Pictures Finally

OK, so now that I'm back in the States, I've finally managed to get some of my photos hosted online. They can be found at
http://www.dropshots.com/nimenhao

"Nimen Hao" is an informal greeting along the lines of "Hey friends" or whatnot (more literally, "You guys good?")

OK, just to illustrate a few: (please excuse the little ads or whatnots on the bottom of the page



A scene from the first day we were in Beijing. It was snowing, uncharacteristically. This is a square right near our dorm in BNU.



Sarah and Mike. At first, it was slightly difficult to find things in the city. So, we often spent some time on our journeys looking up words to try to help us find places. It worked sometimes.





Since we spent a lot of time in the city, it was nice to see a bit of nature. It's one of the things i missed more while in China.



At the Temple of Heaven- There were many Chinese people there just hanging out and playing cards and such.



Another shot from the Temple of Heaven.

Sunday, December 31, 2006




Some shots from the Great Wall



One of my favorite shots from China. This is a child who stayed with her parents pretty much all day as they ran a magazine stand at the East Gate of BNU. I like how completely open her expression is, and (as mike pointed out) how it contrasts with the very energetic expression on the child in the magazine to the right.




A scene from the walk to the subway station.



A monument at Tianenmen Square. Note the presence of Mao's head instead of a flag.



Tianenmen Square is a large site for Chinese tourism in addition to foriegn tourism. I'm not quite sure what it is that girl is supposed to be wearing, but the other one sure looks jealous.



Val, Joe, Liz, and Ish. This picture is notable mostly because the stone lion looks like its about to eat Liz.



Taken at a market in Tianjin, the port city of Beijing. The "ancient culture stree" (basically a tourist trap) was shopped more heavily by Chinese rather than foreigners- perhaps a sign of China's re-emergent interest in its past.





Shots of skyscrapers going up around Tianjin.



Mike got a seal carved with his Chinese name on it.


OK, I'll put up some more later

-Tom

Looking back

So, our dinner was really good. We went to a really really good dumpling house. They had pork shanghai style dumplings, in which you put soup as well as meat, and those were amazing. They also had red bean paste dumplings and buns, which were remarkably good. These were desserts, as red bean paste is sweet and has a very rich flavor; Val compared it to chocolate. I think this is a very good comparison actually- the really good red bean paste has the same richness of flavor that really good chocolate has. It was definitely one of the best dinners of the trip, though there have been lots of those. I'm going to miss the food here so much.

We said our goodbyes to the sushi place on campus at lunch today. I think since Shanghai there have been two or maybe three days max during which I haven't gotten one of my meals at that place. We had the same waitress nearly every time, and by the end she knew exactly what we were going to order ("dragon rolls", which were a kind of chicken roll, spicy tuna rolls, and unagi rolls, which are squid, or perhaps octopus- some kind of cephalopod).

Yesterday for lunch we had gone to a really good Japanese buffet with Vivian, the linguistics phd student who helped us on our trip and who also taught survivor chinese to val, liz, one of the sarahs, i, and jim. she is very nice, and the buffet was very very good.

Anyway, enough of food.

I've been doing some thinking of what I've learned from this China trip. First, some thoughts on what I've learned from the Imperialism class:

Earlier I described an idea that Imperialism could be viewed as a system more effective at manipulating the world displacing one less effective than it. I still think there is merit in this.
One refinement I have made, however, is the understanding that imperialism is a location specific process (not that I didn't think this before, but I have considered more of its importance lately). The Qing dynasty in China, for all its power and wealth, found itself unable to stop the British and other Western powers, not only because of their guns, but largely because the Western powers were far away and many parts of the processes of Western incursion took place far away from the places the Qing could effectively manipulate. The Western powers, on the other hand, developed methods that were very effective in supporting their systems far from their home bases.

Another question is, why did the Europeans devote so much time and energy to developing these systems while the Qing, who in many ways had huge head starts on the Europeans in the times when modern Europe was formulating, never did so? This arose in part because the Europeans had to develop such methods; they had been repeatedly kicked around in the middle ages and many times driven to being wiped out or swallowed by more powerful civilizations. During the times right before European imperialism began, the Europeans were desparate to find new ways to aquire the spices and other goods from India upon which they had become dependent. The Muslim control of the Mediterranean made it expensive, difficult, or impossible for the Europeans to go through the Mediterranean for the spice trade, depending on the politics of the day.

China, on the other hand, had managed to establish a nearly self-sufficient kingdom. This was not entirely true: China also imported significantly from India and the Middle East, but their trade was never seriously threatened. In this case as well, perception of the situation is as important or perhaps more important than the actual reality: As the Europeans saw it, they had to find a way to expand trade and their ability to spread their trade system to the East or they'd be cut off from their supplies. In the Chinese mind, they had all they needed or at the very least had relatively easy and unthreatened access to it. The Chinese view of their kingdom as the center of civilization, and other civilizations as periphery, reinforced their tendency to regard the rest of the world as not particularly worth the effort of trying to get to anyway.

From what I have seen in China, China has largely adapted many of the Western systems that allowed the West to imperialize them a century ago, in technology, certain social patterns, etc. Not that all these things are Western in origin; indeed, I think the actual origin of something is relatively unimportant compared to who uses it to the most effect (paper money was invented by the Chinese, but it didn't really catch on there much to popular extent- it was brought to a much greater level of use by other groups of people and reintroduced in China, so to speak, by the imperialists. Even then, it wasn't enacted with that much succuess til the CCP takeover in 1949).

Eh anyway, I'm bored of that, which means you are probably even more bored. OK last topic for now:

China has a lot of people. A LOT of people. This, really, it the source of most of their problems. America and China are roughly the same in land area (as well as geographical areas in comparable climate zones really- though China has only one coast). America has (officially) around 280 million people right now (probably closer to 310 or so), whereas China has 1.3 billion. That is a lot of people. This is causing lots of problems for the CCP and PRC government.

Corruption: OK, so perhaps the Confucian emphasis on personal connections and the tradition of regionalism reinforced by the Warlord Period of the 1920s and 1930s play roles in this as well, but the problem of corruption (which some estimate drains 2% of China's GDP each year) largely stems from the fact that China simply has too many people for the central government to effectively govern, or at the very least, not without a lot of difficulty. Purely the information that needs to be organized and the number of people you need to coordinate to try to get any policy enforced are staggering.

The Environment: China is facing an environmental crisis on all fronts. Pollution, stemming from industrial plants and power production (China is very dependent on coal, which is very dirty), is a big problem in both airborne and water related forms. Beijing and Shanghai air quality are both very poor (the CCP is trying to do something about Beijings before the Olympics, but it is a hard issue to tackle). Water quality in many big cities is suspect. In Beijing and Shanghai, it is not advisable to drink the water- even for locals. All the restaurants in Beijing serve only boiled or bottled water. China is quickly entering an oil based economy, which will bring further environmental damage.

