August 2004

8-31-04 Tuesday

We all slept late today. We woke up at noon, which was the check-out time. We rushed to get all of our belongings back into suitcases because the hotel had the right to charge us extra for not being out on time. We were at the front desk by 12:30 and they did not charge us extra. Our train to Beijing did not leave till 7, so we had the hotel staff store our luggage for the day. We then took a cab to a subway station. There was a large shopping center above it that we spent about 45 minutes at. We took the subway to the financial district of Shanghai. Lots of things were under construction there, but what we did see was beautiful. There was so much open space between the buildings, nothing like most American cities. Everywhere we walked there were huge courtyards capable of holding hundreds of thousands of people. In the middle of the courtyards were huge sculptures, fountains, and perfect landscaping. We ran into some Mongolians in one of the courtyards and they spent about 15 minutes trying to talk to us. It is sometimes amazing how much communication can happen without words, but it can be exhausting.
After talking to these people, we walked through a science and industry museum, then just continued walking through the other courtyards. We found a hill with bushes that were in the shape of chinese words. The landscaped hill was clearly fenced off and in full view of everone who passed by the road, but Raj climbed over the small fence and sat right on the perfect grass. It reminded me of an episode of Star Trek where people on a foriegn planet try to execute someone for accidentally ignoring a “keep of grass” sign. But, Karim followed him and sat down, so I did the same thing. A cop rode by on his motorcycle and didn’t notice. If he had, I’m sure he would have shot us on the spot. We then took the subway to a Subway sandwich shop. As we were exiting the subway station we came accross the Subway sandwich shop. Raj and Karim had only eaten a couple hours ago, but they were so excited to see the Subway that they decided to eat anyway, and so did I.
After the second lunch we went out to get a cab and the drivers kept ignoring us for a long time. When we did make it back to the hotel, we picked up our luggage and looked for another cab to take us to the train station. We were running a little late already, then we once again had trouble finding a cab. After several minutes, one of the hotel clerks came out to help us flag down a cab. We finally got a cab and it only got about a block away before it got a flat tire. The driver pulled onto the curb and there was a group of people there with an air pump. The presence of these people couldn’t have just been a coincidence, but the tire was almost completely flat when we stopped. It only took a couple minutes to fill the tire. We got out and showed the driver our train tickets as he was filling the tire and he nodded his head. He got back in the car and took off again, running all the red lights along the way to the station. We arrived at the main station in Shanghai. It was crowed and very unorganized. Hundreds of people were all pushing through the one small entrance. There was one conveyor belt by the door that x-rayed everyones luggage. There was so much luggage on the little conveyor belt that bags were getting stuck inside the x-ray machine. Each person was responsible for setting thier own luggage on the recieving end of the machine, then picking it up on the other side. I wish I had recorded some of the chaos at this spot. Everyone was pushing everyone to try to get to thier luggage. I was surprised how strong tiny chinese people can be when they want thier luggage really badly. Despite this, we managed to make it to our train on time.
After the conditions at the station we were shocked when we entered our train. Complete Luxury. There are no trains like this one in the US. We had our own room with a lockable door. There were fresh flowers on our table. Every surface in the train was perfect, as it was only a couple months old. After depositing our luggage in our room, we went to the cafe car and had some drinks, which were even cheap. The staff on this train pay alot attention to the security of the passengers belongings. I sat my wallet down next to me and a waitress picked it up out of the seat and handed it to me. They did the same thing when Raj sat his MP3 player next to him. When I walked back to the room to pick something up, the door was locked. A lady in uniform walked over to me and said she locked it for us because she noticed we had been in the cafe car for a while. When we left the cafe car we found hot food sitting on the table in our room for all three of us. Service, service, service.

8-30-04 Monday

The three of us got us at 9:30 today. After everyone had a shower we went down to the travel agency in the lobby of the hotel and inquired about getting train tickets to Beijing. The receptionist wanted 1500 Yuan for the tickets, so Karim and I went out in search of an ATM. After some unsucessful searching of the nearby area, we had the lady from the travel agency tell us where an ATM was. Right accross the street was an ATM “lounge”. A crazy looking guy followed us into the ATM lounge and stood right next to me and looked at my hands as I was about ready to type in my pin #. Karim stepped in front of the guy and just stared and him, then the guy went into the corner, but continued staring at us. I just took my card back out of the machine and went outside to wait for the crazy guy to go away, then he just stared at us through the glass. After we stepped outside, an employee entered the lounge from a door inside of it and stared at the guy til he left. Then I went back and got my money. Back at the hotel, they lady at the travel agency was on break, so we decided to eat in the hotel restaraunt.
Raj and Karim got thier food within a few minutes, but mine did not come for almost 1 hour. After 45 minutes and several attempts at communication, I told the waiter I didn’t want my food, just the check for what we had already recieved. Instead of the check, my food arrived a few minutes later, so I just ate it. Back at the travel agency, the receptionist was nice to us and told us we could save money by just walking two blocks and buying the tickets ourselves, so we did that. On the way there we passed through an area with dozens of small shops that were selling scientific supplies. We saw all kinds of different chemicals and laboratory equipment for 2 blocks. It looked like stuff that would be used to make drugs or bombs. Someone should tell Bush.
After we got our tickets we took a cab to a place called “the old city”. It was a maze of old chinese buildings that was full of shops and tourists. I bought a Mao Zedong(Mao founded the communist party and is viewed as George Washington is in the US) watch where he waves his hand as the seconds tick, and a statue of a Buddha with a swastika across its chest(the swastica is a religious symbol in Asia). In the street, we were approached by a man who wanted us to follow him. He said “Ming Dynasty….sell Ming Dynasty”. I didn’t think he really had anything old for sale that was authentic, but I was curious, so I followed him. He took us into an alley, then an old building, which turned out to he his house. Raj and Karim were about 50 feet behind me because they thought that the guy might be planning to rob us or something. When we got to his door his wife and family were inside, so we all felt safer at that point and Raj and Karim came in the house as well. The guy took vases and bowls that were wrapped in newspaper off of a shelf. He handed them to us and kept saying “Ming Dynasty”, but the bowls looked like something he bought at the grocery store. He took out a calculator and typed “1800? and pointed at one of the bowls, which is about $200. We all walked towards the door at that point, but the whole family stood in the doorway and blocked our path. They put thier hands together and begged us to buy the goods, but they didn’t speak any english. Karim and Raj pushed thier way out the door, but I my path was well blocked and I didn’t want to push hard. The guy then unrolled a big scroll in front of me. It looked really old and he took the calculator and typed “2000?. I was now determined to leave. As I pushed my way out, the whole family was screaming and begging. The man pushed the calculator into my hand and motioned for me to type a price. The scroll was about 10 feet long unrolled and I liked it, so I typed the number “200?, or about $25. The main said “OK” and handed me the scroll. I gave him the 200 Yuan and left, as the guy and another man inside started to push more objects at me. I found Raj and Karim in the alley, where they were being confronted by another man who was trying to sell them a vase.
We walked out to the street and this guy followed us and tugged on our shirts as he pointed at the vase. As we walked further, more and more people with vases started to follow us and tug on our clothes. They were always looking over thier shoulders to see if any cops were around, because this kind of sale is illegal. After we lost them we walked to a pond that is in the middle of the “old city”. The water there is bright green and it is filled with thousands of giant goldfish. There were thousands of tourists around the pond, and an island in the middle of it, which holds a pagoda. The pond is in a courtyard area that is surrounded by big chinese style buildings which hold many shops.
Next we took a cab to a temple, called the “Temple of Heaven”. Raj and Karim both fell asleep during the cab ride, which took about 30 minutes, because traffic was at a standstill. The temple was very commercialized, even charging us 50 cents for a ticket, but it had hundreds of people worshipping inside. There were fires light all over the main courtyard, inside of big urns. Many of the worshippers were crying and yelling into the sky. Inside of the temple building there were dozens of Buddha statues, some of which were almost 50 feet tall. There were at least 10,000 pieces of incense burning on the temple grounds.
We took a cab back to our hotel after leaving the temple. Our driver was the craziest yet, even driving through a crowded crosswalk at about 30 miles per hour, coming within inches of kids. At the hotel we all took showers, then went to KFC for dinner. We each ate a meal, then ordered another bucket of chicken. After dinner we went back to the Internet cafe that we had been to the day before. An hour later we went back to our hotel and asked the receptionist where a massage parlor was. A one hour massage in China costs about $4(maybe more with the “happy ending”, as the chinese call it). It turned out that there was a massage parlor on the second floor of the hotel. We walked up to it and entered. Two girls in robes greeted us and the walls had posters of people kissing. The girls told us it cost 150 Yuan for one hour, in your own hotel room. By the looks of the place and the price, the girls were probably prostitutes. We didn’t feel that we needed to pay for sex in a country where we get so much free attention from girls, so we went back to our room.
We next decided to go out and find the nightclubs, so we had the receptionist write some club names in chinese for us. The cab driver looked at the writing, but didn’t know were the place was, so I went inside the hotel with her and had her talk to the staff. She still didn’t know where to take us, so she flagged down another cab for us. We were driven to a club about 20 minutes away, called Real Love. It was on the second floor of of a large commercial building. The club was decorated with a Roman theme. As soon as we sat down a girl went to Raj and asked him to buy her a drink. He did so, then another girl same to me and asked me to buy her a drink. By the way she and her friend were dressed, it was obvious they were prostitutes, so I told her “not interested” and she got really mad at me. She yelled at her friend, gave me some bad looks, then left the table. I later saw her sitting on the lap of an old man. After a beer, Karim and I went to the dance floor. There, a group of chinese guys kept staring at me and mocking me.
After an hour at the bar, we went to a pool hall downstairs. Raj and I continued our ongoing competition. I played two games against Karim and 4 against Raj. On only lost 1 game and it was to Raj. It was then almost 4 A.M., so we looked for a cab outside. The first one we got in had a broken meter, so we didn’t trust the driver, becuase they rip tourists off that way. We found another, then came home.

