Un-Forbidden City, Rambutans, Communication Time

After many days of apologetically uneventful posts, I finally have something interesting to report. Finally in possession of a camera and a free afternoon, I went to see the Forbidden City. It took some doing to get there. First I had to find a bus to take me to the nearest subway station. Then I had to take three different subway lines--and that's all of them there are at this point. And the oddly named Line 13 is quite disconnected from Line 2, even though it has a little transfer station symbol. You have to go out, walk about a block, buy a new ticket, go in… Despite all the trouble, though, the subway system is much easier to use than the buses, and I eventually found myself at Tiananmen Square West.

I am somewhat embarrassed to say that I wasn't exactly sure which part of the vast area was the legendary Tiananmen Square. A subsequent search of image results from Google (almost none of which are reachable from behind the Great Firewall of China, incidentally) suggest that it was just the vast area. It seemed to stretch for miles, and made my feet hurt just looking at it. Also, there were groups of green-uniformed soldiers patrolling about. It was a bit odd, I admit, but they didn't seem very fierce. Some of them smiled a bit even. Still, I prudently photographed them when their backs were turned.

It was a bit of a trick to find the Forbidden City, too, because it's mostly not called the Forbidden City, or on some signs it is and on some signs it is called "The Palace Museum" instead. So I'd find myself getting really close and then somehow getting lost at the last minute. I finally did manage, though. The door price was 60 RMB, an astronomical $7.50. Wow. There's a discount for students and for the elderly, though at present I wasn't either of those. I forked over my 60 RMB, elected to skip the audio or guided tour, and wandered in.

The first thing I noticed was the famous knobbed doors. The most wonderful thing about these doors, though, was how the gold knobs within reach have been rubbed and tarnished by so very many hands. Indeed, even as I watched, almost everyone who passed by reached out to touch them. I don't know whether there's a special symbolism in it, or whether there's a certain basic appeal in their rounded shape, or whether seeing something that has been so obviously touched by everyone else makes one want to touch it too. Whatever the case, there was a special meaning to it in my mind--the way the masses pour through the gates of the once-forbidden city, and leave their mark on it, claiming it as their right. I will add that some of the knobs had protective plastic walls over them, but this is completely missing the point of the phenomenon, in my opinion.

Another thing I especially loved was the way plants were growing everywhere, on every surface they could, and being fought back by overmatched crews of workers.


According to my Lonely Planet Beijing:

The palace is so large (720,000 sq meters, 800 buildings, 9000 rooms) that a permanent restoration squad moves around repainting and repairing it. It's estimated to take about 10 years to do a full renovation, by which time they have to start repairs again.

I can personally testify that the place was huge. I spent hours there and saw less than half of it before it closed. But here's a photo of one of my favorite subjects: restoration effects. The building behind the screen was so completely taken apart that there was nothing but scaffolding. However, the huge screen was printed with a huge photograph of what was supposed to be there, and was somehow quite impressive.

Lest you think I spent all my time noticing its flaws, I also enjoyed tremendously the stone bridges and waterways. The day was fairly calm, though overcast, so the water looked a smooth, jade green.



The little side halls of the palace had exhibitions in them. There was no photography allowed in the "Arms and Armor" exhibition, but that was okay because the weapons were creepily deadly looking--especially the arrows.

I did take some pictures of scientific instruments, however, because I know I have a reader or two who is interested in such things.

It wasn't easy to take these pictures, because a flash would have reflected off the glass, but taking them without flash required a very steady hand, and there were bright reflections anyway. Well, make a virtue of necessity, right? I thought this instrument looked interesting in a confusing whirl of light.

I also took a picture of the surface of a star-map, all in Chinese, with reflections from the window which I thought looked very cool.

There is no way to even begin to describe the many interesting art objects I saw, and interesting roofs and tiles and sculptures. But one other interesting thing I think I should mention was the emperor's bed-chamber. In refitting the city as a museum, they made the wonderful choice of allowing you to look at all these things through windows, as if you were peeping in on imperial life, so to speak. The pictures below are from the emperor's own bedchamber. The first one is a full view and the other three are details. I'm not sure I would sleep well with that scary big dragon above me. But, as the Bard has so well put it, uneasy lies the head...





Oh, there were so many wonders, both historical and present-day. A little palace building turned into a snack-shop where I bought a bucket of ramen and ate it slowly under the trees in an imperial pavilion. A veritable maze of long walks and walls and tiny doors and huge doors and brilliantly colored tiles and decorated roofs, in all states of restoration and disrepair. One of the things I liked best--for if you know me, you know the my-eye view is for the small and detailed and less obviously lovely--were the tiny mosaics on the ground in a certain place. Here are my brown shoes just barely trespassing on one of them. But I took many many more pictures, for there were a really endless number of them, each different, and I am thinking of making a separate post about them.

Another thing I thought very fine were the gnarled old trees, some growing straight and standing under their own power, others bent over and barely held up with patches and supports. This tough, knobbly old creature made a nice picture, I thought.

I could go on and on with this, but the best thing would be for you to come see it for yourself. Alternatively, there are lots more photos on my flickr site (e-mail me for the url), though I have not yet figured out how to organize things very well there. Just look for the golden palace roofs and red walls!

To end is one of my favorite pictures of rooftop grass (but this is only one of very many such pictures that I took!), and also one of a blue bowl which is not perfectly in focus but I thought the color was so wonderful.



I left when the place closed at perhaps 5 or so. I had the most exhilarated feeling. In general, I feel conflicted about places of great richness and beauty. Richness, I suppose, being the key. You can't get such places without a cruel stratification of society, so even as I love them I have to hate them too, in a historical sense. But as in Beihai Park, which was once a palace and now a place for everyone, I felt that a very good thing has happened to those magnificent old buildings. We commoners, once forbidden entry on pain of death, slurp away at our noodles under the golden eaves. And for all I have many many qualms about the CCP, this is really a good thing they have brought to China, this one thing--that the worst thing about this place (its cruel forbiddenness) was destroyed, and many of the best things preserved. Maybe that's why I liked so much the signs of disrepair and renewal. No one around to say, "Grass growing on the roof!? Where's that guttersweep? Off with his head!" But neither is the place going to ruin.

I suppose the same praise can be applied to a lot of historic places, but the ubiquity takes nothing away from the praiseworthiness!

It took me almost two hours to get all the way home in the evening rush. It began to rain while I was on the subway. The bus was so packed that I couldn't even get off at my stop, and only just pushed my way out in time for the next one. That was a happy accident, though, because there I saw a man selling these magnificent spiny fruits. They are some kind of rambutan, I think, and the man who sold them to me cut one open for me to taste. No doubt I paid too much for it, because when he stated the price (a bit less than $3 for this massive bunch) and I agreed and paid it, the next fruit-seller over laughed incredulously and muttered a suggestion. "Buy another? Do!" said the rambutan-seller pushily in response. "I'm only one person," I snapped testily, and took away my purchase. I never saw anyone else bargain with fruit-sellers. Anyway, I was pleased with my purchase, whatever its cost. I'd be lucky to get even one rambutan for $3 in the states, if I found one at all.

As I walked home in the rain--of course I had forgotten my umbrella--it was growing dark. The pretty restaurant girls in their fakish traditional garb were all wearing yellow raincoats over their finery, which made me laugh. I made a point of never going to a restaurant that has a pretty girl in pretentious qipao or hanbok. It just seems gimmicky and a sure-fire sign that the place will be overpriced.

I was pleased and very very tired. I had had an early morning taking a Chinese placement taste (mainly not too difficult, though I did not get everything right, I am quite certain). I was also a little regretful, because on my way out to the Forbidden City, I had suddenly caught sight of the goldfish seller, selling goggle-eyed goldfish on the street! How wonderful they were, and how my water-filled fishbowl longed for one, maybe a nice black one that wouldn't clash with the weird red sofa! But everything has its opportunity cost, and the Forbidden City had certainly been a memorable experience.

Would you believe it, after all this excitement and walking, I still had to go out again that evening? I had gotten a call regarding the International Student Communication Association--the ones who were to provide free tutors and all? They were having a welcoming meeting at 9:15 PM in the international students' cafeteria. After nine PM! Why on most nights I'm peacefully asleep by then! But I did grumblingly drag my aching feet back out the door. It was a very stormy night, with thunder and lightning. I was impressed in spite of myself by the drama of it.

The ISCA meeting was dramatic too--dramatically chaotic. I have noticed a certain penchant, in Chinese people's interactions with poor confused Westerners, to plan activities which are tremendously complex, and at the same time provide little or no explanation of what we are supposed to do. This one involved sitting in designated areas only, but it wasn't clear which areas these were, and then having timed amounts of "communication." "We will also have some ice-breaking games so you will get to know each other," the girl at the microphone announced to the sound of silent groans of dismay from the international students in the audience. Ice-breaking games are so uncool. This one actually turned out to be fun, involving a clapping pattern, and various permutations of the sentence "Guangdong fried noodles are spicy, spicy, spicy!" However, you had to have a powerfully positive frame of mind to be willing to give it a try, after such an uninspiring introduction. (Fortunately I do.) I met a math major and a few international studies majors, and they were terribly young (and I offended one of them by asking her name twice--people hate that), but I think it will be fun to go out with them once in a while. At least they're Chinese students, and so will know things about the place that I don't.

One of them asked me to give him an English name. As I barely knew him, I decided to choose one that sounded something like his Chinese name, which was Chen Chang. So I decided on "Charles." Here's to you, Chaz, you have a Chinese namesake now. It was actually kind of fun giving someone a name. I felt honored.

I was very tired by the time I made my slow way back home. The big streets seemed even bigger. There weren't many people about on a stormy Thursday night, though the cars raced about as aggressively as ever. Still, it had been quite a satisfying day, a day that made me feel I was really in a new and fascinating place rather than a lazy stay-at-home who could be anywhere!

