkok is actually:
Krung Thep Mahanakhon Amon Rattanakosin Mahinthara Yuthaya Mahadilok Phop Noppharat Ratchathani Burirom Udomratchaniwet Mahasathan Amon Piman Awatan Sathit Sakkathattiya Witsanukam Prasit
or
กรุงเทพมหานคร อมรรัตนโกสินทร์ มหินทรายุธยามหาดิลกภพ นพรัตน์ราชธานี บุรีรมย์อุดมราชนิเวศน์มหาสถาน อมรพิมานอวตารสถิต สักกะทัตติยะวิษณุกรรมประสิทธิ์

厉害!

First home-cooked meal I've had in over a month, though simple, absolutely wonderful and caused my feeling of well-being to increase tenfold. After that my uncle and I went to an upscale gym for a two-hour workout. My uncle and I walked through the underworld to get there, him smoking a cigarette en route and back.
Yesterday I went up and down the Chao Phraya on a river taxi, wandered lonely through ornate temples and palaces when suddenly I remembered I am in the land of M. Bison and Sagat from Super Nintendo's Street Fighter II. I made it back to central port and found my personal driver Pornthep awaiting me, after which we went to buy some fruit.
I noticed that bicyclists are non-existant here, and traffic is 落后. For one thing, traffic lights are not computer controlled, but police controlled via a little tiny station at every light where a couple of officers sit and decide whether a light will stay red for 3 minutes or 35. What that means is, a commute that should be 10 minutes can often take 2 hours during the rush hour or inclement weather conditions.
In some ways it is nice to have this break to let all the Chinese I have been learning to sink in a bit; the academic program at Nanjing U is a bit 厉害, so I am constantly bombarded with more and more material without much time to actually absorb it. Now I physically feel some of that hardening in my brain like a thermosetting polymer. A thermosetting polymer such as that created by formaldehyde and melamine put together, the latter of which has grossly contaminated milk products coming out of China. Sometimes when I want to speak, Mandarin words come to my mind before English. That's a good sign, but it doesn't help me here, and the discovery that I actually don't know any Thai language is always a new one...

"Off to Bangkok"

It's nice to take a break from Chinese food, and coffee for that matter, for a time, and hang around with someone who appreciates the finest coffee and freshest food. My Swedish uncle and I talked about coffee and sailing, as well as other things upon my arrival in Thailand. Although I rarely see Tomas, he feels like family to me. We talked until late, whereupon I got hungry so decided to go out and explore the neighborhood a little...
Bangkok is ridiculous, at least what I've seen of it so far. I wandered out down the street to the place Tomas had recommended for a bite to eat. As he had described to me, I knew I had found the place because there were lady-boy prostitutes all done up and keeping keen eyes on customers. I was eating a really good plate of Pad Thai that cost around $1 USD, when I caught a glimpse of a real life elephant walking through the street amongst the taxis and I was like, what the hell?
After eating I went to track the elephant down and on the way passed all sorts of street vendors selling food and clothing and random trinkets, colorful Halloween masks, DVDs, etc; smells were shooting off in my brain like fireworks, going from the smell of automobile exhaust and sewage to jasmine and other flowers being sold on strings, to overripe exotic fruits, multitudes of Thai spices, sickly sweet hookah in the Middle Eastern alley, and perfume of the rows upon rows of prostitutes lined up along the way as I passed. Indeed, Bangkok is a city for the nose if nothing else; a five-minute stroll down a given street gives more aromas than one could accumulate in a whole month. Nearly every foreigner in this neighborhood at this hour is a creepy-ass-looking white guy with a prostitute around his arm or fishing for one. Discomforting is a way to describe the sight. And I thought I had seen it all until I walked by a group of deaf-mute lady boys communicating in sign. And then I decided to go back home for the night and sleep. So that is what I'm going to do now.

I just studied a leg amputation procedure, but...

