February 2, 2007 – Chicago
I went downtown at noon today to pick up the Chinese visa I’d applied for on Wednesday, stopping at the library to use the wireless Internet access. The visa cost $70 instead of the $50 that I’d expected. Apparently, I just misread the price on a chart in the consulate office. What a great deal to have a paper sticker stuck into my passport. Americans must pay more than other nationalities because the US government charges Chinese citizens more to get visas. The Chinese are just getting revenge.
I went to the art museum next, which is free from Feb. 1-21. They require that all bags are checked, so I had to pay $1 for that. For the next two hours I walked around looking at Monet’s, Picasso’s and all kinds of paintings by other artists I’ve never heard of. Interesting, many of the patrons were young women that appeared to be alone, some of which were sitting in front of paintings copying them with watercolors or pencils. Almost all the rest of the patrons were young couples.
I headed back to Ericka’s apartment just before dark; rush hour. We picked up dinner from the drive-thru of a trashy local restaurant when she returned home from work. Despite the run-down appearance, slow service and soggy fries, the flavor was actually great. Returning to Ericka’s apartment, we briefly stopped by the home of a big red-headed guy that plays in a bluegrass band, the same place I went to a St. Patrick’s day party last year.
Our next venture out was a trip to the local Walmart where we were almost the only white customers. The purpose was for me to buy a new suitcase, but the store had a very limited selection and I bought nothing. Ericka did end up buying a new fish tank and 4 fish, which we set up upon returning to her place.
Next, we went over to her friend Erin’s house to play his Wii. I’ve hung out with Erin the last couple times I visited Ericka, who lives at home with his parents. This was my first time playing Wii and I never realized how much fun it could be. The controllers sense movement, which provides endless possibilities for unique kinds of games. So, when you play a dart game, you position the controller in your hand like a dart, etc..

Saturday: 2-3-07 – Chicago
I watched a reality survival show last night where a man squeezed elephant dung for water and fed from a zebra carcass in northern Kenya. Clumps of crap were falling in his mouth as squeezed the dung above his head and held his mouth open. He found the dead zebra by walking towards where vultures were circling. There was no cooking or even the use of hands involved with this meal. He just got down on his hands and knees and ripped away the flesh with his teeth, just like the vultures had been doing. This is apparently OK for survival as long as there are no maggots and the smell is still good.
The temperature started out at about 7 degrees today and fell to below zero by late afternoon. The wind chill was near -30, which a TV weatherman said could give frostbite within 10 minutes.
Ericka had our work cut out for us today; making the food we will eat with her family during the Super Bowl tomorrow. We went to her parent’s house at noon so she could discuss the meal with her mother. I brought my laptop and was able to pirate someone’s wireless signal while they discussed this for 45 minutes. The preschool I’ll be teaching for has now asked me to change my plans yet again and teach in a city called Wuxi, which is near Shanghai. This was more of a request than a demand, but I agreed because going to a completely new city is appealing. The other city was going to be Zhuhai, which is very near where to the university where I studied in 2004.
Grocery shopping was long bumper-cart adventure in a packed Jewel store. Virtually everyone in the city that’s hosting parties tomorrow was out in full shopping force. There were so many people that the store was having to call for employees to bring more shopping carts to the entrance. Ericka had a huge $175 list that we split up between the two of us to save time. I had trouble finding some things on my part of the list and asked a random knowledgeable-looking middle-aged female shopper where an item was. She gladly helped me, then I saw her again in another isle and asked another question, to which she playfully asked, “Am I your personal shopper?”.
Jewel was all out of lamb, so we had to stop at a small meat market on the way back to Ericka’s apartment. The rest of the day, almost all of it, till about 10 o’clock, was spent cooking. Jennifer stopped by two times to give us moral support and help out a bit. We had food of all kinds scattered on every available surface in the kitchen. We drank wine and listened to music and kept working and working and working till everything was ready and all the dishes were clean.
We strangely celebrated afterwards with an impromptu yoga-like contest. Ericka put some Pink Floyd on really loud and I asked her to copy my movements exactly. The idea was to stand in weird ways that would be exhausting while moving around and keeping balance at the same time. The competition lasted for the next 25 minutes and we took turns being the other’s instructor. In the end, we were both able to keep up with each other’s increasingly difficult routines, but found ourselves exhausted. This was unusual, fun, useful, wierd entertainment.

Sunday: 2-4-07 – Chicago
Ericka and I got up at 7AM and continued cooking our Super Bowl feast. The food manufacturing had been finished last night, but we still needed to slow cook the ribs and the lamb stew. Ericka went and got us a big Mcdonald’s breakfast for the task.
We put on the movie The Terminal, and spent the next few hours either watching, cooking or sleeping, then went to Ericka’s parent’s house to share our food and watch the game. Also there was her grandma, aunt, uncle, brother and Jennifer. We were complimented non-stop for the food, some of which I would have to admit turned out perfect, especially the ribs.
The game started at 5 o’clock and provided a rollercoaster of entertainment for a short time before it got boring and the Bears lost. I actually thought everybody was joking when I was in the bathroom during the first kick and I heard them cheering a touchdown.
These Chicagoans actually took the loss better than expected. Instead of dwelling on it, people seemed to be just blocking it out for the most part. Ericka and I went on to a party afterwards at her friend Steve’s house. It wasn’t exactly a party, but more of a gathering of friends. I performed an exorcism on a hiccupping girl in the stairwell. There was no smoking in the apartment so everybody was smoking in the stairwell. I noticed that the girl was hiccupping and offered an exorcism. She agreed and I had her lay back on the stairs as I started calmly talking like a hypnotherapist. Then, all the of the sudden, I grabbed her shoulders and started screaming into her face as loud as I could. She laughed hysterically but the hiccups remained.
This exorcism put my mood over the top and I continued similar acts at the bar Keegan’s, where I impersonated a retarded man, chanted by the fireplace and faked an Irish accent to the Irish bartender. The retarded act happened when a guy wanted to fight me for taking his picture. I’d been taking pictures of random strangers to test their reactions, expecting something like this to happen. The guy stood in my face and softly threatened me until he genuinely believed I had some kind of mental illness. He was still contemplating the sincerity of my disorder till I kindly asked him for a cigarette, to which he patted me on the back and calmly replied, “Enjoy the picture”.
Like the picture taking, the fireplace chanting developed because I didn’t really have anybody to talk to most of the time. I was sitting on the brick ledge by the fireplace when yoga-like movements just started to happen naturally. This quickly developed into chanting and the chanting got progressively louder as the people sitting nearby started to react more and more. Mostly everyone at the bar eventually got into the chant some way, either chanting along or booing.
The bartender had a heavy Irish accent and asked me if the chanting was for some kind of religious reason. We had a conversation for the next few minutes, in which I mocked the accent so perfectly that he actually believed I might have been from Ireland. A friend of Ericka’s also asked her where I was from after hearing the accent.
A girl kept kissing me all night. She had ridden to the bar in Ericka’s car and kissed me the first time in the parking lot. We went on to another bar called Hearts and she asked me to go outside to a car with her so I said that my religion would not allow such behavior. My last night out in the US was quite a good time.

Monday: 1-5-07 – Chicago
Ericka and I went out to breakfast this morning. We were both left retarded from the long party yesterday. She showed me a documentary that a friend of her’s in Carbondale had made about the Cosovo conflict. This man and his friend had traveled there just after the NATO bombings. Melosabitch wasn’t a very nice guy.
We fell asleep for a couple hours in the afternoon then felt a bit more energetic after that. I was going to sit at a Starbucks and use their wireless Internet access while Ericka worked from 5 till 8:30, but only T-mobile customers with usernames and passwords could log on. So, I went to work with Ericka and sat around reading and doing other tasks on my laptop in empty lesson rooms.
Ericka had me sit in on two of her piano lessons, the first of which was a Chinese girl that appeared to be about 7 years old. Ericka told the Amerca-looking woman who was with her that I sitting in on the lesson because I’d be moving to China tomorrow to begin teaching kids there. I’m assuming this woman was the adoptive mother because she said a few things in Chinese to me. The girl giggled and hid her face when I replied in Chinese. I again tried to speak in Chinese to her after the lesson, but she was too shy to even say her name. She did say “yes” when I asked if she likes the piano.
The second lesson I sat in on was Ericka’s favorite student, an 11-year-old black girl that was learning some difficult music. We went to dinner at a Middle Eastern restaurant immediately following this last lesson. There were only two other customers sitting at a booth when we arrived at 8:30, then a few more, all Middle Eastern, arrived as we ate. We sat at a big booth with large benches and pillows and smoked a hookah while waiting on the food. This my first hookah experience and I liked it. Instead of the kinds of dry brown tobacco I’m used to seeing, we had something that was wet and yellow. It tasted like apples and went down perfectly smoothly, so smoothly that it was difficult to hurt my throat even if I tried intentionally taking an exceptionally large hit.
Two birds flew around the restaurant constantly, which appeared to just be wild birds that had accidentally gotten in the building, but no employees seemed to be concerned.

Tuesday: 2-6-07 and 2-7-07 – Going to China
(note: two days seem like one when you cross the International Date Line and follow the sun)
I woke up this morning to an amazing coincidence when turning on the TV at 6:30. The headline news story was an astronaut love triangle which ended up with a female NASA astronaut trying to kidnap a female NASA engineer over a dispute about a male astronaut. The coincidence is that I had been talking about astronaut sanctity at almost the exact moment that the first-ever astronaut crime was being committed. I’d asked Ericka last night the same question that I’d posed on this blog a couple weeks ago, “Has anybody ever had sex in space”. Like me, Ericka also thought probably not, then I went on to tell her I agree because astronauts are so rigorously screened and professional. So much for that theory. So if you haven’t yet seen this news headline, let me tell you that the kidnapper drove from Houston to Orlando wearing a diaper because she didn’t want to waste any time stopping to use the bathroom. She knew her victim would be arriving at the Orlando airport at midnight so she waited in the parking garage and attacked her. The kidnapping was unsuccessful.
So, the reason I got up at 6:30 this morning was that I had a late morning flight from O’hare. Ericka got up at 8 o’clock and drove me to the airport. Light snow began falling along the way and she almost crashed on a turn at the airport.
I said goodbye to Ericka and checked in for my 11:45 Korean Air connecting flight to Seoul. It was delayed by 45 minutes, then after boarding, we had to sit for another 30 minutes while the plane was de-iced. A steaming dark orange liquid was sprayed over the entire exterior, then the same was done with a green liquid. I’d never flown in snow before, so these procedures were new to me. Also interesting were the armies of snow-blowing trucks clearing the runways at high speeds. These vehicles travel in packs of 8 to 10 and leave a cloud of snow 25 feet in the air.
There were hundreds of Koreans on this flight and just a handful of other nationalities. This was also my first time flying on the massive Beoing 747. The flight lasted 13 hours and I mostly occupied the time by watching movies and other programs on my seat screen, including, The Departed, The Marine, The Illusionist, a documentary about Van Gough and a documentary about scientists attempting to stop the aging process. Making the flight a bit more comfortable, I had an isle seat and the seat next to me was empty. A young Korean guy sat in the window seat. He had almost dropped his suitcase on me when putting it in the overhead compartment at boarding time. He never really said a word during the whole flight, but sometimes I would notice him looking my direction and he would just smile when I looked back.
Korean kids seem really well-behaved. There were kids everywhere around me and I barely heard a peep out of them for the whole 13 hours. The stewardesses would often offer to take the youngest children and walk around the plane with them to give the parents a short break every now and then.
Our travel path took us over Canada, Alaska, the Bearing Sea and Russia. Watching the plane’s GPS tracking, it appeared that it intentionally went out of its way to avoid North Korean airspace. A green line on the screen showed the most direct route, but the plane deviated from this line and flew back out over the Pacific as we neared the North Korean border. I guess an emergency landing in the ocean would probably be better than a North Korean runway.
We descended into Seoul just before sunset, passing over some mountains and landing on an island airport just west of the city. All transferring passengers must be rescreened by security and the line had about 300 people in a single file. Arriving at gate 27, I had a one hour wait before my flight to Hong Kong left. This airport is impressive with its floor to ceiling windows that are angled outwards so people can look down at the traffic directly below.
I even fell asleep during takeoff on the flight to Hong Kong, only waking up when I smelled dinner coming by. This was my third airline dinner in 24 hours. Korean Airlines stewardesses are all pretty clones of each other and are robotic about their emotions. They smile and make perfect eye contact while giving orders like drill sergeants. They wouldn’t serve me dinner till I put my seat in the complete upright position, which required a movement of about a half-inch. Upon landing, they demanded that everybody stay in their seat even after the plane had come to a stop at the gate. The hundreds of passengers rose simultaneously against orders and began opening the overhead compartments. Ninja flight attendants jumped in from every direction and smilingly pushed the compartments back closed even as passengers had their hands inside. They eventually regained order and made us all sit back down for a couple minutes.
It was nearly midnight now, so the Hong Kong airport was to be my home for the evening. Passing through customs, a 100+ person tour group was screaming at each other in line. They seemed to be about to come to blows, but I couldn’t understand why. Customs was painless and I wasn’t even asked a single question. At the customer service desk, I enquired about ferry service to Macau. I was hoping to be able to leave directly from the airport’s ferry terminal in the morning, but was told that this is only possible as a transfer service. So, since I passed through customs and technically entered Hong Kong soil, I will have to go downtown in the morning and leave from that ferry terminal.
Coincidentally, upon arrival in Hong Kong two years ago, I also spent the night in this same airport, so I had a good idea of the most comfortable place to go. The nice padded couches and chairs had since been removed from that area, but on the bright side, the place does offer free Wi-Fi access now, so I found a nice secluded corner with a power outlet and a table and used my laptop for a couple hours before sleeping on some padded benches.