(Dys)orientation, KFC, New Camera

Yesterday there were only a few things worthy of note. I did about half an hour of dissertation work in the midst of my usual morning time wasting--THAT is worthy of note but not very interesting to talk about, since it was mostly proof-reading.

I went to the PKU New Student Orientation, for which I had high hopes. These hopes were quickly dashed, as the entire thing consisted of a long lecture (actually a short lecture that took a long time) by a security officer, spoken in very slow and heavily accented English. There was some instruction on the different types of visas and necessary procedures, which might have been useful if the FB orientation hadn't done it much better, and if I hadn't already gone all the way through the process myself (I hope). Aside from that, I only learned a few interesting scraps of fact.

· There is no immigration bureau in China because it is a non-immigration country, thus the Division of Entry and Exit Administration has charge of foreigners in the country. (This division was where the security officer came from.)

· Foreign students are not allowed to ride motorcycles. (It's for your own good!)

· Overseas students (meaning us) are not allowed to work.

· A public security bureau permit is required for the raising of dogs.

· Religious activities are permitted, but only in designated places, and no distribution of religious materials or organization of outside events is permitted.

· When taking a taxi, be sure to ask for a receipt in case you have left any belongings in the taxi--you have a better chance of getting them back that way.

I don't think anyone was especially satisfied with this so-called orientation, though we were instructed to applaud repeatedly at designated moments.

Afterwards, I sat around in one of the campus eating places with a group of students, some of which I knew already and others who were new to me. One ABC girl I especially didn't like kept going on and on about handsome Korean guys and hot dating possibilities, how she didn't want a Chinese tutor unless it was a boy, and so on. Maybe in some embarrassing bygone day I myself sounded like just such a hotpants little slut, but eventually one comes to realize that almost no one wants to hear this kind of stuff, especially not at length. In general, the conversation was quite disappointing. The only thing that seemed important was the fancy restaurants and bars they had gone to and with whom. Everyone seemed aware that the present company was dull, so it was especially uncomfortable--people just sort of putting in the time as a kind of investment in hope of future return, such as being included in some more interesting gathering.

Who needs that. Life is too short. I eventually managed to extricate myself, went to the Wu-mei to get myself a notebook. I also browsed a bit in some of the bookstores they had there, though most annoyingly there were so many mosquitoes in the bookstore that I was almost too itchy to stay!

Then--okay, I confess--I had KFC. I was tired and hungry, and it was right next to the site of my next errand. It was welcoming, familiar--until I went in and saw the menu. Nothing like "chicken nuggets" "chicken sandwich" etc. It was all fragrant this and something-or-other that, poeticized names completely obscuring what the stuff really was. I ended up pointing at one of the combinations. "I'll have the number two." The response was a blank look, until she turned around and saw what I was point at. "Oh." She got out a picture menu, and proceeded to quiz me on the options--fries or salad, soda or juice. KFC in China is much spicier than in the U.S., which is a point in its favor, though I definitely got a week's worth of oil right there. Fried chicken AND mayonnaise? Lots of people were in the upstairs studying, and it looked like a classier parody of an American fast-food restaurant. I had seen this in Taiwan too--young people hang out in fast-food places, meaning they go there and stay. Hard to see why it needs to be fast then... It does manage to catch the cold impersonal sadness of a fast-food restaurant but everything has more solidity, like real money went into building it.

Well, I left as soon as I was done eating and headed to the computer city. There I purchased a camera identical to the one I had had, regretting the cost tremendously, but there's no help for it. I explained to the salesgirl that I had had one just like it but it had gotten stolen. She asked me about the details of the theft, and was quite impressed. "That thief was hard-core!" Then she gave me many pieces of advice about how to avoid this in the future, including wearing a front-carried shoulder bag (check) and walking with a companion (yeah right).

As far as I can tell, there is no bargaining in the computer city. The little shops make extra money by selling you many accessories. I was able to quickly refuse all the accessories except another big memory card. "The thief got the memory card too!" she said, shaking her head. They all said I spoke very good Chinese, which I think is only a relative compliment--the real meaning is probably, good compared to the other loser Americans that have come through here. Or suchlike.

Anyway, I was much happier to have a camera again, and here are some pictures I took.

The exotic red fruit, which I have since been told is a Fire-dragon fruit, and is white inside, and tastes like a kiwi:



The ugly bedsheet I bought at the Mini-mart:



My darling laundry-hamper next to a fish-bowl that came with the place, even already full of water. But where to find a fish?



Some shots of my ingeniously strung up bathroom clothesline (taken from below to make them more interesting):







The sun setting through a thick haze of pollution over the barely visible western hills:

Visa Service and the Hypermart

I left the house early to get to the school by 8 AM. Next up on the menu of registration week activities was the "Visa/Residence Permit Service." Actually I should have gotten there much earlier, for by the time I did get there, there was a long line of foreigners stretching all across the courtyard. And it was not a fast-moving line, either. I listened to all four chapters of The Secret Garden that I had brought on my little SanDisk, and listened to nothing for a while, and then listened to music too. The line inched along, and I stifled the thought that in the U.S. they surely would have come up with a more efficient way to do this--had people come at different times depending on their birthdays, or whatever. Useless thoughts. Better to go with the flow.

For a while, since my mind was on gardens, I watched a gardener raking away the weeds from a round flower bed in the middle of the courtyard. Then I saw something hopping along the newly raked bed, and I could have sworn it hopped much more heavily than a bird would. I was hoping very much that it would be an enormous old toad, but of course I couldn't leave my place in line, and embarrass myself and the gardener, by clambering over to find out--in front of several hundred international students. So I was left wondering.

The boy in front of me was wearing a very pretty baby blue hooded sweater that I quite envied. It looked a bit funny on him as it was so girly, but would have looked just right on me! The boy's bag had some buttons on it. "Fuck you, you fucking fuck." "If at first you don't SUCCEED, suck harder." "I like men. [In tiny print:] Big ones, small ones, not fussy." You know I had a lot of time in line, if I read even the small print on the guy's buttons, and memorized it.

It turned out that the "Visa/Residence Permit Service" involved divesting me not only of all the official papers to which I had been clinging so carefully, but also of my passport. Come pick it up on the 25th, they said. That means 20 days in a foreign country without my passport, a rather uncomfortable feeling. "What if I have to change money?" I protested experimentally. "Then you should have done it earlier," they said stoutly, and that was that. Well, at least it will save me trips to two different police stations. I have a photocopy of my passport, in case I need the number. And the FB boss, KC, promised his assistance if anything came up where I needed it.

All told, I waited in line for more than two hours. Maybe I wasn't the only person in line reluctant to give up my passport. By this time, though it was only 10:30, I was hungry again and very weary on account of this lingering cold. I decided I just HAD to have some hot soy juice (dou jiang) which is very different from the soy milk in the U.S. After a couple of misses, I found a cafeteria that was selling it, and also had a fried egg with spicy sauce on it (which I devoured in two bites). I got to use my new meal-card!

On the way home, despite being so tired, I stopped in at a different bookstore, Disanji [Dee san jee]. It turned out to be quite a different thing from the Zhongguancun nearer my house! It was more like the book equivalent of the computer city. It was untidy and divided up into ever so many tiny shops, each with its own bookseller and its own specialization. Most of them were devoted to things I don't care about at all--computer programming--economics--middle school textbooks. But eventually I did find a place that had a certain appeal. I ended up with six books, two scholarly books I had previously had to keep checking out of the library, and four volumes of a classical Chinese textbook written by a famous Chinese linguist, which has always been recommended to me as wonderful but I had never made a serious effort at it before. Well, no time like the present! The total, slightly over 80 RMB, was little enough to me ($10) but made the bookseller hand me his card with a grave expression. "Feel free to give me a call," he said, and I began to understand why people so much like buying books in China. They're cheap, and the booksellers are among those rare people who share your taste for things old and dusty--the make you an honorary member of the fraternity, simply because you are interested enough to pick out a few and pay pennies for them. Getting my purchases home to the States, of course, will be a different matter...

[Update: I later discovered that I never made it to Disanji at all. Disanji is kind of a like a Barnes and Noble type store that occupies the upper four floors of the building. The lower four are small bookmarts, and these were the ones I saw.]

Back at home I rested and lounged and drank hot water and blew my nose a lot. Stupid tough Chinese cold. I ate another green orange, listened to more stories, chatted with Colin on Skype. Eventually, I bestirred myself to go out and look for a grocery store I'd heard about. The one I'd heard about was a French grocery called Carrefour. I was good and even looked it up in their store-finder. Yes, there should be one right near me. I noted down the location on my map. But the place turned out to be--well, like a Chinese equivalent of Times Square, if Times Square were still under construction and swarming with bicycles as well as cars and buses--and minus some of the neon and flashing lights, since there is a certain veneer of energy consciousness here. I just mean that there was this incredible sensory over-load feeling about the place. Though I looked carefully at all the buildings (or tried to), Carrefour must have been somewhere slightly other--or hidden from my dazzled eyes.

I did, however, find a Chinese Wumei Hypermart, which seemed good enough for me. It was in the basement and the first thing I saw were quite a number of fancy departments selling expensive jewelry, cosmetics, watches, clothes, books, and other stuff I could barely take in. Then I got in to the grocery store proper and for a minute was quite confounded. On the surface, at least, it looked exactly as if it were the tiny convenience store Wumei Mini-mart from campus stretched out into gigantic proportions! A tremendous predominance of packaged and snack foods, aisles and aisles of them, most of which I had no clue about. Farther back, though, I found produce, and a bakery, and some of the more common raw materials of Chinese cooking like oil and soy sauce. Also a small dairy section. Milk is not refrigerated, I'm not sure why. It is sealed very heftily, maybe sterilized and vacuum-sealed, so you don't have to refrigerate it until you open it? I'm not sure, but it tastes fine.

