From Bei to Nan

From Bei to Nan
It looks like I finally have some time to add another entry to this blog. This bit of free time wasn’t exactly planned, but waking up at 5am rarely is. Apparently I’m still feeling the jetlag. And since we don’t need to be ready until 9:45 today, why not jot down the many things that have been happening? I can assure you they are many.
So I have made it safely to Nanjing. My week in Beijing was fun, though a bit slower paced than I had expected. I didn’t accomplish very much, but I suppose I didn’t have many big things to accomplish anyways. The first day I ran most of the errands I needed to do. I bought a cell phone (though not a SIM card, since I would need a Nanjing one), some new flip flops and got my watch readjusted. That evening another friend from my last China experience came to have dinner with us. Her name is Tian Tian, and she along with Zhuang Ning and Jason were the people I hung out with the most outside of my study abroad program. Jason apparently had just left for Germany before I arrived, but I was glad to see Tian Tian. She speaks English very well and was in fact preparing to take the TOEFL, a very difficult, high level English exam. Afterwards she was going to work in England for a year. I told her to make sure to eat some Indian food while she was there, since English food would be the worst thing she had ever tasted. Zhuang cooked dinner for us that night—spicy pork with vegetables and a much milder green bean and chicken dish, as well as some sticky rice of course. The food wasn’t bad, but I still can’t get over the Chinese way of leaving bones in meat. The small bits of pork were really small bits of bone with a little meat around it, not my cup of tea. Immediately after dinner I straight up passed out, only to awaken several hours later when Tian Tian had left and Zhuang Ning had gone to bed. I cruised the internet for a few hours and then went back to sleep. This pattern of sleep seemed to repeat itself for the next few nights.
The next day I went to see a movie—a Hong Kong film called “Overheard” about police spying on a stock trader, was very exciting and interesting. It was all in Chinese with no subtitles, so the details were hard to fully understand, but I was happy to be able to understand the general idea of what was going on the whole time. That evening I went to Wudaokou, the downtown area near Beijing University campus where I spent oh so many nights on my study abroad trip. I did the usual routine, which was to go to Pyro Pizza for beer and then to Propaganda next door for some clubbing. The difference between Wudaokou and the area I was staying was like night and day. Doing my errands around Beijing and just walking around Zhuang’s apartment neighborhood, I literally saw at most one or two foreigners in two days. At Wudaokou, they were all over the place. Pyro especially was full of them, where they had beer pong and a very sports bar-like atmosphere. I talked to a few of them, but mostly I sat back and enjoyed a beer while I smiled at the fact that this place was much more of a bubble inside Beijing than I had ever realized. After an hour or so I headed to Propaganda, which had a lot more Chinese locals and was just as hot a club as I had remembered. The music, however, was a little lacking that night so I left before too long. Overall I was really glad to have made the trip to that part of town. I was surprised how nostalgic it was and how familiar everything felt.
On my final full day in Beijing I looked in my Lonely Planet guide to see if there were any interesting sights I had never seen before. Immediately I found just what I was looking for, an underground city built during the Cultural Revolution! I couldn’t have asked for anything better. Let me read you some of the description:
“By 1969, as the USA landed on the moon, Mao had decided the future for Beijing’s people lay underground. Alarmist predictions of nuclear war with Russia dispatched an army of Chinese beneath Beijing’s streets to burrow a huge warren of bombproof tunnels...English-language language tours guide you along parts of this moldering warren, past rooms designated as battlefield hospitals, a cinema, arsenals, other anonymous vaults and portraits of Mao Zedong.“
I was pumped. So Zhuang and I took the hour-long bus trip across town to check out this strange place. It was apparently near a very busy tourist spot—an old-style street that was very pretty looking but filled with little more than high-end clothing shops and restaurants. Still, I liked it a lot. I had spent many afternoons on my study abroad trip walking through touristy spots, so this reminded me a lot more of the Beijing I remembered. Unfortunately, however, after walking around and asking several people, a group of old Chinese men and women sitting in chairs on the sidewalk told us that the underground city had been closed during the Olympics and not re-opened. Nooooo! Quite a disappointment, but it had really sounded too good to be true anyways. A little bit more walking suddenly brought us to Tiananmen Square, and I decided I wanted to see the Maosoleum where I could take a gander at the fearless leader himself, preserved just like Lenin. Yet, once again I was let down when we found out that viewings could only be done between 8am and noon. Oh well. We took a subway back and had some delicious Peking duck for dinner. The subway had actually been well upgraded since I had left. At the time of my first arrival in Beijing, there were only three subway lines. Now there were ten, including one that went right up to the gates of Beijing University, something that would have been helpful for my twice a week subway trips across town for my internship during my study abroad trip. Once again, oh well.