Thursday: 2-8-07
I ended up sleeping on top of a sleeping bag on a carpeted floor of the airport lounge last night hidden away in a corner. The sleep lasted from just 3 till 5AM, when a cleaning woman started moving tables around me. I just watched the movie the Terminal the other day, so I really felt like that character. This airport actually always seems to be full of such characters, as dozens of people were sleeping on benches everywhere. I changed clothes in the bathroom then went downstairs to try and buy some breakfast. McDonalds and one other restaurant were the only things open and they didn’t take Visa so I went in search of an open currency exchange to get some Hong Kong Dollars, which can be used in both Hong Kong and Macau. An automatic currency exchange machine was broken, but a human-staffed currency exchange window had just opened so I got $432HKD in exchange for $60USD. An egg Mcmuffin meal cost $17HKD or $2.50USD.
I sat around the airport using the free internet access till dawn, then bought a $15 ticket for the Airport Express train. This seemed way too high for a short ride on a train, but it was at least a very modern train with carpeting and big plush seats. The train moved toward downtown Hong Kong as the sun came up just enough to see all the lush green tropical mountains nestled among the skyscrapers and massive bridges. But one of the most impressive sights in Hong Kong is the container shipping area where hundreds of thousands of containers full of Chinese goods are perpetually being loaded onto gigantic cargo ships.
At the main train station I took a short cab ride to the ferry terminal. My big suitcase was already killing me by this time, because it’s not the kind with big wheels on the bottom and an extendable handle. I paid $20 for a ferry ticket, then an employee stopped me during the boarding process and asked for another $3 because my suitcase was too big. This seemed absurd because nobody ever offered to give any help carrying the thing.
I’m not sure how long the boat ride was because I slept the whole time, which is amazing considering how extremely bumpy these hydrofoil craft are. Each one holds about 300 people on two levels. Upon passing through Macau customs, I went to a tourist info booth to ask how to get to a hostel that I had found on the Internet. The employee said to get on bus three and take it to the Lisboa Casino. I have a pretty good sense of direction in this city but missed my stop and spent an extra hour on the bus. This wasn’t a problem because it was interesting to see how the city had changed over the past two years. The residential areas were just as run down as ever, but the casino areas had seen billions of dollars invested in them. Near the ferry terminal, casinos have been built as small replicas of entire European and American cities. A 10-story artificial volcano rises between them. I would assume the volcano can puff smoke or something, but it was dormant at the time.
I had to switch buses once during this odyssey, which is when I saw a very old lady trip on the curb and fall to the ground as she tried to step up on the bus. The person behind her picked her up by the belt and she kept on walking like nothing had happened. I finally got off at the right bus stop but still had trouble finding the hostel. Nobody walking on the street claimed to know anything about it so I eventually called the place. It was just a few hundred feet away and they sent a girl down to guide me in the right direction. During the phone call, the owner kept asking, “what is your complexion?”, but I couldn’t understand his way of pronouncing the world “complexion”, so he eventually asked, “Are you white?”. This was just so the girl looking for me would know what to look for, I guess.
The hostel is called Augustos and is basically just a third floor apartment that has had bunk beds put into the rooms. The price is less than $10 per night, which is quite good for Macau, where rooms at most of the casinos go for over $100. The place is actually quite clean and the girl who guided me here seems to constantly be doing housework like mopping and scrubbing.
I went out walking after a wonderful but lukewarm shower. The hostel girl had given me certificate for a free hour of Internet access at a nearby internet café. While looking for this cafe, I passed through marketplaces looking for a new more comfortable suitcase, but I didn’t buy because I got the feeling that the vendors were trying to rip me off. The computers at the café had seen better days and the keyboard on mine kept randomly typing “;”. They did at least have headsets with microphones and decent bandwidth, so I was able to download Skype and make a couple phone calls.
Leaving the café, I stopped back by one of the vendors that was selling suitcases and offered $20 for the biggest one. They made a counter offer of $15 for one that was a bit smaller, so I said “too small” in Mandarin. Many of the people here don’t know Mandarin, so I really wasn’t expecting the old man and woman working here to, but the woman at least did. I had no idea what she was saying back to me, but she seemed to understand everything I said.
I carried my suitcase into the main square of the city, Senado Square, and had lunch at Mcdonalds. I’d tried getting some food from a couple local places, but their menus were in Chinese and I had forgotten to bring my dictionary. The two-level Mcdonald’s was so full that a line of about 10 women was waiting to get in the bathroom.
Back at the hostel, I transferred my things into the new suitcase, then sat the old suitcase and a few old clothes there wasn’t room for by a dumpster outside. I’m sure these items got a new owner within a short time. I next walked to the waterfront to try and pirate a wireless internet signal from one of the many casinos here. The development in this area is even more amazing than the volcano I’d seen earlier. Thousands of workers have torn up about a dozen city blocks to make way for several new luxury highrise casino’s, including Steve Wynn’s. Some of these buildings have already opened as the construction continues, which is where the most frantic work can be seen. There is a network of underground pedestrian and vehicle tunnels being built to handle all the new traffic, but they are not yet completed, so there is chaos right now as thousands of people try to cross the busy streets anywhere they can get a chance.
While I was impressed by the development, the wireless internet access wasn’t all that. All the hotels had networks, but they were locked down. I finally got a working signal in the lobby of one when a friendly guard came up and offered to show me a more comfortable place to sit. Hotel lobbies here don’t offer benches, even the best luxury hotels. They just don’t seem to want people sitting around for whatever reason. This guard told me that he had worked for a contractor in Baghdad as he led me to a plush guest-only area where a bunch of men were sitting around drinking in business suits. Sounds great, but the only problem was that the Internet access didn’t work here. So I drank a coke and smoked a cigarette in this luxury before walking on back to the hostel for a nap.
I slept soundly for three hours, then went out randomly walking the streets for an hour. At 9:45, I met with an old classmate, Eric. When I first arrived at the University of Macau two and a half years ago, the university had arranged for Eric to show me around. We continued hanging out for a few weeks after that till classes started. We’d barely spoken over the past two years except for a couple emails. He is now working full time at the university while he continues to pursue a masters degree in theatre/cinema. He had just bought a new car two weeks ago, which is what he picked me up in tonight. We drove to a Thai restaurant and spent an hour and a half eating and talking before he dropped me back off at my hostel. Just before I got out of the car, he said that a sign at a hotel next to the hostel was advertising hourly room rates.
Entering my room, I discovered an Asian guy of some kind sleeping on the other bunk bed in the room.

Friday: 2-9-07 – Macau
The temperature yesterday had been way above average, about 80 degrees with sun, and it didn’t seem to drop much at all overnight. It was so humid in my tiny room at the hostel that I had to get up and turn on a fan in the middle of the night. An educated mosquito harassed me for hours, so I couldn’t even lie outside of my covers. It was an educated mosquito because it would only land on me just after I had fallen asleep. By the time I would awaken and feel the bite, it had already flown off every time. So, I set a trap and exposed an arm as I peeked out from under the covers and pretended to sleep, which actually worked and the mosquito is dead. But, maybe killing the mosquito was just a waste of my blood.
The Asian guy sleeping on the other bunk bed woke up at the same time I did this morning, 8 o’clock. He was very friendly as we briefly spoke. Going to use the shower in the tiny bathroom, I saw that the overnight desk clerk was sleeping on blankets and snoring behind the desk. All of my possessions wouldn’t fit into my new smaller suitcase, even after I’d thrown a few things away yesterday, so I got rid of some more today. Now gone are a sleeping bag, coat and several shirts, which were all very old and worn anyway. As with the stuff I threw away yesterday, I’m sure this stuff got new Chinese owners within a short time.
Hitting the humidity of the streets, I was instantly glad to have less stuff and a smaller suitcase. It had rained hard for hours last night so the air was much more humid than yesterday. The plan for today was to go to the adjacent island of Taipa, which is where the University of Macau is. Trying to get on a bus going there wasn’t easy, especially with my suitcase. Every bus was packed like sardines and some drivers weren’t even letting on new passengers, which is exactly how things used to be when I used to go to school here. Eventually, a more expensive bus came along that was nearly empty. It costs more because it goes all the way to the furthest island, but the price is still only about 75 cents.
Getting off the bus at the bottom of the big hill the university sits on, I was greeted by a new 40-story luxury casino that is under construction there. When I left here in December 2004, this was just an empty lot with construction equipment being brought onto it.
The main section of the university looks pretty much like it did when I left. I sat in an outdoor lobby area for two hours using my laptop. The plan was to use the university’s wireless service, but that never happened. I’d gotten a password from Eric last night, but there was some other problem that wouldn’t allow my computer to log on.
There’s a wall at the main entrance of the university called The Nine Dragon Wall, which appropriately has carvings of nine dragons on it. This is the place I’d agreed to meet Eric and his friend David for lunch at 12:30. David arrived first and took me to his office at the school. He’s a grad student from a city near Beijing and is studying translation. We’d met once before two years ago on my last night in town when Eric had taken me to his apartment for a ‘hot pot’ dinner.
Eric met us in the office a few minutes later and we went to a nearby restaurant in his car for lunch. David offered to let me stay in his dorm overnight, so we took my suitcase there after the meal. His dorm is for Asian students only and they are not allowed visitors, so David carried my suitcase so it wouldn’t look like I was moving in. The guard at the door didn’t even blink an eye at me. This 20-story dorm building was just beginning to be built when I left in 2004. David’s roommate is out of town and so are the two people that live in the connected room, so he has the bathroom all to himself right now. Underwear was hung on clothes lines all over the room. The bed I’ll be sleeping in is covered with a mosquito net.
We left the building through a different entryway and the guard did a double-take when he saw me walk out, but didn’t say anything. Eric and David now went back to school and I walked down by the area I used to live. Passing underneath the giant new casino, workers had fires burning in wheelbarrows, which appeared to be for the purpose of heating up tar. Walking by the rear of the building, I heard a loud boom and cement chunks started falling all around me. The people on the sidewalk jumped underneath an awning and I was quick to follow. The chunks that fell closest to the building appeared to be about softball sized, while the pieces falling across the street were quarter-sized, still big enough to do some serious damage when falling from 40 floors.
The area near my old apartment was pretty much the same except for the four 30-story apartment towers built across the street. I used to take pictures of this construction project everyday and put them into a time-lapse video which is on this website.
Next, I took an extremely crowded bus to the Hac Sa beach in Coloane, which is the third of the three islands that make up Macau. The bus was so packed that I was shoved by the crowd up against the front windshield. There was a tourist from Melbourne on this bus that I spoke to briefly. Along this route, we passed by another area of heavy casino development, which includes the Venetian Macau.
There were a couple hundred people at Hac Sa beach, most of whom were buying hot food from the dozen or so vendors that regularly operate there. I walked down the beach a few hundred yards and sat for a while before returning to the university. Eric had earlier told me that the library allows guest internet access, but a librarian dispelled this myth. However, I did just so happen to find a logged-in computer on the second floor, so I spent an hour trying to book a Monday flight from Zhuhai to Beijing. China apparently doesn’t have the convenient electronic booking systems that US does, or if they do, they’re not available in English yet.
I’d been hoping to hang out with another former classmate tonight, Dash, but was never able to get ahold of him. He responded to an email with his phone number, but a man that didn’t speak English answered every time I tried to call. Not having a cell phone here is a real problem. If you think that pay phones in your country are bad, then you should see the situation in Macau.
So, with the evening now free, I decided to walk up the mountain near the university and take a few pictures from the pagoda at the top, where I sat until after the sun went down. For dinner I got some food from Mcdonalds and some beer and toothpaste from small stores. I didn’t eat the toothpaste but ate the food on the waterfront facing the main island. It was now about 8 o’clock and I was already exhausted from walking around all day in the humidity, so I called David and told him I was ready to return to the dorm. He had to come with because a student ID is required to get in the building. We met in his office and he gave me a student worker jacket so I would look less suspicious walking into his Asian-only dorm. The guard didn’t even seem to pay attention when we came in the main entrance.
I gave David one of my beers and we talked for a few minutes. He said that the Chinese authorities might seize my books if they search my suitcase, which are about the Cultural Revolution and the Tiananmen Square incident. He went off to play video games with other students in the building at 9 o’clock and left me to myself for the rest of the evening.