8-29-04 Sunday

I got up this morning about 6 and just layed in my bed for a while and looked out the train window. We were passing through very poor rural areas. It was just dawn outside and some people were already at work in their small fields, while others were bathing in muddy-looking water. The people on the train were all getting up and heading to the washrooms. Kareem, Raj and I all headed to the cafe car. All the tables had people at them and the waitress pointed to a table with only one person at it. We went to sit at it and the guy that was there gave us a bad look and moved to another table. The waitress showed us some dishes she was bringing out to other people and then had Raj go back to the kitchen and pick out what food we wanted. The waitress soon came back to us with 2 beef and noodle dishes. Karim didn’t eat because he was not sure if there was any pork in it, which he cannot eat. At 8:30 we all three went back to sleep. At 10 I woke up because a little boy kept poking my feet and pulling on my covers. Raj had told him to do it. A man that spoke english told us that the train was approaching Shanghai, so we gathered up our belongings.
We arrived at the station at 11, 25 hours after we had departed Guangzhou. The station did not appear to be the main station of the city becuase it was not that large. The first thing we did was try to communicate with a taxi driver. A crowd quickly started to gather around us and grew to about 30 people within a few minutes. They all just stared at us. One of the cab drivers called someone on his phone that spoke english and handed the phone to Raj. Raj told the english speaker that we wanted to go to an inexpensive hotel, and then handed the phone back to the cab driver. The guy on the phone translated the information to the driver, then he motioned for us to get in his cab. The first hotel we stopped at was full, so the driver took us to another one, which had no rooms for 3 people. We then decided to walk around the area and find one ourselves. We found some english speakers at a clothing store and a post office who told us of some places to go. We decided on a hotel accross the street from the post office, called the “New Asain”. It is a 3-star hotel and we are each paying only $15 per night. While we were checking in, we had a receptionist translate a list of sights we wanted to see into chinese.
After we checked into our hotel and all took showers, then went downstairs to use some computers that were available to the hotel guests, for a small price. The computers were so slow that we decided to find an Internet cafe. When we had been in the post office earlier, a clerk there had written the words “Internet Cafe” for us in chinese, we took this writing to a cab driver and had him drive us to one. There was a big Internet Cafe just down the street. The driver dropped us off and pointed at a building. We walked into it and it looked dark, dirty and empty. There was a set of stairs going up to the next level. We thought we had to be in the wrong place, but at the top of the stairs there was a big dirty room with about 100 people sitting quietly at dirty worn-out computers. Most of the people were playing online games.
In Macau, Raj and I had prepared a list of all the things we wanted to see in China. The list was stored on his email account, but the website he uses to check his email appeared to be blocked. The chinese government blocks many websites that they are not familiar with, or that they feel that thier people should not view. The first two computers I tried to use were broken . When I found a good one, I was able to log on to hotmail.com and check my email. I had been in contact with a girl from Shanghai that I met on the Internet and I wanted to see if she was going to meet us. I had no new email from her. After about 30 minutes in the cafe we walked back to the street our hotel was one because we had remembered seeing a Pizza Hut somewhere in the area. During the walk we stopped at a ATM, where Karim learned that his card had ceased to work, and I stopped at a camera store to buy to tapes for my camcorder.
We eventually found the Pizza Hut several blocks away, and it was elegant compared to the ones in the US. It was not any cheaper, though. Rodge and Karim both ordered full size pizzas for themselves and I ordered one that was a little smaller. After lunch we got into a taxi and showed the driver a postcard with a picture of the downtown area on it. He laughed at us and drove to a big open courtyard in the center of the city. The courtyard was surrounded by scyscrapers on every side, and they were all very modern looking. In the center of the courtyard was a large museum and fountains. There were hundred of people around the fountain. A group of them stopped us and asked us to get in a picture with them. We walked around the courtyard and then bought some drinks and ice cream at a small shop.
Next we got into another cab and showed the driver a postcard with a picture of the city shore-line. She laughed about being shown the postcard, just as the other driver had. The area we were taken to had a beautiful view of the city. There were thousands of people walking along the shoreline. As soon as we got out of the cab, Karim was pursuaded to buy another watch by a guy who was selling them out of a suitcase and looking over his shoulders alot. He has now bought 3 since we left. We walked for a while, then decided to take a boat ride through the bay, chich cost about $5. We sat on the upper deck and the ride lasted about 30 minutes. The buildings surrounding us were all light up brilliantly, with one of them having a TV screen that was about 20 stories high. After the boat ride, we found a cab and showed the driver our room key with the hotel address on it. He again laughed at us, but didn’t move the car this time. The address on the key was printed in only english. We got back out of the cab and found a girl that could speak english, and she translated the address into chinese. We then found another cab.
At the hotel we dropped off our bags, then had the receptionist write down some entertainment spots in chinese. We showed a cab driver in front of the hotel this address and he took us to an area downtown that had many bars, clubs and shops at it. It was designed for tourists and was beautiful and expensive. After walking around the area for a few minutes we sat down in a bar that had 3 ugly girls on stage singing pop music. We spent about 30 minutes there and had a drink, which was expensive even by US standards.
When we walked out of the bar we found some local westerners and asked them where the larger clubs were located. They told us that what we were looking for was within walking distance. We walked down the street and came to the building they had described. The bottom part of it was a large multi-level shopping center and was closed for the evening. We went inside and took an elevator to the 4th floor, which contained the club. They charged us about $3 to get in, and the admission price included a free drink. The club was nice and big enough to hold at least 1000 people, but there were only 100 or so inside. We took our free drink to a table and watched the people. Most of them were on the dance floor and were very drunk. After we finished our drink we decided to check out the dance floor. As soon as we got there a girl that was about 5 feet tall and no more than 80lbs started dancing with me. I made up some very retarded dances and she did them with me like they were completely normal, so I tried to make the dances more and more unusual, but nothing fazed her. After 20 minutes of dancing, the girl and her friend joined us at our table for a few minutes. It was then close to closing time and we all walked out of the bar together. The girl said that she wanted to go out again the next night, so I got her phone#.

8-28-04 Saturday

We got up at 8:45 this morning because our train left at 10. The hotel clerks had bought our tickets for us in exchange for a small commission. We picked up our tickets from the clerks and paid for them, then crossed the street to the train station. The train was as long as a freight train in the US, with close to 1000 passengers. We are assigned to a car that hold 66 beds. There are 11 compartments with 6 beds a piece. The beds are stacked 3 high and there is not even enough room between them to sit up. There are 2 fold out seats and a half table attached to the isle in front of each compartment. I am the only white person on the train.
The first thing we did on the train was sleep til 1:30, then Raj and I went to the cafe car, which is a long walk through many crowded train cars. We sat down at a greasy little table and were handed a menu that was only in chinese. The waitress’s spoke no english, so I just couragously pointed at something on the menu. Luckily it turned out to be turkey and rice. A bowl of seaweed soup also arrived at the table, which scared me a little, but turned out to be OK. Raj and I then walked back to our bunks and went back to sleep.
At 5P.M. the train stopped in a city and let the passengers get off the train and buy food at the station platform. Karim and I bought some noodles that just required boiling water to be added. The train has a boiling water faucet, right at the perfect level for children to play with it. Raj, Karim and I all ate our noodle on the train. During dinner a guy from Nanjing sat down at the chair accross form me and said, “me want to practice english with you.” I talked to him and his friends for about 20 minutes, in a very simple way. Karim and I then walked back to the cafe car to have a seat, but it was full. There were no empty seats anywhere on the train, so we just decided to go back to sleep. I took two of my tylenol PM, so I should sleep all night without a problem.

Friday 8-27-04

I was headed to the China Consulate in Taipa at 7:30 this morning to get my passport back. I first needed to get 390 Pataca from an ATM, which I had to pay to the Chinese government for my visa. Once again, my ATM card would not work. I had an 8:30 apointment at the Taipa clinic to get my university medical exam, and needed my passport for that. Since I couldn’t get my passport back, I couldn’t go to my exam, so I went to sleep. At 9:30 I got back up. Raj and I went to Karim’s apartment to tell him to be ready to go to the China Consulate to pick up our passports in one hour. We then went to the library to print out the info we had collected about the places we planned to visit in China. The consulate closes at 12 for the entire weekend, so at 11 we picked up Karim at his apartment, then the three of us took a taxi to the China Consulate building. There was no line this time and we just walked in and got our visas and walked back out. Next we had to go back to the university because Raj and Karim needed to sign up for classes before we left for China. While I waited for them I read some strange articles in an english language magazine for asain students that was on a table in the hallway. One of them was about recent criticism in Hong Hong concerning a game that college guys play in China, called “Happy Corner.” The article said that the game consists of several students picking up another one and spreading his legs open while rubbing his crotch against the corner of a building. Weird.
After Raj and Karim were done signing up for classes, the three of us went to the school canteen and had lunch. There I saw my would-have-been roomate, and after I talked to him for a minute I saw Erick(chinese guy). Erick had lunch with us. At 2 we took a taxi to the China-Macau border. Erick helped us tell the driver where we needed to go. At the border, it took us about 30 minutes to get through both sections of customs. In the first section each person is inspected by the Macau police. There are about 50 lines, side by side, seperated by stainless steel rails. Each line had about 20 people in it. We had to fill out a card and then wait in line until it was our turn to talk to the cop that was working our line. The cop looked at my card and passport for at least a minute until he stamped it. He rubed the edges with his fingers and held it up to the light. Next we walked a few feet, then had to fill out another card and give it to a lady that was standing at a table. After that we had to fill out a third card, asking the exact same information as the first two, and wait in another big room with 50 lines in it. This second big room was were each person was inspected by the police from the mainland. Once again, the cop spent longer looking at my passport than the ones in front of me. I think it is because mine is looking kind of worn out. During the 45+ minutes it took to get through the border I saw at least 10,000 different chinese faces. This border crossing in the busiest I have ever seen.
When we exited the border building we then faced the city of Zhuhai, population 6 million. Directly in front of the entrance to the building is a pavilion big enough to fit a football field. Underneath it are several escalators and sets of stair leading to a massive underground shopping center. We went to an ATM machine there to get some Chinese money(it’s different than Macau money), then we walked around and looked at some of the stores, of which there are at least 1000. As we walked by each store, the salespeople would hold products up and yell at us about them. We looked at some pens that one salesguy was frantic about, then walked on to a store that had some camera tripods, which I needed. I bought one for 150 Yuan($15) that would fold into my backpack. We then passed a guy that screaming at us about his fake Rolex’s. Rodge and Karim both bought one from him for about $20 each. Karim thought he was getting a different watch than the one the guy handed him after he had paid. He argued with the salesguy for about 10 minutes, then Raj picked up some binoculars that were for sale on the display case and held them for ransom. When Raj did this, the sales clerk’s face turned red and he made a sound like a cat that was about to get in a fight. Raj quickly put the binoculars back down. Surprisingly, the sales clerk then gave Karim the watch he wanted.
We exited the shopping center and tried to find a bus that would take us to the out-of-town bus station. None of the bus signs were in anything but chinese, so we found a guy in a phone store that could speak some english. He told us what bus to get on and wrote our destination city, Guangzhou, in chinese. We got on the bus he told us to and realized we didn’t have any change to pay with. We did have a 10 Yuan bill ($1), which was worth about 3 times the bus fare. There were 4 other people on the bus and they were all watching us. We put the 10 Yuan bill in the payment slot and they all started laughing at us. Raj got mad at them and went to sit at the back of the bus. It’s hard to be a Gwai-lo.
The bus took us into a tunnel that contained a bus station. We took the paper, that the guy at the phone store had written on, to the ticket cashier. It cost about $20 for 3 tickets to Guangzhou, which was 2 hours away. The bus was nice and modern and left within 10 minutes after we had first arrived at the bus station. Most of the ride was through rural areas after we left the city of Zhuhai. A guy sitting next to Raj spoke some english and wrote some notes for us in chinese that would help us find the train station and buy tickets in Guangzhou.
The city of Guangzhou appears to be at least twice the size of the city we departed from. We had no idea where to go and we were all hungry when we arrived, so we just got off the bus downtown, when we saw a Pizza Hut. As soon as we stepped off the bus a girl handed us a card advertising teenage girl for “massage.” Pizza hut was too crowded, so we went to the Mcdonald’s next door to it. On our way there we passed a table in a hallway that had DVD’s on it for sale. They were all about $2 a piece. I bought “The Passion” and “Farenhieht 911?, neither of which have been released on DVD yet.
After some Big Mac’s, we showed a cab driver our chinese writing that said “train station.” The station was massive and filled with thousands of people. We waited in a line at the ticket counter for about 20 minutes, then showed a clerk our paper that said “train to Shanghai”, in chinese. The clerk didn’t seem to understand and 3 or 4 more clerks joined to help her. On our side of the window, 5 or 6 chinese people had come to try to help us, but neither the clerks nor the customers trying to help us knew more than 2 words of english. All the clerks and all the customers kept laughing and laughing every time we would talk. The line behind us was getting longer and longer. After several minutes of this Raj yelled “stop laughing”, but they just laughed more. We were finally able to semi-understand each other, but they told us that no train would go to Shangai for 2 days. It was nearly 9P.M., so we just decided to find a hotel and check out the Guangzhou night-life. As soon as we walked out of the station, we were bombarded by people trying to sell hotel rooms. One of the flyers a lady handed us advertised rooms for $20/night. We decided to check them out. The lady motioned for us to follow her. She lead us to a stairway that went to a dark underground tunnel. After a few minutes following her through the tunnel, we came to a stairway which lead back up to a road. Then she lead us through dirty alleys. At the end of one of the alleys was a decent looking little hotel with pretty young girls behind the counter and a “massage parlor” attached to the lobby. In the massage parlor, girls sat wearing robes, looking bored while waiting for thier next customer. The girls working the hotel counter seemed very interested in our passports. They spoke very basic english and asked us about our countries. After we payed for our rooms, the girls told us to go to the 6th floor and show our reciept to someone at a desk there. We found the desk, but no person. After a minute, a door opened and a lady came out and lead us to our room. It has triple beds and all the conveniences of a regular hotel, but there is no bathtub, only a shower head on the wall that sprays water directly onto the floor.
We all took showers, then went out to explore the city. We found a line of cabs on a street near our hotel. We opened the first cab door and said “downtown, party, disco, dance” and did a little dance for the cab driver, but he had no clue. We did this to the next 4 cab drivers too, and finally the last one understood us. He took us just a few minutes down the road to a large neon-light club called “Golf Club”. It was raining and an employee on the sidewalk led us inside the club and tried to clear a spot at the bar for us. There were 400-500 people in club and it was hard to move. We told our assistant that we wanted to walk around and he followed us. He saw us looking up at the second level and said “want to go up”. We followed him upstairs and he cleared off a table for us. Nice service here, sometimes. A bartender then came buy and offered us a buy 6 get 6 free Budwiser special, which we accepted. With our beer deal we also recieved a tray of 20 little fruity shots served in test tubes. We sat at this table for about an hour, while drinking half our beer and all our fruity shots, then took our bucket of Budwiser downstairs to a table. I walked around to find a bathroom and two girls tugged on the back of my shirt as I walked by. I talked to them for a minute, but it was hard to understand the heavily accented english in the loud club. I told them where I was sitting and then went to the bathroom. When I came back to the table, the girls showed up. They stayed with us for an hour and even bought us drinks. They asked us to dance with them during a couple of songs. One of the girls, Effie Ho, became very friendly towards me and kept very close. At closing time, we all walked out of the club together at. I hugged Effie Ho good-bye and she kissed me and asked me to email the address she had written on my hand.
We got into a cab and the driver did not know where our hotel was, so he dropped us at the train station. We found a shop open and bought some beer and food and talked to the clerk before going back to the hotel. Sleep.