But the two environmental issues I thought are particularly telling are those related to food and water. In water, China has been using up its lakes. In food, China is overtaxing its farmland so much that much of it is being lost to desertification. These are particularly alarming issues, because they reflect a difficult situation in which the biological systems that support the population are being stretched beyond a sustainable limit. Pollution can be mitigated at least in part with cleaner technologies, but if you are trying to get more energy in the form of food from your environment than the natural processes can support, there is little you can do.

Anyway, these are complex issues so I won't spend too much more time on them. I will say, however, that my time here has changed my perspective on many things. The problems China is facing are of a different scope than any American analog. This has changed my view on some of China's policies: for example, the One Child policy, often seen or at least depicted in America as being authoritarian or cruel or such, I now view as a virtual necessity. Perhaps, of course, it could be better implemented, but the cold reality is that if China does not get its population to controllable levels, it faces ecological and societal collapse.

The other thing I have realized in both my stay here and the classes I took, is that the problems that China faces are not theirs alone, in either the causes or the solutions. Many of the factories that are polluting China's air and water are those of companies based in the US, Japan, and Europe that are taking advantage of China's cheap labor and relaxed regulations. We cannot afford to pretend that we only need to worry about what goes on on our own soil when those systems intimately connected to our nation are doing such things in other countries. This matter goes well above and beyond even humanistic concerns: pollution and environmental problems don't observe any national boundaries, and what effects one area of the world ecologically will soon effect all of them.

OK well, you get the point. It is late and I'm going to try to stay up a bit longer so I can sleep on the plane, but I'm done writing for now.

Last Day in Beijing

So, we just got back from our last day in Beijing. The last stop on Western end of Line 1 of the Beijing subway (the one that runs East and West) is a place called Pingguoyuan, which translates to "Apple Park". We thought this might be a good place to explore on our last day, so we headed out there. It is about a half hour subway ride from the Western part of the heart of Beijing to there, so we were somewhat surprised when we stepped out of the subway and still found dense city as far as you could see in all directions. Beijing is ridiculously big.

We also did not find any park. Instead, it was a concrete area with vendors selling a few things while taxi cab drivers waited outside the subway exit and motorcycle cab drivers sat on their motorcycles near the road. We saw a few old men playing cards and asked them where Pingguoyuan was, and they answered that we were there. We tried to tell them we meant the park, not the subway stop, and they said we were there.

So, it was not quite what we expected. But we looked around, and I saw that there were some bare hills perhaps four hundred feet high or so a bit of a distance to the north of us. We agreed to make it our goal to reach them. We headed as straight for them as possible. This took us through a poor Beijing neighborhood in which houses were shacks with tin roofs. The alleys kept getting narrower and narrower, but we had started to go up an incline, so we decided we were getting close and continued.

This turned out to be a very good idea. Just as the paths we were walking on were getting to feel awkwardly like someone's front steps, we turned a corner and found ourselves confronted with a small path that climbed up a rocky slope with some bramble bushes on it. So we climbed.

We got to the top of one slope. On it were three old Chinese men flying a kite that was at least five hundred feet worth of string in flight. With them they had a small pug dog. They conversed a bit with Mike, though he couldn't understand them very well (the Beijing accent was very very strong). We found out that we were on the Three Hills, or something along those lines, and that the dog's name was Bur Bur. It was very very fun. The hills were the foothills of larger mountains that you could see in the distance. We got some good pictures.

On the tallest mountain, there was a PLA uniformed guard sitting in a nook just under the summit under a flag with a old radio.
When we walked the ten more feet to the top, we found the remains of what looked to be an old guard tower. From the top, we could see city in one direction and mountains in the other. To the West was an area of tall apartment buildings surrounding a nice soccer field where some Chinese teenagers were having a competitive game.

We walked around the area for a bit after that; it was a quieter, less affluent part of Beijing. The people there were obviously not used to seeing foreigners. The kids were, as usual, very friendly and curious. A group of them kept about thirty feet away from us as we stood and looked around for a bit. They shouted things like "Hello!" at us (I think one of them even shouted "What is your name?") and kept hiding shyly behind a truck parked on the side of the road.

We also found a food market. We bought some Chinese apples and pears and mandarin oranges (I had an apple, it was good). We also bought a few cookies, and ate them as we walked away, but got only twenty feet when we decided that the cookies were really good so we went back and bought a bunch more to share with friends later.

It was a very fun afternoon, one of the best I'd say. We got to see a lot of the city that you wouldn't normally see, it was very refreshing.

But now, we are trying to find a good Chinese restaurant for our last dinner here.
Later.

-tom

Behai and Beijing Skyline

i explored behai garden today. it is the oldest classical imperial garden in china. like the summer palace 30 minutes to the northwest, a giant manmade lake was dug with the dirt then piled up in one spot to form a giant manmade mountain. the park/garden focuses around these two fake geographic features with paths and walkways and temples etc.



on top of the fake hill there is a beautiful white pagoda. there was a group singing.



i took a number of photos of the surrounding skyline.


behai park is not in some outlying area away from the main commercial center. it is at the heart of the city. the top of the three frames is the forbidden city itself.

note the lack of skyscrapers and harmony of the modern neo classical roofs alongside their older counterparts.

there are tall buildings in beijing, but not the way there are in american metropolitan zones or even shanghai and hongkong. they are in pockets and many are much more wider and thicker than the comparatively thin american towers. they are nonetheless breathtaking. many actually use their stumpiness to achieve different ways of being beautiful and impressive. i have no picture evidence at the moment. hopefully there will be some to come soon.

-winkler

i do love this city

-winkler

More Beijing

So, we're back in Beijing. Things have been fun. Last night Joe, Val, Liz, Mike and I went bowling. We weren't very good, but it was very fun. During the taxi ride back, our driver appeared to be new, because we asked him to take us to BNU and he proceeded West, when BNU was to the North. We recognized where we were, however, and directed him to BNU. It made me realize how familiar the area around BNU has gotten; I can recognize and get around fairly well in the area. I like the area, I'll miss this place.

The city is easy to get around partly due to the layout. As ancient Chinese society put a lot of value on order (as does modern chinese society to a certain extent), All the major roads on the city run north south or east west, and Beijing people are very conscious of the direction of the roads. One of our Chinese friends that this made it difficult to give directions or get directions from locals, because rather than saying "right turn" they'll say "turn east" or "turn south" or whatnot.

We also tried another Chinese and Asian in general passtime: Karaoke. It is actually very fun; you see, your group has their own room, so its not you making a fool out of yourself in front of random strangers and listening to random songs, but only in front of your own friends with songs of your collective choosing. This was fun if you are in the right mindset.

Enough for now

Spying on a Beijing ghetto

-Winkler

Shanghai part 2

OK. More on Shanghai.
People there were a lot more accustomed to Westerners I guess, or at least, there were a lot more people trying to sell you shit on the street. That part was actually really really annoying.

Oh. Shanghai introduced me to my new dangerous love: Sushi. The first night we were in Shanghai, Mike and I were wandering around down Nanjing street until we left a large shopping section and found a hotel type area, when we saw a small, overpriced but good sushi place and decided to go in. The layout is pretty devious: they had a conveyor belt rotating around with small dishes of food on them, each for only 6 quai (a bit less than $1), in addition to a full menu.

