random pix: lavatopy directions, a huge butt & a Mexican Burrito

 

I wonder, where does the inventory go when it's closing time...

Why wouldn't you want a giant ass on the hood of your car?

This, my friends, is a Mexican Burrito. It is scrambled eggs, beef, Tabasco sauce and cilantro on top of Doritos.

random coffee/burger/waffle experiment

A really modern and hip looking bar down the street from my apartment called "Drink" was unfortunately remodeled recently and turned into a psuedo-Victorian looking coffee shop, so the SO and I decided to give it a go for lunch the other day. After all, how can you go wrong at a place that advertises coffee, waffles AND burgers???

Naturally, none of the staff spoke English, but the fake books on the bookshelves throughout had English titles on the spines, so we were surprised not to find any English "subtitles" on the menu. All the section headers were in English, but none of the food line items. So, we choose one random from the "Burger" section, one random from the "Waffle & Pancake" section, and this is what we got:

Why are there two sort of mini-sandwiches? Who knows. Why is one an egg sandwich and one a burger? Who knows. All in all, not too bad though.

Now this one had some fatal flaws. See how the waffle looks like cake and/or foam from inside your couch cushions? Tastes like the latter. The yellow pile on the left side of the plate is a flavorless, gelatinous custard of sorts. The pile on the right is strawberry ice cream. The swirly, twirly things are marshmallow candies. Buddy the Elf would love it.

Welcome to western food in China :)

Tomb Sweeping Day

Not too far off the heels of Spring Festival is Tomb Sweeping Day/Clear Brightness Day (this one was actually Thursday). I ever-so-politely invited my SO and I to a Chinese friend's family home in Shi Shi, a suburb of Quanzhou, for the holiday.
Shi Shi is about an hour and a half away from Xiamen by bus and about thirty minutes outside of Quanzhou. It's apparently known for a booming clothing manufacturing industry. Coincidentally, Quanzhou is also where the school I initially signed on with when first coming to China is located.

I knew my friend's family had a lot of money because A.) she has not one but two siblings and B.) she's going to grad school in England and her father is paying for the whole shebang. When we arrived at her apartment though, I discovered that were we staying at the nicest home I have ever been to in China.

Napoleon? Of course.

I absolutely love this wall. The door to the storage room (or what in a western home would be used as the pantry) is all but hidden when it's closed!

Oh yes, that is a projector you see over the couch and central air vents over the loveseat. I've never even heard of central air here before.

I think she felt a lot of pressure to entertain us in Shi Shi. The 24ish hours we were there, we rode in three of her family's cars (three!), went to two coffee shops, three restaurants, one temple, one museum and one beach. When I asked her what she'd be doing if we weren't there, she said sleeping, ha.

The temple in Shi Shi was nothing too special. More colorful than your typical, northern China temples- much closer in style to Taiwan's temples, but I realized I hadn't been to a temple in southern China at all yet. The best part was definitely the view of the harbor.

Because Buddha like juice boxes too you know.

After the temple we went in to Quanzhou to go to the museum (and as my third Chinese museum, I have decided they're all pretty awful).

This is somehow underwear. My Chinese friend was also confused...

They are way too trusting with these tiny "No Touching" signs and no other barriers or precautions to prevent said touching.

Seriously, too trusting.

I mean come on, this guy is begging to be touched.

Does this bother anyone else? It remind me of this (second photo from the bottom).

That night we ate out with her family for her brother's birthday. Her family isn't big on drinking (which we discovered when we were the only people that ordered beers with dinner). After dinner we returned home to eat chocolate cake and watch a movie. Everyone except her brother went to bed after the cake though; it was a very chill night. Not what I was expecting at all, especially since there had been rumblings of ktv for the birthday boy.

I was also surprised to find that their entire movie collection seemed to be subtitled American action movies. Her was just apparently the only one interested enough to stay up and watch Minority Report (after he'd turned off Looper because it was too long).

Awesome projector screen movie viewing experience.

