Spring Festival Preparations

Chinese New Year is fast approaching and in the north of China, dumplings are a must-eat lucky food.  So we're in training.

Andrew, dumplings

Drunk guys toasting each other with baijiu (read: liquor).

Andrew, post-dumplings

Just Chillin'

FAQ: Michelle, how is your Chinese?

We've been in China now about 10 months, and I've been studying Mandarin for about 7 of those. Here's a check-in


Remember this sign? It's for the foot massage place that is a 30 second elevator ride from our front door. Here was my assessment last March after about a month of study:

"Let me translate the top row of characters of the sign for you - "something, ren, lin, zhong, something something something zu something". Another step, again, character by character - "something, people, forest, middle(i think), something something something foot something"

Now, in November, starting with the dark green sign on the top, character by character:

still don't know, ren, lin, zhong, yi, know it but forgot it, jian, zu, liao
something, people, forest, chinese, medicine, still haven't remembered it, health, foot, therapy/cure

And finally in full-on English, we're starting to get somewhere:
Something, people, forest - My live-in Chinese translator says this is a name, so it will never make sense.
Continuing on: Chinese medicine health foot treatment


Bottom green sign: (Oh feeling pretty good about this one.)
1st line: Zhong, yi, jian, fei, bu,forgot, don't know mian, fei, ti, yan, yi (easy), ci
Chinese, medicine, lose, fat, not, don't know, don't know exempt, cost, experience for oneself, one, time

You can probably guess the English (I'm guessing a little bit myself here and looked up a word):
Chinese medicine weight loss does not come back. Try it free once.

2nd line: er, shi, si, xiao, shi, nei, jian, don't know wu, don't know, tui, haven't learned it yet
2, 10, 4 (24), xiao shi is hour, within, see, don't know No, give back
And finally, the translated English: Within 24 hours, see results. No results, money back.

And to the right of the door:
mei (duh - it's part of my name, and the word for America), jia
beautiful, add (although translator has clarified that this is actually an abbreviation for fingernails).
So we have "Beautiful Nails 25"

So my translation isn't quite right (or the sign is wrong) because I think it says try the weight loss treatment once for free and if it doesn't work within 24 hours, get your money back. But that doesn't make sense and I have too much pride to ask my personal translator for clarification right now so I'll just have to keep studying.

In the end - It's a little rough but essentially we not only have a foot massage place next door, but they guarantee their miracle weight loss treatment. And I can get my nails done for under $4. The things one learns when one learns to read.

Snow Aftermath

In preparation for this week's upcoming artificially induced snow event (scheduled for Tuesday), thought I'd post a couple pics of the aftermath from last week (also artificially induced):

November 1

Judging by the green leaves still on the trees, someone forgot to tell Winter that Fall isn't finished yet...

Morning Exercise

Tennis guy, daily, 7:40 a.m. sharp

Only in China

Maybe you're distracted by the glimpse of a (rare) blue sky in Beijing, and you can't see the orange specks dangling off the side of the 20-story building:


By individual ropes:




The rope, from my close-up observation:


That seems slightly frayed:



Bi-annual window washing.

月饼 Yuebing

It's Mid-Autumn Festival time - (zhong qiu jie - 中秋节) - the harvest festival. The moon is supposed to be at its fullest this time of year, and thanks to Chinese weather modification for the recent PRC 60th Anniversary, the sky is clear and blue, which means we might actually be able to see the moon (it doesn't happen often).

中秋节 is one of only a few major holidays in China and most of the country has a week off from school and work. 200 million people are expected to be traveling over the next week to vacation and visit family and to eat mooncakes.


We don't expect to receive many mooncakes this year.


If anything, we should be giving the things to other people because that's what you do in this season - give piles and piles of mooncakes to bosses and teachers and people you want to impress. The more expensive, the better.

But we're foreigners, so we're exempt from some of these traditional guanxi building activities. And besides - we're way too late in the season to get our hands on any of those Haagen Daz ice cream mooncakes, as one must get one's order in months ahead of time.


Mooncakes are kind of pretty.


And they are traditionally filled with red bean paste, or lotus paste, or some other paste-y substance, sometimes with a salted duck egg in the middle. Because you know - it looks like the full moon.


The thing is - apart from the giving and the sharing and the general good feeling mooncakes impart, I have yet to meet a Chinese person who likes to eat them.

Except, of course, for the Haagen Daz ones. Which are basically overpriced ice cream sandwiches and my high school language partner argues that they aren't really mooncakes in the first place. She doesn't like mooncakes either.

Running attack

More in the odd Beijing adventures department -

Long story short - a few months ago Andrew, Peng, et al. entered a running competition at our gym on a whim. As in run on a treadmill, those with the best times in all of China get a trip to Singapore to compete in the all-Asia competition.

With a little sweat and a lot of luck, they made it to the China finals.