About twenty plates of food and several servings of sake later (which, I found, when warm is a very good deterent against the cold), I was very hooked. Good sushi instantly became one of my favorite things on the planet. The trap I am in is that it is murderously cheap in China, and terribly expensive in the States. I fear for my livelihood once I get back to the States and can no longer pay $10 for a fifteen course sushi meal.

Shanghai was fun. The last two days we had completely free, so we went to see the SMP skate park there, which is one of (the?) largest in the world. It was very large, and very empty. Partly that was due to the weather; it was overcast/drizzling most of our stay at Shanghai. But it was also partly due to the part of the city it was in: It was in a 'new district', which meant that it was basically an area that some city planners had declared was to be the next hot spot in Shanghai, threw down a bunch of roads, and started construction on some ridiculous housing and other projects. It was kind of bizarre actually; it had a few major arteries in it and even some fleshed out side streets, but there was absolutely nothing there with the exception of the skate park and a few other things. There was a lot of construction however; on the block next to the park these huge upscale apartment complexes were being built. Fu Dan University, the best university in Shanghai, was already putting up a new campus there too.

At the skate park we met a student from Fu Dan who went by the name of Ian in English. He was very smart and we spent the next (last) day in Shanghai going around the city with him. He showed us some of the spots that we would have missed in Shanghai; the city is so big that it's hard to find the places where the local college age kids would shop and spend time. It was lots of fun. It was fun to talk with a smart Chinese contemporary. He asked more questions of us than we did of him, but in answering the questions he asked we learned a lot.

Hm what else to say about Shanghai. Oh, we visited the site of the founding of the CCP, which is a girl's academy in the French Quarter. It was interesting. The highlight of it was the wax figure depiction of the formulative meeting of the CCP, which featured in its center a young Mao Zedong, standing in a Jesus-like pose with the rest of the founding members (there were thirteen, iroincally) positioned as in The Last Supper and looking at him intently as he poured his knowledge out. This is a rather hilarious revision of history; at the time Mao was actually an insignificant junior member who had been given the task of the stenographer. So in actuality, he probably sat in the corner, not the center, and the only time anyone talked to him was probably to send him off for a cup of coffee or something.

Oh well, he got the last laugh i guess. I'll post more later.

-Tom

Shanghai

The second installment of posts of catching up from being without internet while in Shanghai and Beijing. Scroll down to see the one on Xi'an.

Anyway. Shanghai.
We stayed at a really expensive hotel here; the rooms were very nice, and we were up on the twenty third floor. This provided a very nice view, though things were rather cloudy and foggy while we were in Shanghai, and the air is always a bit hazy because of the smog.
The city is big. Like, really really big. It covers an area at least five times as that of downtown Philly, and is covered in skyscrapers for that area as well (the surrounding suburbs only add to this area). It is also a fairly new area; many of the buildings are only fifteen years old or less. The city went through a boom of building in the early nineties when the Pu Dong area was made into a Special Economic Zone, which allowed foreign trade and money to pour into the area. The city has an absurd ammount of skyscapers. Rather than having one main 'downtown' area with the concentration of skyscrapers, there are blocks of skyscrapers throughout the city.

The city sheer size of the city and reocurrance of the same theme (namely, lots of skyscrapers and upscale clothing shops) made the city feel somewhat homogeneous at times. I know this is at least partly due to the relatively short time we had to explore a very huge city. Still, it made the city less endearing to me than Beijing is becoming for me.

Anyway, some fun sights:
We went and saw Dr. Sun Yat-sen's house. It was fun, it has lots of interesting stuff. The funniest part was the end, where it had a tv playing a short video tape on Dr. Sun's life and funeral, with extremely dramatic music. It was obvious that at this point every Chinese person was supposed to be weeping openly with revolutionary pride.
We also went to the house where Zhou Enlai lived and which acted as the Chinese Commmunist Party diplomatic headquarters during its negotiations with the GMD during the 1920s until 1940s. Like Dr. Sun's house, it was in the French foreign concession; the foreign concessions and international zones were often used by political dissidents (as well as outright criminals) as refuges from the Chinese government and police, as China had no sovereignty in these areas (they couldn't even move police or troops through without the permission of the administrating foreign municipal governments).

Zhou Enlai was one of the early and important member of the CCP. He was its head for a brief period during the early 30s, but was replaced by Mao Zedong in the mid 30s during the Long March. He remained extremely important to the party. He went to college in France and was very well educated and well spoken, not to mention very classy, and as such became the most important diplomat for the CCP and later the People's Republic of China. He was the only top party member to not have been seriously criticized or disgraced in some way (perhaps one could claim this distinction for Mao too; though Mao was eclipsed at times- Zhou never lost his position, probably largely because he was so indispensible in his role in mediating the CCP's negotiations with the outside role). He also never got involved too deeply in the inner politics or philosophical bickerings of the party. He is certainly the CCP leader who most interests me; I admire him a lot because, completely independent of any consideration of political philosophy, he was undeniably a man who devoted his entire life to the cause he believed in and the service of his country, and asked for very little in return.

Both Zhou Enlai and Mao Zedong died in 1976 (in that order). When Mao died, his body was preserved and put into a huge mausoleum (or, as Prof. Pong calls it, a MAOsoleum). His death brought about a lot of public unease and nervousness; he was the central figure in Chinese politics for over twenty five years. Appropriately, only a few days after his death an extremely strong earthquake hit china and completely leveled one city and caused damage in several others.
Zhou Enlai was not put in any mausoleums. He was quietly cremated, as were most CCP members (the CCP had realized China's population issue and most agreed to be cremated, to avoid having the dead crowd out the living). What did happen, however, was very remarkable for a Chinese political figure: For days after his death, there were mass public mournings. People crowded in squares to mourn his death. It got so bad in some instances the police were called in to clean up the momentos left for him in efforts to calm people down. No other top party member has been mourned in this fashion.
When Mao died, China trembled. When Zhou died, China wept.

OK, off to do some homework and collect my thoughts before writing more.

Back in Beijing

So, we are now back in Beijing. As I had no computer or e-mail access during that period, I am behind in my journal writing. I'll try to catch up a bit. I haven't yet read mike's updates on this part of the trip, so i expect there to be some overlap.
The flight to Xi'an was only around an hour and a half; I was exhausted and slept pretty much all of it.
Xi'an's population is around 7-8 million, so it is a lot smaller than Beijing, and also has a more distinctly Chinese feel; it's a lot less metropolitan. It was a very old capital city, and as such has a lot of history.

The highlight of the trip, however, was a bit less history related. The first afternoon we were there we went to the city wall. Old chinese cities had walls around them, much like old European cities, but also like Europe most of these walls are now gone. Xi'an is rare in that its wall is still completely intact. The city has put considerable work in keeping it in good condition, probably largely due to the commercial interests involved in keeping the city as historical as possible.