Thursday 8-26-04

At 8:30 I got up and took a shower(I know it’s not necessary to always mention that I took a shower in the morning. I just want people to know that I do actually take them). At 9 Rodge and I went to Mcdonalds for breakfast, then went to Karim’s apartment. At dinner last night he had told us that he would like to accompany us on our Friday trip to China, so we came to tell him how to get his visa. Raj and I were going to go with him, but decided he could do it on his own, so we both went to the computer lab instead.
Next I went to an ATM to get the money I owed Yolanda for the deposit on the apartment. My ATM card worked for the first time in days! Next Raj and I went to the chinese restaraunt on the corner of our street. I ordered some pork chops in rice. After dinner we went to Yolanda’s 7th floor apartment, which is 2 floors above ours. A lady there that looked like a maid called Yolanda on the phone and handed it to us. Yolanda said she would be at our apartment in 20 minutes. She came and I gave her the deposit money, then I fell asleep for 3 hours.
At 7 I woke up and Raj asked me if I wanted to find some pool tables. We walked to the Hiat hotel accross the street and asked the receptionist if she knew of any pool tables in the area. She told us of a place called Casablanca, which was in Macau, near the big gold statue. We took a cab there and found one little torn-up pool table in a corner. We saw some foreigners there and asked them if they had been to a pool hall. They just said “yes”, so we asked them “where”, and they said “in France”. We decided to try out the trashy pool table for 1 hour and watch the US basketball team play Spain on thier big screen TV.
After an hour we asked the bartender if he knew of any pool halls. He gave us directions to a place called Ioa Hon department store. We took a cab there and it was near the Sands casino. The store was 4 levels of luxury, complete with a Mcdonalds, which we ate at. After dinner we asked a guy who worked in one of the stores where the pool hall was and he pointed down the road. We walked around for about 20 minutes before finding it in the building across the street from the China Consulate. It was the same building where we had our pictures taken 2 days earlier. The pool hall was in the basement of this building and the basement was a strange and dark place. It appeared to have once been one of the luxurious shopping centers that are common here, but business appeared to have gone bad. All the stores were boarded up, most of the lights were broken and all the marble surfaces were covered with layers of dust and piles of garbage. Amazingly after walking through several hundred feet of this ghost-shopping center, we found a huge and well-light pool hall. This pool hall also had many snicker tables. I had never played snicker before and Raj was willing to teach me. Our game came down to the last ball and I almost beat him. He was starting to get mad when it appeared that I would win. We played pool next and each won one game. Raj is very competitive at pool and told me there would be an ongoing competition. Current score 1-1. Raj didn’t like being tied and wanted to keep playing but I told him that I had to go to sleep, so we found a cab to take us home.

Wednesday 8-25-04

I woke up in my new apartment today at 10:30. I slept late because of the late night I spent working on the apartment last night. First I went back to my dorm room to gather the rest of my stuff. My would-have-been roomate came home when I was there. I talked to him about helping each other learn our languages and he seemed to favor the idea, but I couldn’t really understand him. I then carried the other half of everything I own down the huge hill and up to my new apartment. When I got there, a maintenance man and woman were putting up curtains. I unpacked, then continued cleaning the apartment, which was now starting to look like a real home. I cleaned our black couch and it turned bright blue. After I had been home for 2 hours Raj sleepily walked out of his room. He said, “I didn’t even know you were home, I would have helped clean”. Raj sleeps while listening to loud heavy-metal on his MP3 player. It’s going to slowly make him go crazy.
At 2:30 Raj and I had an appointment to meet the property manager, Yolanda. We met at the front of the building and she came to our apartment and had me sign a lease. After that Raj and I went to the Chinese restaraunt on the corner of our street. I ordered a dish called sausage and Macaroni and it turned out to be plain macaroni in water with 2 hot dogs layed across the top of it. I ate the hot dogs and ordered something else. After lunch I went back to the university to pick up some things I left in my dorm room and to officially check out of the room. My would-have-been roomate was home again and he said, “want to be your friend, want to learn english, teach you Mandarin(chinese).” I temporarily placed the things I had forgotten in a lounge on the 7th floor of the dorm building, then went to the administration building to check out. I talked to the woman named Sammy again and she gave me some forms to sign and a bill for 700 Pataca, which I paid across the hall, in the Treasury Department.
Next I went to the library for an hour and used the computers, then I went back to the 7th floor lobby of the dorm to pick up my forgotten articles, which happened to be a rolled up mattress and a power adapter. I carried these things down the huge hill and up to my apartment. Next I needed to get some sheets for my bed. As I walked through my new neighborhood for the first time, I was surprised to see the variety of small shops. The possibilites were endless. Within 2 blocks I could buy groceries, hardare, furniture, sex toys, computers, paper sacrifices or even visit the brothel at the casino across the street. But at the moment I just wanted a store that sold sheets, and I found that within 5 minutes. I walked in the store and was followed around by a man and woman who very eager salespeople but not very good english speakers. I picked out some sheets I liked with a cow design on them. I asked what size the sheets were and they got out thier phone and called somebody. They handed to phone to me and on the other end was a guy who spoke english. He told me he didn’t know what I was talking about and hung up. The sheets appeared to be the right size, so I just bought them and left. I still didn’t feel like I had enough sheets, so I went to another store down the street that sold only sheets. I found a nice plain white sheet there, with the help of a friendly english speaking cashier. She even knew the word “elastic.” I proudly carried my new sheets home and dressed my naked bed. As soon as I was finished, the doorbell rang. It was the hottest exchange student with big eyes and her cute friend. I though, what great timing on my new sheets. I showed these two Swedish girls my new sheets, but they only wanted food and invited me to dinner. Rodge came in the door as we were leaving, and of course, he wanted to go also. We then stopped by another apartment accross the street and picked up a Muslim guy from Belguim, Karim. Karim’s apartment was complete luxury and he pays the same amount we do. His place came furnished with lots of artwork, furniture and a home entertainment system that takes up and entire wall. Not fair.
So, Raj, Karim, the Swedish girs and me went to a Japanese restaraunt down the street. The restaraunt was more expensive that we were used to in this area, and when our food came, it was a small amount. It was different kinds of meat on sticks, like kabobs. Good stuff, but I was still hungry. After an hour at the restaraunt we all went our seperate ways. I went to find a pay-phone, but only found 2 double-cheeseburgers at Mcdonalds. They cost 16 Pataca, or about $2. The same as the US. Next I found a little department store and bought 2 glasses, 4 plates, straws, papertowels and hand lotion. They kept the hand lotion behind a locked glass case and it was more expensive than hand lotion in the US. Wierd. When I took my stuff home I asked the guard if I could use the phone.
My ATM card has been junk since the my third day in town, so I called Old National Bank in Carbondale. The first time I was transferred to an answering machine and disconnected. The second time I was transferred to the main office in Evansville. A lady there asked me what kind of ATM’s I was using and I said “chinese ATM’s.” The lady then got a wierd tone in her voice and asked me for my social security number. Then I was on hold for over 5 minutes before I heard her voice again. The tone was now pleasing and she said “let me transfer you to a specialist.” The specialist was very friendly and explained to me that thier computer system had detected suspicious chinese activity on my account and put a block on it. She said that the bank had tried to contact me to verify I was in China, but could not reach me. She took the block off my account and then I went to my apartment and got ready to sleep.