You might think that my experiences with Sunrise in Eugene or the Mei Dong Asian Market in Plainsboro would have prepared my for my Wumei Hypermart experience--but you would be wrong. I guess in the first place a lot of what I bought from those places were Japanese and Korean foods, not really in evidence here. Also, I was decidedly unprepared for the level of staffing the place had. Why, each aisle seemed to have its own aisle attendant. Some were calling out loudly information about the specials to be had on their particular aisle. Also, when I took something and had walked a few steps away, the aisle attendant stepped forward to straighten up the display and erase the gap my interference had created! It was kind of stunning in its way.

Each produce island also had its own produce attendant, and they had produce-weighing stations just like the ones Colin detests as Wegmans--except these were compulsory and of course NOT self-service. (I learned this the hard way.) Some of the produce was familiar, some totally bewildering.

I spent a long time wandering around the store looking at things, despite the fact that I was still feeling under the weather and exhausted from the over-stimulated walk from my apartment. Finally I decided on the following items (yes, I really am blogging my shopping list; sorry if I'm boring you, but you have to remember that I do this instead of talking): milk, brown bread, butter, a papaya, a brilliant red cactus fruit (not sure what it tastes like, but they assured me it could be eaten raw), a super-size instant cup noodle in some mysterious Chinese flavor, a package of black sesame porridges, and a very much on-sale package of pickled vegetables. Good for a start, and it's nice to have some food in my little place. The grand total (drum roll)--slightly under $4. What a bargain!

And though it's a bit out of order, I will report on the foods I have tried as of this writing. The papaya was delicious and brilliant sunset red inside. The pickled vegetables were too salty to be eaten plain and I didn't buy any rice. The bread was probably fine, but I should supplement my report by saying that my terrifyingly hot electric hot plate and really thin lightweight metal wok will NOT do duty as a toaster. My toast was burnt to a crisp in seconds. The kitchen fan is pretty effective, though. The sesame porridge is great with a bit of milk and sugar. When mixed with hot water it is a deep, thick grey color like cement or mortar, and is ground very fine. Here (because I can't resist this choice bit of Chinglish) is what the package says about it:

NANFANG BLACK SESAME PASTE is a kind of black food which is a traditional delicious food of China. It is made of high-quality materials, such as rice, black sesame seed, peanut, etc. It is produced with the advanced scientific technique. This product is aromatic character and agreeable taste, and really an ideal delicious convenient food for people, at home or it tour.

Here here! And it does have some calcium and iron and protein, as well as carbs and fat. I know what I'm going to be having for breakfast from now on. I'll report on my other Chinese groceries soon.

The only other noteworthy thing I did was go back to the pulled noodle place for my dinner. I could have tried out my new cup noodle, but somehow I had a hankering for those chewy pulled noodles again. When I went there, the noodle chef remembered me and asked where I was from and complimented my Chinese. I complimented his noodles, and we did the transaction with knowing smiles. He knows I like to watch his noodle-making, and we both wished there were more customers! It was early yet for the dinner hour, though, since I'd had only the fried egg and soy juice for lunch.

Beyond that, I have to confess that I really didn't do much. My days have been modest and probably look tediously uneventful to your average ex-pat. But I feel that my eyes and brain are practically all filled up with the little details of each new experience, and I like to take it slow, digesting and processing and thinking about it all.

Sad News for Reptile Lovers

I interrupt the slow steady march of my China days to mention the melancholy news about Australian TV personality Steve Irwin, the Crocodile Hunter, who died a strange and unlikely death, pierced in the heart by a sting-ray while filming off the Great Barrier Reef. His wife is from my home-town, and he had two little kids. It's a really sad thing.

Of course I do mourn and respect Steve Irwin, who was a truly likeable personality as well as an amazingly brave guy. At the same time I confess I can't help feeling a little tiny bit curious whether they caught his last moments on film. I seriously doubt they'd ever release it, and I'm not sure I'd want to watch it if they did. But the historian in me does wonder. [Update: I am told by several people that they were in fact filming at the time of his death, but are apparently not releasing the film for reasons of tact. That's good of them, I think.]

Well in any case, rest in peace, Crocodile Hunter.

Catching Cold, Pronounced Healthy, Adventures in Eating

I woke up as usual at 4 AM yesterday, but this time with the strong feeling of inevitable discomfort that means I will be catching a cold. I drank some water and actually went back to sleep for a few more hours, for a total of 10 hours' sleep, an unusually long and restful night. Nonetheless, I woke up with a cold for sure. I felt thick-headed and slow and weak. But I drank quite a lot more water, had some vitamin C, and looked out the window.

What a clear and beautiful day it was! Why, I had almost forgotten that my window has an incredibly lovely view of the western hills--when it's clear. Yesterday it was so clear that things seemed to sparkle and be colored a shade brighter than on overcast, polluted days. It was the rain, apparently, bringing down the particulates, clearing the air. It was the most handsome sky I'd seen since I moved in here.

I was not feeling very strong, so I put most of my to-do list on hold and took my time with things, puttering around the apartment. Around mid-morning I finally went out, walking very slowly and deliberately. Given that the main activity today was to go to the medical center and be certified healthy, it was rather bad timing. But oh well, they surely wouldn't pay all that much attention.

On campus, the first thing I did was buy a little messenger bag. I had been thinking of doing so for some time, but had been intimidated by the pushy salesgirls at the campus Mini-mart. The salesgirls, if they saw you looking at the bags, were quite determined to choose one for you. They had a nice selection and reasonably priced, but I hate having my stuff chosen for me. I like to look at things and deliberate. They like to get the customers in and out as fast as possible, with minimum disordering of their display. Today, though, I decided this was a silly reason to keep putting off this particular errand. Besides, in my weakened state I was willing to be pushed around. I specified the size and let them choose the bag, a dark blue shoulder bag with a soft strap and a lot of zipper pockets big and small. It's not bad, in fact, for just little expeditions--a book, a water-bottle, a notebook, small items, a lunch, a camera (when I get one). For bigger stuff, like groceries or my computer, I can just take my backpack. So I felt pretty satisfied.

I also bought a temporary meal-card and a couple of oranges. The oranges here have green skin like limes, and taste very different from oranges at home. (I made double sure to ask if they were sweet or sour, though, just in case they really should be limes. The fruit-stand guy looked at me like I was off my rocker, but said in an injured tone that of course they were sweet.) Anyway, these green oranges are less acidic but also less juicy and sweet than the ones at home--something like the difference between cantaloupes and those yellow Korean melons. Anyway since it is so difficult to find orange juice here (Snapple-like sugared orangeade predominates), I thought oranges would be a good substitute. (At home I always drink lots of orange juice, the most tasty and expensive possible, when I have a cold.)

After this, I explored some of the cafeterias, but they were so mobbed, and I so ignorant about food, that I was intimidated. Finally, I went to the foreign student cafeteria, which was much less populous. There, while I was waiting in line, a middle-aged Chinese woman came up very close to me and looked me intently in the face. "You aren't--are you from England?" she asked in Chinese. I said that I was from America, and she laughed with embarrassment and said she had mistaken me for someone else. Then I wondered who, but she went quickly away. So somewhere out there I have an English twin.

At the cafeteria, I picked out an intriguing vegetable dish I had seen on other people's plates at the other places. I have no idea what vegetable it was. Thin stalks of something, or something that seemed to be thin stalks and no leaves. They were cut into inch-long segments, cooked in a thin brown sauce with little scraps of meat. They tasted a bit like green onions but weren't. Perhaps they were Chinese long-beans but they didn't have the right texture. The tougher ones were very much like the bottom of asparagus stalks, so maybe they were some sort of very thin asparagus without any heads. But they didn't have asparagus flavor. Oh Chinese vegetable mystery, how I like thee! I would have been very happy if I could have taken a picture of this interesting lunch, but even without that, I was pleased at the new taste.

Then I sat quietly and waited for 1 PM to come. We had been told to assemble at 1 PM, and I had got the sense that they would take us over to the medical center for our examinations. Not that they came out and said this! A lot of things here work by intuition; fortunately mine is good and I am also patient. A big tour-bus was parked nearby for quite a long time, no sign or announcement, but after a while I decided maybe the tour-bus was going to take us to the medical center. I asked someone who was getting off, and--despite a very garbled language-barriered attempt at communication--my hypothesis seemed to gain support. It is rough talking to international students who don't know English, Chinese, or Japanese! Perhaps I could get by with French, but the French people all seem to speak English; and the Koreans all speak Chinese. It's the Eastern Europeans who are rough!

Anyway, got on the bus. Being a nice person, I even made a quick call to a fellow I'd met the day before, Jason, who remembered me from the FB orientation. (I hadn't remembered him.) He was more clueless about the registration process even than I was. Information here is dispensed on a need-to-know basis, and sometimes not even dispensed when you need to know. Case in point, the lack of any identifying markings or announcements regarding the bus and its destination. If you were snappy enough to realize that the bus was for you, you got to ride the bus. Otherwise you could cab it or make your own way!

There's a Chinese saying, "Mention one return three." It comes from Confucius' praise of his best disciple Yan Hui. Yan Hui was the one who (figuratively) when shown one corner of a square could come back with the other three. In other words, a truly good student can take a very small amount of information and derive a great deal from it. The registration process seems to be sorting people like that from the others.... Or possibly everyone but me just has a much better source of information. I'm not sure. I just watch everything intently, wait patiently where I hope I'm supposed to be, and ask in polite Chinese when all else fails.

The medical center: we were there en masse, so that its main distinguishing feature was that it was flooded with us. International students of all sorts, including Asian-looking ones from Korea and Japan, even Chinese-speaking ones from Hong Kong and Taiwan. But also a lot of plain ol' white (and black) kids. Us by the hundreds. The signage was confusing, and I asked several times about which line(s) I should stand in, dutifully disseminating the information to panicked-looking kids with so-far non-existent Chinese. I know by not coming to China at that stage, that I have learned my Chinese the hard way rather than the easy way. No doubt I have a lot of bad habits those kids will never pick up. But it certainly is a boost to my confidence to come here already able to talk and do things (more or less). I think I would be quite terrified if I came here, had to do things, and also could hardly speak a word.

