Sino-psis

wow, long time no post. nuff said, i guess.

so i went to the grounds of the qingdao beer festival to check exactly how far away from the center of town it lies. one of the school i was looking at to become a possible place of future employment told me that they had an apartment for me out there, but seeing as how the bus ride took about an hour, so i wasn't really enthused to take them up on the offer. however, as i read on page five of the newspaper on the way out there (i had time to fully peruse every facet of that issue, including the personals printed column style down the spine of each page) the theme park attached to the beer festival was opening that very night! that at least warranted my sneaking in through a side entrance pretending to be with a chinese family to check out all the commotion.

nope, no commotion. hardly anyone was there. and that, if you have been to either the north carolina or iowa state fairs as i and many others have, is a damn good thing. nooooooooo liiiiiiines. every ride was instantly accessible in a kind of don't know whether to first eat the pizza or the fries way. everything looked deliciously intrudable.

but there are a couple of things that goes through one's mind when in a new city in china. in my mind, for example, at the moment that i was staring up at the G-Force/Joker, i was thinking "Gosh, 60 yuan is kinda expensive for one ride" and "Man, everyone is gonna stare at me as soon as i buy my ticket" and "Is it possible that I might be too tall for this ride? The sign has a height minimum but no maximum. Maybe they've never had anybody my height ride before and don't know what to do." and "Is it possible to throw up on an empty stomach?" and "I would hate having to explain as a ghost to my family and friends how it was that i died in a freak whiplash accident in a beer festival amusement park ride." etc.

But it looked like so much fun and i hadn't been on a ride in years, probably. So i went, and it was worth it.

It's the kind of ride that spins like one spoke of a ferris wheel, but much faster, and at each end of the diameter is a chair where two pairs of people can sit (strapped in) back to back. This chair can swing on an axis, so that when the spoke spins over the top of the ride, your chair will flip over a couple of times on the way down, thus adding to the g-force being exerted on your body and producing the name of the ride. I sat next to a random chinese girl and there were no people behind us. As we got on, there were four people hanging 40 meters above, waiting for the ride to spin them in the opposite direction. The scenery up there, is beautiful.

To one side of the ride, the landscape is a series of apartment complexes followed by beach and then ocean. The day was clear as a clear bell (not one of those dirty brass ones) and you could see everything. One the other side were a series of ridges/mountains that were shear and lush and majestic. The sun was hitting everything just right, so it was sad that it would be suicidal to have brought my camera up there.

The guy let me take my sandals off and then sat us down, locking the bars over my shoulders and buckling everything up. Tug, clank, he was satisfied that it was secure, and i've learned by now to just trust someone who looks good at their job to be good at their job. It might be the death of me one day, but until that day, I will trust in other people as much as I can.

The swing up was fine. We went forewards first, watching the people below get sucked into a whirlpool of noise and diminishing light. The sky above opened up and we could see everything. And then we blindly did a backwards dive into the pool below. That was mildly scary and elicited at least one curse word that my partner prolly didn't understand out of me.

We rushed by the crowd below and back into the blue sky. By this time I was whooping and laughing. My brain couldn't think of any other appropriate response. It was just plain fun. The speed and reversals of up and down were setting fire to neurons that usually don't get called out for duty unless there's an emergency of some sorts, eg tripping, almost getting hit by a leaf, grasping the pole as the bus lurches out into traffic. Needless to say, they weren't prepared for a situation of this magnitude.

And then we slowed to a halt many meters up. it was at this point that we had a breathy, hushed conversation that seemed rushed because we weren't confident how long we would have this brief respite. I spoke.

Wow, this is fun! Are you okay?

Oh, I'm scared to death! she replied. That was so scary!

Are you afraid of heights? I asked.

No, not usually, but this is different. It's too fast! And look at the people! Everyone down there looks so small.

Right! Like... ants!

No, she replied, bigger than ants.

Yes, you're right, as I sized them up below, More like cockroaches.

I don't want to do it again, she proferred.

Then get off the ride! I joshed.

No, she said seriously, Here would not be a good place to disembark. I think I'll wait for the ride to be over.

Then you'll be okay? I asked.

Yes, I think so, I'll be fine, she replied.

And at that moment, the ride took off again, this time dropping us straight to the ground, in the reverse direction we were going the first time. And it was only in this direction that I actually got scared into bringing out countless more swear words to be yelled into the turbulent air to fall onto deaf ears. In this direction, the ride gave you a terrible feeling of vertigo. You rose over the top, looking at the axle bar of the chair you were sitting on. Your mind instantly mistook that piece of metal for ground, back on firm footing. And then you mentally took a leap off the bar, over the edge, straight down onto the swarming cockroaches ready to feast on your remains below. That shiznuckle scared the bejeezus out of me. And it happened over and over again until the ride conductor got tired of hearing me scream and laugh and cry and mercifully stopped the ride. At this point, I was dizzy and my footing was uncertain and I wasn't sure if I'd be able to find my way into my sandals, let alone my bus and my hotel.

Thankfully the feeling passed and I was able to stupidly grin for a good hour or so. It was a good memory of exhiliration and beauty to have at the edges of my thought processes, so that when i got bored or started to daydream, it would rip into my consciousness and drop me over the edge again and again, making me laugh at the curses that streamed from my mouth and the curious smiles of the chinese onlookers below as i wobbled off the ride. It was my pickmeup for the next couple of days.

And I needed it. The next day was my big day of going to schools in the area and haggling over teaching hours and salaries and housing. I went to five different schools, teaching sample lessons to let them see my "skills" at some and looking at basic contracts at others. It was a hectic day chock full of "Oh, your chinese is so good!" and "How long have you been in China?". I've had to recap my three year stint in china so many times recently that it's prolly the most fluent phrase i have in my entire chinese arsenal at this point.