Saturday: 2-10-07
David’s dorm room was too warm and humid all night long, but at least it was free. I got up and left at 7:45 before he had awoken, so I left him a thank you note and a $1 bill. The dollar bill wasn’t meant as any kind of payment, I just thought he might like to have one just for the hell of it.
His building is on total lockdown. Not only are there guards at every single entrance, but the elevator requires that a student ID be scanned before any buttons can be pushed. The doors to the stairwell are for emergency only and have alarms, so I had to keep pushing the elevator call button till one opened up that had people inside who were going down. The crazy thing about all this is that there is very little crime here. Such extreme security can be seen everywhere but it is just more for a piece of mind than for necessary protection.
My first destination of the day was the China border, which I took a 30-minute standing room only bus ride to get to. Many of the buses now have a large LED display showing the vehicle’s speed. This device appears to track the buses location and beep very loudly whenever the driver exceeds the speed limit of a certain area. People here can be very disrespectful in any kind of crowd, especially crowded roads, so this speed monitoring system is probably for the best.
The Chinese people are just now beginning to celebrate the Chinese New Year, which is on Feb 18th. It’s the biggest holiday of the year here, maybe even more widely and wildly celebrated than Christmas is in the US. So, it’s not the easiest time to travel around the country. The Macau/China border took longer to pass through than it ever has for me before. Like I just said, people here are disrespectful in crowds and one of the most obvious signs of this is their inability to form a line. I estimate that about 3000 people were trying to form about two dozen lines, with little success. The most orderly lines seemed to be the ones closest to the walls, so that’s were I went. Even there, several people pushed past me. I love the Chinese people in general but I hate the Chinese people in line.
The customs process was completed after about an hour, then I was in the Chinese city of Zhuhai. Several men approached me as I walked along, offering everything from taxis to prostitutes. One man made a fist and pumped one of his fingers on the other hand in and out of the fist as he smiled at me.
Because of my lack of internet access in Macau, I’d been unable to book a room online, so I walked three blocks to a hotel that Johanna and I once stayed at with her Macau roommates two years ago. It’s not a good deal by Chinese standards, but the rooms are modern and the price is still only about $25 per night. I’ll be staying here two nights, then hopefully will be able to preplan cheaper arrangements after that.
I had several errands to run now, including buying a SIM card for my phone, buying a power adapter and finding an internet café. Hitting the street and trying to ask a couple questions, I was quickly reminded how little English is spoken here, so I returned to my room and wrote down a few Chinese phrases to help me run the errands. I know a lot of basic vocabulary by memory, but not words like “power adapter” and SIM card. People understood what I was saying but I understood little of their responses. With my little bit of Chinese and the peoples little bit of English, I eventually got everything I was looking for.
I found an internet café just a couple blocks from the store but then realized I didn’t have any Chinese currency, so first thing first was to exchange money, which I did at a small candy booth in the underground mall by the border. It seemed strange for a candy booth to offer such services, but the exchange rate was normal so whatever. I bought the SIM card from a small electronics vendor at the underground mall, then also bought a 1GB USB drive from them. I packed a USB drive when I left home, but it somehow has turned up missing.
As for the power adapter, I discovered an appliance store in another mall just next to my hotel that was selling them for $1. Back at the hotel, I got my phone working with the new SIM card and headed back to the Internet Café for an hour. This place has about 100 decent computers with flat screen displays, webcams and microphone headsets. There’s an ashtray next to every computer and lots of smoking going on. Smoking is only an issue here in the most upper class of places. A man came up behind me and stared at my screen and smiled while I typed.
Next, I met a woman named Eva in front of my hotel, who is the woman who that’s hiring me for the teaching job. Her organization, called the Dadi Preschool Group, has 100 schools throughout China and she is responsible for hiring the foreigners to teach at all of them. Not every school has its own foreigner. For example, I will be the only one for all of the three schools in the city of Wuxi.
Eva had her 7 year-old daughter with her, named Kylee, who greeted me by asking for my name in English. Kylee was very eager to speak and had a very good beginner’s level knowledge of the language. Eva bought the three of us snacks; an ear of corn for her and I, and a chicken wing on a stick for Kylee. The corn tasted like it had been cooked days ago, but I tried to eat as much as possible before discreetly throwing the rest away.
We got on a city bus that passed by several of the tourist areas in town, including the waterfront. This bus ride lasted over an hour and nearly put Kylee to sleep. Eva and I talked the entire time and understood each other most of the time. She has a degree in English but said she was having trouble with it because she’s been sick and hasn’t been able to practice a lot lately.
We got off the bus near Eva’s brother’s house so she could drop off the tired Kylee there. Kylee became fully energized again when she realized she was going to her uncle’s house. Eva and I next took another bus to the bus station where long distance busses leave from so she could get me a ticket to Wuxi for Monday. Four bus companies are operating out of this station from different buildings and it is complete chaos, especially now since everyone is trying to leave for home and visit their families for the big upcoming holiday. We went from company to company checking the prices, stopping to use the bathroom at one which had an attendant at the bathroom door collecting money. If you ever thought Greyhound stations were nasty, then you should see the situation here. This was one of the top ten nastiest bathrooms I’ve ever seen and the whole floor was covered with standing urine. The conditions of the buildings lobbies weren’t much better, but the biggest problem was the pushy screaming crowds inside. People would just push past Eva and I as we were talking into the microphone on the window to the clerks. Eva would be in mid sentence when people would push in from both sides at the same time and start yelling questions into the mic.
Most bus companies either had no tickets left to Wuxi or didn’t have any buses covering that route, so I ended up buying a ticket to the nearby city of Nanjing instead, which is just another 2 hour bus ride to Wuxi. The ticket cost about the same price it would in the US, $80, which isn’t surprising since the cost of fuel here is either the same price or more expensive. The bus company didn’t take Visa and I didn’t have enough cash on me, so Eva gladly let me borrow the extra cash till I see her again on Monday.
Next, her husband picked us up in his car with a male passenger in the front seat. He dropped the passenger off a few blocks away and the three of us went to a restaurant that Eva said is famous in this province. There were about 500 people here on two floors and not a single table left anywhere. Every patron and every employee was screaming over each other as loud music played in the background. So, we went on to another restaurant that was smaller and had a few tables available, where we ordered a table full of dishes that included roots and tentacles sticking out of some of them. Even the tentacles were surprisingly great, and I only bit into one terrible thing during the whole meal. Eva’s husband ordered a small pitcher of yellow rice wine that we poured into thimble sized cups and cheersed to each drink. Eva didn’t drink any and kept getting more and more worried that I would get drunk with each thimble full. I tried to explain to her that alcohol was a big part of American culture and that it would take a lot more than thimbles to get me drunk, but she eventually demanded that her husband not pour us any more thimbles. He seemed annoyed and bought more of the wine to go.
Speaking of Eva’s husband, his driving is insane, but its also typical around here. He sometimes even seems to be just honking at thin air. He just bought the nice new car a couple weeks ago and will probably need to get the horn replaced in another two weeks. If a pedestrian threatens to get in front of him, he speeds up and honks. If a line of 10 cars is stopped in front of him, he lays on the horn along with everybody else in line. You just can’t imagine the noise in this city.
Eva told me that her boss was originally weary of hiring me because she thought having a young American man in the schools would be distracting to the Chinese teachers, most of whom are young, female and single, so I promised to play nice. Hehe.

Sunday: 2-11-07 – Zhuhai
What do Chinese people eat for breakfast? There are a couple blocks of restaurants behind my hotel, so I went there to try and answer that question this morning. Most of these restaurants are not restaurants in the traditional western sense because they are so small. The indoor areas of each one may only have room for one or two tables. Some offer additional seating on the street and others offer no seating at all. The streets in this dining area have little vehicle traffic and are filled with people pushing around carts and processing foods. It is common to see people seated outdoors at a restaurant next to cages overfilled with live chickens.
There seemed to be few of these restaurants serving any food at 9AM, so I bought a bag of potato chips and went on to the Internet café for over two hours. A cleaning woman was actively scrubbing tables but should have been working on the bathroom instead, which was spreading the strong smell of urine throughout the building. It was so bad that I eventually had a headache.
I made a few calls on Skype but only got ahold of Nic. Much of the time was spent booking hotels in Nanjing and Beijing. I’m going to stay in Nanjing on Wednesday and Thursday night. The Beijing booking is for when Johanna arrives there at the end of the month. The original plan had been to stay at the apartment she will rent there, but her Chinese roommate said that only married couples could spend the night together in China, like it was the law or something.
I left the café at 12:30 and went on another search for food, coming upon a large indoor market where dozens of workers were processing meats, fruits and vegetables. Blood was running down the floor drains as whole pigs, fish, chickens and who knows what else was being processed. The meats were displayed on a long table stretching down a 30-foot wall of the building. A vendor at the end of the table was selling hot foods, including whole cooked duck heads. I told him “very hungry” and he pointed out a couple options he thought I might like, including a half roasted chicken and some shredded somethings. I think those shredded somethings were pork stomachs, but I’m not sure. That’s what I ordered and the man asked for $1.25. He then put a wad of the stomachs into a deep fryer for just a few seconds, then mixed it with sesame seeds, soy sauce and an some unknown green leaves. He handed me a piece of the stomach and it honestly tasted good, but maybe just because I was so hungry.
The other workers in the building had by this time noticed my presence and the fact that I gave a thumbs up on the food. They all started speaking to me or about me as I stopped to take a couple pictures of the long fresh meat table. The Chinese people really seem to appreciate it when a foreigner likes their food or takes an interest in what they’re doing.
I ate my stomachs back at my hotel room, then went out looking to buy shoes and socks. The search took me over several city blocks as I very casually shopped. It is just amazing to see how much stuff is for sale here, and to think, this is considered a small city. The streets are filled with storefronts, and it seems that just about every building in this area also has multi-level malls inside of it, and then there’s also several large underground malls. I entered one of these underground malls and saw something I just have to have; an electronic Chinese dictionary that recognizes characters handwritten on the screen. I was browsing a store that sold these when a saleswoman demonstrated this wonderful ability. The device cost $200 at this particular store, but I’m hoping that I can find a better deal eventually. Either way, I’ve got to get one in the next couple weeks.
Buying shoes in this country is always a problem because my feet are “Tai da le”(too big). This shortage always makes it hard to find something I like for a decent price. Visiting several stores today eventually led to buying a pair of Pradas for about 30 dollars. Prada seems to be the most pirated brand right now and the logo can be seen on just about every form of clothing and accessories imaginable. The saleswoman who sold me the shoes kept saying, “Prada”, like it was the real thing or something.
Being in China will really make a white person realize what being a minority is all about. I passed thousands of people today but the only white ones I saw were on TV. It takes some time to get used to so many eyes looking at you everywhere you go, but you eventually ignore it subconsciously. I personally have always thought it makes things interesting, but some people don’t feel the same way. For example, I saw a business man at KFC yesterday who was having trouble communicating with a cashier. The dozen or so people standing around him in line all intervened to help and the man threw his hands in the air and walked out. I hate to see my kind show obvious displeasure like this because it gives us all a bad name. People will never forget it if someone they are trying to help responds with anger. I’ll agree it can be overwhelming if a person is not in the mood, but some people are never in the mood and they should just stay home. If you’re going to a foreign country to make big money off it, then deal with it.
I went back to the Internet café in the late afternoon. The smell was gone but nearly every computer was in use and the bandwidth was worthless. Nearly every person was playing one kind of game or another. I left and took a short nap at the hotel before meeting a former classmate from Macau, Dash. We took a cab to a very nice nearby restaurant inside a large hotel. A whole table full of food came to a total of $20, which is an expensive meal for 2 here.
Dash and I walked through the area around my hotel for a while after eating and he informed me that all the hotels near the border are operating large brothels inside, including mine. The owner’s pay bribes to regional police officials, sometimes really huge ones depending on the size of the brothel. One case was recently uncovered where an official accepted $750,000 from a single establishment in the city. I already knew that brothels operated in every city, but not at this widespread level. Dash even pointed at advertisements for women in the elevator of my hotel, which said that the price was about $25 for two hours. He asked if any women had been knocking on my door at night, and sure enough, somebody did knock last night and I didn’t answer. Dash says that the hotel management informs the girls as to what rooms foreign guys stay in.
The border to Macau closed at midnight, so I walked there with Dash so he could return before that time.

Monday: 2-12-07 – Leaving Zhuhai
Checking out of my hotel this morning, the receptionist asked me to write my signature on the receipt multiple times to confirm my identity. She and the other clerks examined all the signatures for a long time as if they were handwriting experts. Another clerk had asked me to sign the back of my Visa card when I’d used it to sign in two days ago. And for the past few days since entering Hong Kong, nearly everyone had looked at the back of the unsigned card with a frown. Funny thing is, I’ve used the card in the US hundreds of times and not a single person has ever asked me to sign it.
I took a cab to the national headquarters of the Dadi Preschool Group, the one I’ll be working for, which was just a 15-minute cab ride from my hotel. I’d have taken a bus, but I’d never been there before and all the information I had was an address on a business card. The office was located in a large attractive modern office building in a very well-kept part of the city. Eva, the woman from the company who’d shown me around the city on Saturday, met me in the lobby and we went to her office. The Dadi Group has their facilities on one of the upper floors of the building and Eva works in the English department, which handles the hiring of foreigners and the creation of curriculum. There were about 15 people working in this room and Eva walked around introducing me to several, then she walked into the main part of the office and did the same there.
Sitting back at her desk, she offered to have someone from the school I’ll be working for in Wuxi meet my bus when it arrives in Nanjing tomorrow. I had to decline the offer because I’ve decided to stay and hang out in Nanjing for two days before going on to Wuxi, but it was very unexpected because Wuxi and Nanjing are several hours apart.
Eva and I had lunch together in the building’s canteen, where dozens of employees from all the companies in the building were dining. A girl from an insurance company asked to have lunch with me but I had to politely decline since I was eating with Eva. I ordered a chicken and a beef dish. The chicken turned out to be chicken feet cooked with some vegetables that were so spicy I had to run and buy a coke. The whole meal cost less than $1 and included free rice and soup. The soup was self-served out of a huge metal container that was sitting on the floor.
Eva took me walking around the area surrounding the building after the meal, which includes a nice cinema and library. It was another 80-degree sunny day outside. Eva’s office gets an hour and a half for lunch and we returned a half-hour early. All the lights were off and nearly every employee was sleeping on their desk or fold up cots at this time. The lights came on at 1 o’clock and everyone promptly went back to work.
I spent the next couple hours helping Eva with a textbook writing project. The company writes its own books and part of her job is to occasionally update them. Most of the students are about 5 years old, so this was very simple work for me. I edited what Eva had already written and helped her write a few simple dialogs about talking on the phone, Mother’s Day and Father’s Day. She also needed to write rhyming songs for the children to sing about Mother’s and Father’s day, which she said was proving to be a very difficult task. So, I did a quick Google search and found her all kinds of new material, which she was very grateful for. Eva’s boss then noticed our progress and came to ask me questions about a project she was working on. Eva says that the company is looking to hire a foreigner in the main office and that she will try to get the job for me. We’ll see.
Eva and I caught a cab to the bus station at 2:30 so I could catch my 3:30 bus to Nanjing. There were at least 25 buses leaving at this time and hundreds of people standing around in the lobby and outside. Passengers frantically swarmed the Nanjing bus’s luggage bay as soon as it pulled up to the loading area. I didn’t know what all the rush was about but I would soon learn. Eva stayed with me this whole time and even got on the bus to make sure I got a seat. The Chinese can always be relied on to help out their guests as much as possible.
So, why was everyone in such a frantic rush to get on the bus? Because some seats are awful. I was the last on the bus, so go figure. This bus is unlike anything I’ve ever seen before in the Western world, as it has bunk beds instead of seats. There are three rows of beds running from front to back and the isles are so narrow that even a moderately overweight person would have serious troubles.
There was one bed left; the bottom bed in the very back of the center row. This is absolutely the worst spot because it is shorter than the other beds, there is less head room and it has no storage space. So, the tallest person on the bus had the least space. There was a 2-year old child with the woman to the right of me. One hour into the ride, a young man asked the woman and I to move our things from the narrow isle, then he put down a blanket and laid down there. As if the place wasn’t already crowded enough. And to make matters worse, there was a no-shoes policy and the whole bus smelled like feet. Well, at least I saved $100 by not taking a plane.
There is a pair of communal sandals sitting outside the bathroom door, which is important to wear because the Chinese floor toilet inside results in a perpetually wet floor. Being a woman on a Chinese bus must be miserable because of this floor toilet. If you’ve ever used a bus bathroom, you know how hard it can be to stand up, but imagine trying to squat over a hole in the ground without even having the benefit of hand rails.
The bus stopped at the Chinese version of a rest area at 6:30, where hundreds of people were using the bathroom, eating at 2 restaurants and buying food from a store. At any one time there were at least a dozen busses in the parking lot and the drivers layed on the horns whenever they would enter or leave. If you’ve never heard a bus horn, it’s just a little less loud than a steamship horn. I had earlier bought two cups of noodles for dinner in Zhuhai, so I just needed to find some hot water. I eventually asked a security guard something that probably sounded like “water, hot, where”, and he pointed me in the right direction. I also bought 2 of what looked like hot dogs from a hot food vendor outside, but the meat was soft, sweet and terrible so I threw the second one away. Not too many foreigners must travel by bus because I was stared at more than ever at this rest area.
Back on the bus, the bus boy got into an argument with the woman laying next to me. I call this person the bus boy because he sits next to the driver and seems to be in charge of things. The homeless passenger was laying in the isle between me and the woman, so the bus boy stood in the isle on the other side of me and argued with her over top of me. They yelled back and fourth at each other for several minutes about the bus company’s child passenger policy, I think. The woman had apparently violated it somehow. This was the second of three times that the bus boy would make comments like this to the woman.
The bus made no more break stops and continued on the highways throughout the night. Our only stops were toll booths and gas stations, where nobody was allowed to get off. The roads we traveled are controlled access and just as good as anything I’ve seen in the US interstate system. Safety rails are in place and drainage and erosion controls seem to be extensive and effective. The only problem is the huge number of toll booths, of which we must have passed through at least 50 during the trip.
I ended up sleeping decently from about 7PM through the rest of the night. At first, being directly above the buses engine was bothering me because of the heat it produced, but it actually was quite nice after the air got a bit cooler. The beds are raised at the head so the person behind has more leg room, which is actually quite a decent way to sleep. I could have used another foot of leg room, but it wasn’t a huge problem. I rate Chinese buses “satisfactory”, unless you have to take a crap.