The beach the next day had a sand sculpture contest. There were a bunch of Disney sculptures and some Chinese themed designs as well that I enjoyed.

You know you love this. I certainly do.

After the beach it was time for us to catch our bus home to Xiamen and leave the family to do the actual holiday thing. Tomb Sweeping Day is about honoring ancestors by visiting their graves and burning "money" for them to use on the other side (this used to be real, but now they mostly print fake money for it). Not exactly something we needed to crash.

stuck in Taiwan

Xiamen is really close to both Taiwan and Hong Kong, which makes it a pretty popular place for foreigners to stop when they need A.) to leave the country and get stamped back in because they're here on a tourist visa (Taiwan) or B.) need to get a new visa (Hong Kong).

Xiamen is the bigger island on the left. The bigger one on the right is actually part of Taiwan. It's a 45ish minute ferry ride away, although, for some reason, the ferry leaves from the middle of the west side of Xiamen to get there...

We're a liiiittle farther from the main island (Xiamen is on the left just south of Quanzhou), but still relatively close. It's a six-ish hour ferry, or so I've heard.

Lots of foreigners take the overnight bus to Hong Kong, it takes about eight hours. There's no night return bus, so the bus back takes about 13 hours with daytime traffic.

Tourist visas in China are usually only good for 30 to 60 days per entry, then holders need to leave and get stamped back in. In Xiamen, that means taking a 150 RMB ferry 45 minutes to Jinmen, Taiwan and then basically turning right around and doing the same thing back.

I happen to know some people here that are doing the working-illegally-on-a-tourist-visa thing and were due to leave the country, so we made a run yeatserday. We all had the day off, so we planned to head out early, around 9am, and be in Taiwan by 11am so we could poke around a bit and catch the last ferry back to Xiamen at 5pm.

Xiamen has many ferry terminals, so I asked a friend that had made a visa run to Jinmen before which one we should leave from. We got to the terminal, found the correct ticket window, bought our tickets for 126 RMB apiece and got on the ferry with no problems at all.

The ferry wasn't anything special. The first level, below deck, had benches and tables to sit at. Kind of strange for a ferry, similar to park benches, but hey, it's China. The second level, where we sat, had patio furniture type chairs in the middle and chairs set up around tables around the edges. This level was open air, and you could pay 200 RMB (74 RMB more than the ferry ticket itself!) to sit at the tables and have tea and, theoretically, a better view. The third level we didn't check out because it was really foggy and intermittently raining.

We thought it was pretty funny that they had binoculars available for rent and tons of Chinese were paying for them, even though the visibility was crap. Everyone was taking of pictures of absolutely nothing and we brushed it off as Chinese being Chinese... at first.

After what seemed like it'd probably been about 45 minutes, we came upon an island with some large Chinese writing on the side and a small flag. The boat actually stopped next to it, and it seemed like almost everyone on board came up to take pictures of the island. Then the boat made about a 90 degree turn and kept going. At that point, we weren't quite sure where we were headed.

A long while later, we came upon another island. Since the first one, my friends had been joking saying that that was it, we'd seen Taiwan and we were headed back to Xiamen. We didn't see anything immediately recognizable on the new island, but once we chugged a little further along the coast we saw that they were right, it was definitely Xiamen.

Out 126 RMB and almost two hours for nothing, for a look at Taiwan, I called the friend that had told me which ferry terminal to go to. She put a Chinese teacher from her school on the phone to talk to the ticket agent, and that was when we pieced together something the ticket agent had been trying to tell us initially. We had bought tickets for a sightseeing ferry (which was now obvious and the picture taking made a little more sense), and she was trying to tell us when we bought them that they were round trip (it's common enough for foreigners to need to make the Taiwan run that ticket agents know it).

When making a visa run to Jinmen, you have to buy the return ticket there, you cannot buy round trip. Apparently, the ferry port we were at had discontinued ferry service to Jinmen. The ticket agent wrote out an address for another terminal for us and we tried again.