Anyway, you could rent bikes and ride them around the wall, so mike and I rented a two person bicycle and set out. Mike sat in front and steered while I sat in the back and shouted things and sometimes took videos with mike's phone.
It was a lot of fun. The bike was a bit unwieldy, you don't so much as turn as you do drift to one side. The terrain was a bit rough at points, but the terrain combined with the clumsiness of the bike actually made it a lot of fun. Mike got pretty good at dodging the bigger pot holes.

We got some good videos, after Mike became more adept at steering and I got used to shooting from the back of a bicycle. At one point we caught up with some Japanese girls biking on two solo bikes, and when one of them looked over at us and saw us she started booking it away. It makes for a good video.

The rest of the trip was pretty fun, but unfortunately we had a rude awakening in that this was the first portion of our trip with a government hired tour guide. I found i really hate tour guides. This tour guide, Tony, was kind of annoying in general, but just having to sit through some tour guide go on and on about information we already know or sometimes just say things that are blatantly incorrect was pretty painful.

Though, worse were the places they took us to eat. We were taken to terrible hotel restaurants or tourist traps. The food was either mediocre or plain bad, which was painful considering how cheap and easy it is to find really good food in China. I assume that this is what people were talking about when they warned me about losing weight on China due to not finding food you like. Well, I'll tell you the truth: There is lots of amazing food in China, but you won't find it in the dumps where they take tourists. If you want my suggestion, DO NOT see China (or anyplace really) by way of a guided tour. This is not the way to see a country.

But I don't mean to complain too much. I did enjoy Xi'an. It was nice to go around and see a city farther from exposure to the rest of the world. Some of the museums and such we saw are fun; the terra cota soldiers were pretty cool. They were built by the Emporer Qin Shi Huangdi, who unified china around 220 BC. They were buried in his massive tomb complex, to guard him during the next life. They didn't work so well, as less than a decade after his death the part of the tomb that housed them was looted by a peasant-turned-rebel leader in order to steal their weapons (they had been buried with new weapons). The rebel leader then used these weapons to turn the tide of his campaign and ended up toppling the former Emperor's dynasty and setting up his own.

We also went to a museum-excavation site of a 'ancient matriarchal village', which had several stone age artifacts, and that was fun. It was interesting to see the excavation itself; I could recognize some of the archeological features (mostly post-holes and such), but many of the other 'features' they had displayed seemed very arbitrary to all but i assume a well-trained eye. It kind of made me remember why I decided not to go into archeology: most tedious job ever.
We didn't see any evidence of a matriarchal society, with the exception of some fake huts made of plaster that had depictions on their roof of large-breasted and naked women having sex with various animals. This had nothing to do with the actual excavation site.

The last night in Xi'an, I went to dinner with a bunch of the other kids to a really really really good restaurant. The food was amazing, which really saved my dining experiences on the trip.
Things were fun.

I'll start a new post for the Shanghai stuff.

-Tom

Shanghai and Chinese Clothing

Shanghai in some senses is barely China. I’m sure depending on your reasons for being there you could spend every day there for years telling yourself you were in a western city. The roads are narrow and lined by either 19th century European architecture built by the various colonial powers or by brand new skyscrapers. There are no bike lanes, and the people of the city, unlike the city folk of the other Chinese cities, show signs of being jaded and hardened by city life the way New Yorkers do. There are plenty of westerners trapsing around, so children do not think to point and people do not stare until noticed like elsewhere in china. you are just another waiguoren.



The city is unbelievably sprawling, and the subway system is still being built and is still inadeaquate. Due to traffic and the sheer size of the city, taxis are a luxury of foreigners and the almost rich. It rains almost 150 days of the year, and it is common for the sun to not shine for a whole month. Fog is heavy and often disrupts traffic. We sat for an hour in a standstill on an arterial highway one day due to how thick the fog was further up the road.



culturally, shanghai is a city of massive hype and future expectation. while it has a manhattan style financial dominance over the mainland, it does not share manhattans cultural hegemony. It displays its monetary advantage in terms of gardens and parks and skyscrapers quite undeniably, but in many senses, the fashion and cultural activities and life of the city are at best a peer to Beijing's. At its worst, a gross majority of the city is monotonous and homogenous with the same small shops selling the exact same knock off merchandise and hardware and the exact same drab blank walled corner eateries cranking out identical soup dumplings block after block mile after mile after mile.

In the rich areas of the city, there are two main roads for higher class consumption. Nanjing Lu cuts through the city East West and is the home of literally hundreds and hundreds of high end genuine merchandise fashion boutiques and department stores. It is intensely crowded come prime time with thousands and thousands of people wandering and consuming amidst bright flourescent lights and loud musical advertisements. The main patrons of this road are foreigners or rich domestic tourists and the stores are priced accordingly. Every day thousands of rural people sneak into the city and come to this street to stand around and approach rich tourists to attempt to hawk DVDs fake watches anything and everything. They are not actually city folk and therefore know little of city folk and their methods of approach are usually quite offensive to people accustomed to civil methods of consumer interactions.

Huaihai road lies 3-4 blocks to the south. It does not run as perfectly east west as nanjing lu, sitting skewed more northeast/southwest, nor does it extend as far in either direction. this road is where the local middle and upper class buys clothing. The style of boutiques overlaps some with nanjing, but are a bit more low key. The scene to understand is relatively universal:

Successful businessman (foreign or han) parading his barely educated tall beautiful lithe Han wife around, both in ostentatious clothing, looking to buy more ostentatious clothing. Do not underestimate the Chinese ability to tolerate, wear, and expect ostentatious clothing. many young single men cover themselves head to toe in outfits so absurd and effeminate that they would get heckled and belittled by manhattan gays. Perhaps since homosexuality does not actually officially exist in china, the phenomenon of the "metrosexual" spiraled incredibly out of control with no fear of lines to cross.

Do not misunderstand though, concerning outfits and dress, chinese society is highly conservative. there are a very very finite number of jacket types and shirt types and styles of jeans and hair, and everyone stays strictly within them. methods of personal expression are limited very much to just picking and choosing different ideas from the acceptable set of ideas and arranging your selection of hair choice and jean choice to attempt to satisfy individualism. Perhaps this is not radically different than the american system, but in America, the variety of ethnic backrounds, more robust dispersal of class, and limitless subcultures seems to hide the concept better. In Chinese cities, the only visible people are millions and millions of lower middle class socially conservative Han people.

Changle road offers more edgy clothing. The boutiques are more adventurous than their conservative han targeted counterparts elsewhere. There are a few skateboard shops with imported american skateboard subculture clothing. The clerks at these skate shops brought to light for me a wonderful irony of contemporary chinese-american relations:

A vast majority of American clothing is currently manufactured in China, but is not assembled 100% until it reaches in America. Skateboarding and other subcultures with associated fashions are growing more popular in China and desire for this kind of subculture clothing is strong enough to justify selling the clothes in chinese stores now. However, the clothes must still be finished and distributed in America first, so all of these garments manufactured in China must still be reimported again and suffer both American market prices and socialist import duties. A Chinese hooded jacket might be 50-200 kuai at a local store. the American brands, after leaving the chinese factories have to be exported to america and then reimported, adjusted to american market prices, and slapped with a duty. An American hooded jacket from a company such as DC shoes or Zoo York will cost a chinese person anywhere from between 500 to 1000 kuai even though it was manufactured at the edge of town for a cost of less than 10 kuai.