And this past week would have been much more miserable had it not been for the kindness of strangers here in Qingdao. Getting on the train coming over here, a girl helped me carry half my things all the way into my sleeper car, and then departed to go find her own car, no thanks required. Climbing the steps of my hostel, yet another person offered to help, but I refused as I was almost there and stopping would only halt my momentum.

But the biggest source of help has been a new friend named Shidong. He was helping out at a local Xinjiang noodle place and started talking to me. His english is passable, but we mostly spoke Mandarin. His is amazingly clear. In a lot of places in China, the accent spoken there always taints their mandarin and makes it hard to understand, but this guy has crystal clear, teacher-perfect mandarin. So we chatted and i told him what i was doing, and he said, i can help.

The next morning, he spent most of it in his office calling around and getting information. he tracked down 7 top schools in the area, two of which i had already visited, but five of which i had never heard, and wrote down a comprehensive list of all of it. telephone numbers, websites, everything. Without his help, i'd prolly still be looking at schools right now, but instead I just signed with one of the schools he provided. he is just a great person. i'm trying to help him with his english in return, but it really isn't enough to thank him for what he did. i'm sure i'll figure out a way, but it'll take time. he's better at it than i.

But this is all kinda boring, so I'm gonna talk for a bit about my hostel and then call it a post.

I'm staying at the Qingdao International Youth Hostel at the moment, though I checked out this morning and need a new place to stay currently. Figure that out later. The hostel, though, is funny. It's another example of reverse culture shock. There are so many foreigners staying there and they are all pretty new to china and have the excited, flushed, and slightly annoyed looks of someone who just arrived. There are certain local issues that become important when you've lived in China for a while, like mass kidnappings, mine explosions, typhoons, train tickets, housing prices, etc, that make other issues seem laughable, even though they might be very serious under different circumstances. It all comes down to what is closest and affects you the most. The things that are distant and foreign just kinda end up getting swept under the rug.

For example, I walked into my room last night, a room with eight beds in bunkbed four-by-two formation, and bumped straight into a heated argument. A danish guy was yelling about helicopter squadrons at an israeli guy i had met earlier named ori. At first I thought they were discussing video games. But in the end I figured out that they were talking about the israeli-palestinian conflict of the past couple of decades and even farther back into history. The dane was comparing sharon to hitler and ori was taking offense to that (rightly) and stating that the dane's facts were incorrect. There were two chinese tourists sitting silently in the room nervously watching.

It was such a weird room to walk into in China. The argument made little sense to begin with (I found out that the dane had drunk a bottle of vodka and punched a hole in the wall of a bar earlier that day) and was unbefitting a hostel of international proportions. People are supposed to be travelling and working together, not bickering. But that was not what bothered me the most. What irked me was actually my disinterest in the whole debate. I am so fully in China now that I have no idea what's going on in the Middle East for the most part. Oh, I'll gloss over nytimes articles and headlines and get the gist of the situation, but it's just nowhere in my radar. This is another difference of living in China and America. China's not so invested in the region, so we hear less about it here. But considering it's conceivably the next powderkeg of the world, I feel annoyed that I've been so negligent of that source of information.

But mostly the situation was laughable. The Chinese had no idea what was going on, except that it was generally about Israel. The dane was off his rocker, and kept using the word fuck in inappropriate positions in his sentences, and it was obvious he had never heard anyone actually use it like that before but was just constructing his own neophrasisms. Ori just looked bemused and beset, and pleadingly looked to me at one point saying with his eyes "I didn't start this. How do I end it?"

But then providence came in the form of two girls, obviously American from both dress and accent (even the Chinese picked up on that, speaking in a Chinese undertone "now those girls are Definitely americans"), who were asking the dane to come out with them to some club. they asked ori and i if we wanted to come out too, and i held in the urge to laugh. now, i wasn't being unkind here. sure, they looked like nice americans, but i just wouldn't be able to talk to them. one, they were much younger than i, and two, they knew little about china. at this point, in this place, there was no way i could communicate with them without feeling bored as hell. so i politely refused and went to bed. i was tired anyway.

This just further confirmed one thing for me. The only thing that i have to talk about with most americans is popular culture, and since i've been out of it for so long, i don't even have that. whenever i bring up china it's like someone bringing up break-through AIDS research with me. I don't really know what's going on in the field and it's something that interests me, but i've never taken the time to get an in-depth understanding of it and have no idea of the extent to which AIDS has spread throughout the third world. China is spreading just as fast and the research one needs to put into it is just as complicated. I can only talk to others who have lived in China for long periods of time. It is rare when anyone else gets it. Just like the Dane didn't get what Ori was talking about, because he had never been to Israel.

And of course, I'm still absurdly American. I'm sitting in a Starbucks right now writing this post, next door to a Pizza Hut. My clothes mark me and my white skin advertizes my presence wherever I go. it's hard to run away from that. and i've decided to stop trying. The shirt i'm wearing says polo jeans company on it and has an american flag in inverted colors on it. slightly reminds me of a painting emmet did in middle school or early high school that used to hang in one of the guest bedrooms. it plainly says "I'M AMERICAN". ah well. embrace your selling point. i'm getting paid ten times as much as most people in this city (200 times more than a good many) and i don't really have to do anything but speak and let some students listen to my pure raleigh yuppie accent. a globalized, bastardized form of the american dream.

hmm, this post kinda got dark at the end. let's just end it by saying, i've got a job, i'm going to have an apartment soon, and i'm waiting for a british girl named maggie to get her butt over here so that i can have my girlfriend back. if that isn't a perfect example of heteronormative living, then i've forgotten what that word actually means. which is certainly possible.

i'll try to keep up the posts. you never know, this time i might actually be true to that word.

e

Labels: Qingdao