1. I saw a rat the size of a guinea pig fall from a freeway overpass onto an old lady's shoulder. Hilarity ensued. Many Chinese are afraid of tiny pet dogs, so if you can imagine a pet dog sized rat...
2. A child in one of my classes threw a fit and wouldn't let other kids draw cards from his hand during a game of Old Maid. After he started crying about it, my Chinese teaching assistant explained to me that he was upset because he didn't want to lose money. He's five.
3. I invited a Chinese friend to do something later in the week, four days in advance to be exact. The day I invited her she told me she wouldn't be able to come, four days later, because her boyfriend has diarrhea.
4. I saw a guy riding a bike in a t-shirt that said, "MICHAEL JACKSON NEVER TOUCHED ME."
5. An elevator opened in my building to two twenty-something men fiercely, and I mean fiercely, making out, who then proceeded to do a terrible and fantastically awkward job of pretending nothing happened as they got out of the elevator. Too bad being gay isn't allowed here.
6. When buying multiple cases of beer for a party, the shop owner asked me if I had friends coming over. I explained that I did because of a holiday and she asked me if it had to do with Jesus. Priceless.
Sunday, March 17, 2013
Friday, March 15, 2013
random pix: for the ladies
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| 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. |
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| Subtle, right? |
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| This is for a business in my building. I think they remove butt cracks via health food. |
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| You'd never know it at a glance, but this is an ad in my elevator for a nearby gym. |
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| They apparently offer umbrella dancing classes? |
Thursday, March 7, 2013
Bikram (or something like it)... finally
Being that Xiamen is a decently large city, I was able to find a small yoga studio down the street from my apartment that actually had Bikram yoga (yay!)... or so they advertise.
Bikram is a pretty specific kind of yoga— it's an hour and a half long series of 26 poses, each repeated twice. It's done in a hot, humid room, so sometimes hot yoga places will try to call themselves Bikram studios, but if it's not this specific series, it's not Bikram. So being able to find an actual Bikram class here was theoretically great, because even though I wouldn't understand the instructor, the series is the same so I'd still be able to do the class.
The studio is pretty cute, it has one studio with the requisite mirrored walls, save for an ocean scape on the fourth wall, and can only handle maybe ten practitioners per class, which I really like. This studio is a little different than the last time I took a yoga class at the gym; it isn't nearly as quiet and relaxing. Even though we do meditate sometimes, people talk and grunt and fart and laugh as they please. The room is actually really loud until class starts, and people come in late and leave early and answer their phones without a moment's pause.
After I found the place, I bought a yoga mat and a package of classes, got the class schedule and started showing up to the Bikram classes— and then I was just kind of confused. In the classes, it was usually obvious that the instructors had seen a Bikram video once or twice, or had some basic knowledge of it, but there were only maybe one or two Bikram poses in each session.
The classes were pretty funny though at first. There are two instructors that speak no English and seemed pretty worried to have me there (the third Bikram instructor was an environmental engineer or something cool like that in Seattle for like seven years, random). Basically, nobody else speaks English either, neither the front desk staff nor the other practitioners, so it's pretty much all a game of charades.
Once they figured out that I had some yoga background and was halfway decent at guessing what they meant when they called out positions and corrections, they relaxed a bit. If I'm not understanding something they'll usually stop walking around and demonstrate or just come over and fix me. They are not shy about touching practitioners... or climbing up on us and pulling on us with all their might.
There's one instructor that really beats on us, and she can't for the life of her understand that I'm not flexible in the same ways as Chinese people. She pushes me like nobody's business on positions that require hip or lower back flexibility and kill me, and then is really surprised when I can do backward bending positions or things that require shoulder flexibility better than her.
After I'd been going to classes for a few weeks, the front desk handed me a written note one day asking me to call two hours before I'm coming to a class, which made me laugh and lead to my biggest Chinese victory so far. I had a friend teach me how to make the call ("Hi, I'm the foreigner. I'm coming to yoga class at 6:15pm. Thanks."), and the first time I did it they understood me on my first try, no repeating; win!