-winkler

Xi'an

Xi'an is dirtier and grittier than beijing. Its home to about 7 million in the greater metropolitan area. There is a 15th century Ming dynasty city wall that encircles the center of the city. It is about 8 miles in circumference and is still intact. We rented bicycles and rode one revolution around the top of it. Tom and I got a tandem bicycle and he was able to shoot video on my phone from the backseat while I steered.





Outside of the old wall is an explosion of skyscrapers. The new towers here are not quite as rich and strikingly impressive monetarily as their Beijing counterparts. However, the architecture here is much more noticeably and immediately Chinese. Amidst crumbling and decrepit blocks of soviet style, many new towers and apartment blocks and hotels are being raised in a fabulous neo classical Chinese style.

Most of the city is gritty and is not as bright and flashy as comparable commercial areas of Beijing. However even through there are lane after lane of storefronts reminiscent of Queens, most of these lanes have many very pleasant 20 foot trees between the bike lane and main roadway. I imagine in the other three seasons this area can be pleasing to the eye.

There is a long main shopping street running eastwest from the center; Prada, luis vuitton, this that and the next thing. There are also plenty of clubs in the center clearly designed to suck in wandering tourists. We passed one yesterday, near a 3 story McDonalds, a 2 story pizza hut, and amidst a rain of fluorescent lights and advertising screens, named the ‘Red Club’. Out front of it, an actor dressed up in a gray military uniform with red trim marched around comically with a rifle and a cigarette. He gestured menacingly at passerbys for laughs and to draw attention to the club.

In front of our hotel, there was an amalgam of intersections and underpasses. The Chinese, especially the old, love to exercise in public as a group at the beginning and at the end of the day. This is not just limited to tai’ji. In the morning, the underpass in front of our hotel was dominated by martial arts; In the evenings by line dancing and couples dancing. Note the Blade Runner style urban lighting, the sheer number of participants, and the second nature familiarity that has come with daily repetition.



scattered outside the city of Xi’an lay dozens and dozens of tombs of ancient emperors. The countryside shows little evidence of receiving either the fruits of modernization or access to the money generated by the tourism machine.



When visiting the terracotta soldiers of qin shi huangdi, if your tour allots far too much time (ie 4 hours when only 1 is needed) a constructive alternative additional activity:

(step 1) China is no different than the US in loving to take advantage of tourist and theatre patrons lack of options. Somehow Tsingtaos at the western coffee shop inside the gate of the museum complex are shockingly only 12 kuai. ($1.50 US)

Outside the gate is a long and wide expansive walkway approach area. The ground stones are a staggered checkered pattern of 2foot by 2foot concrete blocks. This area is haunted by dozens of poor hawkers attempt to leech tourists for trinkets. Among their trinkets are myriad miniature and reduced size terracotta soldiers of various rank and size and armament. In the winter offseason, these hawkers are desperate.

(step 2) A large collection of these warriors can be assembled at whatever assortment you desire for maybe 50 kuai (6-7 US).

(step 3) come up with a willing partner

(step 4) find a clear area on this field of checkered blocks. This is very easy in the offseason, the area is massive and the crowds are non-existant.

(step 5) denote ranks and sides and play chess with the statuettes on the blocks.

Wang Bin

One of my chinese professors is good friends with the film screenplay writer Wang Bin (To Live, Hero, Fearless, House of Flying Daggers, the incident of my young wife, etc). He hooked us up with a chat today after lunch. I believe he is a very wise man. He fielded many of our questions at length. Here is an overview.

Wang Bin: I have not been able to spend much time in America, but from my perception of America and the time that I've spent there, I feel that the American obsession with legality has undermined the extent of its freedom. Laws are much less hardened in stone and our justice system is not fleshed out to such an obsessive extent so that I feel much more free when I am in China than when I am in America.

When I was younger I would see American films and I wouldn't think much of them. Now that I am older and Chinese films have been around long enough to begin to make comparisons, I have gained much more respect for contemporary American films. Even in the most commercially base films, there is an American spirit underlying as the premise of the film. A sense that one should help those in need and that people should work together. This kind of national spirit is still absent from Chinese films. In my films I have been attemping to create a sense of this Chinese spirit through revitalized Chinese nationalism. After the humiliation and hardships of the last 150 years, I feel that an increase in Chinese nationalism could do nothing but good. This is not to say that I espouse a narrow minded exclusive Nationalism. Instead it is about finally understanding and evaluating the concept that we Chinese are no different than westerners. At the beginning of the modern period, Chinese believed themselves superior to westerners and all others. The westerners had trinkets and inventions but were culturally inferior and backwards. Then after we were repeatedly defeated and subjugated we came to believe wholly that we were in fact the ones who were backwards and primitive. We rejected our tradition and attempted to destroy it. The teachings of confucius and buddhism were stripped away and we entered a period of chaos. Now that order and unity have been restored and the Chinese people move into a world leadership position again, an appreciation of Chinese nationalism and tradition would do all well. This is not a concept of necessary Chinese superiority but of necessary Chinese equality. American films have very much exhausted most of the topics of contemporary western life. In order for us to make chinese films that can compete artistically and commercially right now, we must capitalize on that which we have and others do not: Chinese national culture and tradition.

Note: This is my paraphrasing of professor Chen's translation. Neither did we record it directly nor did he speak in english.

-Winkler

Chinese contemporaries

On monday we had dinner with friends we made from Beijing Normal University. We went out to a hot pot place, it was very tasty. It was a lot of fun to talk with Chinese contemporaries and see the similarities and differences between the cultures. College seems like its a lot more intense here. They take around 20 classes a semester, and though each class meets less often than ours do, they still seem to have a much steeper workload. They say they spend most of their time studying, and live in dorms with like six people in a dorm room around the same size as the doubles back home. It doesn't sound like as much fun as American universities.

Even on weekends, they tend not to go to bars or parties that much it seems. They have a curfew of 11:30 PM; if they arrive later than that, they get fined (They say the way around this is to just stay out all night until the dorms open for morning hours).

Note that we're talking about students at Beijing Normal University here. BNU, along with Beijing University, is one of the top schools in the country, so these kids are probably a lot more intense than others. In general, it seems like college requires a lot more studying here at the expense of social time. Keep in mind that college is a lot more elite here than in America: A lot lower of a percentage of people go to college here than in America. Also, the percentage of people who can intellectually handle the rigors of college who can actually attend college is a lot lower too: We met many people working in the markets who could handle themselves very well in at least three languages (And while our interaction was limited, many of them we spoke to clearly had a grasp on the language that exceeded the note-list vendor-phrase type thing). Many of the vendors who work at such markets are young, college age people who are in many cases smart enough for college but do not have the money or connections to go there.