I can say that the one thing I was happily able to accomplish was to eat my share of good Beijing food. I made sure to get a jianbing from the street (a crepe with an egg spread around one side of it, covered in herbs and sauces, wrapped around a crunch wafer), eat hot pot for lunch (Chinese fondue), have jiaozi for breakfast (crescent-shaped dumplings), and of course the wonderful Peking duck. Unfortunately I never got a chance to eat any baozi (another style of dumplings with a thicker, softer breading), but those can be found pretty much anywhere in China, so I wasn’t too disappointed.
Saturday brought on the train trip to Nanjing. I took with me my leftover kaoya (Peking duck) to eat for lunch, as well as my enormous suitcases that I somehow managed to close once again. I had to take a taxi to the Beijing south station instead of the closer one in the center of town because the train I wanted only ran out of the southern one. It was quite a worthwhile tradeoff though, as this 8-hour ride was the only one under 14 hours that I could take, and it also ran during the day so I could actually see the countryside. Boarding the train was pretty painless, although I was the only one with such a horrendous amount of luggage. I had to store my guitar case and suitcase in a closet at the end of the car. I lucked out with a window seat and a friendly woman who sat next to me. She appeared to be in her 30s and was traveling from Beijing, where she currently lives and works, to Shanghai. We seemed happy to talk and even spoke a bit of English, though it was clear it was something she had studied long ago and hardly used. Most of my time was spent either reading or looking out the window as I listened to music. The scenery was beautiful, and it got noticeably greener and less polluted as the trip went on. By the time we arrived in Nanjing, there was plenty of blue sky and greenery was everywhere. I couldn’t believe I would ever see blue sky regularly in China, but apparently Beijing is the exception to the rule. I was thrilled to learn that, since Beijing had been even more polluted than I was expecting when I arrived. When I got off the train I quickly found Jennifer and Mr. Jin from the Nanjing school, and we took off on a drive to my apartment.
Nanjing is beautiful in ways that I was not expecting. As I said there are trees everywhere, even in the downtown areas. The streets reminded me a lot of Chengdu, my favorite city in China. The one difference, however, was what made Nanjing even cooler. They apparently are in love with bright, color-changing lights. High-rise apartments would have streaks of bright colors running up and down the sides of the building, and bridges had strips of the same lighting running along the outside. All would gradually transition through a number of colors. It made the whole city look like some racing video game. Our neighborhood was no exception. We actually turned to live a bit far out from the main city area, in more of the “suburb” of Nanjing. Still, it looked like just as big a city to me. The only difference was that the streets were spotlessly clean and there weren’t nearly as many cars on the road. It is my kind of place. We luckily pulled up to the apartment just as the entire group of TAs was leaving to go out for the night, so I was able to meet everybody at once. They headed out to the downtown area, and we met up with them in an hour or so for some dinner and a night on the town.
First I should say something about my apartment. Coming to China with a promise of an “apartment provided,” I was a little nervous of what to expect and made sure to keep my expectations low. I figured I would have some small, cramped bedroom that maybe had a kitchen attached to it. After all, China is crowded. Their living spaces are a lot smaller than what Americans are used to. Yet, what I ended up seeing blew me away. I walked in to a gorgeous, modern apartment, with a living room complete with large tv and dvd player, L-shaped couch and glass coffee table. The ceiling even had some more bright, color-changing lights. I have a large bedroom with what I would guess is a queen sized bed and an entire wall of window overlooking the city. Simply amazing. I will be more than happy living here for more than a year.
We met up with the group at the main downtown area in the most expensive part of the city. We ate at a restaurant in the mall which turned out to be not bad, and while it was expensive the total per person was still less than $6. Afterwards we headed to a fancy bar district. Most of our first hour was spent drinking beers from convenience stands and walking around the area. Everything was very nice looking, and it was obvious this was the most high end part of the city for night life. We went to the upstairs of a bar and had some drinks as we all got to know each other. They all seem like really great people. It is nice to be around a much older crowd as well, as most of the people are in at least their mid-twenties if not their thirties. I very quickly have left the college life. But that’s not to say we didn’t have a good night on the town. We left the first place and went to a very nice looking club. As we entered, there was a guy and a girl dancing (not together) up on a sort of platform in the back in front of a wall of bright, color-changing lights. It reminded me of the nicest clubs in Beijing. The drinks were unbelievably expensive, however, so Daniel and I (the other guy from W&M) grabbed another cheap beer from an outside stand and came back in. For the rest of our time in the club, I still can’t believe what happened. A couple of us sat at the bar, which ran around in a square with the bartenders in the middle. They were a group of six or seven young, cute Chinese girls who seemed to be having a great time themselves dancing with each other and drinking with the customers as they served them. Usually one of them was playing some sort of dice game with a customer that I could not for the life of me figure out. As we sat there, they began to just hand us drinks. First it was a beer, then it was a couple more, then they were giving us cocktails. Then they started giving us shots of whiskey. Most of the group went around to different parts of the club, but Daniel and I (different one, this guy was from the UK) stuck around. We stayed at the bar for a good two hours drinking nothing but free drinks the whole night. I ended up not paying a cent at probably one of the most expensive clubs in town! I still have no idea how or why this happened, but hey I’m not going to ask any questions. We all had a great time and eventually headed back at a very late hour.
