random pix: spotted in Jiu Long Cheng (my building)

Remember what I said before about trust issues? Well this is the entire contents of someone's apartment, sitting in the first floor elevator waiting area. It stayed here like this for almost three full days and I didn't notice anything missing any time I walked by.

Speaking of trust and safety, this apartment was completely open with no one in it for a decent amount of time (I wandered in and poked around). Apparently no one thought this was hazardous for say, children in the building.

 

Nothing strange about an elevator full of old logs. Nothing at all.

follow up: old man skin

An awful patch of my random old man skin disease reappeared on my shoulder yesterday and has been bugging the ever living crap out of me (it itches like the dickens). I was complaining to some Russian friends of mine and they looked at it and immediately went to interwebs for translations.

They kept telling me it was "the mange", which I didn't know of as a disease, but turns out it is- a disease for dogs. The human version is called demodicosis and is commonly associated with pityriasis, which my dermatologist said I had when I went back to the States last fall.

Awesome = finally being confident in knowing what I have and knowing that since one of the Russian guys had it and kicked it, I will too, after almost a year.

Not so awesome = knowing I have a dirty dog disease, and I'm almost certain it came from these guys in Cambodia. Thank god I'm not losing my fur like they are.

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.

skewed vision

Chinese people have a bit of the same stereotype-y ideas about looks that we do. The same way that someone in The States might say all Chinese look the same, a lot of Chinese would say that all non-Chinese look the same. 

In Songyuan, many Chinese thought my black, Jamaican friend and I were sisters. Tonight on the street, someone told me I look like Beyonce. I'm about as white as they come.

So, clearly, there are some interesting things with perception going on here.

But I've come across something else pretty funny recently. I dyed my hair hot pink a few weeks back, and naturally have gotten quite a bit of attention for it. What's been surprising to me though, is the number of Chinese people that think it's my natural hair color.

After assuming it's my real color, they will almost always tell me there is something wrong with me. I don't even know what to say to that. I can't imagine even a child anywhere else possibly thinking this color was natural.

random pix: for the ladies

This was in the nail salon down the street from my apartment. They laughed when they figured out I was taking this photo during my pedicure.

Subtle, right?

This is for a business in my building. I think they remove butt cracks via health food.

You'd never know it at a glance, but this is an ad in my elevator for a nearby gym.

They apparently offer umbrella dancing classes?

Taiwanese garbage truck = ice cream truck?

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!

random pix: great store displays/names

Mannequins usually show how the clothes are supposed to look, so what's up with this dress that doesn't cover the crotch...?

"Big & Tall" just has a little better ring to it.

So creepy. So, so creepy.

I was completely on the fence about the floor mat... until I saw it on the mannequin as a samurai outfit. That was definitely the selling point.

Club 1801

Being a big city, Xiamen has a decent variety of both bars and clubs (I think of a club as being a place with a dj and, theoretically, dancing and the like). The bars primarily function like western bars, but the clubs are definitely a little different.

Most of them don't have a large dance floor, rather almost all of the space is occupied by tables, both low ones to sit at and tall ones to stand around. The small dance floor they usually have is actually a runway or stage, for they all have some kind of live entertainment that happens at regular intervals every evening. They have fashion shows, singers (western and Chinese) and dancers, and sometimes they have themes.

 
Guests hang out at the tables and play Rock Paper Scissors (yes, seriously) and Chinese dice for drinks, with small breaks for dancing and watching the shows.

Westerners also prove to be a good attraction for the clubs, so they all have some kind of system of giving foreigners free drinks. And this is how I came to work in a Chinese nightclub.

One of the floor shows at my club, a singer and models.

The clubs all have some pretty decent screens to play whatever on all night.

When I first got to Xiamen, I found I had a lot of free time- MUCH more than in Songyuan. I was out at a club one night and the manager of the International Department (aka the people in charge of bringing foreigners in and keeping them happy with free drinks) asked me if I wanted to work for him. I declined for a while- as a general rule I'm not a fan of clubs; I don't like to dance and, as a non-smoker, I don't like cigarette smoke. Eventually I came around though, the pay wasn't great per hour, but it was an additional half month's teaching salary for just hanging out and drinking with people every other night (oh yes, I got to drink).

I worked every other night from 10:30pm to 3:30am and if foreigners came in, if they knew anyone in the International Department, if they were good looking, if they looked like they weren't going to buy their own drinks, my job was to set them up with a table next to the stage, complete with all the free bottles of vodka or whiskey and mixers they could drink. Oh, and there were always snacks too.