Wednesday: 2-12-07 – To the 2500 year-old city of Nanjing
I’m not sure how many miles the bus traveled overnight, but it must have been at least 800. We went from the tropical climate of Zhuhai to the semi-temperate one of Nanjing, where the temperature was about 50 degrees. Rain was falling and a heavy fog was in the air. I thought our bus was non-smoking but a guy lit up by the bathroom at 8AM. We made a couple stops and let off passengers as we neared the city of Nanjing at 10AM.
The traffic in the city was awful and a single traffic light took 30 minutes to get through. This light let us enter a long bridge that crossed the Yangtze river, which appeared to be about a mile wide. The bus’s last stop was the main bus station at the center of the city. From here I began following signs pointing towards a subway station. The extendable handle broke off my new suitcase just 5 minutes into the journey, which make it very awkward and uncomfortable to carry. The wheels still worked, but I had to bend down in order to roll it using holding the non-extendable handle. The rain was still falling and my pant legs quickly got soaked from puddles.
The subway station was actually several blocks away. An employee saw me looking at a map and offered assistance buying a ticket. The ticket was dispensed with a machine and is actually just a plastic coin with an electronic chip inside of it. The gates leading to the train are opened by holding the coin over a sensor. The trains are much more modern than I might have expected, with all the cars open to each other so the people can freely move from car to car without passing through any doors. There is only one subway line in the city and it appears to have opened in the last couple years.
My stop was just 3 stations away, then I was hopelessly lost. I had written down directions to the hotel I’d booked, but these directions were now unclear and I suddenly realized I hadn’t even written down the name or phone number of the hotel. So, I ate a much needed lunch at a nearby Mcdonalds and asked the cashier where the nearest Internet café was. Her response was unclear, but I went in the direction she pointed and again asked for directions from a woman pushing a cart of trash around. More pieces were now falling off the bottom of my suitcase, but it was still rolling, for now.
The internet café was in a narrow alley about 150 feet from the street. The girl working at the front desk asked for identification, which had not been necessary when using the Internet in Zhuhai. The computers here were in several small dirty rooms attached to the main hallway of the café. Getting the phone number of my hotel online, I called and the receptionist spoke barely a word of English. We were getting nowhere, so just told her I’d find the place on my own.
Leaving the building, I immediately lost the card I’d written down all the information about my hotel on. The wheels fell off my suitcase before I even made it out of the alley. Carrying it at my side proved to be too difficult, so I just balanced the whole thing on top my head and steadied it with both hands. As if I hadn’t already been getting enough stares, now people were doing double-takes. I guess a wet foreigner carrying a suitcase on his head is not a common sight.
I at least remembered the street name my hotel was on, so I asked a couple people where that street was and they pointed me in the right direction. Things didn’t get any easier even after I spotted the hotel’s sign, because the only entrance was at the rear of the building and not well labeled. Check-in was on the 6th floor and I was greeted by the receptionist that barely spoke a word of English. According to the Internet, the hotel took VISA, but not according to this clerk. She seemed to be oblivious of my online reservation, so it is unclear how I’ll get my online credit card deposit back.
The hotel only costs about $6 per night and is very clean. I have a private room but no private bathroom. The are several showers, each of which is in its own small private room, but the water temperature constantly changes between cold and scalding. Very surprisingly, I turned on my laptop to find an unsecured wireless internet signal, but like the water in the shower, it’s unstable.
After settling into my room, I took the subway to the main railway station in hopes of buying a ticket. As I expected, not a single word in the building was in English. There were about 30 ticket windows open and each one had a different Chinese label above it. So, I went to the information window and asked which ticket window a person could buy a ticket to the city of Wuxi at. Surprisingly, the information clerk replied, “17”, in English. At window #17, I thought the clerk said the price was 440(yuan), so I handed her 500 and she just stared. She finally handed back 456 along with my ticket and the people in line behind me laughed. As it turns out, the ticket cost was 44 instead of 440, so maybe I should brush up on my counting skills. I believe that Wuxi is a few hours from Nanjing, so $5USD seems quite cheap for a ticket.
Walking away from the ticket counter, I realized that the clerk had given me a ticket for today instead of Thursday. I had said Thursday, but she apparently had been too shocked from getting the 500 yuan to remember. I received a corrected ticket with no problems.
For dinner, I had a meal from a KFC by the train station. The cashier kept saying something in Chinese I didn’t understand, then the person in line behind me translated, “soup or salad”, I replied, “soup”, but the soup never came and I eventually ate the rest of the meal and left. It was now raining too hard to try and do anything in the city, so I went to a very nice internet café located above KFC. Despite the nice condition of the place, the toilets were Chinese style and the bandwidth was terrible.
Strangely, I had been unable to access CNN.com at the café earlier today, but was able to at this one. Supposedly CNN is banned all over the country, so this is a bit confusing. Wikipedia was inaccessible from both locations. According to recent news reports, Google has agreed to ban sensitive subjects in China, but that also doesn’t seem to be the case. I typed in the word, “Tiananmen”, and the first result returned was a picture of that man standing in front of the line of tanks in 1989.
It was raining harder than it had all day as I returned to my hotel at 7:00. The streets here turn into a muddy mess when they get wet. There is a 24-hour store below my hotel, where I bought a huge beer, apple and a pack of cigarettes for $1 before returning to my room for the evening. Luckily, tomorrow is supposed to be sunny, but it will be a bit cold at 40 degrees.

Wednesday: 2-14-07 – Nanjing
I got up at 7 o’clock this morning and ate a cup of instant noodles for breakfast, just like a Chinese person. The hotel was cold and it doesn’t appear they even have a heating system. In the bathroom a man was squatting on one of the Chinese toilets with the door wide open reading a newspaper and grunting. He made no attempt to close the door it when I walked in.
Watching a few minutes of the only English TV station, CCTV-9, they were continuing their in-depth coverage of the 6-party nuclear talks with North Korea. Like all the TV stations in China, this one is of course state-run, so there is never any negative news about China. As for the North Korean talks, CCTV-9’s reporters claim that there were two antagonists screwing up negotiations; one was North Korea and the other was the US. Just as there is some truth to what the US media says about China, there is probably also some truth to what they say about the US. They claim that the US’s unwillingness to negotiate certain issues ruins the hope of any progress at all with North Korea.
The weather was bright and sunny today. The afternoon even felt warm. I went out onto the streets at 8 o’clock looking for tourist bus #1, which I had read about on the Internet yesterday. Mistakenly, I had thought it stopped near my hotel, but that was just regular bus #1 and not tourist bus #1. So, after hopelessly searching for a bus that didn’t exist for 30 minutes, I took the subway to the main railway station hoping to find the bus or at least more information.
After 30 more minutes of searching, I finally at least found a bus stop where the correct bus would supposedly be stopping. There were many buses in this area and huge whirlwinds of trash were moving through. Searching for this tourist bus, I realized that I didn’t know the Chinese character for tourist, so I still couldn’t tell tourist bus #1 from regular bus #1. I pointed at the sign for the bus and asked a Chinese guy “where”. He pointed to a wooden bus right in front of us. This bus really was made almost completely out of wood. They had been trying to go for the cable-car look, but the years of wear and lack of maintenance left for a pretty pathetic replica. The seats in the bus resembled park benches and there were a couple small tables in the front. The rear doors were about to fall off and cold air rushed in.
We moved along very slowly through the heavy traffic and I got off 45 minutes later in one of the city’s main tourist areas; a wooded mountain where an emperor and Sun Yat-Sen are buried. The roads leading up the mountain are lined with birch trees and are maintained much better than other areas of the city. Both tombs cost about $10 each to enter, so I just decided to explore the area and save the tombs for another time when I’m on a date or something.
There was a stone structure on either side of the road where I got off the bus, both of which were apparently part of the old main entrance to the emperor’s tomb, meaning they would have been about 600 years old. From the looks of the stonework, they definitely could have been that old. One was just a gate with three arches and the other was an open enclosure with a large spire and a statue of a dragon in the center. Walking another half-mile up the mountain, I came to the area near Sun Yat-Sen’s tomb, which was terribly over populated with stores and sales people who all yelled at me to come buy stupid little trinkets. I decided it was time to leave when a woman charged me $1.25 for a cup of coffee, which would have normally cost about 10 cents in this city.
I now got on tourist bus #2 and rode to one of the gates in the city’s ancient walls. An emperor ordered these walls built in the end of the 14th century, I think. They used to encircle the city but now cut through the middle of it. Only some sections still remain and only some of those are still taken care of. The section I hiked along was not one of the maintained ones. There was trash everywhere and homeless people had been taking bricks out of the wall to make shelters. Examining these loose bricks more closely, about 25% of them were molded with Chinese characters on one side of them. There are tens of thousands of these character bricks embedded in the wall and probably just as many more loosely laying around. I just might have to get myself one since nobody seems to be concerned about them.
Walking along the top of the wall, I eventually came to a spot where the path was blocked by another wall that was built just for the purpose of blocking the path. This blocking wall wasn’t very wide, so I was able to slide around it and keep walking in an area that was even less maintained. Good-sized trees were growing up through the bricks and only a narrow path was walkable. Walking along here for several hundred more feet, I eventually came to an area where the wall ended at a highway. There was no path leading to the bottom, so I climbed a tree down.
A several hundred foot wide canal had been running alongside the section of wall I walked and it continued on after the wall ended. I followed this canal for at least two miles from here. There were stone paths the entire way, some of which that were luxurious and some that were in ruins. The sights along the canal were so interesting that I just kept on walking and walking. People were just being very Chinese and there were lots of picture opportunities.
I eventually came to an area along the water with more walls and lots and lots of Chinese tourists. People had brought out PA equipment and were performing different kinds of Chinese music that included both instrumental and voice parts. This is where I ran into the only foreigners I saw all day, Naomi and Wayne from Perth, Australia. It turns out that they had come to the city looking to teach English, so I promised to put them into contact with the woman who hired me. That woman, Eva, had paid the agency who found me $700, so I think I should get at least a couple hundred dollars if Eva hires Wayne and Naomi.
My camera was quickly running out of available storage space, so I decided to slowly try to find my way back to a subway station. Walking through an outdoor food market, I saw large softball-sized fish heads that were still breathing on a table. Yes, it was just the heads, but they were still trying to catch a breath. The woman working at this booth was holding whole fish above her head and slamming them onto the ground as hard as she could. Each of these fish weighed at least a couple pounds, so she had to beat them to a bloody pulp before they quit moving. She noticed my picture-taking and pulled a three-foot long fish from a tank and held it up for me. Unfortunately, she didn’t slam this one down for the picture.
I next came to a bridge where hundreds of finches were being sold by old men. It is common to see old men walking around in China holding small finch cages, as they apparently think watching the birds is relaxing. The old men on this bridge had driven the birds here stacked several cages high on the back of old scooters and bicycles. One man had his birds trained to fly into the trees and return to his fingers after a few seconds.
For a snack, I bought some pork on sticks from one of the many street vendors that grill meat on long narrow grills all over the city. I then got on a regular bus #1 hoping to eventually come across a subway station. The bus was double-deckered and the windows on the upper level could be opened wide. It felt a bit chilly but offered a very good view of the city’s activity.
When we eventually came to a subway station, I realized that there was also an underground shopping center there, so I walked around in search of a new suitcase. This area eventually led to a massive upscale shopping center on the ground floor of a downtown building. There were at least 100 people selling perfume alone, so the place smelled great. As for suitcases, even the cheap ones cost nearly $100, so I decided this wasn’t the place for me to buy. In the subway station, the recorded voice came over the PA system saying in English, “This is Valentines Day, so wish that all lovers all over the world get married and live a happy life”. Valentines day isn’t big here, but some companies are starting to market it.
After a brief stop at my hotel, I went to a supermarket located a block away. This store was situated on two levels, had thousands of customers and sold everything from live crabs to suitcases. The live crabs were of little interest to me, but the suitcases were, and they just so happened to be priced right. I’d learned my lesson on cheap suitcases yesterday, so this one had to be different. Wheels and handles attached to the exterior are worthless unless you never plan on carrying anything other than air. So, I found one with an embedded handle and wheels for about $20.
Getting to the checkout among the crowds wasn’t easy, so I was pretty disappointed be told there was no bar code on the suitcase and that I would have to go back upstairs with an employee to show him the price. The journey actually turned out interesting because the employee kept talking to me in Chinese and we were actually understanding each other, at least a little bit. On the way back down, he started speaking very broken English. Most people here have a very basic knowledge of English, but they won’t speak it until they get comfortable with a person. Sometimes that’s too bad, because their basic English is definitely better than my basic Chinese.
The problems were not over for my suitcase. The security gate started beeping as I passed through and the guard sent me back to customer service. Working together, the clerk and I eventually found the security tab buried deep in the liner, along with the missing bar code. The reason for all the huge crowds today is because the biggest holiday of the year is coming in 4 days.
My legs were done with walking by the evening, so I bough some food and a beer from the 24-hour store below my hotel and spent time in my room preparing my pictures to put online before going to bed early.