Taiwan ferry attempt number two was just as easy, and another 160 RMB. We had bought a backpack full of beers to be prepared for that one. We discovered that you can walk through customs with an open beer in your hand on a Tuesday morning and nobody looks at you any funnier than usual (yay China). Ferry number two was a lot nicer, with seats like a coach bus and tvs. And it had good bathrooms (clean and well lit), which is a win for me, as I have the bladder of a four year old.

Reading glasses in four different strengths to help fill out your arrival & departure cards, thanks China!

When we got to Taiwan, we classed things up a bit and didn't take open beers through customs. We did meet a Taiwanese customs official who'd spent a lot of time in Scottsdale, AZ (basically where I lived the five years before coming to China, random coincidence), and was very friendly, but he had the honor of dropping bomb number two on us. When we told him we were in Jinmen just for the day, he informed us that the rest of the ferries that day were cancelled due to the aforementioned fog.

That posed a bit of a problem for us, as none of us had brought much cash and we'd already spent a lot more than expected. Also, we definitely didn't have anything outside of the clothes on our backs and none of our phones worked. We all had the next day off though, luckily.

At that point we were delirious with hunger, as it was 3pm, none of us had eaten more than a banana and yogurt for breakfast and we'd all been drinking beer since about 10:30am. A friend of ours had told us about a great pizza place, so we decided to head there and regroup.

It ended up taking us what seemed like forever to decode his awful directions, but we did discover that they have a temple basically on every corner (his directions said "across from the temple") and the temples are really cool and colorful.

Naturally, once we got there the pizza place didn't take credit cards. They pointed us to an atm at the 7 Eleven down the street and one of my friends set off, while myself and the other waited for the pizza. The atm ended up only taking locals cards, no visa, so he went on a 45 minute wild goose chase to find a bank that was open and took visa. Meanwhile, we got the pizza and it was not nearly as good as all the hype, another letdown. It kind of made us all feel like we were dying after we ate it.

After pizza, we walked down the street and popped into the first hotel we found, were shown a room and checked in. And then we didn't know what to do. We'd been told by a few people there wasn't really anything to do on the island except camp, which was obviously out, so we decided to stop by the one and only bar. Which, sadly, was closed. In the end, we spent the night playing a little poker, drinking some random terrible beverages, going to the worst arcade ever (with only grabby claw games) and then giving up and watching Payback on tv before going to bed. It was terribly boring; the whole day falls into the "fail" column, for sure.

We had to try "The Beer" because, duh, it's THE BEER. Both kinds are crap. Also, I feel like someone should tell Asahi what "Draft Beer" means.

Sparkling Chardonnay is clearly very fancy and tastes like sparkling grape juice, only not as good.

The next day we woke up early, again (8am). It doesn't sound early in the western world, but the earliest I ever work is 10am so the earliest I ever have to get up is maybe 9:15am. We ate a quick breakfast and headed over to the ferry terminal feeling pretty apprehensive, because it was still really foggy.

When we got there, the place was absolutely packed. Hundreds of people had just spent the night, waiting for the next ferry that would be allowed through. Ferry service begins at 8:30am, and the Departures board showed everything up to at least 12:30pm as delayed. We went up to the ticket counter and were given sets of numbers in line for two different destinations, though we weren't quite sure why, but we were numbers 496 through 498 and 502 through 504.

At around 10:30am they finally announced something to the effect that the fog had lifted enough to allow for departures, and they began selling tickets based on everyone's numbers. By the time they got to 500 we figured out why we had two sets of numbers. We wanted tickets on the ferry to Dongdu, Xiamen, where we had left from. Unfortunately, because of the backlog of people, we wouldn't be able to get on that ferry at any point that day. The second set of numbers was for the ferry to Wutong, Xiamen, maybe 45 minutes by public transit from where we live.

After another two hours' wait, another 160 RMB 45 minute ferry, a 15 minute taxi and a 30 minute brt (Bus Rapid Transit) ride, we finally arrived back at home around 4pm, 30 hours into our day trip.