Many kids had brought their chest x-rays. I had already ascertained, by earnest study of the medical form they had filled out for me at registration, that the Princeton doctor's notation regarding my chest x-ray was going to be adequate, as was the negative HIV test they had done there. So while other people had to risk dubious Chinese needles and x-ray machines, I got off lightly with an ECG and a brief check-up (blood pressure, height, etc.). The doctors were of course quite overworked, with all of us lining up for their services. I got yelled at for not understanding which pieces of clothes I was supposed to remove for the ECG, and so forth. But it was all quite painless and quick, once the waiting in line was over.

Then I waited for a long time on the bus for everyone to get done so we could go back. All this waiting was made quite tolerable by my recent addiction to audio books. They are freely downloadable, for example from LibriVox, which has a quite decent collection. I have been listening to The Secret Garden, unabridged, and remembering with nostalgic pleasure my childhood fondness for the cassettes of it I'd got from the Springfield Public Library. The lady who read those had a better impression of Yorkshire speech, but they were abridged, excluding the repetitious details, the wandering through strange and wondrous rooms, and the un-P.C. speculations about the "blacks in India." So it is fun to listen to the unabridged version (of course I read it once or twice as an adolescent too, full of the same fondness for those wonderful long-ago library tapes). Listening I can suddenly remember some of the very words and phrases as they sounded read out loud, even before the LibriVox reader says them. I must have heard those tapes over and over again! I guess I have always liked hearing stories out loud, even though it is much slower that way. They are more lively and magical, also more vanishingly ephemeral, also cheaper--given the difficulty of finding English books around here! I mean, there ARE English books, but they are a motley selection, and expensive (relatively) as imported things tend to be.

Back on campus, I found myself with a little cluster of new acquaintances: the FB fellow I'd called before, a girl from Belgium, a fellow from England. It was the usual sort of accidental ex-pat group, the sort of group that also sometimes forms on the first day of school. You may have nothing in common at all except being new to the place. But we decided to all go for a snack together. Ended up at a Papa John's pizza, can you imagine! It is less than half a block from my house. There are also a McDonalds, a Pizza Hut, and two KFCs. But the Papa John's was the first Western food I'd had so far in China. It was less sweet and saucy than Papa John's in the U.S., but it really hit the spot after the light lunch of Chinese vegetable and all the fraught medical center queuing. Pizza and Sprite. I still had to laugh at the cost, which came out to about $4/person. At the Chinese food court next door I could eat four meals for that! Etc.

It was not stressful getting to know my fellow foreigners because it seemed...well, somehow less consequential that things go right. It's kind of a bad thing to say, but there you go.

We all exchanged phone numbers. There's a clever way to do this with cell phones. One person says her number out loud, and the other three type it in. Then they each call the first person in turn. Now that first person has all three of their phone numbers, and all three have hers. The first person is then left out of the next iteration (since she has everyone's and everyone has hers) and they repeat the process until everyone has everyone's. It is the work of a moment to add the numbers to the cell-phone's address book, quickly labeled with a first name. (Of course I had to be taught how to do this, but since everyone's phone is practically identical to mine, that wasn't a problem.) Exchanging numbers seems a much smaller deal using this process--just an obvious thing that everyone does. And then you automatically have caller i.d. too. I wonder if cell owners in the U.S. do this too and I just didn't know because I didn't have one, or any occasion to meet a lot of people at once?

Anyway, after this I confess I went home and had yet another quiet evening, listening to The Secret Garden and resting. The important thing seemed to be shaking off this miserable cold!

Wudaokou, Registration, Window Shopping

Yesterday, Sunday, was registration day. I gathered my big sheaf of documents, feeling nervous and yet also pleased that the waiting was done and I would finally have some sense of official connection with the university. I found the place all right. There were volunteer helpers who even spoke some English. I imagined myself volunteering in a corresponding capacity and felt amused.

Of course, I imagine most U.S. universities simply have a Chinese students' association to help with that kind of thing. Not here, though--probably there simply aren't enough long-term Western students. There were special areas for Japanese and Korean students, though, the latter of which are impressively numerous. For Americans and Europeans, there is the international student communication association (or something like that), which does some liaison work. It was pleasant to interact with them, as they were clearly all people who are interested in international students. They also had a form to fill out in order to join, and claimed they would provide a free Chinese tutor. I filled out the form, though as a rule I'm not a club-joiner, just so as not to seem too surly.

The paperwork went smoothly enough, though with a few hitches. One of the ladies asked my Chinese name. I told her, and she wrote it down and then shook her head over it, muttering to her neighbor. Zapaper, what kind of name is that to give to an American. I interjected that my father is Korean and that it's my real name, and she seemed mollified. My surname always says "Korean" to everyone. I think my Chinese given name (a sinified version of my middle name) is a grand and odd name with mythical associations--kind of like naming someone Phoenix. Some people think it an unusual but pretty, others find it pretentious. Oh well. In giving me this middle name, my parents probably didn't realize I would be using it every day.

I did not fully pass the medical exam, and thus couldn't move on to the residence part, because I didn't have a Chinese medical form. Well most people didn't. Fortunately I had the Fulbright form that had my chest X-rays and HIV test results, so I got out of that. But, they said, I must go to the specified medical center to get an printout of my heartbeat and a general physical examination. Do this tomorrow afternoon, they ordered sternly, and then I was done.

The communication association was offering a tour so I went along on it. It had some useful features, such as information on how to use the cafeterias--we are allowed to. We just have to buy a temporary card. They also told us where to do that, so that was cool. Of course, most rudely, the majority of the students were so busy getting to know one another that they barely listened to the halting English monologue. But I listened carefully whenever I could and asked questions in Chinese. I learned where the gym is, where to apply for computer access, and that almost none of the people around Nameless Lake are actually Beida students--they're mostly tourists. Except at night, one of them said. At night it's where couples come. (Wink, giggle, nudge.) There's a joke, one of them said, that you don't see the couples around Nameless Lake. You just hear them. (More giggling.)

Ah, romantic. I can hardly wait for Colin to get here so we can sit there too. Of course then it will be the middle of winter, bitter cold and probably frozen over. Well, Colin's such a radiator we'll be fine. We'll probably just have the place to ourselves.

After the orientation, I came home and got around to returning a phone call from a friend of a friend who is supposed to give me advice about the academic side of things. He is a graduate of Beida, now at Harvard, and he was explaining the strengths of the place. He sort of half-offered to introduce me to some professors, but with a certain chagrin added that he is extremely busy finishing up his summer reading list and will be leaving the country in only about a week or so. Still, we talked for a long time and he suggested several interesting-sounding courses that are taught every year, which I might want to sit in on.

Later, I called a fellow FBer and former Middlebury classmate, CMc, and we agreed to meet in Wudaokou for coffee. Wudaokou is where most of the foreign students live. It is a lively place, too far really to walk but only a short bus or taxi ride. This was my first time to go there and I found it--well, very different from my own neighborhood. It was definitely more ex-pat oriented, a feeling that was both more seedy and more student-y. I should add that there are about five or so universities in close proximity, and quite a lot of their students live in Wudaokou. Fair enough, but I sort of enjoy being the only Westerner in my building, and living in a less foreigner-oriented milieu. Though it only exacerbates my stick-in-the-mud tendencies. If I were more in on the ex-pat scene, I would probably get out more.

The café where I was meeting CMc--when I finally found it (my sense of direction is so embarrassingly bad)--was called Sculpting in Time. It was a quintessential expat place, and cool in that funky expat way. Served Western food, like spaghetti and milkshakes. Had a warmly glowing wood interior, and shelves of English and Japanese books. It was a hangout spot where you'd buy a cup of tea and stay all day. That's what CMc does, she said. It's just where she studies day in and day out. It's funny about being an expat: some people are expats just because they dig the expat lifestyle for its own sake, and there is a certain sameness to it the world over! I really knew I had "gone native" so to speak when I found myself thinking that for the price of a $2.50 cup of tea at Sculpting in Time I could get three square meals in my neighborhood. But that's Chinese food of course. Some people just have to have Western food, which as far as I'm concerned means they should have gone to Europe, or at least Japan, to live the expat lifestyle. But oh well.

By the time I left the café it had started to rain. I had taken a cab there because I wanted to get there on time (I was still late) but CMc had suggested taking a bus back. So I found a bus that had Beida on its list of stops and got on. The lady reading the stops, however, was completely incomprehensible. She also somehow ignored me and refused to take money, even when I offered. During all this distraction, I missed my stop and ended up (again!) out by the Fifth Ring Road. Why is taking buses always such a disaster for me? After muddling about, wandering back and forth, looking and my map book, and getting pretty wet in the process, I ascertained that I just needed to pick the right bus and ride one stop back. For some reason, this took forever. I waited at the bus-stop for one of the two or three buses I'd decided would serve…and waited seemingly endlessly. I was amused to see a little girl in split pants. I didn't realize kids still wore split pants. It's a cute alternative to diapers (or maybe training pants) if you don't care too much about street hygiene--the kid can just squat and go. This particular kid didn't, and maybe they're encouraged to use the bathroom, but I had to admire the convenience--and probably comfort--of the system.

Well I finally made it back to campus. If I'd had a better idea of where I was, I probably could have just walked it--maybe twice over--in the time it took me to find an appropriate bus. But oh well. At least for once I got a bus to actually take me where I wanted to go.