Thursday: 2-15-07

The bed in my hotel room is actually just box springs. Actually, it feels even more uncomfortable than box springs, just like laying on a piece of plywood.
The school I'm supposed to be working for in Wuxi just may have lost their teacher today. They had earlier agreed to let me stay at my apartment there for the next 10 days, but today called and said that would not be possible, just 4 hours before my train was set to depart for that city. This is not a simple lack of communication and I really don't trust the school anymore. Had I known the apartment wasn’t going to be available, I would not have paid for a bus ticket to Nanjing. This also results in 10 days of extra hotel costs. The position is still available starting March 1st in Wuxi, but I'll be looking at other options in the meantime.
I checked out of my hotel at 9 o'clock this morning. A young Chinese guy wearing a nice suit started speaking to me in Chinese as I got off the train, but as usual, I barely understood a word he said. Everyone always stares at foreigners, but it seems that only the young guys ever make an attempt to speak to them. Girls occasionally will, but only when they traveling in packs.
I took the subway to the train station to buy a ticket to Beijing. I wasn't set to arrive in that city until the 26th, but now I'll spend this extra ten days there researching other jobs. Two days ago, I had bought a train ticket to Wuxi, but there’s no point in going there now, but that is only a wasted expense of about $5.
Researching other jobs is what I did all day long from the Internet cafe near the train station. I sent out dozens of emails and already got a few responses back. Interestingly, a job listing for a movie role requiring a white male foreigner was mixed with the English teaching job listings on one website. I sent an email out of curiosity and got a response back an hour later from a member of the production crew. I doubt such a job pays anything substantial, but who knows.
I took a job-search break at 2 o'clock to eat lunch at Mcdonalds, then continued job searching for the rest of the afternoon and early evening. I went to the train station waiting lounge at 6:30, about 3 hours before my train to Beijing was set to depart. A once in a lifetime occurrence may have happened here. I was reading when I noticed a little girl come within a few feet to stop and grin at me. I looked back and smiled as she shyly ran away. Then as if the girl had teleported, I noticed her staring at me from the other side just a second later. Turns out it wasn’t the same girl at all, but her twin sister, dressed identically in a big bright red coat and red shoes. I went back to reading as both girls continued their pattern of coming up to investigate me before running away. Then I looked up again and there were three identical girls! It was now definitely time to take a picture, but the best part was yet to come, a fourth girl in a red coat and shoes! Quadruplets! I’ve never even personally seen triplets, but randomly coming across quadruplets in Nanjing, China seemed almost surreal. The father was sitting across from me and could speak some very basic English. He confirmed that the girls were indeed quadruplets. His wife and sister were also traveling with the group. The sister said that her brother was the “main boss” of the largest logistics company in Nanjing, which I guess means CEO or something like that. The man gladly took a photograph for me with his quadruplet daughters, but had considerable troubles working my camera. The girls were about 7 years old and enrolled in an English school, but like most Chinese, they were too shy to speak any English till I loosened them up with some Chinese. They then chatted away about how they liked pizza, ice cream, biscuits and all kinds of other stuff.
Unfortunately, my train started boarding just a few minutes after I met this group. They were on the same train, but in a different car, headed to Beijing to catch another train on further. I was in bed #17 of car #13, which was a kind of car called a “soft sleeper”. A soft sleeper is an enclosed room containing a table and 2 bunk beds. A hard sleeper is an open-ended room containing 3 beds on each wall and no table. There was a father and son in my room whom I spoke a bit with, mostly unsuccessfully. The son was in high school and the father was an office worker. Like almost everyone else on the train, they were on their way to visit family for the New Year’s holiday. The son knew only a few words of English and the father new even fewer. The son eventually went to another room and was replaced by his mother. I quickly fell asleep after watching a few minutes of the TV that was located at the end of my bed.

Friday: 2-16-07 – Nanjing to Beijing
The rail system here is like a train highway. We constantly passed other passenger trains at high speeds all night long. Each time produced strange loud wind and engine noises that woke me up, but I slept decently for the most part. The train pulled into Beijing’s central railway station just before dawn, about 6:30AM.
Security officials were checking the tickets of passengers as they left the train station. I can’t imagine what the penalty could be for loosing your ticket after the train has already arrived. A poor-looking man grabbed the ticket out of my hand immediately after I had exited the station. I can’t imagine what he wanted it for, but he definitely wanted it, and I didn’t see why I should stop him, but nor did I have the chance.
I boarded the subway entrance next to the station. The underground system here is primitive and paper tickets must be bought by hand and then collected again by hand. The subway cars are old and seemingly excessive numbers of police patrol the platforms. There were soldiers and police everywhere blocking the streets as I exited a station at Tiananmen Square. They were blocking people from entering the Square for whatever reason. I was directed to an underground pedestrian tunnel along with some other people who happened to also be trying to walk onto the square. At the other end of the tunnel, a rope was tied up across the stairway and police were stationed there also. So everybody turned around just to be told that we now couldn’t even exit the way we came in. It seemed that we were being held prisoner now, but some of the other pedestrians in the tunnel just started walking under the rope, so I followed and the police made no attempt to stop us. So, I guess the rope was just there to stop people from entering.
The sun was coming up as I walked past the Forbidden City and the perimeter of the Square. I knew my hotel was just to the south, but I’d somehow lost my directions again. When I was here two years ago, the south end of the Square contained a couple hundreds smalls stores along with some Western restaurants like Starbucks and Mcdonalds. Now, everything there is being torn down to make way for some nice government-looking buildings. Whole blocks of the area have been encircled with three-story high barricades showing pictures and advertisements. It appears that the city is trying to clean the neighborhood up before the 2008 Olympics, as it used to be quite dirty and a haven for deformed homeless people.
I had a breakfast at a nearby KFC, then walked on in search of my hotel, as I had now found the directions. It was supposedly located in one of the many busy alleyways south of the square. I found the street quite easily, but didn’t see the hotel. Of course, I hadn’t thought to write down the phone number, so I entered an Internet café to check online. Strangely, the clerk working at this café would not let me use a computer. This could have been because the access was down, but it appeared that other people were online, so I’m confused. But I just went on down the street to another one and had no problems there. This floor of this second café was filled with hundreds of cigarette butts.
Looking at a map on my hotel’s website explained everything and I easily found the place just a couple hundred feet down the street. It was still only about 9:30AM, so too early for check-in time. The receptionist let me put my suitcase in a storage room and directed me to the common guest facilities of the hotel. These facilities are actually quite nice and have some real character, which is exactly how they were described on the Internet. This happens to be the same place where Johanna and I have reservations in 10 days. I chose it again because the dorm-style rooms are only $6 per night. My single room in Nanjing had been the same price, but Beijing is generally a bit more expensive.
The common areas of this hotel are located on two floors and include a restaurant, free internet rooms, a couple lobbies, and a room with a pool table. One of the employees said that parts of the building are 300 years old. I sat by the pool table and used my laptop till I was allowed to check in at 2:30. This is where I had my first conversation with an American in two weeks; a girl from Spokane. It suddenly hit me that almost every word I’d spoken over the past few days was Chinese, and my Chinese sucks, so it was great to have a real English conversation.
There are free-use computers here for Internet access but only one connection for personal laptops. There also only appears to be one male shower, which is unfortunate since there are many dozens of people trying to share it. There is an outdoor bathroom on the roof next to my room, but the shower displays a sign saying, “Sorry, too cold for winter. Please use downstairs shower.” There are three beds in my room and two British guys, Giles and Rob, checked into it at the same time as I did. They’re on a 7-month backpacking vacation all over the world.
I took a short nap at 2 o’clock and was awakened by Giles and Rob returning to the room after lunch, who were on their way to visit the famous Summer Palace. Most of the main attractions here cost a considerable amount by Chinese standards, so I’m trying to come up with alternative activity ideas. Since I’ll be here for two weeks, paying for activities every day could add up.
The hotel offers a laundry service for about $1.25 per kilo. This sounded cheap until mine was weighed at the front counter and about $5 was requested. I’m not always a cheapskate, but just hate to pay Western prices for things here, so maybe I’ll research other laundry options next time. For a late lunch, I ordered a cheeseburger and fries from the hotel’s kitchen for about $2. The tiny portion of fries was dripping with grease and way undercooked. The meat on the hamburger consisted of burnt crumbles of beef. Discussing my meal with another guest, she said that her lunch here yesterday had left her sick overnight.
I took a coat shopping walk in the late afternoon. There are dozens of little stores in the nearby alleys selling clothes, but few had any black leather coats, which is what I have my heart set on. Westerners get stalked whenever they shop in China, unless it’s at a large supermarket. It’s just hard to relax when money-hungry salespeople follow at your heels with every move around the store. I’m a bit skeptical of buying anything more costly here, like a black leather coat. I thought I’d bought a real quality pair of shoes for $30 in Zhuhai last week, but today discovered that the tongue had fallen out of the left shoe. It was lying on the bottom of the shoe when I went to put the shoe on after my shower. Maybe I’ll try out one of those little shoe repair shops tomorrow, but I’ll have to learn some new vocabulary beforehand.
I walked the perimeter of Tiananmen Square and took some photos just before sundown. A few hundred people were crowding around the national flag at the north end of the square waiting to watch the soldiers march in from the Forbidden City and take it down. There are always about 100 or so soldiers stoically monitoring all areas of the square, many of which stand around with fire extinguishers at their feet. Why fire suppression could be an issue in such a location is a bit of a mystery. Maybe there has been an issue in the past with protest immolation.
Walking back through the alleyways, many shopkeepers could be seen putting up Chinese New Year’s decorations on their storefronts. Firecrackers could be heard exploding in the distance all over the city, just like the Fourth of July in the US. The intensity of the explosions increased as the darkness fell.
I did some brief shopping at a supermarket before returning to my hotel. The packaging of products here never ceases to amuse me, and this store was selling men’s underwear that displayed a male model with a huge beer belly. During my visit to China two years ago, I learned that some of these crazy models are actually quite famous in China and can be seen displayed on all kinds of products.
I didn’t really have anything important to do for the rest of the evening at my hotel, so I hung around the common areas blogging, reading and chatting with various people. Most of the chatting happened with a sassy blonde Australian girl named Davina, who happened to also be writing a blog at the same time. She has somehow arranged for her university to pay her to put the blogs on the university’s website. Maybe SIU should have put my Pig Head blogs on their’s.

Saturday: 2-17-07
My pillow is stuffed with beans and the city was like a warzone last night. Almost constant firework explosions could be heard until after midnight, some of which where rockets that exploded very near my room. A few booms could be heard again as early as 6AM this morning and I was up by 6:30.
My roommate Rob had pushed his bed stand in front of the door over night because I’d been telling ghost stories before bed about how our room was the one that people disappeared from. Rob, his traveling companion Giles and I had set up for about 30 minutes joking about things like waking up in a bathtub of ice with a kidney missing. Rob had been laughing the whole time and sharing in the joking, but it obviously at least got to him a little bit.
I discovered a unisex bathroom upstairs with three more showers this morning. Each shower has a large tank in it mounted to the ceiling, which is apparently the hot water heater. Taking a shower with the big tank hanging over my head makes me feel somehow strange.
I had breakfast with two Australians, who were the girl Davina I’d met last night and a guy named Brad, I think. Brad is about my age and speaks better Chinese than any other foreigners I’ve met since coming to China. He’s only been studying 1 and a half years, so this is a bit encouraging. Davina asked me to help adjust her bra strap in the middle of the dining room after the meal.
I left the hotel at noon with a group of 7 people and headed by subway to the Silk Market, which is an indoor marketplace consisting of 5 or 6 floors of insanity. The isles are narrow and the salespeople are psychotic. A woman grabbed my hand and literally drug me into a shoe booth against my will, hysterically giggling and chanting “shoes for you” the whole time. I had already had enough, but agreed to explore a while longer with Davina before we went off to look at other sights. I did end up buying one thing at the Silk Market, a bright pink wig to wear out onto the streets with my US Army jacket later tonight when all the big New Year’s celebrations are taking place.
After another brief subway ride, Davina and I ate lunch at a clean inexpensive restaurant that had several other foreigners dining inside. Davina was fishing meat out of our chicken noodle soup dish when she suddenly came across a whole foot, which she asked that I remove before continuing the meal.
We had next hoped to visit the nearby Llama Temple, but it was closed early because of the holiday, so we walked on through the alleyways to look at other sites. Fireworks could now be heard more and more steadily all over the city and I was in the mood to buy a few. Strangely, there didn’t seem to be any businesses selling them. I bought what I thought were Roman Candles from a small store, but they were actually incense. So, I’m assuming that the government only allows firework sales to happen at certain highly regulated areas, which makes since considering the history of terrible firework store and factory disasters in Asian countries.
Davina and I eventually found something that was open; the Drum Tower. This is a large traditional Chinese building with a couple dozen massive drums at the top. They claim that one of these drums, at about 2 meters wide, is the largest drum in the world, but that sounds like all hype. Getting to the drum room requires walking an extremely steep set of stairs up about 150 feet. I really can’t stress the steepness enough. People must have surely tripped and died before.
We just so happened to be lucky enough to arrive in the drum room as three people entered wearing tradition clothing and beat the drums for a few minutes. The balcony of the building offered great views of the sun lowering over the city. The bathrooms outside the building had a sign proudly reading, “Toilet 3-star. Rated by city of Beijing.”
We next walked on to a nearby partially frozen lake. The temperature today was in the upper 40’s and sunny, so we are probably quite lucky for this time of year here. Walking back to the subway station, Davina ordered us guava fruits coated in a hardened brown sugar solution on a stick, which were actually much better than I expected.
I’m glad to have developed a friend in Beijing, especially considering I’ll here for the next 10 days with nothing much to do. Davina also just happens to be here for the next 10 days with nothing much to do because a planned trip to Tibet was abruptly ruined when she realized that the government wasn’t issuing Tibet travel permits over the holiday period. Davina and I do like to harass each other a bit, so it’s yet to be seen if we will actually remain friendly for the next 10 days. She has been calling me a “tool” all day long, but can also endure a bit of abuse herself, so we’ll see.
Walking from the subway to our hotel, a man pulled a massive firecracker out of his pocket and offered it to me for 25 cents. I went to light it on the sidewalk in front of us and everyone standing around freaked out, so I took it across the street. It was about the size of a quarter stick of dynamite and may have actually been a quarter stick of dynamite. A man talking on his phone about 30 feet away nearly dropped it and I was left in awe.
At 8 o’clock, I left the hotel again with Davina and three other people; an Australian, a German and an English. We sat at a restaurant across the street for about an hour and a half sharing buckets of liquor. The drinks only cost about $4 each and were served in small stainless steel buckets that held about 1/3 of a gallon. The bucket came with a dozen straws and the liquor of our choice mixed with coke.
This restaurant was strongly geared towards foreigners and was full of them. The interior was themed as a log cabin and just about everything was made of logs, including the tables and benches. The intensity of fireworks exploding outside had now reached an extreme peak and some restaurant employees came and sat free fireworks on our table. The German got out a lighter and jokingly asked, “here?” We lit these fireworks outside on the street and they were quite powerful.
Soldiers, police and fireman were now running up and down the alleyways constantly to take care of unknown situations in the distance. Some of the firemen were traveling on motorcycles that had little fire hoses and tanks mounted on the rear. Leaving the restaurant, a circle of a couple hundred people was lighting hundreds of fireworks. Such circles could be seen as far as the eye could see down the alley in both directions. This is how a billion and a half Chinese people celebrate their biggest holiday, with lots of fireworks and alcohol. They don’t usually drink a lot, so this can be a dangerous combination.
I was now wearing my pink wig and US Army jacket. Davina had also generously offered to apply pink lipstick. Throngs of people were constantly asking to borrow the wig for pictures and it eventually completely disappeared. An young American missionary had seen me dancing around in the street with Davina and came up to offer the advice that she would leave me terribly unsatisfied because Jesus was the answer. Davina then put her hands all over him and he quickly forgot all about his lord and savior. There was some very heavy petting going on a few minutes later when the three of us got into a cab with a Finnish guy named Matti.
The cab took us on a 20 minute ride to an area of the city with many clubs and bars. It was now after 2AM and most of the bars were closing early for the holiday, but we did find one that was open and completely packed with hundreds of foreigners. I stood around talking with Matti as Davina made out with at least one random guy at the bar. Her missionary had since vanished and she was very worried at about loosing a coat that never existed.
Matti and I took a cab back to the hotel at 4AM.

