another adventure

The Chinese American teacher from my school in Songyuan recently moved to Nankai, another district of Tianjin City. My last tutoring student cancelled Tuesday night, so with the free evening I headed to Nankai to visit my friend. I hopped the 30 minute lightrail by myself and actually made it there, my first successful solo public transit trip (last time I tried my train got cancelled, the clerk didn't tell me and sold me a ticket to a train the next day instead and my phone died so I couldn't call my TA once I figured it out)! My TA made me a little note with Chinese to show people if I needed help and I almost wanted to safety pin it to my jacket, like a child traveling alone. I ended up not needing it though, because the light rail has automated ticket machines with English and a scrolling sign with English in the cars. Yay for independence.

In Nankai, my friend and I had dinner at a crazy big restaurant that was actually three restaurants in one, a French place, a Russian place and a German place, each with its own floor. Nankai has a lot of little pockets that are heavily influenced by different cultures; they're called concession areas and are products of the war. Dinner turned out to be an overpriced, under-delivering bust but that's alright. I tried duck liver there, I'm not sure I'd say it competes with frog or shark fin soup on the crazy food scale though.

After dinner we wandered around Nankai a bit and headed to the expat bar right near the university where he teaches for cocktails and a rousing game of Battleship! My friend is not really a drinker, but we ended up staying up until 3am talking. He seems to have made it his mission to solve all the questions in my life and find me a profession that's going to make me happy. More on that and my motives for coming to China in a future post (how has that not come up yet?).

The next day we got up early and headed to the aquatic park. This was not a water park in the traditional American sense. It is more like a city park designed around water features. It's very large with a themed island for each season, a zoo, a Bonsai garden and an amusement park for children. Naturally it would be much more beautiful in summer, but it was still a cool place to visit. I don't think my friend could imagine how it would look otherwise, so he did not much appreciate it.

transient art in the park

Clearly, the park was very crowded. Also, to be fair, school was in session, so no kids.

After the park we headed to the Ancient Culture Street to explore. This turned out to be very cool. It's basically a street full of traditional Chinese shops and vendors. There's definitely a lot of commercial, touristy kitsch and crap, but there is a lot to look at and not all of it is completely fake. If you want a knock off purse though, this wouldn't be a bad place to look though.

While we were there, we stumbled upon the Queen of Heaven Temple. This was a small courtyard area full of little rooms to look into, each with some kind of deity or figure to pray or pay homage to. Each had a large incense pit in front.

Then it was time to head back to the university to grab lunch with a group of the foreign professors that meets every Wednesday. Turns out most of the other foreigners that teach with my friend at the university are elderly retirees and, oddly enough, Mormon. Two of them are even from Chandler, AZ. They all like to stay on campus and after talking to them for an hour and watching them in action at a restaurant in China I'm alright never seeing these people again. They're nice enough, but they don't go out and try new things, they don't try to follow Chinese customs at all and they seem to be pretty sheltered here. And they're perfectly ok with that.


After lunch we had just enough time to go check out the world's fourth largest Ferris wheel, and the only one built over a bridge! Kind of crazy to see cars driving right along next to you as you ride.