Time for one last errand: explore the computer city and see about getting a new camera. I did a lot of camera research only a few weeks ago, the LAST time I was looking for a brand new camera... so I pretty much knew what I wanted. And what's the point of getting a crappy one, since even crappy ones are expensive here. Might as well just get the one I want. I explored the computer city top to bottom, and that's saying something. Most places were selling just the same old crap, though. Optical mice, wireless cards, MP3 players, printer cartridges. It was kind of like the shopping place in Seoul, each little stand run by different people, hundreds of stands crammed into each floor. This building had several exits, though, so didn't feel like quite so much of a death-trap. On the fourth floor I finally found a place that was selling a camera pretty much like mine, 1500 RMB or thereabouts--that is, about the same price as in the U.S. Grumble. I had the money, but it was pretty much all my ready-cash, so I decided to wait until after Labor Day in the U.S. (a half day later here) and I could get my ATM situation straightened out better.

From there I dropped by the little restaurant where I'd had my first lunch in this area--the one with the checkbox menu. This time, adventurously, I ordered a random assortment of things to see what I would get. I did my best to ignore the weird looks that the serving people gave me. What I ended up with was sweetened tofu pudding, a kind of chewy Chinese donut, and some rather salty steamed balls of vegetable/herb and rice. Okay, it was a kind of weird combination no matter how you slice it. But interesting.

After that I wandered into the nearby bookstore. I had a thorough look at it this time and was kind of unimpressed. Not much in the way of scholarly books, or English books either. Not much to interest me anyway. All the same, I ended up spending an immense amount of time in there, exploring all the floors, looking for things that might be of interest. By the time I came out I was dropping with exhaustion, and barely managed to drag myself home and crawl into bed. Yeah, I went to bed at about 7:30 PM. But unlike usual, I didn't get up at 4 AM but instead slept straight through until 6:30--so you know I was pretty darn tired!

Appropriate Housewares and Arab Candy

Yesterday once again was a mixture of the mundane and the bizarre. Mundane because my main goal was to make it to Ikea, bizarre because of the adventures that brought me there. I had got this idea of going to Ikea because of a little text message sent my by my landlady's daughter. They had obviously furnished the apartment entirely from there, right down to the odd red sofa. And, feeling a little frustrated with the consumer possibilities around here, I thought, why not? You have to realize this was the first text message I had ever received in Chinese. It seemed to give directions for how to get there: you take the #944 bus. What it actually said was "Take 944 route Gongjiao get to Yijia get off." At the bus-stop, I had looked very hard at the sign, which lists all the stops. There was no Yijia stop, which made sense because after some pondering it was clear that Yijia is the Chinese word for Ikea. (It's a cute translation, by the way, because it means "Appropriate Household" but also with maybe a slight implication of "Bargain Household." And it sounds reasonably like Ikea as well.) But there was a Gongjiao stop. Now Gongjiao also means "public transportation," which I had assumed is what it meant in this context--"Take public transportation route 944 to Ikea"--but seeing the Gongjiao stop I thought, huh, that's what she meant: take route 944 to Gongjiao. So I, er, did that.

It was my first time on public transportation here. This is how it works: the bus is actually staffed by two people, a driver, and a ticket taker. The ticket taker has a sharp eye for who gets on the bus and after they get on she asks each person where he or she is going, tells them how much it will cost, and sells them a ticket. If you ask, she will also tell you where to get off. This considerably increases the speed of each stop, since there's no waiting for people to pay one by one. Of course in the U.S. they could never afford it--the cost of labor is too high to pay two people to do a job one person could do. But here… well, 'nuff said.

In Chicago, the buses run in straight lines, each one along a certain major street, so if you want to go north and then west, you take the northbound bus along the street you're on, then get off at the appropriate corner and transfer to the westbound bus. Not so with the 944, which took a route resembling Ariadne's thread through the minotaur's maze. We went through so many parts of town I can barely remember any of them. And then we got out to the sticks. Well, Ikea in Chicago is in some distant suburb, so how should I know? There was in fact a big complex with blue and yellow flags, some distance before the stop at which I was instructed to get off. I didn't SEE a sign saying Ikea or Yijia, but maybe I missed it.

I got off the bus. A sand-choked street. Some grim official buildings, some people vending miserable-looking street-food. Cracked paving stones. Very smelly garbage cans. I asked an official-looking person if there was an Yijia around here? Blank look. A place that sells housewares? He pointed vaguely further on down the street. I walked for a bit. On my left, a manicured complex behind a fence. On my right, across the street, some very sad looking shops selling cigarettes, alcohol, hardware. I walked for a ways, but it just felt really unpromising. Dust and sand blowing everywhere. Buildings interspersed with demolition rubble, sometimes whole fields of it. Why be so quick to knock things down if they were just going to leave it like that? It was a disheartening scene, enlivened only by one, wonderful sighting, as follows:

I may have mentioned here, or elsewhere, the wonderful tricycle trailers they have here? They're all clearly quite ancient, but they're everywhere. I regularly see laboring cyclists pulling 8 or 9 desktop computer boxes, or boxes of laptops stacked up higher than their heads, on these rusty old things. Not to mention, of course, boxes of produce, and numerous other miscellaneous items. I love the tricycle trailers. But out in the sticks I saw...a tricycle truck. I kid you not, it was an ordinary sort of truck (you know, motorized, with a steering wheel), but it had only three wheels, one in the front and two in the back. I had never seen anything like it before in my whole life, and it practically made the whole transportation mishap worthwhile. Ah, if only I could have snapped a picture of that.

I turned around and went back to the big complex. As near as I could tell, it was a gigantic "fashion school," all new and shiny and deserted. But definitely not an Ikea. There was a security guard by the gate, and I asked him. He said something to the effect that, No, you are in the completely wrong part of town. So I asked where the bus-stop for the 944 was, feeling ready to admit defeat. (Bus-stops out this far were barely marked.) Then as I was trudging toward there, a taxi came by and slowed questioningly. Why not? I was so ready to get out of there. So I hailed him in the way I had seen Chinese people do, not heil Hitler style like in the U.S., but extending the arm palm down and curling the fingers back toward oneself repeatedly in a beckoning gesture.

The taxi stopped right away and I climbed in. He had at least heard of Yijia. He said it would be less ambiguous if I said Yijia jiaju (Ikea home furnishings), and said it was extremely far away. I asked how much it would cost. He did some mental calculations and said, about 60 RMB. Hey, $7.50 to get out of this dusty dead-end? I was hot and thirsty and discouraged, and it didn't seem like too much to pay.

It was indeed a very long way. He was a chatty cab driver, though I occasionally had trouble understanding him. I found out about him that he was from nearby the area I had been in. It turned out to be a truly distant suburb, out beyond the fifth ring road. He asked me how I came to be there, and I explained as best I could the misunderstanding I had had, about my friend's text message. He was a bit vague on the concept of text message, possibly because I didn't know the Chinese word for it, possibly because he didn't use them himself? I'm not sure how well I managed to explain, but he got it enough to say that I had got on the right bus all right, but had gone in exactly the wrong direction.

May I add, as a general exhortation to anyone giving directions to someone in a city new to them: in addition to the bus number, mention the direction and the name of the stop as well!

The cab driver also said that next time I am trying to go somewhere I should mention to the ticket person where I want to go. "Just saying one sentence more, you would have avoided so much trouble!" he grumbled. I owned that this was true. Alternatively, I could have just gone to their website, which, though it doesn't have directions, at least has a map, which would have shown me the general area. Well, education is expensive, as mom always says.

The taxi also wanted to know if there were taxis in the U.S. I said there were, mostly in major cities. Small towns might have one or two, I said, but they're so expensive that one rarely uses them. I didn't mention that ALL cabs in the U.S. are expensive compared to here!

That being said, the meter passed 60 and kept right on going. I was a bit worried, but $8, $12, whatever, it was so much more comfortable in the cab than on the bus, since I did not have to worry about my destination or whether I would get a seat. When we finally did reach Ikea, however, it turns out we had negotiated a fixed fare of 60 RMB. In fact, when I only had a 100 bill and a 50, he readily accepted 50 and change. I guess he couldn't break a hundred maybe. The whole thing flustered him a bit. Perhaps he had expected me to bargain at the beginning, and was now feeling bad that I hadn't tried to talk down the price at all. Or perhaps he was feeling bad about my bus disaster. An honest, small-town sort of guy, clearly. I think a slicker driver used to confused foreigners would have happily accepted my hundred.

In any case, there I was. The Ikea is brand new in Beijing, as you will know if you looked at their website: opened 2006. Half of it was still under construction, but they had considerately opened the other half. And the place was MOBBED. Foreigners were there, yes, more than I had seen anywhere else in Beijing so far. But they were a drop in the bucket compared to the Chinese people jostling along, packing the aisles, mostly marveling at how classy things were and how expensive.

At home, Ikea has a connotation of cool but also not expensive. And the Beijing Ikea was, from my perspective, cheaper than the U.S. one by a factor of two (or so). An ice-tray I had got in the U.S. for $2, for example, was about 8 RMB (=$1). But in line with my factor of two buying power conversion hypothesis, everything seemed to strike my Chinese fellow customers as quite overpriced. I hypothesize that, from their reactions, it seemed like a $4 ice-tray, not a $1 ice-tray. A better example was a very wonderful laundry hamper, which I debated for a long time. I need a laundry hamper, having no real closet or place to put dirty clothes. They had some very lame ones for something like 40 RMB (ugly and plasticky), and this one wonderful one, with a wooden frame and a sturdy linen basket in soothing olive and cream color, for 100 RMB. I stood debating the extravagance for a long time. But I REALLY liked it, and it's something I would use every day--not to mention being totally visible at all times, given that my studio is only one big room. While I was standing there considering it, some Chinese people came by and looked at it too. They reacted to the price tag with exclamations of horror--who could possibly pay so much for something like that!? And so on. I suppose if I had found a real Chinese housewares store, I would have got some much better deals. But there was something very home-like about being in the Ikea, comforting after all my adventures. Oh, and yes, I did buy the extravagant laundry hamper. A whole $12.50, most self-indulgent. (The real thing is even better than the picture.)