If they were lucky, or more likely if they were friends of mine, I could usually pull off getting them free beer or a bottle of champagne (these being my personal preferences for beverages). The club was pretty particular about the drinks we could give away. Outside of bottles of vodka or whiskey, there was usually a limit to how many beers or bottles of champage we could give out in a night, and those were really our only other options for a table.

If lone foreigners came in, we had cards for single free drinks we could give out for them to redeem at the bar. When I first started, the cards were open, any single mixer drink or even a just Coke or something was game to trade for a card. About halfway through my time there, they switched and had three sets of cards made with a specific drink designated on each one, further limiting the options for free drinks.

The International Department consisted of my boss, myself and up to three other International Consultants (awesome job title, right?!). There were always supposed to be two Consultants working, and my boss was usually there. I really needed another consultant to be working, because outside of us, no one at the club spoke English, so I couldn't order drinks, or key them in to the computer myself. I did manage to communicate enough with the front desk hostesses to be able to tell them when I needed to tables and have them kick out the Chinese for me though.

The club routinely removed Chinese from tables to fill them with westerners drinking free drinks, which made me feel pretty bad at first, until I realized that a LOT of people at the club were paid to be there. They were supposed to act like they were having fun. When the small dance floor was empty, a bunch of them would get a text message telling them to go dance and make it look busy, or whatever the club wanted. Some of them were men, most were women. Some were models. Some were hookers of course. Most of them weren't allowed to drink. Eek.

There was one girl in particular that worked every night. She wore the same silver dress every night, wore the same disco ball Mardi Gras mask, stood at the same corner of the bar and had the same bored expression on her face. Every night. She ignored everyone that talked to her and confused the heck out of me.

Before I accepted the job at the club, I told my boss that I was new to Xiamen, didn't know many people and wouldn't be inviting the few I did out every other night like a club promoter. He said that was fine. Naturally, not long into the gig, he was asking me how many people we had coming every night. I'd mostly just make numbers up. If I hadn't seen a club kid in a while I'd text them, and when new foreigners came in, I'd give them my number and tell them they could text me next time so I'd have their table ready, but I'm neither obnoxious nor a salesperson.

The "having the table ready" line was actually kind of funny, because the foreigners' tables are all sort of interchangeable. Because the drinks are all free, a group never really has "possession" of a table to the point that they can tell other foreigners to leave, foreigners kind of just all mingle around all the foreign tables and drink whatever is on any of them. It can be kind of awkward at first, until you figure out what's going on, when a couple strangers walk up to your table, grab your booze and pour themselves a glass (this happened to me the first time I went as a patron).

Working at the club would have been a great job... if I was like 22. I found that most of the same people came in every night, and most of them were nice enough, fun to party with, if a bit young. In this way, going to work was more like going to hang out with my club friends every other night. But on the random nights when no one came in, it was oh so very boring. Add that to the aforementioned reasons for turning the job down initially, and the fact that staying up till 3:30am every other night is pretty challenging, and you have me quitting after a month.

I also had some issues with my coworkers. I've got a pretty strong work ethic (tip of my hat to my Midwestern parents), so I was always at work at 10:30pm on the dot and I stayed at work, in the building, until I was off at 3:30am. It took me a few weeks to figure out, but when my Chinese coworkers (that I relied on to get our guests drinks) were "at work", they'd often put in an appearance and then leave. Even though the bartenders knew me, they still wouldn't help me when the other girls weren't there, because none of the departments really work together or stick their necks out for each other.

And then, even for the initial appearance, the other girls were usually at least 45 minutes late, stranding me with no way to do my job. One in particular was usually hours late, if she showed up at all. We didn't have a time clock or anyone to check in with, so no one knew and it was pretty frustrating. 

A few weeks in they bought a fingerprint time clock. My boss told me it wouldn't matter to me because I was on time, but the other girls would get docked 50RMB every time they were late. Now, a 50RMB deduction for being hours late is nothing really, but it's better than no consequences I suppose.

At first the time clock worried me a bit, because as a foreigner on a work visa with a Foreign Expert Certificate for teaching, the only job I can legally do in China is teach, and only for my school, so any record of me at all at the club was no bueno. I got paid cash under the table, naturally.

I certainly didn't look like I worked there, I just looked like a club kid that knew the system. I could wear whatever I wanted to work, there were patrons that came in more than me and I couldn't talk to anyone else that worked there.

All in all it was a good experience, I made some easy cash and met a couple of people I actually still talk to, but I'm definitely happy to only be going to the club about once a month, instead of every other night!