Sunday: 2-18-07
I drank whiskey, brandy, vodka and beer last night, so today wasn’t very pleasant at all. Large quantities of harder liquors are rarely included in my diet anymore because of their terrible after-affects. Today was the official Chinese New Year and the fireworks were again intensely exploding outside by noon, which finally forced me from sleeping any longer. I was ready for bed again after getting some breakfast and answering a few emails, then slept on till about 4 o’clock.
Everybody that had been with my group last night was feeling at least just as bad as I was, except for the Finnish guy Matti. John the German said a guy at the hotel had tried to start a fight with him as he returned at 4AM. Davina had almost complete memory loss of the last few hours of the evening, so watching her look at my pictures was quite amusing. We agreed to not read each other’s blogs till after going our separate ways, which is probably a good idea.
The hotel seems to have lost almost all the clothes I gave them to wash on Friday. They put all laundry in an unlocked cabinet by the reception desk and I’m assuming someone stole it. There was one bag there containing a pair of jeans and some t-shirts, but everything else seems to have disappeared. Shopping for new clothes is going to be costly and time consuming, so I’m going to speak with the owner Leo unless the clothes are found by tomorrow.
For dinner, I went out with Rob, Giles, three other English guys and Matti. Beijing is famous worldwide for the way its chefs cook ducks, so we wanted to go to the nicest duck restaurant in town. Unfortunately, duck meals were $35 each at this restaurant, so we went to another less-classy place next door. After being seated here, we decided the menu looked pathetic and decided to move onto another restaurant nearer to our hotel.
This next place had seating for a couple hundred people on two levels and we were placed in a room by ourselves that contained a big round table with a spinning glass disk in the middle of it. These disks are commonly called Lazy Susans and are for the purpose of easily sharing dishes.
The waitress was having a difficult time communicating in English and claimed that one of the restaurant’s fish dishes was one kilometer long. Speaking of Coca-Cola, she kept asking if we wanted large or small “cocks”, which got everybody at the table to giggling even more. I have to admit that the Chinese can be very patient at times.
Giles ordered a fish dish and the waitress came in the room a few minutes later with a whole uncooked fish in a clear plastic bag to ask him if it was what he wanted. The fish weighed a couple pounds and I could see that it was still breathing, or at least trying to. It then freaked out and almost flopped the bag out of the waitress’s hand. Giles decided to order something different. We were wandering what the waitress might have shown up with had we ordered a beef dish.
Our whole meal ended up costing about $3 per person, then Matti left the group and the rest of us went to another nearby hotel to play pool. I played the first game and bet my opponent 10RMB(about $1), which I lost. Giles and Rob told a very strange story of their new roommate in the hotel, a crazy sickly-skinny English girl with a black eye. She was under the bed in her underwear earlier in the day, then later sat in bed rocking and clawing at her head while mumbling creepy nonsense. The hotel staff was apparently worried yesterday and took her to the hospital, saying she was glad to return anytime and they would happily take her to the hospital any time she needed. It is hard for me to imagine how such a severely crazy girl could even make it to Beijing on her own from England. I must speak with this girl tomorrow. Even my ghost stories had scared Rob his first night here, so I can only imagine how terrified he must be of his new roommate, whom he said he could picture standing over him with a knife in the middle of the night.
Fireworks were still going off all over the city again tonight, but not nearly at the level that they had been last night. There was an article on CNN.com today stating that the city had just lifted a ban on fireworks that had been in place for the past several years. There were 125 people taken to hospitals overnight and several buildings burned. In the most serious injury, a person had to have both eyes removed. A few other people had to have one eye removed. I’m seriously wearing safety glasses next time I celebrate the Chinese New Year in China.
Two Japanese girls have moved into my room, who are traveling around several Asian countries for the next couple weeks. Giles and Rob had checked out yesterday because they’d planned on finding a better place to stay, but in the end had decided to just come back here.

Monday: 2-19-07
The hotel staff found 90% of my missing laundry today. Some guest had taken the wrong bag on Saturday and just now finally realized it. Unfortunately, my favorite pair of jeans is the only thing missing, but they were in need of replacement anyway.
I left the hotel in the late morning with Davina and a guy from Northern Ireland. We took a cab to a temple were huge crowds were practicing some very interesting New Year’s traditions. Tickets to the temple cost $1.25 and were being sold out of a small van in the street. For all I know, someone completely unaffiliated with the temple could have pulled up in their van and started charging for tickets.
Just inside the main temple gate, people were crowded around a big hole throwing gold washers into it at a big gold plate hanging from chains underneath a small bridge that spanned the hole. Washers were being sold by the thousands from a table set up by the hole. People of all ages were getting great pleasure from hitting the gold plate with the washers, which made a “gong” sound and apparently is thought to bring good luck.
Lines of people formed to rub animal carvings on certain spots of the temple walls. These spots had been so rubbed over the years that the walls were changing colors. Coins were being set upright on the various dragon statues in the temple. Each statue had a crowd of people surrounding it trying to complete this very difficult task. So much incense was being set in front of the temple buildings that police officers piled it into blankets and carried them away. Some blankets were so full that they took two officers to carry.
The Northern Irish guy now left so he could get to the airport and catch a flight. I joked that the temple had a brothel in the rear and Davina seemed to get mad. After exiting the temple ground, we spent about an hour exploring a market behind it with hundreds of small booths and people selling things off blankets. About half of the vendors had products that were specifically geared towards the New Year’s holiday, which included certain kinds of foods and ugly noisemaking devices. A vendor gave me a sample of something on a toothpick that turned out to be some kind of horrible-tasting larvae. I helped Davina bargain the purchase of 4 jade bracelets for about 1/3 of the original asking price.
For pre-lunch snacks, we bought two sticks with squid on them and two sticks with strawberries dipped in a brown sugar solution. Our lunch took place at a restaurant a few blocks away displaying a sign reading something like, “Welcome 4 foreigners”. The English menu listed “sweaty spring rolls”, which we ordered and discovered to be “sweet spring rolls” with a sweet bean filling.
Getting onto the subway, we went to a park where a few hundred feet of the city’s original walls were still standing. A sign by the wall said that most of it had been “dismantled” during the 50’s and 60’s, which was a pleasant Commie way of saying it had been intentionally destroyed during the Cultural Revolution.
Getting to our last sight of the day, The Temple of Heaven, took another subway ride and quite a long walk. The temple itself was closed, but not the surrounding park, which cost another $1.25 to enter. It was now very near sundown but a few hundred people were still hanging around enjoying themselves. Among the memorable sights, a group of old men and women was doing some terribly hilarious singing and a group of three 60-somethings was playing the Chinese version of hacky sack.
Another cab ride got us back to the hotel at 6 o’clock. A few fireworks were going off again in the evening, but there are now fewer every day. I sat in the hotel’s restaurant for the rest of the evening talking with the group that I’d drank way too much with on Saturday night, including John the German, Sharna the English and Zak the English. Davina discovered this morning that she’d received a standby flight back home to Sydney, so she left the hotel at 7:30. I guess I’ll have to find a new friend at the hotel now. Davina’s family has a beach at the end of their street that is warm year round, so I’m just going to have to arrange a visit sometime in the future.
There was plenty of interesting conversation with the German and English the rest of the evening as we sat around drinking huge 75 cent QingTao bottled beers, China’s most famous brand. Zak shared an unforgettable account of how he was detained and harassed for 24 hours by Homeland Security when trying to catch a connecting flight in Miami a couple years ago. He had done nothing wrong but was banned from the US for life and told things like “we don’t like your kind” repeatedly. The reason for the initial suspicion had been numerous visits to Libya, which were for the reason of visiting his dying father. As the Homeland Security agents put him on the deportation plane, one said, “I’m glad your father died”. Zak could tell that this agent was Cuban, so he responded by calling him a bad Spanish word for Cubans who defect to the US, which put the man into a rage. Zak’s local newspapers wrote about this and it is definitely worth reading.

Tuesday: 2-20-07
I slept in till 10 o’clock today, not even waking up when the 2 Japanese girls moved out of the room or when the cleaning girl came in to make up their beds. I have little to do here till the city’s population goes back to work after their long New Year’s holiday. Most of the people I’ve contacted about English teaching jobs are not even checking emails right now, so I must just sit around and wait till at least a couple more days.
Life at the hostel changes everyday as a couple dozen new people arrive from all over the world and a couple dozen others check out. On the downside, there is never really time to get to know anyone really well, but on the upside, there are lots of new interesting people to meet everyday.
I went for a 3 and a half hour walk starting at 2 o’clock. Tiananmen and the areas surrounding it were packed with thousands of holiday tourists having a wonderful time. Kids were running around flying little kites and waving little plastic Chinese flags that are sold by numerous enterprising individuals on the Square.
My walk took me along the outside of the Forbidden City’s western wall to the entrance of a large park with a small entrance fee. A sign above the ticket window read, “Free for children less than 1.2 meters”, so I guess that includes any short people under 18 years of age. The park was beautifully landscaped with boulders, pagodas, waterways, waterfalls and a wide array of vegetation. Lots of people were within the park’s walls, but it was so big that there were still plenty of wide open spaces.
In one of the many courtyards, people were crowded around a child using a giant brush to draw Chinese characters onto ground with water. The child appeared to be less than 10 and the woman accompanying him would make a disapproving sound when he made a stroke incorrectly or forgot one. He always knew how to correct his mistakes. If crowds of people will pay attention to a Chinese kid drawing Chinese characters on the sidewalk, then they will also probably stop for a foreigner. So, this could be a future idea for my Chinese comedy plans. The possibilities of what I could write are endless…….
The east side of the park had an entrance to the outer gates of the Forbidden City. There are three outer gates, each of which is a massive traditional Chinese building with a tunnel walkway going through it. Red doors made of copper and steel stand open at each tunnel entrance, which are about 25 feet tall and must weigh tons. The first gate is the one facing Tiananmen Square that has had the giant picture of Mao Zedong hanging on it for decades. All areas past this first gate are completely enclosed with beautiful traditional buildings that also act as walls. Each of these massive courtyards is at least thousands of square meters, and the entire Forbidden City complex could probably be measured in square miles. This was the area restricted to the emperors and their highest government officials for thousands of years.
Entering the first and second gate is free, but passing through the third into the main complex costs a few dollars. It was now near closing time and tens of thousands of people were streaming out of the third gate. Based on this traffic level, there could have easily been 100,000 people inside.
Two Chinese women, Jenny and Cindy, approached me as I passed through the outer gate facing Tiananmen. One claimed to be an English teacher that wanted to practice English with me, and the other said she was unemployed. Cindy gave me the number of a potential employer at a local university and invited me to walk with her and Jenny. They then invited me to visit a tea shop with them at the south end of Tiananmen. There is a sign at my hotel warning the guests to be weary of people that approach them offering to go to a tea shop or art exhibition, so I was now a bit skeptical of the women. According to the sign, the tea shops and exhibitions are not dangerous, but will offer services to foreigners and then try to charge them hugely outrageous prices.
The tea shop was on an upper floor of an office building facing the Square. The facilities were very classy looking, but suspiciously, no other customers were present. An attendant led us into a small room with a curtain over the door. Inside, were chairs and a table with a menu and a small tea set on it. Some things on the menu cost as much as $50, so I was almost convinced by now that the women were full of crap about the English job and everything else they had said. Still, there is a lot I have to learn about China and I couldn’t be for sure I wasn’t blowing a job lead by just walking out, so I ordered the cheapest tea on the menu, which cost about $3.50. The attendant was dressed in bright red traditional clothing and handed us all tiny little cups, which she showed us how to correctly hold before pouring tea into from a tiny pitcher.
I casually told the women about the sign in my hotel and they didn’t seem at all uncomfortable or surprised. But, when the $10 bill came neither of them made any move to pay their part, which was suspicious considering Chinese people will usually at least make an attempt to pay the bill in a situation where they have invited a person out. I had earlier made it clear I was only willing to pay the $3.50, so I again reminded the women of this. I ended up paying for about $6 of the bill, but I probably shouldn’t have paid any more than my part. Considering the sign in my hotel, I can almost be for sure that the contact numbers and names the women gave me for the English teaching jobs are not real. We will see.