8-24-04 Tuesday

I got up at 8:30, and after taking a shower I went out to find the only medical office in Taipa, where I needed to get a university medical form filled out. I had a woman in the administration building write the address in chinese so I could show it to a cab driver. I found a cab and was taken to the clinic, which was in the rich area of town. I made an appointment at the clinic for 8:30 Friday morning. I then went walked back to campus and went to the library til 11. At that time I got hungry and went to the library cafe, where I found Rodge sitting. I ordered a tuna sandwich, then we went outside and it started raining. I helped him move his stuff down the hill to his new apartment, then I got on a bus and went to Macau. I was going back to the consulate to get a single-entry visa, which would be 200 Pataca cheaper than the double entry visa that I applied for yesterday.
When I got into Macau I wanted to take a bus to the consulate building. I asked a bus driver, that was outside his bus smoking, if he knew which bus to take, and he motioned for me to get on his bus. After a 20 minute ride, our bus came to the China border, not the China Consulate. I had been worried the driver misunderstood me, and sure enough, he did. I did find a store at the border that sold the phone card I needed to call home, and I had the clerk that sold it to me write “China Consulate” in chinese. Then I needed a cab. At the border there is a huge demand for cabs, so there are barricades set up there, with lines between them, where the people wait on cabs. Luckily the line was short and I waited 10 minutes. The cab took me to the Consulate and I waited for about 15 minutes before my number was called. Then they took my application and passport and told me to come back on Thursday with 390 Pataca.
I got on a bus back to Taipa, then went to Rodges apartment. Another student was there, Joseph, who is a Dutch guy that has been studying here 3 years. We walked to a restaraunt nearby as it started to rain. During dinner Joseph told us that he saw a cat skinned alive in a chinese restaraunt on the mainland. After it was skinned it was still fully alive and they threw it in a fry vat. It tried to swim out of the boiling grease for several seconds before it died. After dinner Rodge and I went to a computer lab on campus. The labs require a student ID to access them, which neither of us have yet, but we just knocked on the door and somebody let us in, then we used a password Rodge knew to log on. We stayed there til almost 1 A.M. planning our trip to the mainland on Friday.
While we were in the lab he told me that his would-be roomate had disappeared on him two days ago without signing a lease, so he was looking for new roomate. I asked him the price and it was just a little more than I am paying to live in my tiny dorm. I have been craving a real home lately and Rodge has a decent size apartment, so I told him I would take it. So, when we left the lab I got some of my things from the dorm and started moving in. When we got back to the apartment we worked on cleaning it. It was a mess and we cleaned until 4a.m. and made it look nice. I now get to sleep on a real bed everynight.

8-23-04

At 8:30 I woke up. I knocked on Rodges door to wake him up, as he had again requested, then I took a shower. After the shower he was still asleep, so I knocked louder. He got up and we smoked a cigarette on the stairs, then I went to the administration building so I could sign up for classes. A lady there told me to go to a different office, but when I got to that different office, another lady told me to go to another office. Then, a lady at this third office told me that they would not know the classes offered until the week classes start. She added, “read the school manual again”. What’s wrong with this place? Everybody here has something different to say. They told me last week to sign up for classes this week, then today they told me to sign up in two weeks.
I went to the library til 11:30, then went home to meet Rodge, because he wanted to go to Macau with me. He didn’t show up on time and I fell asleep waiting. He knocked on my door at 1:45 and woke me up. I can really sleep well sometimes. We got on a bus to Macau. I had to pick up the x-ray I had taken last week and Rodge needed to have his taken. We had trouble finding the x-ray place(no surprise), and asked several people before we got any real help. We found the bright pink building after about 20 minutes. Inside they gave me a tuberculosis card, which means I don’t have it. I guess that’s good news. Rodge decided not to have his x-ray taken today, so we walked out front and smoked a cigarette. A guy came out of the building wearing a mask and pointed at the street, meaning don’t smoke by the door. I guess it is bad to smoke in front of a tuberculosis center.
After the cigarette I went inside and asked a masked employee to write the name “Chinese Consulate” in Chinese.
Rodge and I took this paper to the first cab we saw and got inside and handed it to him. We needed to apply for a visa to go to mainland china in this building. The cab took us to a huge marble building only a few blocks away, near the Sands casino. It was surrounded with gardens, fountains, and hedges that were trimmed into the shape of dragons. When we got out of the cab, we had to wait until 3 for the building to open. I guess some government employees here don’t have to work that hard either. There were also about20 other foreigners waiting at the gate. At 3 a guard opened the gate and there was a mini-gwai-lo-stampede. Gwai lo is a chinese term for westerners. It means “white ghost. Nice huh?
Inside the consulate we got a number and realized we didn’t have any passport sized photo to attach to our applications. We asked the guard where to get one taken and he pointed down the street. We didn’t find the photo place, but we did find a sex store with some interesting chinese gadgets in it. We asked a couple people on the street where the photo place was and got a couple different answers, then found it. We each had our pictures taken and walked back to the consulate. Rodge has dual citizenship and his American passport was stamped when he arrived in Macau. The chinese charge Americans twice as much for a visa as they do other nationalities. So Rodge decided to wait and get his Dutch passport stamped so he could save money. When I went to the window they told me to pay 590 Pataca, which seemed like too much, so I didn’t get a visa either.
Rodge and I then took a cab to the border so he could get his Dutch passport stamped. The border was crazy, with thousands of people going each direction and carrying large amounts of wierd things. We fought the crowd only to be told that Rodge would have to go to Hong Kong to get the passport stamped. We then decided to look for food in the area, but couldn’t find any restaraunt that looked like it wouldn’t kill us, so we took the bus home.
It was the loudest bus I have been on yet. It sounded like it was going to fall apart each time we hit a bump. At one point it shook so bad I heard a chinese lady in the back scream “F*CK”. Rodge just slept the entire way back.
Back in Taipa, Rodge and I went to a supermarket, then I went with him to look at his new apartment that he was getting ready to move into tomorrow. We drank a beer there, then went back to the dorm and drank a bottle of wine. While we were sitting in his room drinking the wine, a huge fearless roach came out from under the bed and went directly for my wine glass. Every time I moved the glass the roach would follow. We played hide and seek games with the roach for about 20 minutes. Midnight, time to sleep.

8-22-04 Sunday

I went to bed early last night, so I couldn’t sleep past 7. At that time I took a shower and made some phone calls. It was about 6P.M. back home. I called Mike, and Jeff was at his house watching a Cardinal game with him, so I talked to both of them. I then called home and talked to my dad and Clara. It was raining for the second day straight, so I fell back asleep at 9. The rain stopped at noon and I went out. At the library I found Rodge. At 1 I went to the library cafe and ordered a chicken biscuit and some egg salad that tasted like it had salantro in it. The chicken pattie on my biscuit was unrecognizeable as chicken, but was edible. Rodge joined me at the cafe when my food came. We saw that they have a chess game there made out of different salt and pepper shakers, with salt on one side of the board and pepper on the other.
At 3 I went to the city to try and buy a cheap phone and digital camera. I went to Iao Hon market again, but could not find the computer store, which I knew was only 1 block away. I had just been there yesterday, but everthing looks the same in most parts of the city. I am getting better at telling chinese people apart, but not one street from the other.
After walking for a while I found a phone store and was going to buy a phone, but they only accepted VISA for the phone, not the deposit. I went to find an ATM machine and didn’t see any, but I found a camera store with a camera I wanted. I tried to pay with my ATM card but it was declined. So, I continued my search for an ATM machine. After a 20 minute walk in random directions, I finally found an ATM that took VISA. It told me my balance was 36,000 Pataca, but when I tried to withdrawl 2000 it said “insuffient funds”. So, I decided to admit defeat and go home. I walked another 15 minutes in random directions until I found a bus stop that would get me back to Taipa.
I got there at about 6 and it was hot, so I turned on my air, which put me to sleep. I didn’t wake up for over 2 hours, after having dreams I was in a hospital full of snakes. I have been dreaming alot about snakes lately, probably because restaraunts all over the city here have them swimming in tanks in thier windows by the sidewalks. In America they would put a picture of a hamburger or a steak in a restaraunt window, but only live seafood and reptiles here. I guess the sight of a live snake makes the chinese mouth water.
After I got up from my second nap of the day, I made a sandwhich and called Gretchen. My card ran dry after 20 minutes. I don’t know why I am so tired today, but I’m going to sleep early tonight, even after taking a nap this morning and just sleeping for 2 more hours. I was told not to drink the water here, but I have seen chinese people everywhere drinking it, so I have been doing the same. Maybe I should stop doing that.

8-21-04 Saturday

I was going to the beach with Johanna and the Finnish girls, but it rained all day, so I met Johanna at the library at around 10:30 and we used the Internet while it rained for another 2 hours. She thinks it is such a weird concept to keep journal online and laughed about it the whole time I copied pages out of my written journal onto the website. She told me my entries were “exhausting”. At 12:30, Johanna, Kaisa and I walked to Mcdonald’s for lunch, which was actually Kaisa’s idea. On the way there I snuck them into my dorm room so I could show them the conditions I live in. Females are not allowed on the male floors and males are not allowed on the female floors, but the security guards just sleep all day. Sometimes they will wake up if I make a loud noise and will smile and wave at me, then go back to sleep.
At 2, after lunch, I walked back to my dorm room to find Rodge. I was taking the girls to a computer store I had been to in Macau and Rodge wanted to go with. I found a note under my door from him that said “I am in the library”, so I went there and found him. But he had just gotten an instant message from his girlfriend, whom he had not talked to in a while, so he decided to stay in the library. I then noticed I was late to meet the girls at the bus stop and I ran down the hill to meet them, but noone was there. But, as soon as I got to the covered bus stop, it started pouring rain, so I’m glad I ran.
After a few minutes Kaisa showed up and a few minutes after that Johanna came. We got on bus 30 and were suppost to get off at a place called Iao(yo) Hon Market. We saw a sign that said just “Ioa Hon” and decided we should get off there. We didn’t see the market anywhere. I called Erick(the chinese guy) from Johanna’s phone, because he was suppost to meet us at the market. I didn’t know how to tell him where I was, and it was raining, so I handed the phone to a chinese man standing next to me in the bus stop. The guy looked at me like I was crazy, but tilted his head towards the phone, so I held it to his ear. He then started talking into it in cantonese and took it out of my hand. After a minute he handed the phone to his wife, and after another minute she handed it back to me and pointed in a direction that I needed to walk. Erick told me to look for a gas station and wait by the bus stop there. It was still raining a little bit and I had no umbrella yet. We waited at the bus stop we were suppost to and Erick called back saying he couldn’t find us. He was at the wrong bus stop and found us a couple more minutes later. We then had to walk to Iao Hon market to meet the other two Finnish girls, Johanna#2 and Riitta, who were waiting for us there. We all walked to the market and waited as Erick went inside to look for the girls. After 10 minutes Erick showed up with them. Now we all walked to the computer store, the same one that Erick and I had been to a few days ago.
Johanna was looking at laptops and Riitta was looking for a digital camera. I helped them get thier questions answered because the salespeople were not understanding thier english, which I had thought was actually quite good. Erick left to get his car because he wanted to take us to another computer store. He called at 5 and we met him in the street out front. All 4 girl piled in the back seat of the small car and I took a picture of it.
Erick just dropped us off because he had to go to a Shakespeare rehearsal. He is in a competion with students from several asian countries. Whoever sends in the best videotaped Shakespeare rehearsal wins a trip to the Globe Theatre. Erick gave me an umbrella when he dropped us off. The girls and I stayed at this next store for about 30 minutes. Riitta was so happy when she found CDR’s with hundreds of different designs printed on them. She bought the ones with little pink designs on them. Girls - Even the Finnish. Noone had bought anything yet and now we got on a bus to go to a little camera store that Riitta was interested in. The bus took us way out of our way and even stopped once while the driver smoked a cigarette outside. It eventually dropped us off at Kentucky Fried Chicken, which is where the camera store was. Johanna and Johanna#2 had been complaining of hunger for an hour, so they decided to go home at this point, so just Riitta, Kaisa and I went to the camera store. Riitta wanted me to help bargain. The cameraman wanted 4250 Pataca for the camera and Riitta told him 4000 and he said no. So I said “Riitta, lets go back across town and get it at the computer store because it was cheaper there”. The cameraman spoke english and heard me, so he typed 4200 on a calculator and pushed it to us. She then typed 4100 and he typed 4180. Riitta gave in and bought the camera. She ended up saving the equivalent of $9 on a $500 camera.
We then waited for a bus to take us back home. We missed the first one so we looked for an ATM while we waited for the next. There were three ATM’s on the street and none accepted VISA. The bus came late, by about 20 minutes. Back in Taipa, we went to a grocery store to find some dinner. I bought some sandwhich material, then went back to my room and made one. It’s 9 and I am going to sleep early.