That was when my night turned into something else I couldn’t believe. I rode the elevator up with a couple people, but I was the only one of our group who lived on my floor so I said goodnight to everyone as I exited. I went to my door, but for some reason my key would not open it. I had a ring of three keys, all of which I tried over and over again, but to no avail. I tried the other rooms around me, thinking maybe I had gotten the number wrong, but the keys were even less close to working on those doors. On mine, at least I could get the key into the hole. I just couldn’t turn it. I went downstairs to tell the woman working in the lobby my problem. She called somebody, who went up to my room to open the door. However, he demanded 120 kuai to open it. First of all, I didn’t have that much money on me at all. It was all in my room. Secondly, I didn’t see why I had to pay to enter my room when it seemed like it was a fault of their key that I couldn’t get in. Yet, they would not budge. He demanded the money, and neither he nor the woman had any sympathy for me. They actually started to laugh at me the more I talked with them, when I asked, “What can I do? Sleep on the street?” Somehow the apartment had no list of who lived in what room, nor did they have extra keys. They couldn’t even verify that this was my correct room. All I did learn was that the key I thought went to my front door was not the right one. They told me it was supposed to be longer and shaped differently. But how had I gotten in in the first place? Jen showed me to my room when I arrived. The keys I grabbed had been in the door to my bedroom. They were the only ones I saw, so I figured they must be the right ones. Had she accidentally kept the key? Was it in my room? Since at this point I had no phone and didn’t know what room anyone else lived in, I had no idea what to do. After an hour or so of arguing with the man and the woman, they eventually just grabbed their things and walked away. I couldn’t believe this was happening. My first night at my new apartment, and I was homeless. I didn’t even know what options I had. The only thing that I could do was to wait. Wait for what I wasn’t sure, but I could do nothing but wait. I figured that eventually Jen would walk outside and I could ask her what the problem was. By the time I went downstairs the sun was coming up. So I went outside and I sat. I sat on a marble wall right outside the door. And I waited. I waited. And I waited some more. People started to come out, but none of them were from my group. Since we had stayed out so late, it was entirely possible nobody I knew would come outside until close to noon. And it was barely past 5am at this point. So I laid back on the wall and fell asleep. That’s right, my first night in Nanjing I slept outside on a wall. I couldn’t have slept for more than an hour or so before I woke up, when a friendly Chinese man started talking to me asking why I was there. I explained to him my situation, and he, unlike the two people who had worked for the apartment, was sympathetic. Yet, there was nothing anyone could do. Some old women even came out and pitied me, offering me some fruit that I declined. I simply waited. Eventually, at 8am I had had enough. Actually, I had had enough by 4am but it didn’t really matter what my I decided was enough at this point. I went back into the lobby and loudly plopped myself down on the high desk. A man (the head person at the hotel I figured, he had only recently arrived) told me I couldn’t sit there, and when I told him my story he was actually very sympathetic as well. Since I thought Jen had my key, I asked him if he knew her or where she lived. Fortunately in China, “foreign girl” is the only description you really need for a person to know who you are talking about. There aren’t too many of them around. He actually knew the room she lived in, and took me there. She was horrified to hear what had happened, but she didn’t have the key. She did come downstairs with me to help, however. All that could be done was to call the man again to open the door. He was pretty cheeky when he arrived, and I must say I was a being a bit of a smart ass back to him at this point. This time he told me he would open it for 80 kuai, which turns out was the actual fee, not the “I’m going to cheat you because you’re in a bind and I can, plus you’re a foreigner” fee. Fortunately I actually had 80 kuai on me, so I could have him do it. Yet, his expensive method merely entailed taking a card and jimmying the door open. Great. If I had known I could do that, I would have done it six hours ago. So finally I made it inside and fell asleep, at 9am, a good six hours after returning home. What a night.
I realize I should try to write in this every day if I can, so I can actually do a good job of retelling things that are going on with me in a more accurate way. I feel like I had to rush through this one and merely repeated the things I have done without providing much insight. But hopefully I will find some time soon. We start work today, so I’m off to find some breakfast before I have to be ready in a little over an hour. Zai jian!