Probably my most important Ikea purchase was a rolling office chair. I had been using one of the kitchen chairs at the desk, and it was horrible. No doubt purchased at Ikea also--Ikea has some pretty rickety stuff. In any case, the aluminum legs were somehow not perfectly aligned, so every time I sat down there was this feeling that the legs were about to collapse, or were getting more and more strained. Given how much time I spend sitting at my desk, this was a terrible annoyance. I managed an on-sale office chair for about $20. It's a cheap on, but much more comfortable than the lousy kitchen chair. I guess Chinese people maybe aren't so into rolling office chairs? or maybe just not as home furnishings? Because the selection was very small and very few of them were padded (and instead were made of molded plastic). Go figure.

Oh, and I also found some nice sheets. They don't sell package sheet-sets, but by the individual piece. So I got a fitted and some pillow-cases in a nice midnight blue. Some natural instinct of parsimony prevented me from getting another fitted sheet to replace the awful lavender one I got the day before. I don't know--the lavender sheet is part of my history, and besides, it's kind of funny. I mean, amusingly ugly, much like a shower curtain I once had while I was living in Boston. I had bought the shower curtain thinking it was a blue and green geometric pattern. Instead, in turned out to be a blue and green geometric pattern overlaid with big black and grey cartoon pictures of tools, hammers and wrenches and such. One of the ugliest shower curtains I have ever owned, but I kept it because it for its humor value.

Anyway, with these and various other small purchases which I would like to show you but I can't because I still have no camera, I went through the check-out (the first place I've seen that takes credit card, but unfortunately I didn't have my credit card on me and paid cash like everyone else). They charge you for plastic shopping bags, so I just stuck the small stuff in my backpack. In fact, a nominal charge for shopping bags is a darn good idea. I think if stores did that, people would be much more likely to bring and use their own bags, reducing waste considerably.

The office chair box was big and heavy, so rather than schlep it down the street in search of a bus-stop, I decided to just take a cab again to home. The cab driver on the way in had pointed out the incredibly long line of cabs waiting at the Ikea cab-stand. It was about two blocks long. I'd said to him, "You're not going to wait in that line, are you." He laughed. "Where do I have the time to do that?!" I felt actually rather bad to have taken him so far off his home turf. I hope he really was ripping me off, by his lights, so that it would make it worth his while.

The cab driver who took me home was not talkative. He sat inside a little one-person cage around the driver's seat, which made him look rather pathetic. I suppose it must be for his protection, but still. I was a little apprehensive about being able to tell him the address, and it was not entirely easy. First I tried the street name and apartment complex name (there isn't really a number). Blank look. Then I said it was near Beida. That got us going. The southwest corner of Beida, I added. And then when we got to the bridge I recognized, I said it was south of the bridge. He looked askance. (Beida is north of the bridge.) So I pulled out my handy map book and pointed to the place. He peered at it through the bars, and after a hesitation agreed it was south of the bridge. And we got there fine, didn't even overshoot it, given how distinctive the complex is.

Then I spent some time putting together my new furniture. The office chair was particularly challenging, but I felt rather pleased that it all came together so well. (Thank goodness for my handy little keychain screwdriver set.) I mean, I'm sitting in it now and it hasn't come crashing apart yet. The seat-height adjustor even works!

So that was pretty much the part of my day that was worth mentioning, except that I also got cheated by an Arab candy-seller.* The Arab candy-sellers have these huge fascinating cake-like concoctions (I mean, the size of an entire tricycle-trailer bed), wrapped in plastic and topped with dried fruit. I had seen several, but seeing one along my route yesterday morning, I decided to try to have a taste. I just want a little, I insisted, just a taste. But seeing I was a conspicuous (and probably rich) American, he cut off a considerable slap and wouldn't make it any smaller, and unlike most food around here, it wasn't ridiculously cheap. In fact, the slab he cut (sold by weight) turned out to be about $5. I really didn't want $5 worth of Arab candy (I'm pretty sure it is some kind of halva). I wanted $1 worth of Arab candy. The guy in front of me had got $1 worth of Arab candy. But I was stuck with $5 worth or nothing and facing the vendor's ire (seeing as once he cut it off he couldn't sell cut pieces, he exclaimed). So with considerable irritation and protest I forked over the money. I guess I shouldn't really say I was cheated, since I did get a horrific amount of halva. But it's sort of like the grapes--a completely impossible quantity!

It turned out to be okay-tasting, not excessively sweet, primarily composed (I think) of sesame paste and cashews. It's probably pretty proteinaceous, if high in fat, and rich enough that I can't eat more than a little square at a time. A good way to solve sweet-tooth cravings (of which I've had much fewer here), and to fill of the little appetite wholes left by a steady diet of unfamiliar things. But it doesn't taste as good as it would have if the transaction had gone the way I wanted. Maybe that's silly.

Oh, a final thing. Did I express puzzlement at the night-time fruit vendors on the campus? How silly of me. Now that the students are back, it all becomes clear. Around 9 PM, they go out to the bathhouses for their evening wash and come out, hair all damp and faces shining. I guess this is when their thoughts turn to the pleasures of eating some nice juicy fruit, because the fruit vendors do a brisk business!


* You might ask what made me think he was an Arab candy seller, and am I yielding to racial prejudice and so on? Well, he wasn't Chinese. Most of the times I have seen this candy sold, it was being sold outside a building with Arabic writing on it. And the candy itself had a very Middle-Eastern taste. This isn't proof that he was an Arab, but that is my best guess.

Moving in, Disastrous Non-Trip to Ikea, Pulled Noodles

This morning, as I was checking out, I had a sudden realization about the guesthouse I had been staying in. Putting two and two together, this IS the foreign students' dorm where I would be staying (with another person!) if I had opted for that option. I partly realized this by putting two and two together as far as building numbers are concerned, and partly by glancing in through an open door and seeing a VERY FULL, lived in looking room. Laundry hung on a clothesline across! Books! Papers!

As a hotel room, by myself, it was okay I guess. A bit cramped. But living there for a year with another person would be absolute hell. I know I'm really spoiled! But my apartment is about twice as big as that room, and half the cost. A much better view, and I don't have to share! Of course there's no maid service, but that may be for the best. I think the only thing I will really miss about the guesthouse is the tall ewers of hot water which the maids were supposed to replace every day (sometimes they only replaced one). The insulation on them was fantastic. Even half a day later, the water stayed hot enough to make tea.

I decided I should be able to get everything in two trips. First trip: backpack full of books and box of grapes. Second trip: backpack full of toiletries and shoes, suitcase full of clothes. That made the suitcase much lighter and solved the problem of the grapes. I mean, I actually could have taken everything in one trip, but it would have been a stressful and comical-looking trip. Things were going according to plan up until I crossed the first street on the first trip. Halfway across, the bottom of the grape box suddenly gave way! Grapes everywhere! But I was in the middle of the street, and there was nothing for it. Many were past their prime anyway, I could see when they were all suddenly revealed. Not really so much of a loss. All the same, though, it was quite a shock. I didn't see that there was anything for it but to keep on walking. I couldn't exactly stand around picking up grapes in the middle of the street. But I did feel very bad for making such a mess.

Other than that, the move went smoothly enough. I did not enjoy dragging the still-heavy suitcase down the street, as its structural integrity has suffered somewhat from being overstuffed, and kept catching on things. (Stupid cheap suitcase.) But no matter, I made it eventually. By this time, it was a well-known well traveled route and so didn't feel quite as long.

I was all moved in by 8:30 AM. I promptly hooked up to the internet and did several hours worth of stuff I had been putting off, as well as delightful stuff like talking on skype to Colin and my parents.

Around noon, I was getting really hungry and thirsty. The electric kettle provided, however, was coated on the inside with some highly disturbing yellowish-white residue, powdery and weird. I suppose it was harmless but I could really scrape it off very well and I just felt incredibly suspicious of it. So I decided I should go out and buy a new one. In addition, I needed sheets for the bed and a clothesline. (My laundry situation was getting fairly dire, and of course no one here has a dryer.) So I ventured out, first off to get me some bottled water and food, then perhaps to find a supermarket. Supermarkets in the U.S. have everything, all the sorts of stuff I needed. And I wouldn't mind, I thought, buying some food as well. Failing that, perhaps a home furnishings store? I walked around for more than an hour, exploring the neighborhood, but there was nothing like that. Restaurants and banks, restaurants and banks, the occasional hotel or bookstore. What looked like a very promising furniture store was in fact not yet populated by merchants except for one "baby supplies" store on the ground floor. The upper floors were all empty. A promised shopping mall proved to be nothing more than a big hole in the ground (I mean BIG, several blocks), with construction workers wandering about, gazing down into it, or taking naps in the shade. It must be frustrating to live in a place that seems to undertake nothing new unless it is on a grand scale, for as far as the practical necessities of everyday life are concerned, a half-built supermall is totally useless, as is an unpopulated housewares building, however gigantic.

Eventually I did find the so-called "supermarket" associated with our housing complex. The landlady had implied that there was one very near, but it took me a long time to find it. Let me mention that in Chinese the word "supermarket," chaoshi 超市, is a direct translation. Superman, for example, is chaoren 超人. So I was very pleased when I saw the sign for "supermarket," and so close. In the event, it was a perfectly frightful place, set up in a dark awful underlit basement room and sharing space with the bicycle parking. I didn't see any refrigerated goods either. Some weird unfamiliar produce. Some household chemicals. One extra-attentive attendant sitting in the middle of the room and looking askance at me. I confess I didn't take a proper look before I fled. No doubt I will go back in a less expectant frame of mind, and perhaps find something useful there. But I felt very full of protest at the abuse of the term "supermarket." In WHAT sense was that place super!?