8-20-04

Rodge knocked on my door at 11:30 and woke me up. He talked to me for a minute, then we took our laundry to the full service laundromat on the 1st floor of the building next door. For the equivalent of $4, a lady washed my laundry for me. She put the laundry on a scale and it was 26lbs, which is how the price is determined. I left my laundry with the “maid”, then went back to take a shower. At 12:25 I went back to get my laundry, but the lady there picked up a clock and pointed at the 10, which meant that the laundry would be done at 12:50. I waited in my room until 12:50, then picked up my laundry, which was dried and folded perfectly. Some things here are even better than home.
After I put my laundry away I called Johanna and asked her to walk to the exchange student BBQ with me. I was glad she was still talking to me because I fell on her when we danced last night. Next I went to the Library from 1:30 to 2:30. Then I came back to my room and went back to sleep, because last night was a long night. I couldn’t fall asleep and Rodge came by my room at 3 to talk to me. Then it was time to meet Johanna at the bottom of the hill at 3:45. She was a few minutes late, then we waited for 2 of the other Finnish girls to meet us, Johanna#2 and Riitta. The girls decided they did not want to go to the BBQ til 5, because the first 2 hours were going to be games, and they were still tired from the night before. So, we all went to the library til then. I showed Johanna my website and she went through everything on it, and she told me she thought it was “wierd” that I was married.
The girls and I got a cab at 5:30 and went to the BBQ place, which was a boy scout building that the school rented. The games were still going on when we got there and I entered the last one. Groups of 9 people all tied thier legs together in a line, then had to walk from one end of the room to the other. While we were practicing, the middle of our line fell down, so we moved the clumsy people to the ends of the line. Surprisingly we ended up in second place.
The BBQ’ing started at 6. I sat around a table with Kaisa and Johanna for an hour while the coals got ready. Then it was a cook-your-own dinner. The food was pork, chicken wings, 2 hot dogs and corn. The coals were so hot everones food got burnt. I think the corn was rotten. At 8 a surprise storm hit. With no warning, huge drops came out of the sky, soaking most of the people instantly. Luckily, my table was near shelter, and I had seen the rain coming in the streetlights down the road, so I didn’t get wet. The rain poured and the wind blew for 20 minutes, then it ended as quickly as it had began. Afterwards everyone helped clean up our mess, then we all walked back home. The area we walked through is the rich area of Taipa. It is were Grace, the person in charge of the exchange students, lives with her 2 24-hour maids from the Philipines. Grace always is talking about organized crime in Macau and I think she’s in on it.
On the walk back we saw dozen of giant snails on the walls of the buildings and on the sidewalks. I got back to my room at 10 and Rodge knocked on my door. We stood on the stairs and smoked and talked for about 30 minutes, then I went back to my room and called Jen. I talked to Steph also. I then called Jen Earst to tell her to tell Erin to have the electricity shut off at our old place. Erin left alot of things undone when she moved out 3 months ago.
At 12, Rodge and 2 of his friends knocked on the door and asked me to go out with them. I first said no, but then they asked me a second time and I went. His friends name is Stephan, and he used to be an exchange student here. His girlfriend, Ling Du, was with us also. We sat a cafe by the golden statue in Macau and had 2 drinks each. Then we walked along the water-front for a while. Rodge and I called a taxi home and were surpised it was 3:30 when we got back. We had planned on playing cards, but when I saw the time I decided to go to sleep.

8-19-04 4P.M.

Our orientation group went on a bus tour of the city today at 9:15. I took a shower, then Rodge and I walked to the bus stop. We first went to a temple in Coloane, which was next to a thin strip of water that seperates the island of Coloane from mainland China. On the China side you can see fences and guards and I have been told that the guards shoot Chinese people trying to escape China there. The Chinese are not allowed to freely travel between the islands of Macau and the mainland. The temple we looked at here was full of Buddha statues and giant spiral shape incence that was hanging from the ceiling and burning.
After the temple we drove to the beaches of Coloane, but didn’t get out of the bus here. Our driver was having a very hard time getting our bus through the roads on this island, which were small even for a compact car. After we left Coloane we went to a very large temple in downtown Macau. It had dozens of different rooms, each filled with statues and burning incense and candles. There must have been at least a hundred different burning shrines within the building. I guess they make the temples fireproof, hopefully.
After this temple we went to a maritime museum, which had lots of models of ships and and an aquarium in it. I really didn’t find the ships all that interesting, except for 1 model of a raft that floated on inflated whole pig skins. How must have that smelled? It was raining when we entered the museum and there was a guard at the door that shot each one of us in the forehead with a laser as we entered. This was to take our temperature. I asked our guide, Grace, about this and she said that if anyone has a high temperature they will be taken into custody by the police immediatly and quarantined.
We then went to a lookout area above the Museum of Macau, which used to be a fort. There were lots of cannons on the walls. The next stop was the Grand Prix and Wine museum, which I liked to call the Drinking and Driving museum. Here we sampled wine and looked at restored Grand Prix cars.
Next was lunch and the bus took us to Kentucky Fried Chicken. I gave the other exchange students an American culture lesson about Kernal Sanders. There was a statue of the Kernal in the restaraunt and none of them knew who he was. After dinner I bought a back of dried squid tenacles and passed it around the bus. They were not nearly as bad as they smelled and the students ate most of them. At 4 the bus dropped us at the University.
I went to the library and used the computers til 5:30, then I walked back to the bus stop to meet the exchange students for our night out. First, Grace took us to a Chinese restaraunt in Macau. I sat next to a girl from Finland who looks like a perfect porcelain doll, Riitta. I have never seen a girl like this in the US. After dinner Grace took us to a supermarket so we could buy beer to sneak into the karaoke bar we were going to. I put 3 cans of Tsing Dao in my pockets. The Karaoke bar was tiny and had a bad sound system, but everyone had more than enough fun. Everyone sang something and I sang Strangers in the Night. After 2 hours of the Karaoke bar almost everyone of the the 50 students was drunk. Most of the night I hung out with 2 of the Finnish girls, Johanna and Kaisa.
At some point in the night, the Karaoke bar closed and most of the students walked to a luxury hotel accross the street, called the Mandarin. I didn’t think they would let me into thier bar because I had on sandals and shorts, but they didn’t look twice. The bar area was full of prostitutes. Most of the exchange students spent the entire time here on the dance floor. This is rightfully called orientation week, because, by the looks of things happening on the dance floor I think that lots of the students became much better oriented with each other after they went home tonight.
A band of western looking people was covering songs by Eminem and doing a surprisingly great job at it. Drinks at the bar were even more expensive than the US but everyone was already so drunk they didn’t buy much anyway. I spent most of my time there dancing with Johanna, the 6 foot tall girl from Finland. A French guy kept trying to steal her from me and it was a battle to keep him away.
At 3 or 4 oclock Johanna, Kaisa, another guy and myself looked for a cab in front of the hotel. It was difficult becuase each time a cab driver rolled down his window and I told him “University of Macau” in Cantonese, he sped away. There was a line of about 20 taxis in front of the hotel and the first 5 ignored us or left, then we found a driver who knew some english. When he dropped us by the University we went to a supermarket to buy more beer, the went to one of the student apartments on the 18th floor. Everyone from the taxi was there, plus about 10 others. All of us from the taxi stood out on the balcony for about 30 minutes then I walked outside with Johanna and we both went home(seperately).

8-18-04 Wednesday

I woke up at 8 this morning. After a shower I knocked on Rodge’s door and woke him up, as he had asked me to do. Before class I showed him around campus and we went to the library and used the computers. Class was at 9:30. In class we continued talking about the same subjects we had the past two days. At 12:30 the class walked to an Indian restaraunt about 4 blocks away. The restaraunt was very nicely decorated with Indian themes. Most of the class barely ate any of thier food, as it was very spicy. It was my first time with Indian food and I also thought it was spicy, but I liked it and finished it.
After lunch, Rodge and I walked down the street, looking for the Park-N-Shop department store so we could buy envelopes and toothpaste, but we couldn’t find it. We found another store nearby with those things, though. We then walked back to the dorm, stopping for cigarettes on the way back. At the dorm I addressed a letter to my dad, then Rodge and I went into the school to try and figure out how to mail things. We were directed to an office in the administration building. A lady there weighed my letter and charged me 6 Patacas for stamps, then I put the envelope in a slot on the desk. Next task of the day was laundry. I took my clothes to the laundromat on campus, but it was closed. Rodge was still with me and both of us asked the employees nearby, but nobody spoke any english. I went back into the administration building to find an english speaker. At the main information desk a lady said she didn’t know anything after she had spent several minutes on the phone trying to get information for me. So, next I decided to go to the housing department. There I talked to Sammy, who printed me out a list of the laundromat’s summer hours. Finally I knew that it was open from 9 til 1. I was tired of carrying my laundry around by this time.
After the laundry failure I went into the library for 2 hours and used the computers. I recieved pictures from Carolyn and Mike of the hog heads I ordered on my last day at Schnucks. At 6:30 I went to my dorm and fell asleep. Erick called at 7 to see if I wanted to go out. He called back at 8 and I got on a bus and met him at the Bank of China building. He was on his scooter. He handed me an extra helmet and I got on the back. It was much more exciting than riding in the car, and alot faster too because scooters are allowed to pass cars in any way they want to. We parked the scooter in his parking garage and went to a food court in a shopping area called Iao Hon Market. The eating facilities were on the second floor and were crude. There are dozens of vendors in boths around a cafeteria style area with stainless steel tables. I tried a poppy-seed desert before we got our food. I then went to watch the food being prepared and was shocked when the lady making it broke a raw egg over the top of it, then closed the box and handed it to us. We took the food to Ericks apartment and stayed there about an hour after we ate. His father, mother and brother were all home and his little brown dog finally let me pet it for the first time.
At 10:15 we picked up his friends Tony and Judy in Erick’s car. It was the first time I had met Tony and it was his birthday. We went to a cafe downtown and met 4 others whom I had met before. During the meal they asked me all kinds of strange questions about the US. Before I came here I always thought that chinese people were conservative, but after this conversation I am convinced I was completely wrong. Our table recieved a small birthday cheesecake for Tony and sang Happy Birthday in Cantonese.
After we left the cafe Erick dropped me off at home. I knocked on Rodges door and woke him up becuase he stole my lighter earlier in the day. I felt a little bad for waking him up, but he did steal my lighter after all. We smoked a cigarette on the stairs, now it’s time to sleep.