Wednesday: 2-21-07
The war in the city has suddenly spiked again. The loudest explosions I’ve heard since arriving happened after 10PM last night, powerful enough to shake the ground and leave car alarms wailing for blocks. This leaves me wandering if such fireworks are legal or if they are brought in from somewhere else.
Needless to say, I ended up getting out of bed, as even earplugs could have done little good against this. To further illustrate the sound, I’ll say that I used to take naps when my roommate’s band practiced two rooms away in my house a few years ago.
My time not sleeping, till 2AM, was used to send an email to the school that offered me the teaching job in the city of Wuxi. That email turned down the job on the basis of the school’s refusal to let me stay at my apartment there over the Chinese New Year holiday(which they had promised up until the day I was set to arrive). I’ve decided that there are just too many job options here to make any sense of signing a 1-year contract at a school 13 hours away that has lied to me. According to sources I’ve read on the Internet, it can be difficult to get future jobs here if you walk out on contracts, so I really want to make sure and not get into some bad situation where I have to.
So, moving onto today. The city was enveloped in a thick fog that left the dirty pavement slick as ice on certain smooth surfaces. This thick fog left visibility only mildly worse than it had been yesterday when the sun was out. So far in my life, yesterday was the worst smog I’ve ever seen, leaving the sun as a pale orange disk that was even pleasant to look at just before sundown.
The temperature was also unpleasant today, much colder than yesterday but still above freezing by several degrees. My first outing of the day was an important one; getting money, as I’d suddenly found myself with a couple little paper bills that were the equivalent of about 25 cents or less. In all my walking over the past few days, I’d never seen any ATM machines at all. I was now faced with not even being able to eat lunch, so finding an ATM couldn’t wait any longer. Walking around Tiananmen, I eventually found a Bank of Beijing 24-hour Banking Center, which was a little glass room with a guard on the ground floor of a building by Kentucky Fried Chicken.
Sure enough, the machine rejected my card, twice. My first thought was that the bank had put a block on the card because of its recent international use, which happened last time I was in China. I’d made a call to the bank a couple weeks before arriving this time, but my bank is seriously stupid when it comes to fraud protection. They recently had a security breach and have now declared a war on fraud that leaves all the customers severely disadvantaged.
On the phone back at the hotel, a bank official surprisingly told me that the card had no blocks on it, but did ask that I verify some recent transactions in China. So, the problem had been with the ATM machine earlier and not the card. Walking 10 minutes to the south of my hotel, I found a machine that did work. The problem here was that only 1500 yuan could be withdrawn at a time, which means that getting the money I needed required two transactions, each of which will no doubt come with a substantial Foreign ATM Transaction Fee. A withdrawal of 2000 yuan last week had cost nearly $10 in fees. Bankers rule the world.
With my newfound wealth, I paid for the next 5 days at my hotel($30 total) and ordered a big plate of chicken fried rice, then went out in search of a big electronics store that I’d heard was nearby the broken ATM I encountered earlier. My chosen walking route this time took me through a seemingly endless maze of tiny alleyways only big enough for two or three-wheel vehicles. Most of these roads are perpetually brown with caked dirt and almost all of the buildings are literally falling apart. Passing by what looked like a home with a glass door, a young lady sitting behind it came out and asked, “massage?”. ($30, just kidding, the visit to the doctor would cost too much)
The electronics store was indeed were it was supposed to be and was indeed big, but had big blankets hanging over the doorways making it look a bit shady. But blankets over the doors of stores are quite common here in winter, so when in China, don’t judge a store by its blankets. Inside, everything was shiny and all kinds of modern electronics and appliances filled two levels. Also in modern fashion, the salespeople didn’t harass me, in fact, they barely paid any attention to me whatsoever. But, I was actually hoping to be harassed by just one employee because all the product labels were in Chinese. My goal was to compare prices of Chinese/English translators, but this was impossible without help. I left the store without purchasing or looking at anything, and I probably need to go shopping with a Chinese person in the future.
The cold dark weather helped put me back to sleep for a couple hours in the afternoon. Two of the beds in my 3-bed room have been empty for nearly two days now, so I’m enjoying the quiet. The only place a person finds any quiet in Beijing is a park, their home, or if they go to certain areas in the middle of the night.
Movies are constantly played in the hotel’s restaurant/bar, which the guests can choose from a large selection. I chose “V for Vendetta” tonight with my chicken fried rice dinner, then spent the next couple hours in my room alone editing videos. I went back to the lobby at 1:30AM to try and get the videos uploaded to my website, but the account is out of space and the administrator has not answered the emails I’ve been sending for the past two weeks asking for more space. It might finally be time to quit doing business with Matt at webelucidations.com.

Thursday: 2-22-06
My alarm clock this morning was a string of hundreds of firecrackers detonated in the alley facing the window in my room. This happed at 8:03 and was followed by many other people answering the firework rooster call in other surrounding alleys.
Now that people are starting to go back to work after their holiday, I’m suddenly getting numerous calls and emails about English teaching jobs. A man named Frank called at 9:30, who surprisingly is a friend of the women who scammed me at the tea shop two days ago. The women had said that they would pass on my contact info to him, but I had just thought it was another lie. However, they probably get some money if I would sign a teaching contract.
On the subway ride towards Frank’s office, a young beggar girl was going from car to car singing into a microphone that was attached to an amplifier in her backpack. Passing in front of each passenger, she would stop and bow several times waiting for a handout to be placed into the red paper bag that she carried. Considering her age and original begging methods, the red bag was seeing quite a bit of action.
Getting to Frank’s office required traversing all three of Beijing’s subway lines, which took over an hour. Lines one and two pass through the city center and line 13 arcs across the northern areas. Lines three thru twelve must be imaginary or invisible. There is absolutely no subway access to the entire southern half of the city, which much be quite a problem with a population of 14 million. Line 13 is above ground and much more modern than its two counterparts. The tickets are still sold by hand here, but are at least checked automatically. Unlike lines 1 and 2, there is no free transfer to line 13, but the cost is still only about 40 cents.
Frank’s office was a 10-minute walk from the nearest subway station, on the 11th floor of a nice 20-story office building near Microsoft’s China headquarters. In the office with Frank, was a Chinese woman, and a black man who wasn’t a native English speaker. Frank is an agent that finds foreign English teachers for schools, the woman was from a school that wanted to hire me, and I have no idea who the black man was. The woman did most of the talking and definitely didn’t sell me on the job. It is only a couple hours per day 4 days per week. No housing is included and the pay is less than $500 per month. No, no, no, I won’t go. Since I’m a native English speaker and an American, there are much better offers out there. American’s are most sought after because American English is the language of business.
This was my first venture very far from the city center, and even here, lots of foreigners could be seen. I had lunch at a Mcdonald’s near Frank’s office after the meeting and counted at least 3 white faces dining there. Getting back on the subway, my next stop was back near downtown to meet with another potential employer. This required a bus ride. A vendor ripped me off by a few cents when I bought some gum to get change for the bus. It turned out that the bus had three employees on it, so getting change in advance wasn’t really even necessary. Those employees include the driver, a front door attendant and a middle-door attendant. The attendant’s jobs are to collect money and shuffle passengers around to make room for the maximum number, and that maximum number was definitely reached. Like many of the city’s buses, this one was a double-length with three doors.
I missed my stop once and had to ride another bus in the opposite direction back to it. The representative of the school, a tall Chinese woman named Jasmine, met me here. We went to a classroom in the school’s office building across the street and she had me fill out a very short application before describing the job. Jasmine’s offer sounded quite a bit better than Frank’s, but it still won’t do, as the beginning pay is low and no apartment is offered.
Going back to the subway station, the afternoon holiday crowds were tremendous. Taking the whole city into account, there must have been millions of people out shopping and enjoying the sunny day.
A representative from a school was supposed to meet me and several other potential teachers at the hostel at 7 o’clock, but sent a message saying she would come tomorrow instead. So, I spent the rest of the evening at the hostel, mostly talking to John the German, Zak the English, Brad the Aussie, an unknown Finn, and two Swedish girls who make Volvos. One of the Swedes made AC hoses and the other made right tail lamps. I asked if the left lamp was considered a promotion and she said that getting to move around the assembly line at all was.
The fireworks were still going strong after dark and I stepped outside to have a look until getting hit by some flying debris. Two guy wrapped strings of firecrackers around long bamboo poles and suspended them over the alleyway, sending the debris flying the maximum possible distance.

Friday: 2-23-07
A drunken Israeli girl moved into my room at about 4AM last night. Her name was Karen and she seemed so pleasant that I invited her to breakfast at the Western restaurant across the street this morning with me and John the German. John and I ordered a big wonderful meat-lovers pizza for $3.50, which was so good we had to also order a large tuna pizza. Karen is a vegetarian smoker that hasn’t eaten meat for 20 years. She has been teaching English in a nearby Chinese city for 3 months and is making an upper middle-class income by Chinese standards, but has to work 40 hours per week for it.
John and I rented bicycles from the hotel and spent the whole afternoon randomly exploring the city. The left pedal of mine began loosely spinning on the axle just five minutes into the trip. An old Chinese couple saw us examining the problem and pointed us in the direction of a repair shop. We asked for directions to the shop again at a small hotel and 2 employees unsuccessfully tried to fix it with a wrench and pliers. The shop was a tiny store just down the street staffed with a teenage-looking guy and two girls that were less than 10. The guy hammered on the pedal with a sledge and corrected the problem for 15 cents.
Riding on, we stopped in a park and a policeman made us move our bicycles out to the sidewalk. Children were being allowed to play with bikes, but adults were not. Some old men were flying kites hundreds of feet into the air.
We next rode onto what looked like an abandoned college. The main building was built in a classical European style with thousands of intricate shapes molded into the concrete exterior. Many windows were broken out and the exterior was severely weatherworn. The long two-story wooden structure dorms that surrounded the main building appeared to be being used as apartments now. Each one had balconies running along the entire length of both levels. Parts of the balcony floors were caving in but people were still living on the damaged levels, so I guess the government doesn’t regularly inspect and condemn structures. If so, half of the city would probably have to be torn down. The school’s old library was in just as poor of shape, with all the red carpeting peeling off its stairs. Strangely, the landscaping of the old college was still being maintained quite nicely.
John and I now took off riding through the narrow alleys and my pedal broke again. I tried beating on it with a brick, but this only worked for a very short time. There just so happened to be another bike repair shop in the alley, staffed with an old farting man and a little white dog. Then man replaced the whole pedal axle as his little dog laid in my lap in the alley. The cost for the replaced axle was about $2. I jokingly asked, “How much for your dog?”, and he put his hand on his chin and appeared to be thinking of a price before I let him know I was joking. Everything is for sale here, and John told me a story of how his friend had jokingly asked a Chinese man on the street where he could shoot a giant panda. The Chinese man didn’t understand the question, but didn’t want to pass up an opportunity to make money off foreigners, so he started calling his friends and asking what it meant to “shoot panda”. After a few calls, the man claimed to have found a way for them to shoot a baby panda. John and his friend were too shocked to ask what the price would be.
We next rode into the area between the outer gates of the Forbidden City, where appropriately, I think bikes are forbidden. A Chinese tourist said this to me as we passed him, and lots of other people stared, especially the soldiers outside the main entrance. So, we thought maybe people also wouldn’t stop us from riding bikes on Tiananmen. We walked them into the pedestrian tunnels that lead to the square and the soldiers there also started to stare, but we pretended not to notice. Eventually, two of them stood in our path and pointed back the other direction. If a person was to get a bike onto the square and they refused to stop when commanded, there could quickly be a mass of dozens of soldiers giving chase.
For dinner, we stopped at a small local restaurant in the alleyways near the hotel. There was no English menu and a couple employees came out to help us order. Combining our Chinese skills and with the help of a translation book brought out by the employees, John and I were able to order a pork vegetable dish and beef dumplings with rice. A small coal cooking stove sat in the middle of the restaurant’s tiny dirty dining area. The food was excellent.
I spent the rest of the evening hanging out with several people in the hotel’s lobby. The black guy I’d met at the job interview at Frank’s office the other day checked into the hotel this evening. His name is Tom and he’s an Oxford physics graduate fro Sierra Leone. He teaches mathematics and writes Chinese voice recognition software, which sounds like too good of a job to live in a cheap hostel, but I think he just likes the party environment.
I’d planned on going out with other hostel guests tonight, but they sat around the lobby till midnight and I just got tired and went to sleep eventually.

Saturday: 2-24-07
I had the American Breakfast at the 365 Inn across the street this morning. Not perfect, but much better than what’s available at my hotel. Customer service so far in Beijing has been amazing, as nearly every employee I’ve dealt with always has a big smile and is more than willing to help out. It almost seems strange when every member of the hotel staff smiles and says “hello” every time I pass, even the people mopping the floor.
I bought a painting from Tom at the front desk today, who sits there nearly every day creating his art. There are a few hundred of his scrolls and canvases all over the hotel, each of which is for sale at a very reasonable price. He was pleased to pose for a picture after the sale with me and him holding up the painting I’d purchased together.
I took a venture out through the maze of alleyways looking for a small local post office, which was closed until tomorrow for the holiday. It seems strange to reopen on a Sunday because many government agencies are impossible to do business with on weekends, but it appears that the post office is different.
A great movie was playing in the hotel’s restaurant, called, “The Three Burials of (some spanish guy)”. I highly recommend, but some may think the plot is too slow. The two girls from Sweden, named Annalenia and Bulin, bought a Spiderman radio controlled flying disk and we went to Tiananmen together to fly it. A Swiss guy named Monet also came with. Unfortunately, the disk’s battery wasn’t fully charged and it couldn’t lift off the ground. To satisfy her unfulfilled flying desires, Bolin bought a little kite from a seller on the Square. The string was of course sold separately.
For dinner, I accompanied John the German to a small restaurant down the street that is owned by Muslim Chinese. They wear the traditional Muslim hats and don’t sell pork. Pictures of Muslim holy sites decorate the walls. The Muslim population in Beijing must be considerable. There is even an old run-down mosque in one of the tiniest of alleyways near the hotel.
Late in the evening, I left in a cab with my roommate Tom, Monet the Swiss guy and a cool English guy full of amazing travel stories. This English guy claims that hunters can pay $1000 to hunt humans in Cambodia. This may be just a legend, but people supposedly have the option to hunt with an assault rifle or grenades.
Our cab took us to a bar called Baby Face, which was just as luxurious as a nice downtown club in any American or European city. Making it even better than the Western clubs, foreigners are given free admission. I’m almost certain that locals must pay a large fee. The musically choreographed lighting system inside may have costs hundreds of thousands of dollars. The English guy and I took a couple pictures but were quickly asked to put our cameras away by the mass of security officials. The reason for the secrecy quickly became obvious. You could say that this club was operating as a cult, and it seemed that at least half the patrons or more were members.
The cheapest thing on the menu was $4, and that included even water. Beer and water were actually the same price. There were two attendants by the bathroom sink forcefully giving massages and drying hands. This country surprises me every day.
Leaving the cult, I traveled with Tom and the English guy to the Bus Bar, which appropriately, is a bar built inside two buses that have been fused together. This place seemed to also be operating its own cult, but of a different kind than Baby Face. I met a fascinating person here that I ended up spending the rest of the evening with, an American named Paul. Paul is married to a Chinese girl and has been teaching English in Beijing for five years. We tried to get into another nearby bar together but it was closed, so we got a few beers and headed by cab back to his apartment on the 11th floor of an apartment building on the north side of the city.. Tom is a writer who’s life has many similarities to my own. He even used to be a manager in a supermarket. His wife was out of town and he let me crash in his spare bedroom sometime after the sun came up. If I end up staying in Beijing, I’ve almost certainly made a new long-term friend.