To be honest, i think i like our system of universities better. Perhaps this is easy for me to say, as I enjoy the free time and social aspects of our system (the idea of studying all the time isn't fun), but i think there is a lot to be said for the aspects of college that happen outside the classroom. College is when you do a lot of learning how to conduct yourself as an adult and when you really start to define yourself on your own terms, and I think the freedom to do things other than studying (and at times at the cost of studying) is one of the most valuable parts of college. The rigid study regime the Chinese colleges impose on their students I feel makes their college experience more akin to an intensified high school (in terms of the more structured environment), which I don't quite agree with. But, this is more conjecture.

Anyway, the dinner was very fun. It was fun to explain bits about our language and culture to each other. We explained to them what "nerd" was (and in the process found out that the stereotype of British people as rather stodgy was shared by at least one other culture), and explained to them that the pop music that the rest of the world thinks is "the" music of america is not actually listened to by anyone in america with the exception of girls in their early teens. We found out that they viewed Taiwanese people as backwards and out of touch, and then informed them that Taiwanese people had the same estimation of them.

We also found that out most significant things about college kids are pretty universal, including the humor of repeatedly prematurely dropping things from your chopsticks into the hot pot, splattering hot and spicy broth all over your friend's plates and table.

-Tom

(anonymous comments enabled)

i noticed that anonymous comments were previously disabled. this was due only to our unfamiliarity with the website. they are now enabled. feel free to drop us a line at any point without the pain in the ass registering and logging in. just leave a name in the comment so we dont have to use your ip to guess who you are.

-winkler

Beijing Subway

There are two major subway lines in center city Beijing. The blue line (ignore the map's green) forms a rectangle/oval shaped loop under the second ring road which encompasses much of the main mass of the urban center. The red line is a line segment that cuts east-west through the center of the city. The Red line stops inside of the blue line oval are the most highly trafficked. Commuters are dense enough that it was deemed worthwhile to build miles and miles of video screens on the inside of the subway tunnels that can be seen from the subway car windows. The frames of the screens are staggered and aligned to the cruising speed of the subway cars so that when at full speed, from the subway car, it looks as if you are watching a stationary television.

The two change over stations that allow switching between the blue ring line and the red east west line are the busiest stations. The two are always hideously packed from about 8:30am to 9pm or so. Again, forgive the poor cinematography. I was being mashed on all sides by shoulders and bodies and was trying to be at least a little discreet about public video recording. Overall, Beijing has not left me with the impression of unbearable crowdedness and overpopulation that I expected. These two stations are clear exceptions.

-Winkler

Tianjin

We went to Tainjin today; Tianjin is the official royal port, being about 100 km from Beijing, and had been one of the first treaty ports. It was a slightly disappointing trip compared to what it could have been; we had a local tour guide that made the trip feel too much like a tourist guided tour and not enough like a bunch of students exploring a city. We went to mostly tourist places; first the 'arcient chinese culture' street that was mostly a bunch of shops. They were actually decently priced, but i wasn't in the mood to shop and it was extremely cold and windy, so i didn't end up buying anything. I took some pictures of the markey; there were people who had mats set up on the street selling stuff, so hopefully some of those came out.

We then had a really good lunch, though they didn't give us quite enough food, or at least, we could have eaten a lot more. After that we were told to wander around another shopping area for an hour; this time a food market area. That wasn't so bad as it was at least a bit different than the usual shopping. We bought some twist-dough, a dense pastry type thing (though as with most chinese food, it wasn't very sweet, but it has a nice peanut butter flavor in it). We also got some yummy chocolate.

Finally we made it to the Nanjing history museum, which was actually a pretty nice museum, but we only got an hour there. They had a really interesting calligraphy section that had calligraphy from ancient history (before the chinese language was finallized; many of the characters still resembled pictograms), and then from around the 6th century AD to present. It was gorgeous; calligraphy has a very sweet style to it. Many of the calligraphers had very distict styles; some of them looked halfway between writing and paintings. One of my favorites was a mid 18th to mid 19th calligrapher who wrote in the old style (lots of rounded lines) with very clean lines and had a feel to it that reminded me of a lot of post-modern graphic design. It was also sweet to see how little calligraphy has changed in hundreds of years. One neat thing about nonphonetic writing systems is that you can go back and read hundreds of years worth of material fairly easily. With phonetic writing, you're lucky if material from two hundred years ago makes sense.

There was also a super super sweet photography exhibit. They had lots of really good photos, i loved it. It was a nice mix of simply amazing photographs and historically significant (and also usually really good artistically) photographs. One of my favorite is one of a march protesting the Gang of Four. The protesters had portraits of all four of them up on posters with X's through them; the caricature of each of them was hilarious.

After that we took a like fifteen minute walk of the foreign concession area; there was some interesting architecture, i wish we had more time to see the museum and concession district rather than wasting time at stupid tourist places. Oh well.

One thing Tianjin got me thinking about is the transition from the trade and concession-area style imperialism that focused mostly on procuring (or forcing) trade and, while the Western powers took some real estate and transformed that, had only limited cultural flow to the later imperialism which would change the whole way of life of China. As I discussed previously, one of my main frames of thought is the consideration of systems of manipulation of the world, and in this case I think the industrial revolution and the introduction of those technologies and systems into the relationship between the West and East have a clear impact, but I want to think more on this before I write anything further.

Also, I want to try to elucidate some of the cultural and physical technologies that lead to the formation of the imperialist relationship in the first place. The West, at the start of imperialism, was materially very poor compared to the vast wealth of the East, and didn't even have much in the way of material products that the East would be interested in. How then was the west able to quickly (in historical scope) put itself into a position of dominance over the long-standing Eastern empires? The west's weapons certainly would be one factor, however, I find an argument that claims weapons and a willingness to use them as a main cause of Western Imperialism a woefully incomplete and perhaps even misleading explanation. I think there are other, and perhaps far more basic and important, factors at work here. Two that I would like to think about are:
1) the Western monetary and banking system
2) the Western concept of representative government

Keep in mind that I am going to do my best to avoid putting any subjective labels on things, i.e., I'm not going to argue "The West won out cause our banking and representative governments are such great things" (A simplified version of what such a sentiment might look like anyway), just as I'm also going to try to avoid any moralist judgements on imperialism (Not that there is no moral implications, just that I'm going to try to leave those out of my consideration). Rather, I want to try to find the underlying causes for imperialism and the means by with it took place, as I believe could provide a glimpse at the deeper patterns of cultural interactions.

another long post. more off-the-cusp asshole philosophizing. at least i'm getting in the habit of leaving that off until the end, so you can at least hear what is actually going on with us in China before having to wade through it, haha.
Later.

-Tom

Beijing material culture and graphics

In the afternoon sometimes if there is no wind blowing from the north or from off of the ocean, a hazy smog settles in on Beijing. Many locals wear cloth fashioned face masks. More so than Godzilla era japanese nurse masks, they resemble older generation American style cloth diapers: ribbed white main surface areas with whatever floral or patterned trim they can come up with.