Where is 8-17?

8-18-04 Tuesday

I woke up at 8:30 and took a shower before going to the second day of the exchange student orientation class at 9:30. The first half of class was about local cultures, again, most of which centered around superstition. We were told how buildings in the city were designed to bring good luck, with owners often spending tens of thousands of dollars extra for this. It is done on a massive scale and you can expect to see me create a video on this soon.
After the late night most of the class had last night, they did not have the same energy that they did yesterday. We took a short break at 11, then had some more Cantonese language training, where we even had to sing songs in Cantonese. The students from each country also had to get up and sing thier country’s version of a certain well known song. I was the only US student, so I was forced to sing by myself. I could not remember the real English version of the song, so I sang a version of the song that Gretchen and Tonya Rhodes had created and used to sing. It was called Revelation - “revelation, revelation, 21-8, 21-8, liars go to hell, liars go to hell, burn burn burn, burn burn burn”. The class thought the last part was really funny.
At 12:30 a chartered bus picked us up in front of the casino down the hill. It took us to a restaraunt in a hotel in Taipa. On the way there I sat with a giant from Sweden who is over 7 feet tall, Anders. The restaraunt was chinese, but we didn’t eat any bugs today. We recieved at least a dozen different dishes and sat at huge round table in front of huge windows overlooking a lake. The bus left at 2 and I got off at the school, while most of the rest went to a travel agency. I didn’t have money to travel yet, so I went to the library.
Erick called at 7:30 and I got on the bus and met him in front of the Bank of China building. He had invited me to his house for dinner, but said his parents were worried I would not have enough to eat there. We Americans must be pigs. We had to pick up his cousin at the Lisboa casino at 8:30, so we walked around the city for a while waiting for him. After his cousin was off work, the three of us decided to get some Thai food. It was my first time with Thia food and it was spicy, but I really liked it. After dinner we walked around the main town square then decided to look for desert, but couldn’t find any parking, so we went to a bar instead. The bar was underground, on the water near the bridge. There were hundreds of people along the water-side walkway fishing as we walked to the bar. The bar was one of hundreds of Karoake bars in Macau, but noone was singing tonight, there was just loud American music playing, mostly love songs. They love American love songs here. Most of the music that is popular here is only played in gay bars in the United States. I mentioned that to one of the exchange students and he said it was the same way in Europe.
Erick took me home after an hour at the bar and I immediatly got a knock on my door. It was an exchange student who had just got into town from Holland, named Rodge. He had lived in the US till he was 10 and speaks perfect english. We went to the New Century Casino(the one directly next to the University), and had a beer. Rodge is very knowledgeable and curious about business opportunities here and wants to make some money in the same ways that I do, selling items from the mainland on the Internet. We stayed at the casino about 45 minutes and talked about this, then went back to the dorm for some rest.

8-16-04 Monday

Today was great. Most of the exchange students arrived today from all over the world. I got up at 8 to get ready for our orientation that started at 9:30. There are 50 of us and we packed into a room together this morning. For two hours we were handed information and told things we needed to know. Our leader, a University employee named Grace, has been giving us all kinds of good information on cheating different systems here. For example, where to buy pirated software and how to ship it out of the county without getting caught.
At noon we went on a tour of the library. We had a terrible guide who was hard to understand. There are about 50 exchange students and they are from countries all over the world, but mostly Europle. About half are guys and half are girls. Everyone in the group is a lot of fun and all the girls are pretty.
At 1 o’clock we had a free luch provided for us in the library cafe, where I got to meet 4 girls from Finland. After lunch I checked email in the library. Our orientation class started again at 2:30 and lasted til 5:30. The 3 hours passed quickly because the class was full of energy. We were learning about the local culture and everyone got a lot of laughs out of the local customs here, mostly the different kinds of beliefs in superstitions. It is about 6 now and we are getting ready to go on a charted bus that will take us out for the evening.
(now late at night)
Everbody had a hard time finding the bus and gathered at 2 different bus stops in front of the school. We eventually found everone and left on time. Our first stop was the restaraunt. We walked to the entrance and saw dozens of different kinds of animals and bugs in cages and tanks. We galked and took pictures then an employee cut the head off of a live snake and frog in front of us. The animals were still moving after they had been skinned and the guy who sat next to me at dinner fainted onto the sidewalk. Our group sat at a table outside that was about 40 feet long. We first recieved about 20 big bottle of Tsing Tao, which is a chinese beer. Things started to get really interesting at this point. Over the next hour we recieved duck tounge, snake, pidgeon, frog and some other less extreme dishes. Next came the grand finally. Grace carried a big bowl around the table that was covered up. She made each of the 50 exchange student close thier eyes and open thier mouths while she placed something inside. She did this two seperate times. The first item put into my mouth was only mildly displeasing, and after everyone had eaten it, she showed us the bowl - Silk Work Larvae! I actually ate two more of them then and decided that they were not as bad as I would have expected. The second item was terrible. It was big and crunchy and had no real taste. I couldn’t chew all of it because it was too hard, so I had to use my beer to wash it down. The students at the end of the table saw the reactions of the ones who had tried this mystery dish, and some of them ran away from the table. Grace chased them down the sidewalk and made them close thier eyes and open thier mouth. It was funny watching the people fight it, but Grace is very persuasive, with only one or two people not eating. After the second dish had been served to everyone, she uncovered it - Cock Roaches! I am not joking. She made us eat roaches! She said that they were the kind that live in water, though, not the kind in your kitchen.
After an hour and a half of “dinner” we got on a city bus and went to a casino, the Lisboa. Once there, we all split up. I decided to have a beer and try out the slots. After I got change I realized that every slot was full of people. I tried to walk out with a group of students, but security saw I was taking out one of thier red buckets, which was full of my coins. I put the 200 coins into my pockets then went out and got in a cab. The driver had no idea what I was talking about when I said “university”. He had me say it over the radio several times to his dispatcher, then he had me write it down. When he saw it in writing he knew what I meant. I’m home and now will sleep.

8-15-04

I slept later today than I have since I got here, 10:30. I took a shower then went out in seach of food. I tried the canteen, but it was closed, so I decided on a Big Mac at the Mcdonalds down the street. After the food I tried finding a shortcut to the library, but ended up walking in circles in the alleys and discovered that a back way did not exist. The alleys behind the university were interesting though. They were a completely different world than the rest of the city, with people living in small shack that are surround by all sorts of random junk.
When I finally got to the library, I spent an hour there, then went back home to call Erick. He called back a few minutes after I talked to him and asked me to meet him at the Bank of China. I asked him where that was and he laughed because it is the biggest skyscraper in Macau. I got on bus 11 in front of the school, and the Bank of China was the first stop after we crossed the bridge. I waited for about 5 minutes and Erick showed up in his car. We drove to the ferry terminal to pick up some of his friends that were visiting from Hong Kong. Traffic was even more intense than usual. Erick told me that China just began allowing tourists to come more easily from the mainland. Before the new law came into affect it was difficult for them to come here, now there are tens of thousands coming every day, and they love to gamble.
After we picked up Ericks friends we went to Macau tower, which is huge and looks kind of like the Space Needle in Seatle. It was built by the same man who built most of the casinos in town, Stanley Ho. More people met up with our group there and most of them had been SIU exchange students. Three of them went to the top of the tower, but I didn’t because I wouldn’t get the half price student discount until I get a student ID in a few weeks. The rest of us explored the building at the bottom of the tower, which was modern and huge. I spent most of the time talking to Ericks friend Judy, who is the best looking chinese girl I’ve met yet. She said she would have lunch with me soon.
After the tower we split up and I rode with a chinese couple that was visiting Erick from Chicago, and 2 other local girls. We went to see two old churches and a chinese temple. The last church we went to, St. Johns, is the main attraction here, but it is actually only the facade to a church. It stands on a hill above the central square of Maca, which I mentioned I have been shopping at the last two days. We took some pics of the church then walked through the shopping area. Next we drove to Taipa and met the others, where we went to a great Portugese restaraunt. A silver van stole the parking spot we were waiting for and I learned some great new chinese words to call people. Our group had grown to about 12 people now and they were all speaking Cantonese. We sat at the restaraunt for over and hour and ate lots of food, as I have every day since I got here. The chinese love to take pictures and we took at least 50 during the meal.
After dinner we visited the shops in that area, then went for ice cream. We sat in a courtyard eating our ice cream, then I went to an Irish Pub with 2 of the girls, Demi and Sarah. Eric was suppost to meet us, but his friends outgoing ferry was late, so he did not make it. The three of us saw at the bar for an hour. Most of the time I talked to Demi. She is 24, cute, and about to go to school at York, in England. Her friends say that she is some kind of genious. She has almost perfect english, with no accent, which is very rare here. Even the chinese english grad students have accents. The girls dropped me at my apartment at 11 and now it’s time to sleep.

8-14-04 12 p.m.