The landlady's daughter had sent me a text message telling me how to get to the Ikea. At first I rejected the idea, but then it kind of grew on me. It would be interesting to see what was sold at a Chinese Ikea. I popped back up to my room to get my backpack, also map and camera. I thought it would be easier to carry things with the backpack, and was looking forward to taking some pictures for purposes of comparison with the Ikea I had seen in Chicago (that was the first one I'd ever seen, by the way). However, when I got to the bus-stop I began to have serious second thoughts. I really should have just pressed on with this plan, in hindsight, but my goodness. Not only was the bus was utterly packed, but traffic was at a total standstill. The weather was really hot. Horns honking, the smell of everything… it was only 2:30 in the afternoon, but maybe people go home early on Friday. I don't know. So instead I decided to go back to the little store on campus, the approximate equivalent of the U-Store at Princeton (or anywhere really) that sold dorm set-up supplies. It was no Ikea, but enough for starters. The streets were mobbed with people. Reminder to self--stay in on Friday afternoons. I was also full of accumulated exhaustion from so much walking around, crossing so many streets, breathing so much car-scented air. All of these are my excuses for the fact that it took me all the way until I got to the little store on campus to realize that the outer pocket of my backpack was open. Perhaps I should say "opened." It was a zipper pocket, and I'm not sure how I didn't notice it getting unzipped, since I'm usually really aware of even innocent jostlings against my backpack, but some bold thief had managed it. So, alas, no photos on this post, and I shall have to visit the computer city and hope that cameras are cheaper here as well.

This incident made me feel very gloomy. I resolved to buy a messenger bag instead, that you can carry on the front and keep under your eyes. Most people walking around do carry them, and not backpacks. I guess this must be why.

I managed to find most of the things I needed at the little university store. Had a bit of a tustle with the over-attentive salesperson about sheets. Yes, I REALLY do want a double bed sheet, not a single bed sheet. She looked at me as if I were a bad woman. The double-bed sheet came in a package with a silhouette logo of a couple passionately embracing. There weren't many choices in the university store, though single-bed sheets were available in all varieties. Yeah, oh well. Now I have an impressively ugly lavendar sheet with weird big bunches of some weedy looking flower on it.

Back at my apartment I did some laundry in the "Double Strength Spirit" washing machine. Spirit as in "ghosts and". A cute name. I lay about. Started making a crocheted hat. When the wash was done, I strung up a clothesline in the bathroom and hung it up. I was very clumsy with that. It has been a long time! I suppose I had to use a clothesline in Taiwan (I remember it was outside and all my clothes ended up with an odd "Asian city" smell). But before that, I hadn't really used a clothesline since we had one in Jasper, when I was a little kid. I suppose it was to save money on electricity that we did that in summer. In winter, we did use the drier.

Then I just lay around feeling gloomy and did some sleeping also. It was dark when I woke up, around 8. I decided I should get up and have some dinner. I didn't really feel like having dinner, but my 7-11 lunch (two dumplings, one vegetarian) and Quikmart breakfast (some little cake-rolls and yoghurt) were hardly very substantial. I had just been too busy dashing around all day to eat properly. Not feeling up for much walking, I decided to go down to the Meimei Xiaochi, which is right next door to my building. It proved to be a substantial basement food-court, and looked about the level of your average mall food-court. I wandered around, trying to decide what to eat. I have finally become dissatisfied with the all-baozi diet, and was up for something different. Following the "I'll have what he's having" strategy of dealing with unfamiliar culinary choices, I picked out a guy who was receiving a nice steaming bowl of noodles. "Are those beef-noodles?" I asked the guy behind the counter. "Beef pulled noodles," he said. I wasn't sure what that meant, but I ordered one. Rigamarole with paying: the restaurant rings up your order and gives you a ticket. You go to the central cashier and pay. The cashier gives you a receipt and you give it back to the food-people, and they make your food. I have not got used to the system yet, as there are all kinds of variations. Well anyway, I finally did that and sat down near the noodle place.

Then I saw something amazing, which was the meaning of pulled noodles. The guy who had taken my order was banging and stretching a lump of dough. Suddenly, he started pulling it out long, then bringing his hands together in a quick, loose fold, and pulling it out long again. He did this very quickly and very stretchingly, and in a short time he had…noodles. MY noodles, in fact. He tossed them in a vat of boiling water and pulled them out soon after. He ladled broth over, and then another counter-person added some thin slices of beef and turnip, a spoonful of cilantro, then invited me to add my own hot-pepper oil and vinegar. I took the steaming production back to my table. It was quite good, though I will say that a little hot-pepper oil goes a long way. The noodle--or rather, noodle: it was completely unbroken until I bit it--were slightly irregular in width and slightly chewy in a very good way.

I confess, I was totally fascinated. It cheered me up a lot, watching the noodle chef bang and stretch the dough while I ate my noodle. The noodle chef had an interesting face. It was thin and peaky, and looked especially small and sprite-like under tall white paper chef-hat he wore. The hat was probably three or four times the height of his little head. He noticed I was watching him, and grinned at me once, stretching the noodles with extra panache.

The big bowl of noodles was really too much for me, but I ate it all anyway because I didn't want him to think I lacked appreciation!

After this pleasant interlude, I made my way home. I had a brief chat with Colin, which also cheered me up a lot too. I told him about the noodle chef, and he was very anxious to try some. I told him about the camera and he suggested that maybe someone was just borrowing it to take some pictures and would be giving it back soon. Ha ha. No need to detail all the sad feelings I have about that incident, but in the long run the loss of good times is worse than the loss of a replaceable material object, so the important thing is not to be too sad, I think.

New Apartment

Yesterday was a full and exhausting day. The morning was devoted to gathering up a large sum of cash. I guess that even in the U.S. it would have been troublesome to manage so much, about $1800. Here it was complicated by several factors: ATM machines themselves have a daily limit, the bank where I have the most money also has a daily limit, and not all machines accept all cards. Fortunately, I have three ATM cards and by ingenious combination over the course of two days managed to get all the money. It was down to the wire, though, as far as time was concerned, and I also feel bad for Shenzhen Development Bank, which had a very reliable ATM in a private room. They shelled out something like $750 for me, all told! Though I suppose it can't really hurt them to do that. All these banks though--they feel kind of dinky and tenuous. You kind of worry about them as you would about a fragile child.

I got to the apartment to meet the landlady and there she was, much to my pleasure and relief. She had drawn up a contract for us both to sign, something like a lease but home-made. I cast my eye over it while she explained it point by point. (If I had taken the time to read through every word it would have taken about half an hour, but by looking at it while she explained it I got the gist.) So we signed that and each got a copy. Then she explained to me a lot of things, for example how the electricity and water work.

The apartment comes with two cards, an electricity card and a water card. The way to get electricity is go to the bank and buy a certain number of units, which they record on the card. Then you take the card and stick it into the electricity meter down the hall (each apartment has its own). The meter registers the new balance, and you have electricity until it runs down to zero. Water works the same way, but you buy the units at that apartment complex management office rather than the bank.

I think it interesting how everything here seems to work on the declining balance principle. Really it's a good idea I suppose. In a society as quick-changing and fast-moving as this one, with a notable lack of government control over most transactions, I think a credit system would leave people much more likely to skip out untraceably.

After all these explanations, we set off to find the police station. It is required for any foreigner renting an apartment to go with the landlord to the police station and register, and if this sounds weird, it is, but at least the more knowing landlords expect to do this. Finding the police station was an ordeal in itself, but a boring one (mostly a lot of walking about and asking directions) so I shall skip over it. We found it at last, and the lady behind the window scrutinized my passport, the landlady's ID card, and her "landlord permit," a kind of triple-sized red passport showing that she is legally allowed to rent to place out. They then gave me a little form, which I have to take to some other office, then go back again to the police station.

Chatting with the landlady as we walked back from the station, I learned something interesting, the answer to the riddle of why some landlords are willing to go the police station and some aren't (this the FB people sternly caution us to ask first before committing to renting a place). The landlady explained that if you buy the apartment with a loan or mortgage type thing, you don't get the landlord permit. That you only get when you have bought the place outright, as she apparently did. So I was very lucky to find her. She said she is one of the only people in the whole building who has one. She also mentioned that the builidng is brand new, put up only last year. I was surprised, because although the apartment is quite spotless, the lobby and elevators have a very lived-in feeling. Many of the numbers are worn off the elevator buttons from constant pressing. Well, a whole lot of people do live here. Although it seems like the place is mostly studios, I think living one to a room is the exception, rather than the rule.

Anyway, our next errand was to go buy the electricity at the bank, which she explained very carefully how to do. There was a long wait at the bank, take-a-number like the DMV. I talked some more with the landlady and she asked me about my family (five children! she seemed a tiny bit shocked) and what I want to do when I grow up. She said she is a professor also, teaches something to do with management at another university, I forgot what it was if she even told me. But it was interesting. I debated asking her if being a female professor in China has any extra associated difficulties, but I wasn’t sure if that was polite.

After we got the electricity, I made the short trek back to my hotel. I say short but the day was hot and I was really exhausted and thirsty, so it seemed quite a long way. But I did take a picture of this funny sign on the way: no horses and carts on the freeway!

When I got back to campus, there were mobs of students on it, all moving in. I realized that I had thought of the campus as a dead and quiet sort of place, peaceful, boring. But this was clearly its true state, absolutely packed with excited, chattering kids. I drank a bottle of water, a bottle of "bloom-ade" (which tastes like gatorade but is actually "green orange" juice; there a lot of green orange here), packed up my computer, and set off back down the road to the apartment. The landlady had suggested that if I weren't busy I should try bringing my computer and hooking it up to the internet, as the process might be a little complicated.