I'd definitely like to go back to Taiwan, the people were much friendlier and spoke a lot more English, which makes everything so much easier, and everything was so shockingly, wonderfully clean compared to China. It'd be nice to be able to actually plan for a trip though, and maybe go somewhere where there are things to do and see!

Chinese food vs American food

In the States, I tended to be a pretty healthy eater. I just feel better that way. In China, I've always felt like that was a lot harder to do, especially eating enough produce.

Fruit isn't an issue, you can find it at small stands and corner stores lining pretty much any street. Vegetables, on the other hand, you usually have to go to a larger grocery store to find, or catch a man riding around with a cart of them for sale.

Availability of produce aside, it's kind of interesting to think about whose food is healthier by nature.

Chinese food is far, far greasier, full of msg (regular salt is really hard to find) and usually unregulated by any kind of FDA like agency, so not very clean. On the other hand, overall, everything is very, VERY fresh and grown/raised without chemicals, hormones, pesticides, etc.— the up side of deregulation. You're usually buying your produce directly from the grower, even as restaurant, and meats are often fresh enough that you can see the rest of the animal carcass slaughtered out back if you really wanted.

And who doesn't want that? Ha.

the hunt

Cost of living in Xiamen is much higher than either Songyuan or Tianjin, both due to the easy availability of more entertainment options and more western establishments, but also just because of the aforementioned size and economic factors of the city. This made my initial move here a bigger financial burden than expected. If I'd known about all the up front moving costs and been prepared I'd have been fine. I was not, soooo, it was not the most fun thing ever. I definitely had to get an advance on my salary to make it work, which is actually pretty common, but still, not a thing I think any westerner likes the idea of.

My school here didn't give me a fully furnished apartment as part of my contract, which had its pros and cons (and ended up proving to be the biggest struggle, naturally). My salary was theoretically higher to compensate, but now that I know all I know, it's just plain harder to save money here than Songyuan. Salaries are lower relative to cost of living. I'm really happy I got to choose my own apartment though. It has Chinese quirks, but quirks I'm comfortable with. It's a place I'm ok calling home (for a year), and I really like the area I live in. That said, it was definitely challenging to find and settle in to.

When I left Songyuan to travel in August, I was headed to Xiamen at the end with intentions of crashing on a friend's couch here until I found my own place. About a week before I was to arrive, my friend skype'd me to tell me he was moving back to the States and he'd be gone by the time I got here. No bueno. Luckily, his roommates were still fine with me staying on the couch, but of the three people in the apartment, I'd only met two of them before moving in with them, and only met them once at that.

Their apartment was great, and they were really nice people, but there were some obvious drawbacks. It was the hottest month of year and their apartment had ac everywhere EXCEPT in the living room, so sleeping was virtually impossible. They also all kept different schedules from each other and different schedules from me, so people were coming home drunk at 4am and ordering McDonald's delivery while others were getting up at 8am to go to make breakfast and go to work. It was exhausting.

View one direction from one of the balconies of my friends' 30th floor apartment. Not bad, not bad at all.

Finding an apartment on your own here is virtually impossible, not being able to read or speak. Most people have to use a real estate agent to find a place. Agent commission is half of one month's rent. Otherwise, there are a few local websites for English speakers where people post roommate wanted ads, sublets, "will" down apartments when they leave and things of that nature. As part of my contract, my school had to help me find an apartment, but after three weeks of searching and no dice on one that I was comfortable with, I went on a local forum and found a Chinese woman offering her apartment hunting services for less than an agent.

While she was looking, I decided three weeks on my new friends' couch was more than enough; it was time for another temporary move. I moved to an area further away from things (like my school) than I wanted to be (15 minutes commute instead of 5, boo hoo, woe is me), but I had a room with a bed and ac (yay!), and a bathroom and all that. I paid a pretty cheap rate to live there for half a month while I kept looking for my own place. The guys that lived there had actually both come to Xiamen from Songyuan, so we had a lot of friends and experiences in common, which was great.

