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...

Bats flying around in 曲阜

泰山： At 4:38 a.m. I received a wake up call and groggily arose in the musky, damp air of my hotel room on the top of the mountain. I put on a heavy overcoat provided by the hotel and walked out to catch the sunrise. I sat on a rock and silently watched the giant mass of clouds marching past like a funeral procession in the valley below me. I thought about a lot of things. And the sun did rise quickly, magnificently, bringing a new day to throngs of people waiting for it in military-like overcoats.
I spent the next night in 曲阜 (Qufu)where Confucius is from. It was pouring down rain not long after we had arrived and a group of us went out into it quite unprepared looking for a meal. We wandered into a very impoverished area without a road, but just a muddy path with garbage filled ditches on the sides, peppered with restaurants and vendors all vying for our business. Walking past a dirty cart with dog meat(狗肉)inside, skulls and ribs visible amongst the mass of meat piled up on itself, my clothes were saturated and muddy, rainwater pouring down my face from my hair and the song "Videotape" from Radiohead's latest album "In Rainbows" was playing on repeat in my head. It was a very wonderful and haunting scene in my memory.
In Qufu I was told I looked like I was from 新疆(Xinjiang)by a restaurant worker, which I assumed was an insult since a lot of Han Chinese look down upon minorities.

北大楼

Nanjing University: North Large Building

The Shoes I Passed Up

At a small DVD shop a CD caught my eye: a two-disc set of Chinese actor Leslie Cheung's greatest hits. This actor is famous for such emotionally intense and epic movies such as "Temptress Moon" and "Farewell My Concubine." Openly bisexual in the later years of his career, though surprisingly still reknowned by Chinese people, he committed suicide by jumping off of a tall building in Hong Kong in 2003. Everyone was shocked. So I bought the CD set and it's pretty corny Cantonese pop. The cover has a tagline that says: "Each song all is the Peru system glistens in each all to have the shining sunlight the shade." But I like him as an actor quite a bit.
Here is a vignette of my time in Beijing:

On our last day in Beijing, Shawna and I wandered around some smoggy, rainy streets in a strange stupor. Our third of four inevitable goodbyes was yet another heart-wrenching trial run for the big 3-month goodbye at September’s close. Hopefully we will be well prepared for that when the time comes since we have had so much practice. That last day in Beijing we really didn’t know what we wanted to do, and the weather was amply oppressive. For the first time we slept in that morning and had a late start, which took it out of us as well. (Late as in 9 am instead of 8 am). But as down-and-out as the both of us felt, I was still very happy walking by her side, hand in hand. I wanted to kiss her every moment and hold her close like a warm fire on a cold night.

As we lazily meandered like two parallel creeks through rows upon rows of fake goods at the market, a pair of bootleg BAPE shoes stood out to me. They were green and white and very plastic in appearance. On the sides of the shoes was a little cartoon Santa Claus holding a court-order. I should have stuck around and bargained them down to a reasonable price, but I just didn’t have it in me that day. And I am a foreigner after all, a foreigner in Beijing during the 2008 Olympic games. That means a lot to a Chinese shopkeeper, let me tell you.

"Insectual"

I took a nice cool shower to strip myself clean of the elements of this new city, feeling both lonely and content. I spent the evening in the company of a few of my classmates, three other friendly students with whom I shared a meal of soup dumplings that exploded with every bite in spite of the warning signs put up on the walls of the establishment. Then I drank another Snowflake (雪花) lite beer and ate lamb skewers (羊肉串); I sat on a stool at a small roadside table with my fellow cohorts, soaking in the muggy night. I was very warmly invited to sit outside the little kiosk where I bought the beer by the woman shopkeeper, but decided I needed skewers to accent this beer. Thought about Nanjing, my impressions after two days here. I was never met at the airport by CIEE program staff when I arrived so I hopped on a shuttle bus that took me to some place in the city center unbeknownst to me and from there I hailed a taxi to take me to Nanjing University. The taxis here are mostly an emerald green color, with the hard plastic guard wall separating driver from passenger. A few other cabs are a sleek marlin blue, but I chanced upon a green one. The driver swept through the hectic streets, heavily congested with bikers, mopeds, pedestrians, buses and the like. We pulled onto a large avenue called 北京西路 and passed down through it smoothly like a blood cell through a major vessel. It was by far the most beautiful street I have ever been on; lined uniformly on either side with towering planetrees whose thick overhanging branches with the scaly bark created a canopy tunnel over the road. My jaw must have dropped, taking in all of the scene at once, the imagery so overpowering. Nanjing is a good city. Dirty, pretty, and raw just the way I like them.