It was, rather. Apparently all DSL modems here require a user-name and password. But first I had to figure out how to put it in. We tried installing the software that came with the modem, but it was all in Chinese and that didn't come out on my computer--just a lot of question-marks. After a lot of fiddling, I finally figured out how to switch my computer over to Chinese, and tried it again. Now the password didn't work. The landlady called the former tenant to see if he had changed the password (he had!) and got a new password. This still didn't work. Then the landlady called her daughter and had her explain to me how to do it through Windows XP. Yeah, I guess I should have thought of the whole built-in make a new connection thing, but I had never done this for myself. Someone else had already done it for me. So I did that and it finally worked. But it was all pretty stressful, and my computer still addresses me in Chinese!

Then we waited for the locksmith. The landlady wanted to change the lock just in case the previous tenant had his own copy of the key. "It's just because you are a girl living alone," she said. "I want to make especially sure that you are safe." She is a very nice person, and several times mentioned that if I had any trouble I should make sure to call her. This is a tremendous improvement from my landlord in Taiwan, who WAS the trouble.

While we waited we watched a little TV. She said if I practice watching TV my Chinese would improve tremendously. I have heard this from other people too. People who have the habit of watching TV, I think, find something soothing in the very act of watching so it's a painless way of practicing listening comprehension. But I usually find TV fairly boring at the best of times, and when I don't understand half the words…. Well, that being said, I did find an archeology program that caught my interest for a while. Then we got started talking about history, and the landlady told me many stories from Chinese history. Some I knew, some I had heard of only vaguely, but it was fun to hear someone tell them with such animation. Do Americans tell the biographical details of this or that president hundreds of years ago with such enthusiasm and flourish? Of course, American history doesn't even have enough hundreds to be comparable. In any case, I enjoyed it a lot. This talk of history led to the landlady enumerating for me the five "must-see" sights of Beijing. The first was the Great Wall. The Ming tombs. The Forbidden City. The Summer Palace. And the Alter to Heaven. But, she enjoined, you have to first read up on these places before you go see them, because if you don't then they won't be as meaningful. I agreed to do so.

Now time was stretching pretty long and we were both pretty tired. She asked if I eat dinner at school, because she wanted to make sure I didn't miss the open time? It seemed easy to go along with this excuse, so I did that. She said she would call when the locksmith had come, and then drop them off at the Beida west gate on her way out. (She actually lives far away in a northern suburb. I had asked.) In due time, she did this, and the apartment was mine.

Here are some pictures I took of it. It is hard to get a whole sense of the place, which is just one big long room and a little bathroom off to the side, but I hope you can.

Korean Food Hustlers

After the excitements of past days, yesterday was a very quiet one. I have been spoiling you readers with thick and eventful posts, I know, and today I'm afraid you will have to be disappointed.

I walked out in the morning, still feeling flushed with victory. It was the first rainy day since I have been here. Overall, the weather has been warm and muggy, but not unbearably so. Chicago was good practice in this as in many other ways. The rain was just a drizzle at first, not enough to make anything feel cleaner, if that ever happens. I decided to be adventurous: I would go out for breakfast. I first off discovered that the multitudinous cafeterias on campus are closed to me until I have a student ID: they effectively limit their customers to just students by not taking cash. So I wandered down the street. Meanwhile it started to rain hard, so I bought an umbrella from a newsstand. It is royal blue on top and silver underneath (the silver is some kind of UV protector). It is called a "sun and rain umbrella." After I got it, I sort of wished I'd got a more feminine pastel color; my hand just reaches for blue automatically, but I'm already built like a bear compared to the women here. No reason to make it worse by having a manly sort of umbrella too. Well, most guys' umbrellas don't have the silver UV shade, I've noticed, so at least there's that.

Soon I went into a little restaurant. I decided to have their breakfast special: six baozi and a bowl of porridge for 2 RMB. The porridge was sort of like cream of wheat but neither sweet nor milky. It was served with a little dish of some kind of brown bits, salty pickled something. The stuff was so bland without them that I dumped them straight in, whatever they were, and the result was quite palatable. Maybe I'd like cream of wheat better if I put brown pickled bits into it rather than milk and sugar. Chopsticks but no spoon--I guess porridge is to be drunk from the bowl.

After I got back from breakfast, I did my internet stuff and then wandered about looking for a place to get photos taken. I need 8 for registration--passport type photos. It's a good thing I waited to get them here! There was a little photo-shop in the campus Mini-mart where I ordered a sheet of 9 for only 15 RMB. I couldn't help thinking of Taiwan, where I had to do the same sort of thing but somehow ended up in a store that did graduation photos and senior portraits and such, so I got touched-up glamour shots (including making my tanned and freckled face many shades whiter and less freckly) and it cost me more than $20. Here it's just plain me for $2 or so. I just hope they're the right size. None of the school information is as informative as I might wish.

The only other notable thing I did was withdraw some money for my apartment transaction. More on that later.

I also looked in vain for a post-office. I will have to work hard and find one soon, but no luck on this occasion! I even wandered east along a big road off the south-side of campus. There I discovered that my new place is less than five minutes walk from not one, not two, but at least 3 huge multi-story bookstores. This is not counting the two university bookstores in the Mini-mart and another, actually called "The Peking University Bookstore" which I think sells products of their own press (housed in the same building). I have not gone in to any off these except the first one, as I am going to have to move soon and must force myself to resist temptation. But I will say that the money I have been saving on food is very soon going to become my book budget.

Speaking of saving money on food, I was starting to get a little hungry walking along that big street. You can tell I'm getting spoiled when I walked into a beef-noodle restaurant and found myself thinking, 8 whole RMB for a bowl of ramen? No thanks! Maybe I just didn't feel like eating ramen, though. Instead, my eye was caught by a fellow with a sizzling hot grill, making delicious looking toasted sandwiches. I know that by and large street food is a bit suspicious, but again, this fellows customers were plentiful, and the fire was very hot. Besides, the meat was a type of really salty ham, and what can go wrong with something that salty? I had a ham and egg sandwich with spicy hot pepper sauce and a bright fresh lettuce leaf on a toasted round of bread that reminiscent of a double-size English mufffin, 2 RMB (the egg doubled the price), the whole thing sizzling hot. Totally delicious, and no ill-effects thus far. I think eating even street-food ought to be okay in small quantities--I'll just sort of build up my immunities. And street food always looks so tasty.

After this I went back to my room and just hung out. It was very lazy of me, when I should have been out accomplishing things, but I just wanted to chill and do nothing. I have decided I will wait to start working on my dissertation again until I move in to my new place. I just hate to drag out all my books and papers when I'm going to have to pack them again. Besides, without internet everything would be slow and frustrating. I actually use the internet quite a lot in my work. So anyway, I read, dozed, made some lace, played around with my computer. The photo at right, by the way, is some of my recent productions. The one on the left is a fern pattern, and the one on the right is called Cluny. Which one do you like better?

Around dinner-time I ventured out. It was about 6:30. I had had the curtains drawn and it looked so dark in the room that the fact that it was still daylight came as a shock to me. I decided to explore the east edge of campus. There was nothing much there, though. All the workers were getting off work, and so there were big swarms of people waiting for buses. I had been walking south, but eventually turned west. I was sort of half-looking for the restaurant FL took me that first night, but I didn't find it. It must be on the north edge of campus? Or on some further-off side-street. Or I saw it and simply didn't recognize it. I was feeling a little glum. It's such a trade-off, whether to seek out social interactions which 9 times out of 10 cause me such intense anxiety and unhappiness, or whether to slog through the days and nights all by my lonesome, which is kind of a chronic sadness but rarely acute. Anyway, I would have been glad for someone to have dinner with, but not quite willing to go to the trouble of making that happen. At left, by the way, is a picture of my new phone. A real rock-bottom model as you can see, and nostalgically reminiscent of my old cell phone, which I gave up four years ago! Phones have got much fancier since, but you can still get a pretty simple one, as I found out.

Eventually I decided to have Korean food. The waiters in the restaurant I found were very pushy, cheery, and solicitous, which I found (for once) more soothing than embarrassing. However, Koreans tend to speak a horribly incomprehensible brand of Chinese. I can barely understand a word they're saying! I think it must be because they slip back into Korean pronunciations of some of the words, which are near enough for native Chinese speakers to get it, but for me, I have no clue. To make matters worse, these Koreans had memorized and frequently employed some jolly fast-paced set-phrases in Chinese, all rhyming and elegant, but totally incomprehensible to me. The upshot of all these lingual obstacles was that while I had intended to order some comforting homey sort of food like chapjae or bebim bop, what I got instead was a rather unsettling hot-pot. This was very Chinese-y Korean food. The stock in the pot was so oily that things you stuck in were half deep-fried, half boiled. As for the things they suggested I order… heart of pig, intestine of beef… They didn't really give me time to read the menu, which I could have done albeit slowly. I settled on lamb and chicken, seaweed, and napa cabbage. I was confused about what I was even ordering (at first I thought it was some kind of appetizer, and didn't realize it was a hot-pot at all). They found the tiny quantities I asked for rather hilarious (ONLY 4 lamb sticks?), but in the event it proved more than enough! In retrospect, I think it was some kind of uneasy marriage between chigae and Chinese hot pot. You stick the raw stuff in on sticks and pull them out when they're cooked, but the broth you stick them in to is a highly spiced chigae sort of broth, which would ordinarily be stocked with slow-cooking and odiferous things.

Well, I tolerated it well enough, though it wasn't exactly what I felt like eating. It did beguile the time agreeably, and provide lots of lively social interactions, what with the waiters chanting little Chinese ditties to the effect of "eat slow slow, eat more more" or "eat good food, eat until you're full." Okay, they were real food hustlers. What else would I expect from Koreans. It was pretty funny, though I felt rather indigested afterwards.

I got back to the campus in time to see numerous fruit vendors setting up on various corners. Why to the fruit vendors come to campus at night? I didn't see anyone buying any fruit. I guess it is just one of those mysteries. Melons peaches apples plums. Naturally I was still too guilty about the grapes to make any purchases!