I shared my room there with a friend from Songyuan that I had talked into moving to Xiamen around the same time I did. My school had been screwing with her visa, her pay, her schedule, etc. and she wasn't happy. We both discovered that moving into apartments in Xiamen was going to be more expensive than we had anticipated, so we decided to split the temporary room costs and share till we found our own apartments.

The woman I found on the forum ended up finding my current apartment after a little less than a week of looking, so we weren't there for very long anyway. She also negotiated the rent down a little bit for me, which was of course awesome.

In China, you pay rent quarterly, so to move in to an apartment you have to pay four months' rent right off the bat (three for the first quarter you live there and then one for the security deposit). On top of that, you probably have to pay your agent fee. You need to pay to change your locks when you move in since so many agents have the keys to one apartment. Then there is something akin to HOA fees that you also pay quarterly. You have to put a deposit on your utilities if you don't pay them directly each month, like me. Then there's internet, you pay for the entire year of service at once, you pay for setup and then if you have to buy wireless router that's an additional cost as well. There's drinking water, to get a water machine with the large jugs you have to pay for a large quantity of jugs up front and then they just deliver them to you as you use them up. And then, even for a furnished apartment, you need to buy normal house-y things, like plates and chopsticks and bedding and towels.

All said and done I paid more than two months' salary to get myself set up in this apartment. Eek.

I ended up in the below one bed, two bath, loft apartment on the eleventh floor of a large building that's also home to a somewhat bizarre variety of businesses. My boyfriend was moving to China to live with me at the end of December, so I got a bigger, more expensive apartment than I would have if I'd planned on being alone. The friend that shared the room with me while we were looking ended up staying with me here too until December so we could split costs and she could save money to tackle getting her own apartment.

I feel the need to stipulate that the below photos are pre me moving in a giving the place a serious deep cleaning.

my lofted bedroom

Yes, that IS a seriously random low bit hanging down from the ceiling in the middle of the bedroom that I constantly hit my head on.

living room

This is my master bathroom. "Complete" with three walls, one being frosted glass. I did mentioned apartment quirks, right?

It's hard to tell, but there is something serious missing here... any type of cooking surface under that large hood fan. And the appliance under the counter? It's a dish DRYER not a dish WASHER.

Major quirk #3: the urinal in the downstairs bathroom. And no, I don't use it.

I'm baaaaaack

It's been a long time since I've posted or kept up with what I've been doing, but I'm back. More importantly, I'm back with the intention of keeping up more consistently. So, where did I leave off? Ah yes, my move to Xiamen, in Fujian province, at the end of August, after almost a month of travels.

Xiamen is an entirely different ball game than Songyuan or Tianjin. A LOT of what I'd noticed and posted about in my previous home cities doesn't hold true here, and I attribute that to a couple main factors.

It seems to me that northern China and southern China are very, very different- the accents (northern Mandarin is more pure), the food (northern food is saltier, southern food is sweeter and spicier), the physicality of the people (northern people are shorter and stockier with potbellied men), the general attitude of the people (southern people seem friendlier toward strangers), etc.

Xiamen also has a lot bigger metropolitan area than Songyuan (not Tianjin, but my time there was limited) with a lot more western influence. There is a huge stone export industry here that draws many foreign business people (no quarries though, explain that one to me) as well as a large, well reputed university with several international programs and thousands of foreign students.

These things, as well as some factors more directly related to my school have made my life here significantly different. Stay tuned for details...

random pix: depressed fox, terrific cops & slomed salads

Why is this children's character about to hang himself?!

Songyuan traffic police are terrific!

If this doesn't help explain plumbing in Beijing, nothing will.

random pix: tighty whities, carmel corn & fduck

Why are people's faces blurred out in this restaurant ad like the perps on COPS?

I'm so glad my friend got to see this. This is in front of the McDonald's and the grocery store in Haikou. I put it about on par with adults going to the bathroom on the sidewalk in the middle of the day.

So gross. So, so gross.

Ever heard the expression "fuck a duck"? I wonder if it's related to this brand...

As an American, I am confused.