I woke up this morning at about 9 and was surprised to see the construction workers across the street hard at work on a Saturday. I took a shower then went out to find the library so I could check email. I found it within view of my dorm window, just about 300 feet away. There was a security guard at the dorr who made me sign in. There is a camera by the guard that constantly moves its lens up and down your body as you walk by. A sign by the camera says “stand here for 3 seconds”. I think it takes your temperature to make sure you are not sick. There are lots of buildings here where your temperature must be taken before you enter. It is because of SARS.
Once in the library I tried to find the computer lab inside the 5 story building, but had no luck, so I went downstairs to ask. An english speaker at the front desk took me to a room just a few feet from the entrance that was full of computers and empty of people. I sat in the lab for a couple of hours and when it was time for me to go, I looked up from the computer screen and realized I had almost forgotten I was in China. Two hours surfing familiar sites from back home had put me into a near trance. I felt like you do when you just wake up and it takes a split second to remember where you are. Six or seven people had even entered the room without my knowledge.
I walked back to my room at noon because Erick was suppost to call. He called, then came to pick me up at 12:45. First we went to a resteraunt in Taipa where he taught me how to use chopsticks for the very first time. We also were able to order Cokes in big glass bottles there. I ate a beef noodle dish and was doing OK with the chopsticks by the end of the meal. After lunch we went to a few stores nearby. The first one is called Park-n-Shop, which is like a small version of Wal-Mart. Next we went to a store nextdoor that sells bedding, because I wanted a blanket, but I didn’t buy anything. After that we went to a hardware store to look for a power adapter so I could plug my camera in. But, the people there were rude and diseased looking, so we left. Then we drove to Macau so I could buy some clothes and look at computer stores. For clothes, we shopped at the square with the wave shaped blocks that we had been to the night before. The stores were so crowded it was hard to breath, but at least I’m a head taller than everyone here. I ended up buying 2 shirts and 2 shorts at 2 seperate stores. We also took some pictures on the steps of the old cathedral, which is at the end of the square. On the way back to the car we stopped at a very large cell phone business, where I bought a phone card.
We were now hot and tired becuase of the weather, so we took a break at an E.S.Kimo cafe, where I drank a Heineken. We sat at the cafe for about 45 minutes and talked about what makes an asian girl and an american girl good looking, and coincidentally two asain girls in the cafe kept staring at us during this conversation, and Erick used them as an example of what is not a pretty asain girl.
After the cafe we drove to Ericks parking garage and parked his car. We walked around his block to a photo/vending machine store where Erick had some photo made from a CD. Next we went to the computer store and it was crazy. The store was actually a market, with dozens of vendors in our faces as we walked by the different booths. But at least the computers were cheap, so I will be back.
Next we went to Ericks apartment. When I went into the bathroom I was shocked to see that there was no shower, but only a shower head attached to a wall. Eric explained that the water just goes all over the floor. He then gave me a drink with something called “live bactocillicus” in it. It was suppost to contain a bacteria that is good for you. His mom came home and put a huge bowl of soup in front of me. It had some kind of roots in it, and fish. It was not bad, really. After I finished the root soup she gave me a bean popsickle, which was only edible, and two more bacteria drinks.

8-13-04

I have to do something about that grass matress today. I am about to leave for the city to run some errands and a new matress is number one on my list. The showers are cold this morning. At dawn I saw a guy walking backwards down the street while clapping his hands above his head. It looked like some form of excercise.
11:20 A.M.
That was an adventure. I went out to run the errands and just got back. First I got on a bus that took me to Coloane, which is an island in the wrong direction. There I changed buses to get back to where I needed to be. Getting on the wrong bus was an interesting experience because the island of Coloane is much more poor and less developed than the rest of this area.
When my bus finally got into Macau I tried to follow a map as the bus moved, but the tiny bus was so crowded that I could not see out the windows, so I ended up getting off at the wrong side of the island. I decided to take a walk so I could figure out where I was going. I needed to find a government office where I was suppost to have a chest x-ray taken, so the chinese government could be sure I wasn’t diseased. For the next hour I walked accross the island and it was shocking to see how people lived in this part of the city. Highrise residential buildings were everwhere and laundry was hanging off the balconies 40 stories into the air. The air was smelly, the streets were dirty and some kind of liquid kept dripping on me from the highrises. There were more scooters on the crowded streets than cars and neither scooter nor car driver stopped for pedestrians. As crude as things were here, I kind of like the lack of petty rules.
I could not find the office I was looking for, so I got out my medical form and showed it to a man on the street. It was written in english and chinese. This man lead me to a room in a hospital, but the nurses tried to tell me, in broken english, that I was in the wrong place, but they did not know how to tell me where the right place was. Outside the hospital I got in a cab and showed him my form, but he pointed back at the hospital. I think that older chinese people are partly illiterate. At 10 A.M. I finally found the street the x-ray place was on. I showed my form to a literate kid who was about 10 years old and he pointed down the street and said “around wall”. Sure enough, around the wall was the bright pink office of the Center for the Prevention of Tuberculosis. When I walked inside there was a security guard, so I showed him my form and he pointed at a desk behind a glass wall with 3 clerks behind it. Most of the employees in the building had masks on. A guy behind the glass spoke some english and asked me a bunch of questions as he filled out paperwork. Next he sent me upstairs to a waiting room with 6 or 7 other people in it. There was a TV in the room playing a chinese cartoon that looked kind of like vegi-tales. At the front of the room there were 3 doors. A sign on each door said to enter and change “cloth” when your number was displayed on a panel above one of the 3 doors. While I was waiting a nurse came and took my passport. After about 5-10 minutes, my #27 was displayed about door number 2. I walked inside and the room was just a bit larger than a small closet. A second door was on the opposite side of the room. There was a little bench in the corner and a hook on the wall with a blue hospital gown on it. A sign said “remove all top-clothes and put “cloth” on”. On the opposite wall was a speaker box and a button. A sign there said “when you have dressed push button twice”. I did this and waited. About a minute later a soft voice came on the speaker. The words were chinese, so I said “english”. A few seconds later an english speaking female voice replaced the prior chinese speaking male voice. I still couldn’t understand the distorted words coming through the little speaker. I said “what”, then I heard “ready?” and I said “yes”. I was then told to come into the next room. So I opened the second door in the tiny changing room. It lead to a large room which was emply except for a huge x-ray machine. A doctor came from an adjoining room and handed my passport back to me. He pointed at a spot on the floor and I stood there. He moved the giant machine up to me using a remote control in his hand, then softly pushed me into a plate on the front of it. After getting me exactly where he wanted me he left the room, and a nurse who was looking through a glass window said “still”. A second later she told me I could go, so I went back to the little room and put my real shirt back. I saw another sign on the wall that said “replace apron to hangar”, so I did this, then went back downstairs. The clerk there told me to come get my x-ray on the 20th.
I left the building and walked to the nearest busy street I could find. I had a list of buses that went back to Taipa(my home) in my backpack. Bus 25 was one of those buses and it pulled up as I was reading the list. The buses here are so small that I can’t stand up in them, and they are so crowded that it is hard to even find an spot on the handrail that has no hands on it. As I watched traffic on the way back I noticed some insane scooter driving on the bridge between Macau and Taipa. The bridge is only 2 lanes wide and about 2 miles long. The scooters will pass cars on either side of the narrow bridge, coming within an inch of them as they travel at highway speed. As our bus crossed the bridge 30-40 scooters quickly passed it.
The bus dropped me in front of the school and I walked down the street to find some food. I walked into Mcdonalds, again. Breakfast was being served and I didn’t want that. Across the street I saw a photography business, so I went there to get some passport-sized photos I needed taken for school applications. A woman there spoke a little english. She told me it would cost $50 and took me to the back, where another lady helped her take the pictures. The two of them kept looking at me and talking and lauging as they got me into the right position and took several pictures. I waited for 10 minutes afterwards as the women processed the pictures. When they handed them to me the english speaker said “very handsome”.
I decided not to eat until later. On the way back to my room I walked into a hardware store looking for a chinese-american power adapter, which would allow me to charge my camera batteries. Noone there knew a word of english so I went back to my room, where I ate a beef stick and listened to the radio.
2:45 P.M.
At 1, a chinese grad student named Eric called me. It was the first time my phone had rang. Ming had given him my number. She had arranged for him to show me around. So, Erick came to the school and we ate lunch at the canteen. Erick is 22 years old and has just recieved an english degree. He spent a semester at SIU. He refused to let me pay for my food. He had to go to work at an office at the university at 2:30, where he let me use his laptop to check email. Tonight he is going to take me into Macau and introduce me to some of his friends. He is one of a very few students that have a car, as it is very difficult and expensive to get a liscence here.
After I checked my email in Ericks office, I went to administration building to turn in my school application, with the pictures I had just taken attached. Some skinny guy behind the counter gave it back to me for some reason that I could not understand. I went to Ming’s office and told her about the problem. She took the application from me and said she would call me in a minute. So I’m now back in my room waiting for her to call back.
11P.M.
Ming called back about 3 and I retrieved my application from her and took it to a woman named Karen in the administration building. Ming had called her and straightened things out for me. Karen told me that she needed to copy my passport, so I went back to my room and got that. Then I waited in the office for about 10 minutes while Karen processed my application. She then gave me a temporary ID. I don’t get a real one until I get my X-ray back on the 20th and get evaluated by a doctor.
I still had an hour left before I had to meet Erick again, so I went back to my room and read through some of the piles of information I was given. I also tried to write some chinese words so I could see if Erick understood what it said, because I still believed that chinese writing might just be a hoax and have no real meaning. This would prove it either way.
I met Erick in his office at 5 and we went to his car so we could go to some stores and buy some things I needed. First we went to a place where I bought a matress to put over my straw bed, and a pillow to replace the folded towel I had been using. Next we went to another spot in Taipa where the streets were very narrow and full of small businesses. Erick took a picture of me in front of a dragon in a courtyard here. I tried some ice cream called “King of the Fruit”. The first bite tasted like ass, but then the rest tasted surprisingly OK. Next we got back in the car and drove to the highest hill in Taipa, where we took some more pictures.
After we left here he took me to the apartment he lived in with his parents. Everyone here lives with thier parents until they get married, unless they go away to school. It was in Macau on the 7th floor of one of the big dirty looking buildings. Everything inside was surprisingly organized, even in the hallways between the apartments. His parents spoke little english but they smiled alot and shook my hand. Erick gave me pillow cases here, which was the reason we had come. Next we walked to a nearby outdoor market, where I bought some socks. By this time it was 7 and we went to pick up two of his friends, Judy and Maria, who had also been SIU exchange students during the same semester Erick was. His two friends were cute and friendly. The four of us went to dinner at a Portugese resteraunt near the border with mainland China. We ordered five dishes, that we shared; eel, huge whole sardines, chicken rice, steamed vegies and chicken soup. It was all good. We all talked through our meal so it took us quite a while to finish, which is exactly what they told me people do here. During the hour at the resteraunt I showed them the chinese characters I wrote and they were able to recognize them. They asked me to say some things in chinese and for the meaning of some english words. They would not let me pay my part of the dinner. Afterwards we walked around the block, which is an area of town that rich people live. We stopped at a store and they recommended I buy toilet paper, because bathrooms in the dorms don’t have it. I also bought some crackers and chips.
Next we went to the center of the city, where there is a courtyard laid with stones in a wavy design and a fountain. We took some pictures in front of the fountain. Then we walked around the area there. It was very commercialized, but looked great. We walked through a few stores and bought some drinks at one of them. The drinks had big pieces of fruit in them that I could not identify. After this we dropped the girls off at home and and then Erick took me home. I need to learn some chinese.