Peng, Andrew, and team at the finals on Sunday, 8 a.m. :



Teams of runners came from all over China to compete in Beijing. The bad news: no trip to Singapore. The good news: they didn't come in last.

Guanxi. 关系.

Andrew has dived back into Beijing a little quicker than I over the past week. We arrived, after a total travel time of about 23 hours (Indiana to San Francisco, San Francisco to Hong Kong, Hong Kong to Beijing) on a Tuesday. With jetlag. And zero intention of re-entering our chinese life until the weekend. The plan, basically, was to collapse. And unpack later.

But on Thursday, around 8 p.m., Andrew got a phone call. From the Director. About being in the Talent Show. At the Academy. On Friday. At 8 a.m.

Let's face it. He didn't want to go. Jetlag can be brutal and after a month of living out of a suitcase, sometimes it's nice to just curl up in your apartment and let the world move on without you for a little while. Skipping that to be in a talent show? Like someone doing cartwheels and singing God Bless America while twirling a baton? At work? Seriously?

Well. There's a little something important to know about living, working, operating in China - 关系。Guanxi. Relationships. It's a good thing to have. Being able to speak the language is helpful and all. But you're not going anywhere if you can speak the language and can't get the guanxi going.

Andrew has a pretty good handle on the language part. And quite frankly, a fair bit of the guanxi part. But it's just not a thing that you collect and move on. Guanxi is high maintenance. Especially when you're a Ph.D. student and visiting researcher whose data collection involves interviewing and sitting in on meetings and tagging along on projects and generally a lot of good will and generosity of busy working professional planners.

So when the Director who is hosting your research fellowship in his International Urban Planning Research Studio at the China Academy of Urban Planning and Design calls you at 8 p.m. at night and wants you to come in early the next morning in order to play back-up for your co-workers who, in your absence, have been practicing for weeks their live performance of Claptons' "Tears in Heaven" - well - for the sake of guanxi - you say yes.

In celebration of the upcoming 60th Anniversary of the PRC and also the 55th Anniversary of the Academy, each department and then some at the Academy had an act. An entire day devoted to 26 acts ranging from Flamenco dancing to choir singing to Bollywood lipsynching to patriotic military marching. And one particularly moving rendition of "Tears in Heaven" with one jet-lagged foreigner strumming along in the background.

Back to business

We're back. Back in China. Back at school. Back at work. Back on-line (at least for now). More to come.

Blue skies

There's no shortage of these types of pictures from China, but here's our view, looking toward the subway, both taken in the afternoon.

No, it's not fog. And it's not raining. You know. It's just the air.


But it does clear up from time to time:

In case you were wondering

What things look like on this end:


It's surprising, really, how often the servers here seem to unexpectedly drop connections for some websites.

After maneuvers:

Beijing Summer

I know - It's been a while, there's some catching up to do, all in good time. China is carrying on, as it does. Know that it's in the 100 degree range (upper 30's and even 40 for anyone following the world dominant Celsius scale) for most of this week and next week here in Beijing. This is officially the first time in my life that I've considered turning on the A/C. That's mostly because, living in China, it's actually the first time I've lived in a place with A/C available:



Yeah, well, our parents tortured us growing up, and then promptly bought an air conditioner the year after I moved out. And there was this attempt by roommates to air condition that giant somewhat dubiously (il)legal loft in Chicago, but let's face it - a wooden floor that you can sometimes see through to the business below combined with giant, leaky, south facing windows makes the idea of "cooling" more of a placebo effect. We had A/C to make us think it seemed cooler. But really. It wasn't.

So - I'm thinking about it. But check out the only way to turn the thing on, the remote:



We've run into another washing machine moment.

Would you believe I've been studying Chinese since February and I still only know 3 words on this remote: 开（on), 关(off), and 睡眠(sleeping). There is progress though - there are actually a couple more characters here and there that I know, and I am now a virtual professional at looking up characters (on my cell phone...). But even with all of that, it doesn't make sense. So, I will likely be reduced to haphazardly pushing buttons until something happens. Stay tuned - it's a scorcher this week in Beijing...

Annoying, more than anything

In case you haven't heard, these are sensitive days for insecure regimes. Blogspot is blocked in China, so am testing some alternatives. Some work, some don't. Stay tuned.

April

Life is rolling on here in China. April has come and gone in a flash. It seems that at the beginning of the month we were preparing for a visit from Anne, she came, she went, and *poof*. It's May. I'll start with the present and work backwards:

It's officially Spring/moving into Summer.  It's hard to tell the difference really.  But lots of flowers everywhere, the weather is mostly warm, and we've had a bit of rain.  

Andrew and I have recently determined that I have a bona fide addiction to spicy food, somewhat perplexing given my Midwestern background of meat and potatoes (and I mean, like, once in a while we would eat chicken or a pork chop for variety. or spaghetti with meat sauce.) And believe me, it's not that I've lost my love for mashed potatoes.  But I dreamed of Mapo Doufu last night.  (Homemade version below.)
 