The BNU campus is gearing up for finals. Tom and I attended a physics class today with an evironmental science student I met named Li Wei. Before class, many students were asleep at their desks and Li Wei explained that they were taking advantage of any time they could find for sleep. Finals seem much more intense here at BNU than they are at UD. Another difference from UD: even the physics and math students here dress tastefully. I still do not really like Chinese men's clothes though. They seem to be interpreting American culture through nippon and euro lenses. The result feels like they missed the point as the styles' aesthetics create seeming contradictions within themselves. I think perhaps its because the original functionality of the clothing designs have been so far distorted in translation twice removed that they become convoluted and ridiculous. However their effort to be fashionable is very noticable around campus and around the city.

The Beijing state construction company is also very noticable throughout the city. They paint their graphic logo on the fences around their numerous construction projects and they have their name and logo on a major commercial tower in the business area of the city. At first glance, their symbol is an ominous soviet style simple geometric pattern designed to impress and intimidate. However after a week of seing it on a daily basis, I realized that the negative space was in fact a shadowed representation of an American style tower being raised from a square urban field. I feel that this graphic is a wonderful microcosm of the state of China in 2007. It is a soviet style graphic plastered all over the city in Orwellian fashion denoting the incredibly numerous construction projects of a nation undergoing a complete metamorphasis. However the graphic itself is in a highly postmodern contemporary style of idea and the subject matter is a representation of an American debtor's tower; Ginsberg's Moloch.



Tom and I found another wonderful piece of contemporary Chinese material culture yesterday. We found our first skateboard shop in Beijing. On the bottom of the rack of imported American decks was a bright red deck. It had Chinese characters denoting in a completely serious and direct fashion the company name. It featured a graphic of a socialist style propaganda statue wearing a mao suit and a mao hat holding a skateboard and says in small English letters below it: 'the people's skateboards'. It is a powerful capitalist mockery of Chinese socialist culture fastened to a skateboard: The bastard child of high capital middle class idle sporting and the urban desert-jungle combination of the concrete and automobile age.


-winkler

Tianjin

Tianjin is the fourth largest city in China. Over 11 million people live in the greater metropolitan area. It is Beijings main port and is only a 90-100 minute drive to the Southeast. It reminded me of Detroit. it is a major producer of electronics and bicycles and cars. it is very cold. It was much more dirty and gritty than beijing and more flat and less attractive. The architecture was drab. The wind was biting. a handful of chinese flew kites in the large square in front of the tianjin museum. The video is not sharp, but note the dillapidated amusement park rides.



the tianjin museum is shaped like a giant '80s minimal crane. some chinese danced and played in a circle in front of it.


-winkler

Bad food and good skateboards

OK, so I'm still having trouble getting photos up. The internet connection from China is not very good; I suspect that the cable is still not yet fully repaired from the earthquake off Taiwan. If that is not the case, and this is as good as it gets... Well, then it becomes less likely I'll manage to get many photos up before coming home. If mike's super-phone becomes operational, perhaps we could use that, but that too seems to not be making more progress.

Anyway, China is very good. I said last time the food was amazing; well, the spell was broke and we stumbled across our first bad meal here. In fact, it may have been the worst meal I've ever seen. Mike and Sarah and I wandered around looking for dinner, hoping to find a restaurant with either pictures or English on the menus, and eventually found someplace a bit off the main road. We walked in and sat down, and some workers walked by us outside, saw us through the windows, and laughed at us. This should have been a warning sign. We sat down and ordered what looked to be nice dishes from the menu.

The first one came out, and we got a bowl of burnt peppers, cut up bone with a little meat on it, and a few burnt peanuts. We strongly suspect the meat was dog meat, based on the width of the bones (fairly reliably too thick to be chicken bones), and the scantness of meat on them.

The second plate was, no kidding, a huge dish of greasy bacon with a few peppers thrown in. Beijing food is pretty greasy in general (it seems it is notorious for this among people from other areas of China), but the restaurants we usually eat at manage to keep this to a manageable level. This, there was no managing. It was amazing. It was amazing that someone would think to eat this, and not die of a heart attack immediately afterwards.

Luckily, the third dish was a relatively edible sweet and sour chicken, so we ate a bit of that, laughed and took pictures of the other stuff, then left and found a bakery to get the taste out of our mouths. It was very funny.

Last night was a much better dinner. Mike and I skated South towards the area we had previously found the shoe shop and music store, and found a really good equivalent of a Chinese diner, with the added bonus of pictures on the menus. We got some decent pork dish, a really tasty beef-pepper chinese burrito type thing, and a really tasty vegetable-and-seafood dish. We're not quite sure what the seafood in the dish was, it was cut into thin, inch or two long strips. We're suspecting starfish, but that may be us hoping we tried something exotic and tasty.

Our luck just improved after that. As we were eating, in walked two Chinese guys who looked to be our age or a bit younger in low-hanging thugged out western jeans and similarly styled jackets, and one was carrying a skateboard. So we both jumped up and shouted "Friend!" at them in Chinese and ran up to them. Mike asked them where the skateboard shop was in Chinese, and after working on getting it out for half a minute or so, the dude with the skateboard said in perfect English, "Yea man, there's one right down the road." His English was good enough that it was fairly clear he had spent some time in the States (his clothing suggested as much too). It was funny.

Anyway, we got the directions from him and finished dinner, then headed down the road (by this point we had given up on getting back in time for the acrobatics show that was scheduled). On the way I bought a jacket, which I really like cause it isn't too flashy, no graphics or whatnot, but the cut of it is subtly but definitely Chinese. We eventually found the skateshop. Once there, we made friends with the store clerks and bought a real sweet deck from a new Chinese skateboard company (We both wanted it, but bought it now in hopes that we would find more from that company in Shanghai. It's apparently a very new company). We watched a skateboard dvd made by that company and talked to the store clerks for a bit.

It was sweet. OK, off for now.
Hope things are well in the states.

-Tom

Buildings and Clothes

OK, so I'm still having trouble getting photos up. The internet connection from China is not very good; I suspect that the cable is still not yet fully repaired from the earthquake off Taiwan. If that is not the case, and this is as good as it gets... Well, then it becomes less likely I'll manage to get many photos up before coming home. If mike's super-phone becomes operational, perhaps we could use that, but that too seems to not be making more progress.

Anyway, China is very good. I said last time the food was amazing; well, the spell was broke and we stumbled across our first bad meal here. In fact, it may have been the worst meal I've ever seen. Mike and Sarah and I wandered around looking for dinner, hoping to find a restaurant with either pictures or English on the menus, and eventually found someplace a bit off the main road. We walked in and sat down, and some workers walked by us outside, saw us through the windows, and laughed at us. This should have been a warning sign. We sat down and ordered what looked to be nice dishes from the menu.

The first one came out, and we got a bowl of burnt peppers, cut up bone with a little meat on it, and a few burnt peanuts. We strongly suspect the meat was dog meat, based on the width of the bones (fairly reliably too thick to be chicken bones), and the scantness of meat on them.