Now, it turns out there's usually one or two people in class that speak a little English, so they will occasionally collectively ask me questions or say things to me. The first thing they usuaully comment on is my being an American and being skinny, which I never have a clue what to respond with.
I also found out that the classes I go to used to be straight Bikram, but the Chinese complained, they think it's too boring and repetitive. I guess I understand that, and even though it bums me out, I'm still happy to be able to get some kind of work out there.
Bikram is a pretty specific kind of yoga— it's an hour and a half long series of 26 poses, each repeated twice. It's done in a hot, humid room, so sometimes hot yoga places will try to call themselves Bikram studios, but if it's not this specific series, it's not Bikram. So being able to find an actual Bikram class here was theoretically great, because even though I wouldn't understand the instructor, the series is the same so I'd still be able to do the class.
The studio is pretty cute, it has one studio with the requisite mirrored walls, save for an ocean scape on the fourth wall, and can only handle maybe ten practitioners per class, which I really like. This studio is a little different than the last time I took a yoga class at the gym; it isn't nearly as quiet and relaxing. Even though we do meditate sometimes, people talk and grunt and fart and laugh as they please. The room is actually really loud until class starts, and people come in late and leave early and answer their phones without a moment's pause.
After I found the place, I bought a yoga mat and a package of classes, got the class schedule and started showing up to the Bikram classes— and then I was just kind of confused. In the classes, it was usually obvious that the instructors had seen a Bikram video once or twice, or had some basic knowledge of it, but there were only maybe one or two Bikram poses in each session.
The classes were pretty funny though at first. There are two instructors that speak no English and seemed pretty worried to have me there (the third Bikram instructor was an environmental engineer or something cool like that in Seattle for like seven years, random). Basically, nobody else speaks English either, neither the front desk staff nor the other practitioners, so it's pretty much all a game of charades.
Once they figured out that I had some yoga background and was halfway decent at guessing what they meant when they called out positions and corrections, they relaxed a bit. If I'm not understanding something they'll usually stop walking around and demonstrate or just come over and fix me. They are not shy about touching practitioners... or climbing up on us and pulling on us with all their might.
There's one instructor that really beats on us, and she can't for the life of her understand that I'm not flexible in the same ways as Chinese people. She pushes me like nobody's business on positions that require hip or lower back flexibility and kill me, and then is really surprised when I can do backward bending positions or things that require shoulder flexibility better than her.
After I'd been going to classes for a few weeks, the front desk handed me a written note one day asking me to call two hours before I'm coming to a class, which made me laugh and lead to my biggest Chinese victory so far. I had a friend teach me how to make the call ("Hi, I'm the foreigner. I'm coming to yoga class at 6:15pm. Thanks."), and the first time I did it they understood me on my first try, no repeating; win!
Now, it turns out there's usually one or two people in class that speak a little English, so they will occasionally collectively ask me questions or say things to me. The first thing they usuaully comment on is my being an American and being skinny, which I never have a clue what to respond with.
I also found out that the classes I go to used to be straight Bikram, but the Chinese complained, they think it's too boring and repetitive. I guess I understand that, and even though it bums me out, I'm still happy to be able to get some kind of work out there.
Thursday, February 28, 2013
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).
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.
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.
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!
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| 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... |
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| 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. |
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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. |
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| Sparkling Chardonnay is clearly very fancy and tastes like sparkling grape juice, only not as good. |
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!
Wednesday, February 27, 2013
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.
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.
Tuesday, February 19, 2013
random pix: great store displays/names
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| Mannequins usually show how the clothes are supposed to look, so what's up with this dress that doesn't cover the crotch...? |
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| "Big & Tall" just has a little better ring to it. |
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| So creepy. So, so creepy. |
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| 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. |
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