It's not MSG that does it I think, since I don't cook with it at home (and we ask to have it left out at restaurants, but who really knows). I think it's Sichuan peppercorns, which are not so much outright spicy as numbing.   and addicting.
       
Continuing back in time - I'm on the mend from a cold I had this week. Despite that fact that I probably chop about 8 cloves of garlic for every meal we make here at home, can't remember the last time I cooked without ginger, drink green and ginger tea like it's water, take a Vitamin C pill just for placebo piece of mind, and wash hands like a crazy woman, I still got sick.  Ug.  I will note that dearest Andrew did not catch aforementioned cold.  

So I missed a few classes this week, but luckily made it on Thursday, which was learn more about the menu day. That means I'm finally starting to decipher a little more on the average chinese menu, beyond 水(water) and 米饭(rice).  I can, at this juncture, successfully catch the attention of a server (no small task in China), ask for a menu and for the bill.  I'm soon hoping to move beyond just pointing at said menu and saying 这个 (this) (picture menus, by the way, are ubiquitous here. and genius.)

Before the cold, Anne was here. Anne as in we've-known-each-other-for-something-like-25-years Anne. We've spent thousands of hours on the phone (most of which a. were probably 4th through 8th grade and b. drove our respective parents crazy), and to this day

I can hum the tune that her home phone number makes when I dial it (well - her parents' number now I guess). With all of those days spent randomly wandering the mall in Fort Wayne, who knew someday we'd do the same at the Forbidden City? Or the Great Wall?

Anne came, we saw, she conquered. I had been saving up the Beijing tourist circuit for when she arrived. Save for the Beijing Tap Water Museum (which is at the very top of my list of must-do soon), we saw it all. I actually had an exam right after she came, so Anne ventured off on her own while I was in class, brave soul.  All in all, I got to practice a bit of Chinese and she got to become the Valparaiso Public Library System Expert on China (Anne is a librarian by trade, and manages one of the branches.)  There were a few adventures involving long subway rides, a curling iron, bargaining for various souvenirs, foot massage, and climbing lots and lots of stairs. Fun was had by all.

Before Anne's visit is really digging deep.  And likely uneventful.  Just a couple pics from the visit:

(maybe you can't see the sign - "Look out Knock head"

Visitor Explained

That unexpected visitor was our landlord. This is the first we've seen of her. She's in town for a few days on a business trip and wanted to check in - she works for one of the big national banks and is based in western China. Mainly she wanted to chat about her son, who will soon graduate from college and wants to go study in America or England. So we chatted all about U.S. colleges and majors and the application process. This is the sort of conversation I have had many, many times because so many Chinese parents are trying to figure out how to get their son or daughter into graduate school overseas or, more generally, to arrange his or her life after college.

Anyway, it looks like our landlord is now eager to be friends with us. We are being taken out to dinner tomorrow night and we have an invitation to visit the beautiful province of Ningxia.

A visitor

We have a visitor tonight. Someone knocked on our door - a couple of times - and since I don't generally answer the door in this country, I left it up to Andrew. He answered, they talked for a minute, and then he invited her in and offered her some water. And they've been talking ever since. I thought my Chinese was coming along pretty well until now, where for the last 45 minutes, I've been listening to a conversation and I have no idea what's going on. And I still don't know who she is, but I trust Andrew on this one.

My version of their conversation goes something like this - she likes something, Andrew says America is something, she says something about China and America in the same sentence, there's talk of school, and they both think things, and then some of those things are not bad and ok - wo xihuan, Mei guo, Zhong guo, xuexiao, wo juede, renhou, bucuo, ke yi - "I like, America, China, school, I think, and then, not bad, ok" - with a few pronouns thrown in for good measure.

Spy photos:

Something Foot Something

So I have learned that one of the most maddening things about learning Chinese characters is the subsequent forgetting of Chinese characters. 

For class everyday I am memorizing (or trying to) 20 or so new characters. If you do the math, so far that comes out to lots. Which of course is a relative term – lots compared to what I came with, but nothing compared to the number of characters required to, say, read a newspaper.

But no matter the method of study, I have learned the inevitable is this:  everyday I am confronted with a sign, an advertisement, a magazine, anything really - that has at least one (usually more) character that I recognize, that I know I’ve learned, but also then realize, I know that I have forgotten. It’s one thing not to know the characters in the first place, but to learn the things and then forget?  It's enough to drive a person bonkers.

On the brighter side, when I can remember, the world is starting to (slowly) reveal itself to me.  Here's a picture of a little shop right next to our building:

Let me translate the top row of characters of the sign for you - "something, ren, lin, zhong, something something something zu something".  Another step, again, character by character - "something, people, forest, middle(i think), something something something foot something".  I have no idea what it all means, even though it is helpfully translated into Korean at the bottom.  And yes, I can read the English on the door.  But somehow I think there's more to the sign than the English gets across here, don't you think?