I just studied a leg amputation procedure, but the catch is that it was entirely in Chinese. That took some time to interpret. Now I have a quiet moment where I would like to relay last weekend's trip into words.
The crowds in Xitang's old town died out by Monday morning. Shawna and I spent our last night in a pricey inn that provided us with a balcony right beside the canal. The canal, though pretty in its own right and romantically lit with lanterns by night, was quite foul. The same water that people used to wash their faces and clothes was the same water used to dip dirty mops, rinse food, gut chickens, and urinate. Very vividly I recall a boy peeing into the canal while less than 15 ft downstream a restaurant worker was washing snow peas. In all though, the place was fun and romantic, and altogether different than the big city style.
Leaving Xitang we hopped on a rickety bus bound for Jiaxing. The tiny bus, like a clown car, was filled far beyond its intended capacity. In Jiaxing we found all the bus tickets back to Nanjing were sold out so we took a bruise-colored cab to the train station in order to try our luck there. It was shortly after 1pm when we bought the only train tickets available which would have us leaving Jiaxing at 8pm, having to go thru Shanghai. Stranded in the small city for much time, Shawna and I were chased into a dimly lit restaurant by nasty nasty storm clouds quickly fronting. There we ate and watched a young woman who was very much insane silently talk and make twitching movements. Monstrous rains were hitting the area meanwhile. The rest of the afternoon was spent at a surprisingly inexpensive all-you-can-drink teahouse.
The train station was a little sketchy seeming, and resultingly the train itself. It was such chaos getting on and having to yell at some folks who took our seats, exiling them to the "no seat" ticket holder designated area.
On the train people were so bored they would be fascinated in watching anything anyone was doing: what got me most was some adults tinkering with a toy spin that played a high-pitched squeal of the Happy Birthday song over and over and over and over and over, nonstop for maybe an hour and a half. Somehow, what could be a three hour train ride turned out to be double that, allowing our arrival into Nanjing to be approximately 2am Monday night.
Most of those midnight train riders were farmers; it was an interesting blend of people to say the least.

Watertown

After a few days spent in Suzhou (苏州) wandering about without a plan, Shawna and I caught a bus to Xitang (西塘), one of a few Venice-like water towns in this area of Zhejiang Province. We had to transfer in Jiashan to a small rickety bus to take us the rest of the distance. Jiashan was a rundown more rural city, if that makes sense. In Xitang we were randomly dropped off in the non-water area and had to make our way through traffic messes to the old town.
Once here we have found a nice inn to spend the first night, positioned right beside a waterway. At night the noises of passersby below our window can be heard and the narrow alleys are all lit with red lanterns. It's a very pretty place. On the bus I heard the tune to a song from the movie "Love Story" play over and over again as we careened past goose farms, etc. Just now I heard the same song being played on a flute outside my window.
What I will remember most of Suzhou was a cheap, but epic late night hotpot (火锅) experience as well as breakfast this morning consisting of mind-blowingly good dumplings (小笼包), soymilk (豆浆) and youtiao (油条). Both of those meals left me reeling in Cloud 9.
As for how I feel after being in China about a month now... living here is frustrating at times and others a real joy. Sometimes I'll be embraced for my mixed heritage and sometimes I am a complete outsider. The most I am capable of now is some small talk, conversational kind of things, but I still have an overwhelming amount to learn, and that gets me down periodically. I still need to work on stringing longer, more complex sentences together. Some things come quite quickly as though I've programmed it already, but then it can take a while to express myself in other moments. I still have 3 months to focus entirely on Chinese, so my goal is to do just that, and not get caught by the feeling of being overwhelmed too much.

大屠杀

The Nanjing Massacre Memorial Museum (南京大屠杀纪念馆) is unarguably one of the most profoundly unsettling historical museums in the world. I went there a few days ago after I had gotten out of class. Situated in a desolate, far-off area of Nanjing, the museum was very well-planned and organized, with sleek architectural design. The exhibition was quite flowing, providing a very thorough, very circumspect rundown of the series of events, key players surrounding the atrocity known as the Nanjing Massacre.
It has taken a few days to allow the content I learned from all the eye-witness accounts and graphic photographs to fully sink in. A period of six weeks under which the Japanese army invaded Nanjing "peacefully," by performing a multitude of horrific acts far too numerous, far too disturbing to write about here, surmounting a death-toll of over 300,000. But it was not just mass murder, it was prolonged torture and rape of individuals. Try to imagine the most humiliating and viscous things that could be done to a human being and then multiply that by ~300000. That an entire army of people could act without conscience in a way that displayed no moral structure in any way whatsoever, while writing home about how quiet and serene things were in Nanjing is completely baffling.
The ultimate message of the museum was of course to forgive, but never forget.
Outside the museum was a field of water representing bloodshed, as well as an actual burial ground referred to as the Mass Grave of 10000 Corpses where one could view piles upon piles of human skeletons as they had been ruthlessly laid to rest in the ground.