The second plate was, no kidding, a huge dish of greasy bacon with a few peppers thrown in. Beijing food is pretty greasy in general (it seems it is notorious for this among people from other areas of China), but the restaurants we usually eat at manage to keep this to a manageable level. This, there was no managing. It was amazing. It was amazing that someone would think to eat this, and not die of a heart attack immediately afterwards.

Luckily, the third dish was a relatively edible sweet and sour chicken, so we ate a bit of that, laughed and took pictures of the other stuff, then left and found a bakery to get the taste out of our mouths. It was very funny.

Tonight was a much better dinner. Mike and I skated South towards the area we had previously found the shoe shop and music store, and found a really good equivalent of a Chinese diner, with the added bonus of pictures on the menus. We got some decent pork dish, a really tasty beef-pepper chinese burrito type thing, and a really tasty vegetable-and-seafood dish. We're not quite sure what the seafood in the dish was, it was cut into thin, inch or two long strips. We're suspecting starfish, but that may be us hoping we tried something exotic and tasty.

Our luck just improved after that. As we were eating, in walked two Chinese guys who looked to be our age or a bit younger in low-hanging thugged out western jeans and similarly styled jackets, and one was carrying a skateboard. So we both jumped up and shouted "Friend!" at them in Chinese and ran up to them. Mike asked them where the skateboard shop was in Chinese, and after working on getting it out for half a minute or so, the dude with the skateboard said in perfect English, "Yea man, there's one right down the road." His English was good enough that it was fairly clear he had spent some time in the States (his clothing suggested as much too). It was funny.

Anyway, we got the directions from him and finished dinner, then headed down the road (by this point we had given up on getting back in time for the acrobatics show that was scheduled). On the way I bought a jacket, which I really like cause it isn't too flashy, no graphics or whatnot, but the cut of it is subtly but definitely Chinese. We eventually found the skateshop. Once there, we made friends with the store clerks and bought a real sweet deck from a new Chinese skateboard company (We both wanted it, but bought it now in hopes that we would find more from that company in Shanghai. It's apparently a very new company). We watched a skateboard dvd made by that company and talked to the store clerks for a bit.

It was sweet. OK, off for now.
Hope things are well in the states.

-Tom

Pictures finally

Hey, haven't posted from china yet, finally getting around to it.
China is very fun. One of the fun things about the trip is how much food they are giving us. We are eating lots of food. There hasn't been any such thing as a small meal here. Each meal, we are giving plates and plates of food to choose from. Not that I'm complaining. I have yet to try a dish here that wasn't really good. Before I left, a few people said foolish things like, "I hope you find something you like to eat in China!" Well, I have. Everything.

Skateboarding in Beijing is really fun. The bike lanes are perfect for it; they are very wide and nearly all streets of considerable size. People there are very used to bikes, so skateboards, while a bit exotic, don't phase them at all. Also, I think the chaotic nature of driving there actually makes things safer; they get used to other people doing unexpected things or manuevers blatanly against traffic violations, and thus get used to compensating for them, rather than in the US where an unexpected move can cause an accident. Perhaps this might not seem plausible to you, but I have yet to see an accident in Beijing or see any evidence of one.

In any case, skateboarding is a very fast way to get around that instantaneously revolutionized our experience here: the first afternoon we went skateboarding, we found a shoe shop that I bought some shoes at for around $50 that would have been at least $160 in the states and then found a record store nearby where we found some sweet Chinese contemporary music. The top two finds were an all-girl punk band that liked to sing curse words in English, and a Chinese avant garde rock band called "New Pants" that perfectly satirized 1980s American culture and was lead by a frontman known as "Millionaire Peng". Later that night we skated South until we found a restaurant that had pictures in the menu (though Mike is decent at Chinese, ordering food is particularly difficult as the vocabulary of food is rather extensive and specific, making restaurants with pictures or English translations the preferred venues when venturing on our own). It had Arabic script on the front, and though it seemed to serve regular Chinese food rather than anything Arabic, it did have possibly the best shrimp I've ever eaten.

We had our first classes today. The history class seems like it will be good. It was a bit different than Prof. Pong's usual style; rather than lecturing, it was more an open discussion on the topics of imperialism and colonialism. It was fun. I tried to articulate the idea in class that imperialism (as defined as one culture expanding its influence over another) occurs because of and by means of systems that allow a greater manipulation of the physical world. A easy example is perhaps weaponry, as that is often tied to imperialism, but I really think better examples could be found in the more basic realms of food, transportation, and housing. (hm, the last one could tie in cities, which might be interesting, i should think of that some more). Note here that the idea of the system is very important; a technology could be transferred rather quickly from the imperialist to the subjugated, and unfortunately the subjugated tend to stay as such often for considerable lengths of time. This is because the technologies are only half, the other half is the implementation and control of systems that accomodate the exploitation of the technologies in question. Anyway, this is just a rough idea still, I'll have to think on it more.

The idea that the system of greater ability to manipulate the environment tends to expand seems to have some depressing implications for the near future, as we are approaching the point at which we must face the fact that there is a limit to the ammount of resources we can take from our environment to utilize. The idea that we can continue to increase our 'wealth' (which i propose could be defined as a measurement of ability to manipulate the world) is one that will have to be replaced with the idea that we must instead live in a balance with the physical and biological systems we are a part of. Even disregarding our tendencies to choose immediate and sure pleasure despite distant problems and a difficulty with making quick and drastic changes to our living patterns, the idea that a system that continues to manipulate the physical world to the maximum extent will tend to win out over one that chooses moderation is a rather disturbing one. This is of course a simplification, or rather, just one influence in a complex issue. Actually, what i was trying to lead into is a discussion on China's environmental problems, which are immediately apparent as well as a topic in the Contemporary Chinese Culture class (i'm kind of tired, which i think is making my mind wander a bit). But I've been too long winded as it is, and I wanted to get some pictures up. As i need to look up the html to do so by taking a look at mike's earlier posts, I'm going to post this and then make another post with the pictures.

Which means you read through all this and didn't even get to pictures at the end of it. sorry.

-Tom

Bike lanes and skateboarding

A majority of Beijings streets are extremely wide. In addition there are many side road channels for taxis and bikes. It is an ideal environment for skateboard commuting. This morning I went out at dawn and made a short video to illustrate these lanes. I was filming so I was not moving as fast as i would have been otherwise, but pay attention to the separation of the lane I was in from the actual road the cars were on. Also note the density of bicycles. People stare when I skate past, and many children smile and shout and point, but people are very used to loose traffic rules and are very used to heavy bicycle traffic, so skateboarding around is shockingly stress-free. I cannot imagine another major urban environment like this where this is possible.

the Great Wall

Beijing is in a great plain basin. The basin is surrounded by mountains. There is no piedmont. The mountains appear right out of the plain in spectacular fashion. We drove one hour north of beijing today and climbed from the ground a few thousand steps and maybe a thousand feet up or so to the highest point the restored well-kept portion of the wall reaches.