8-12-04

The airport was really quiet until about 5A.M. I moved locations once overnight, but slept O.K., considering I was sleeping in an airport. At 5:30 I found the only business in the airport open to be a 7-11, so I bought some Colgate toothpaste for 20 Hong Kong dollars, or about $2.50 American dollars. I found an Internet terminal and sent an email to my dad and replied to a message from Carolyn and Brandy on my message board. I slept from 6:30-8 on a bench by the Macau information stand. Nobody came to work at the stand til 9, so I wandered around the airport for an hour trying to find info on getting to Macau. At 9 I finally saw a woman behind the dek, sho told me to get on bus A11, si I did. It was a 30 minute bus ride and I was impressed by the city. Building a huge city among mountains requires lots of large bridges and tunnels. So, all these bridges, tunells, mountains, skyscrapers, etc. are packed tight over a huge area. It makes New York City look easy in comparison. The city smell wierder than New York too. I havn’t decided if the smell is a bad one yet, but I think it probably would be if I smelled it everyday. The bus dropped me off in a crowded, dirty area and I went up an excalator to the ferry terminal. I was shocked to find a big, beautiful, multi-level shopping mall at the top of the escalator. I found the ferry terminal at the top level and it was chaos. Thousand of people and hundreds of employees moving everywhere. I didn’t understand the system, but the employees pointed me in the right direction each time I went the wrong way. Ther ferry ramp was shaking so violently from the waves that people were falling into each other as they boarded. I sat in the wrong seat twice because only part of my ticket was in english. Once the ferry started moving the ride was not a bumpy. 15 more minutes and I have finally made it to Macau.

8-12-04 7:30 P.M.
My ferry pulled into the port and everyone aboard walked into a building where we joined thousands of others who were arriving by ferry. Everyone entering or leaving Hong Kong or Macau must pass through immigration. I waited in line for about 15 minutes, then they opened a new line next to me and I was one of the fist in it. When I walked out the front door of the building I was approached by several pedicab drivers. One of them was very persistant. He could not really speak any english. I tried to tell him “university” and he told me “100?. The currency in Macau is the Pataca and there are 8 Pataca in a dollar. I didn’t want to pay 100 Pataca because I didn’t yet know how far the university was and I also felt bad letting a tiny old man pull me around with all my bags, so I said “no”. He said “50? and I again declined. He said “40? and I still said “no”. Then he said “40 cheap” and I gave in. Then he put me bags on his pedicab and took me 5 blocks in the middle of heavy traffic. It was kink of scary. He stopped in front of a casino and said “casino”, I said “university”, and he again said “casino”. I just got off and gave him the 40 Pataca. There was a cab behind us and the back door opened itself when the driver pushed a button. I said “university” and the driver had no clue. I pulled a brocure from the University from my pocket and he said “oohh”. I asked how much 3 times and he just pointed at the meter. I finally just put my bags in the trunk and got in. It was about a 10 minute ride acroos a long bridge to the University. When I got out of the cab I had to pay 27 Pataca. I saw a security guard at an entrance to the school, but of course, the guard spoke no english, so I just walked up the stairs and started looking for a woman named “Ming” in room T217 of a building where the name sounded like “fung”. Thats all the arrival info I could remember from an email I had recieved 2 weeks ago. As I looked for the spot I was impressed by the small school. The courtyard area is very unique, with pools full of turtule and gaint goldfish, with sculptures and gardens throughout. The entire university is built on top of a large hill that overlooks the city. I quickly found the room with Ming in it. She is a short, thin woman with glasses who speaks decent english. After a short introduction, she first took me to the administrative building, which is connected to the main university complex. We visited the housing office first and I was given a room key. In this office I was a girl that looked familiar and she kept looking back at me also. She told me she attended SIU and I looked familiar. I asked her if she had a radio-television class and she said no, then she remembered it had been journalism. Sure enough, she used to sit next to me in that class during the fall last year and we had talked on several occasions. Her name is Amanda and she had even asked me out to lunch one day at SIU. Small world. I will go ask her to lunch sometime soon.
Next, Ming took me to my room on the 7th floor of the third block of 13 story dorm towers. Ther are 3 blocks total and mine overlooks the ocean. Ming left for a while and I found the showers and took my first one in days. I then went to the school “canteen” which is only two buildings down. It is run by a franchised company called E.S. Kimo. No one there spoke much english, but I was able to figure out how things work. I sat down oat a table and was waited on, just like the U.S. I had a ham sandwich which tasted like it had some kind of seafood on it. It also had cucumber, tomato, and hard boiled eggs. It was good despite the odd ingredients.
I was suppost to talk to an english guy in Mings office at 2:30. I looked all over campus for a clock and there were none, nowhere. I have since learned that it is bad to give a clock as a gift becuase it means that you are waiting for the person you gave it to to die. Maybe that has something to do with there being no clocks. I went to Mings office despite not knowing the time and found the english guy, Glenn, in an attached office. He is in charge of something important I think. He was very friendly and asked if there was anything I needed. After we talked for a few minutes I went back to my room and unpacked. This was when I noticed that the mattresses were filled with grass! They are hard as steel and I am going to have to buy something else. I first thought that part of the bed was missing, but I asked and was told that the chinese like thier beds “firm”. Well, I guess “firm” has a literal meaning here.
At 4 I was suppost to talk to “Sammy” in the administration building, who had helped me there earlier in the day. Sammy gave me some rules and other info about the dorms, then I went back to talk to Ming as she had earlier requested. Ming took me to another building to meet the girl that will be giving me my orientation next week. Her name is Grace. She told me that during orientation we would be eating worms and roaches.
After this short meeting I went back to my room and tried my luck with the phone. I called the hospital to ask about getting my medical forms filled out. We had a descent conversation and I am going to go there in the morning. Next I took my map of the local area and looked for a store to buy some basic things I needed, like soap, hangars, wine, etc. I found 2 stores that I had the courage to shop in. The first one is where I bought the wine. At the register the cashier pointed out that the bottle had a scratch-off contest on it. She scratched it for me and I won a second bottle of wine on the spot. How great, to win wine the first time I ventured out on my own in China! Next I went to a store that was like a dollar store, but everything was $8, which is one US dollar. Then I went to Mcdonalds for the second time today and had a double cheesburger value meal. There is only so much change I can handle in one day. After dinner I walked to 10 minutes back to my room. I did not see one non-asain person during my entire excursion away from the universtiy. When I got to my room I realized that my wine had a cork in it. I took it to the canteen and held it up and made a corkscrew motion. A girl took it to the back and cam back 5 minutes later with the corkscrew hald out. I took it to my room and broke it off when I tried to pull it out the rest of the way. So I bent one of my new coat hangers to push the rest of the cork into the bottle. Before I drank any wine I recorded a few minutes of video and listened to some chinese radio an a headset I bought at the $8 store. Wierd stuff on the radio here. I can’t wait to learn some chinese because I have to know what they are so excited about on the radio. Maybe they just broadcast from a mental institution. I hope so.
Before bed I drank some wine and smoked a cigarette on the stairs outside. My dorm building is built on a steep hill and from the 7th floor I have a great view both day and night.

8/10/04-8-11-04 Tuesday-Wednesday

After a sleep filled with nightmares I woke at 5A.M. to the sound of a new alarm going off. My friend Bill gave a mini-PDA to me a few days earlier as a going away present, and it appears that the alarm works. It was still black outside and after getting cleaned up, I organized my 3 bags of belongings that would be coming to China with me. My dad and Clara woke at 5:15. While they talked and prepared for thier seperate trips(my dad taking me to the airport, Clara to visit family in Minnessota), I went through the bag of gifts that Carolyn and Mike had given me on Sunday. I had run out of room for some of the food they had given me. There were also wrapped gifts in the bag that I was suppost to open every hour on the plane, but I had remembered the night before that airport security unwraps gifts. I think that they are just nosy, but they say you might be concealing something, like cookies. I set the gifts aside to open on the way to the airport. Before my dad and I left, clara took some pictures and video. At 5:30 we left Murphysboro in the red Surburban. Our only stop on the way to St. Louis was at the Nashville Hardees.
When we neared St. Louis, traffic came to almost a stop. We decided to stop at a MetroLink because the train was obviously going to be alot faster. My dad and I waited 10 minutes for the next train then said goodbye. He waited and waved to me as the train pulled away. It took about 30 minutes to get to the airport. Getting through security was easier than usual and I was sitting on my plane withing 30 minutes of getting to the airport. The flight to Dallas was 1 and a half hours long. I was tired and fell asleep for a while and also read parts of a book about learning chinese that Brandy gave me. The plane landed safely at 11A.M., and then I walked and I walked and I walked toward my next gate. Then, I came to a shuttle train, which took me from gate C to gate A, then I walked a few more minutes and found gate A21. I knew I had found the gate before I saw the number, because there were about 300 Japanese people sitting in the waiting area, with 3 or 4 minority Americans. We boarded as soon as I arrived. The plane is a 757 which is bigger than others I have used. There are 9 rows of seats and plenty of Asain and American stewardeses, but the flight is only about 2/3 full. It looks like the next 12 hours should go smoothly. Good Bye United States.

Wednesday(Tuesday) 1:47 P.M.
We are now about 3 hours from Tokyo. We have been in the air about 10 hours. By the time I see nightfall I will have seen almost 30 hours of continious daylight. I guess I will get to experience real jetlag for the first time. Over the past 10 hours our plane has crossed the Rockies, Mt. St. Helens, The Northwest Passage, The Allutian Chain, and the Date Line. Becuase of the Date Line, my August 10th never got to see a night-time, wierd.
I have spent the time on the plane so far either enjoying the clear skies view until we got to the ocean, watching two sappy movies(no options), reading my chinese books, or sleeping. Two hours fourty minutes til Japan.

8-11-04 Wednesday(Tuesday) 11:07P.M. Hong Kong (Wednesday 10:07A.M. Carbondale)
I have lost alot of time over the past 24 hours. Almost 2 days have passed becuase of time changes.
I’m now in Hong Kong and this is surely going to be interesting. My last plane arrived in Tokyo at about 3P.M. After 30 minutes of trying to figure out thier airport system, I found my gate and checked in. I had about 2 hours there, so I slept. When I woke up I had a headache, so I took some kind of P.M. headache medicine that was in my bag from Mike and Carolyn. I boarded the plane, a even bigger 747, at 6:30. I was so tired, and the stuff was so strong I slept through take off! I remember opening my eyes for a second as the plane accelerated and the next time I opened them our plane was high above Tokyo. I could only manage to stay awake for a moment, but I remember that the cloud tops were bright orange, but the ground was black, except for brilliant city lights. It was an amazing scene and I have never seen anything like it; maybe I was just dreaming. Between breaks in the orange clouds, all the bright lights on the ground were organized in perfect patterns throughout the city. American cities don’t look as nice from the air. During the next 4 hours to Hong Kong, the only time I woke was when I heard the food cart come around and for landing. The landing view was great also. I saw hundreds of tall, well-lit buildings for miles as we approached the runway. The city is huge and it is built among large mountains. When I arrived I fought the crowds to a terminal train and then to immigration, where they stamped my passport quickly. I decided to stay in the airport til mornng because I have no clue where to go to get to the ferry terminals. If I was to go to the ferrry tonight I don’t know what I would do in Macau til tomorrow, so I will sleep in this recliner I have found, surrounded by other recliners of sleeping Chinese.
Good Night.