In the Cup of Tea

Spending this late Monday evening with Shawna in a very comfy tea house off of 湖南路 drinking a bottomless cup of "Invigorate the kidney to maintain the skin" tea, I wrote a 643-character essay in Chinese about Nanjing people's perspectives on local housing. We were here a few nights ago eating snacks and drinking tea for hours, enjoying the atmosphere as little packs of business men filed in with flushed cheeks to end their work day with a cup of tea and a game. Opposite us sat two very focused, very well-postured men playing Chinese checkers, while another friend of theirs, a penguin-looking guy came barging in, and found himself quite uninterested in his friends' quiet affairs. He sat and occasionally poured them tea, and seemed to call every single person in his cell phone to yell in completely incomprehensible Nanjing dialect. He would cover his mouth at times to be quieter, but yell even louder into the phone to make up for the muffling effect his hand over the receiver made. I like this tea house a lot.
The other say Shawna and I went to an older, more run-down area of Nanjing that was right beside the big huge commercial district of Xinjiekou (新街口). Here we wandered through a narrow street full of food stalls and various other abodes/shops. We stopped in at an underground "fresh" food market where we were amply greeted by by far the worst smells I have ever experienced. Here they sold everything from live, de-shelled turtles to ducks and geese and chickens and pigeons in cages next to stacks of their butchered fellow inmates, they had fruits and vegetables abound, and tons of pork cuts and other seafood, live or dead including eels and shrimp and random no-name fish. Once we had re-emerged from the marketplace out into daylight once again we meandered some more through the same area as before, passing along the way a very out-of-place dentist office in the middle of this mess.

爬泰山

Shandong Cuisine

Before I knew it I was in Shandong Province(山东省) once I had awoken from a light slumber. I survived a cramped 7-hour bus ride with nothing to eat but vacuum-sealed dog meat on digestive wheat crackers. As dusk approached the sun was a faint smear of a bloody orange, illuminated through layers of indiscernible cloud and smog. It was that perfect time of day, plenty light out to catch the scene as it quickly glided by.
And by the time we reached Tai'An (泰安) it was night time and the tiny town was all quiet and still. A rather large group of us 老外 went venturing out for some sort of nightlife that was essentially nonexistent. I broke off from the group early on with a few others to eat a few dishes at a dirty open square managed by a street vendor. On miniature stools we ate and played Crazy Eights on a miniature, wobbly table.
Meanwhile, back in our hotel lobby some 10-15 local gangsters were kicking the shit out of one other Chinese guy who rubbed them the wrong way, breaking a plate and an ashtray over his head. All of this was caught on videotape which I watched the following morning over breakfast.
Contrary to the preceding story, I found in general Shandong people were very friendly. I spoke to a few locals here and there as time and opportunity saw fit. Luckily those I did talk to for the most part didn't use their Shandong dialect on me, otherwise it would have been a mess. While the people were seemingly quite friendly, their cuisine was a another story. Confucius as I mentioned earlier is of Shandong and so there is a dish named after him, perhaps the most famous, most expensive. It is called Kong Men Doufu (孔门豆腐), a type of tofu that tastes exactly like a cigarette-smoke filled motel room. The taste captures the very essence of the stale smoke entrenched in the furniture that is preserved over time, the wallpaper and bedsheets of your standard Super 8 motel.
Now I am trying to recall what it was that I ate that tasted like the cadavers in my lab smelled? Shawna and Thuy should know...