Sunday: 2-25-07 – Johanna comes to Beijing
I woke up in Paul’s spare room at noon this morning and he got up and made us some coffee before I left an hour later to take the subway back to my hotel.
Johanna flew into the city today and moved into an apartment with a roommate she found online. She will start her Chinese language classes in a few days, which will consist of 4-hour classes from 8-12 on Monday thru Friday and last for four months. She should have a basic fluency after this time, especially considering her new roommate speaks little English.
I called her at 4 o’clock and my phone ran out of credit mid-conversation. I’d assumed that recharging the credit would be a simple task, but that wasn’t the case. The hotel staff took a look and said that the SIM card I purchased in Zhuhai two weeks ago was costing twice the rate that a local card would. So, a staff member helped me purchase one of the local cards at a small store across the street for $15.
Johanna and I arranged to meet at 8 o’clock so I would have time to take a much-needed nap before the meeting. We met at a subway station south of Tiananmen and went to a nearby restaurant for dinner. Each table sat so low that neither of us had room to slide our chairs underneath, so the waiter brought us smaller chairs.
We next took a pedicab(bicycle cab) back to my hotel and I introduced Johanna to the few friends I’ve made. She had taken a cab to come here earlier and was unsure how to get back to her apartment, so I accompanied her and showed her how to get there by subway, which costs about $1 compared to about $5 for a taxi.
We needed to take a short bus ride from the subway station nearest her apartment, but the buses had already quit running, so we took a cab instead. Johanna had the address written on a piece of paper but the cab driver had to stop and ask random pedestrians for directions a couple times along the way.
Johanna is living in a small 5th floor apartment on the north side of the city. Her room is good-sized and she has a small balcony. Her roommate was already asleep.
The subways were already closed by the time I left, so I had to take a taxi and pay about $7(the fee is higher late at night). The ride took 30 minutes and the cab driver chatted the whole time, even giving friendly jabs on a few occasions. We only understood half of what each other said but were able to do some real communicating. He says that Chinese people like America, so I asked him if they also like Bush. I didn’t understand his response so he said, “Saddam” and pretended to be shooting a gun. I think he was trying to say that the war was a bad thing. Getting out of the taxi, he asked if he could keep $1 of my change and I let him. I had earlier asked him how much money he made per month(which is acceptable conversation here) and he had said, “$250”, so I felt like he deserved my dollar.
Walking down the street my hotel is on, two police cars were parked and a small crowd of people were gathered around. The police were pushing around a young guy and writing out some kind of citation, but I couldn’t understand what had happened.

Monday: 2-26-07
I checked out of my shared bathroomless room this morning and checked into the real room that I’d booked for Johanna and myself for the next three days(at the same hotel). This room wasn’t nearly as nice as the one I’d been shown last week, bit I took it anyway because the price was right and all my bags were already here.
Like every other room, corridor and public area of this hotel, the new room’s lighting only equals the power of about a few small candles. This is a common phenomenon in China, but only for the reason of saving money, not environmentalism. Energy prices here are comparable to those of the West, so this is huge cost for people who make a tiny percentage of what Westerners do.
There is no real shower in the new room, but rather just a shower head mounted on the wall and a drain in the floor. I had lunch with a couple English guys that just checked into the hotel yesterday, then made another unsuccessful attempt to use the post office that’s located in an alley near the hotel. It was at least open today, but wasn’t selling any packaging materials.
There were very few people dining in the hotel this afternoon, so I spent some time exchanging language tips with two of the bored young female employees there. Among our conversation topics, I described the difference between “bored” and “boring” and in return learned the same words in Chinese.
Finland is a very small country, but there have been several of its citizens come and go over the past few days, now including Johanna. One of the Finnish guys bought a movie this afternoon and played it in the restaurant only to discover that it didn’t offer English voices or subtitles. So, most of the non-Chinese speaking people quickly left the room and were replaced with the Chinese studiers who had been studying in other nearby rooms and heard the Chinese voices.
I nearly knocked myself out on the doorframe of my new room’s bathroom twice today. The door is only about 5 and a half feet high with a hard wooden frame. The hits were so hard that I fell down both times, putting my right hand right through the paper-thin door the second time. It was almost like a setup to keep my $15 deposit. I glued the wood back together and will get some black paint to mask the damage even more. The staff here is exceptionally friendly but facilities and some of the services are severely lacking, but you get what you pay for I guess.
Johanna arrived at 7:30 at we had dinner at the 365 Inn’s restaurant across the street, having one of the $3.50 whiskey buckets with a cheeseburger and macaroni meal before doing some shopping at a couple nearby small markets before returning to the hotel.
There was a documentary on CCTV 9(the only English channel) about a Chinese war criminal named Pu who aided the Japanese in their occupation of the country during WWII. Instead of being executed, the criminal spent years in prison and was eventually released. The narrator of the documentary then said something like, “Some feared that he would be ostracized by the public after his release, but they just called him “Old Pu(pronounced Poo)””. Using the word “old” with someone’s last name when addressing them is considered respectful, but it obviously doesn’t translate well in some cases.

February 27, 2007
Johanna and I had breakfast together in the hotel’s restaurant before leaving together on the subway. I was sitting sideways in my seat talking with her when the man next to me fell asleep up against my back. Getting off at XiZhiMen station, we ran into Zac, the English guy who’s been staying at the hotel. Introducing him to Johanna, he said he’d already seen her on another subway car yesterday afternoon. In a city this large it seems strange to run into familiar people, especially after only being here a few days, but Western faces really stick out from the crowds.
Johanna and I now went our separate ways so we could complete different tasks. She to take care of business at her school, and me to go to a job interview with an American woman named Catherine. No taxi drivers knew the name of the street the interview was on, so I called Catherine and she asked me to hand over the phone to a driver. We met on the 17th floor of one of the thousands of small office towers that dot the city’s landscape(there seems to be no massive skyscrapers). Catherine works for an English teacher recruitment agency there. She’s a pretty 20-something from Wisconsin that’s been speaking Chinese since she was 12. We went into a conference room with a young Chinese woman to discuss the job. The agency recruits teachers for high schools in southern China. The jobs all include a free apartment with free meals and free Internet access with a monthly salary of about $700.
The group that I’d earlier planned on working for, The Dadi Preschool Group, yesterday sent an email asking if I’d be willing to go to another school other than the one in Wuxi that lied to me. Their offer sounded a bit better than today’s because they are also willing to pay me $300 for each foreign teacher I could recruit for them by posting ads on Internet message boards, etc.. With 100 schools in their company, there is the potential to make a lot of money recruiting. Also, they offered to pay additional money for assistance in writing new textbooks. But, the reason I’m here is to get fluent in Chinese over the next year, not make as much money as possible(and that’s obviously not much teaching English). So, I asked Catherine today if her deal was negotiable and she replied, “Sure, this is China, everything’s negotiable”. We ended up drafting an tentative agreement where I would teach for 10 months(instead of 12) in the city of Kunming for a 12.5% higher salary, airfare and free daily Chinese lessons. A contract is supposed to be sent to me by email this Friday and I will sign it next Monday unless some other better offer comes along over the next week.
Randomly walking around the area after my interview, I realized that a subway station was just a few blocks away. I don’t know why Catherine had earlier told me to get off the subway at a different station and take a cab, but maybe she just wanted to make the directions as simple as possible. I spotted a “Wal-Mart Supercenter” sign by this subway station and had to go take a look. There are two Wal-Marts in the city and I’d just mentioned to Johanna earlier today that I was very curious as to whether or not they were similar to American ones. It turns out that they are similar, very similar, except for the fact that they have “Foreign Language Ambassadors” and many of the product labels and signs are in Chinese. The Foreign Language Ambassadors are apparently employees that are specially hired for their English skills.
Wal-Mart China seems to be doing its marketing just as well as Wal-Mart USA, as I ended up making the impulse purchase of a new electric razor for $10. I’ve heard from some local people that the Wal-Marts here have a reputation for higher prices instead of lower ones, but everything seems very reasonable and I am more than willing to pay a couple extra dollars to not have to worry about things like the tongue falling out of my new shoes. Like Wal-Marts all over the world, the return policy is the same here.
The subway traffic was insane coming back to the hotel. The XiZhiMen station is a transfer point that seems particularly clogged with people. Many more police than normal were patrolling the ticket window lines and the flows of pedestrian movement. I was barely able to squeeze on a train but several more people managed to push in after me. People were still trying to shove their way in as the doors closed on them. The police simply solved this problem by forcefully pushing these final passengers in. The police officer nearest to the door I was at pushed on the people as if he was trying to close an overfilled suitcase.
English teacher recruiting agents are becoming a nuisance. My email inbox today was a mess of job offers that will almost certainly turn out to be worthless. I’ve recently tried to be much clearer about exactly what I’m looking for, but these agents incessantly offer low-paying part-time work. Even worse, some of them lead me to believe that they have a real offer when they actually don’t, not revealing the fact till we actually meet. There are several people at my hotel looking for English teaching jobs and all of us are sick of the agents. We’ve all been lured to far-away parts of the city for interviews only to find some lame Chinese recruiter sitting in an empty office who barely knows anything about the potential job. Zac the English guy said he went to an interview today in which he and two other applicants were being rushed through a very crude interview at the same time. There were two Europeans and a Russian. After a couple simple questions, the Russian was offered an English writing teaching position and the others were offered oral teaching positions. As for the pay and hours, neither the recruiter nor the school’s representative had any idea. Walking out of the interview, all three applicants burst out laughing with no intention of taking jobs with such unprofessional organizations.
A new hotel guest told an extremely opposite story about one of his interview experiences. He and several other applicants had shown up for an interview and were unexpectedly led into a stadium with 700 elementary school students, parents and teachers. Each applicant was given a microphone and told to conduct an impromptu lesson. The crowd then decided which teacher was the best.
Johanna arrived back at the hotel in the late afternoon and we bought some mini bananas, Snickers bars, fake Oreo cookies and instant noodles for dinner from the grocery store next to the hotel. Later in the evening we went out into the hotel’s lobby and had a couple drinks with John and Zac, then got a cab with these two guys and went to the Huhai area of the city. This is a place were dozens of small bars surround a lake. It’s a nice scene with bar’s neon facades reflecting off across the lake’s surface. There were few customers in the bars or strolling the perimeter of the lake. Nearly every bar had customers outside trying to lure people in for drinks. We bargained with each of these outdoor employees until we finally found a bar which agreed to give us 4 beers for about $6. Not a great deal(the same kind of beer costs about 30 cents in a store), but much better than the $17 original offer. The bar reminded us of a Middle Eastern restaurant with its couches and pillows.
Next we walked on around the lake and didn’t see anything else all that appealing, so we took another cab onto the Sanlitun area, where many more bars and clubs are located. When the cab stopped, a black guy opened my door and asked what we needed, then continued asking several more times after we’d said “nothing”.
We went to the Kai bar, the same place where I’d been on Saturday two weeks ago for New Year’s Eve. Many of the city’s small bars are mostly empty during the week, but the Kai bar seems to attract at least a small crowd all the time, mostly all foreigners. A Chinese Spanish band was playing and drinks were cheap. The band members were all Chinese and they sung in Chinese, but they dressed Spanish and sang with a Spanish accent. Strange combination of cultures, but great band. The Kai bar is always a wonderful environment with its customers from all over the world, but it unfortunately only has only one tiny smelly bathroom with a broken door and a Chinese toilet.
Leaving this place, throngs of Chinese beggar children descended upon us. I made the mistake of giving one a few cents and then even more appeared. One of my bills fell to the ground and the kids surprisingly knew better than to grab it up before me. Then one of the kids started punching me as hard as he could. He was probably 7 years old or less and was taking running jumping swings apparently trying to reach my face. He became even more aggressive when I began laughing.
Johanna wanted to go back to the hotel now, so I took a cab back with her while the other two guys went on to another bar. As the cab was pulling out of the alley, that aggressive little kid starting breaking bottles and glass in front of it until the cab driver rolled down the window and yelled something at him.

Wednesday: 2-28-07
A woman called offering a job interview this morning but I called back to cancel because she seemed like just another pathetic employment agent with nothing decent to offer. On the phone, she at first had said the job was part time, then said it was full time after I said I was only looking for full time. I asked how many hours per week this full time job could guarantee and she said 10. As for the salary, she kept acting like she didn’t understand the question, so I finally just said, “not interested”.
Johanna and I left the hotel at 2 o’clock and went out on a very long walk, passing through Tiananmen and then on to a large crowded upper-class shopping street a couple blocks east of there. Tourist trolleys took passengers up and down the shopping street, each of which had a different company’s logo on it. One trolley passed with KFC’s logo on it so I assumed it would probably stop at KFC to drop off customers, and sure enough, it did. Johanna disagreed with my theory that it intentionally stopped at KFC, saying that KFC just advertised on it and the location of the stop was a coincidence. Another trolley then passed advertising the city of Macau(1000 miles away) and we joked that this one was going to Macau.
Also coincidentally(or not), we ended up having lunch at another KFC down the road before walking on to Jingshan park, directly north of the Forbidden City. This park is a mountain of dirt that was deposited here when earth was removed to construct the Forbidden City’s moats a very long long time ago. This is the highest point in the city and three large traditional Chinese buildings sit at the top. The high point offers great views of the Forbidden City’s rooftops and the rest of the Beijing. Unfortunately, there was quite thick sfog in the air. Sfog is not a misspelling.
We took a cab back to our hotel’s street then had a 30 minute massage at a business next door for $5 each. There are many kinds of massages to choose on a menu in the lobby, and by the sleazy appearance of the business’s interior, maybe more kinds to choose from that aren’t on the menu. The massages are given in a vast dark basement with pictures of nude women on the walls and real women walking around in little silk night dresses. Instead of massage tables, each room has at least one or two beds in it. Johanna and I were directed to one of the two bed rooms and left to ourselves for a few minutes. Normal massage parlor procedure here is to take off all clothes but your underwear and lay under a blanket to wait for the masseuse to arrive. A more conservatively-dressed male and female came into our room; the male for Johanna and the female for me. Johanna started to take off her shirt and the female directed her not to. Both masseuses seemed to maybe think it was strange that we had already taken so many clothes off, but maybe this was just our imagination, because it’s hard to give massages through layers of clothes and blue jeans.