Three flavors of the apocalypse

Take your pick: earthquake, bird flu, or benzene.

Ok, so the first two are mostly just rumours (in the part of the country that I'm in, anyway), but the third one was definitely no joke. About two weeks ago, a petrochemical plant in the city of Jilin had an explosion, killing a handful of people, wounding around 70, and resulting in the evacuation of about 10,000 more. The explosion also released about 100 tons of chemicals (mainly benzene) into the water of the Songhua River, which flows a couple hundred miles north from Jilin until it reaches Harbin, where I've been camped out for the past several months. According to the CDC, benzene is a nasty drug that can kill a person pretty quickly (if exposed to very high concentrations all at once) or cause leukemia (in cases of long-term exposure), along with a bunch of other fun effects. Realistically, the levels of benzene once it has been diluted in a river probably wouldn't straight out kill a person, and I probably won't be sticking around in China to have long-term exposure, but it still didn't sound very appealing. (Check out the CDC toxicology report.)

But most of the people in Harbin weren't thinking about this at all on last Monday morning. I, for one, was worrying about my homework for literature class that afternoon. Despite having known for the better part of a week that there was a 50 mile stretch of water in the Songhua River headed our way with a benzene concentration over 100 times the national acceptable level, the government had not yet alerted the people or even acknowledged that there was any pollution. Yet the word got out anyway, and by Monday afternoon rumours were spreading fast. In my 3:30pm literature class I heard rumors that the water supply for the whole city would be turned off the next morning; by the time class let out at 5:15pm, there was not a bottle of water to be found in any of the stores on campus. Everything potable, except for alcohol, was off the shelves and there were hour-long lines at all of the registers. Some of the other foreign students and I decided to high-tail it to the German-owned import supermarket outside of town. We figured that, as it was out of the way and required a membership card to enter, it might not have experienced the same mad rush as everywhere else. We squeezed six people into the one taxi we could find and made it out there, only to find that it was swarming with people, too. Our only saving grace was that the Chinese people there had never heard of Gatorade, and there were boxes and boxes of it just sitting next to the ransacked shelves of water. Only after all of the waiguoren (foreigners) had nabbed half of the boxes did some people start to catch on that they could actually drink this funny-looking stuff. We also nabbed some PB&J and (very expensive) Campbell's soup that we hoped would tide us over.

When the government finally did make an announcement, they stated that they would indeed be turning off the water, but they didn't mention the pollution, stating that it was for "routine pipe maintenance." Plus one of the state news channels ran a special on earthquake safety, sparking a rumour that there would be an earthquake in the next few days. Every day the rumours changed; at first it was that there was going to be one today, then there was going to be one tomorrow morning (between 2am and 4am), then that there already was one somewhere nearby and that we would be feeling the aftereffects, so on and so forth. All of our Chinese roommates started sleeping with their clothes on and shoes at the foot of the bed so that they could hit the ground running. One of the teachers advised one of my classmates to leave glasses on the ground so that he could hear them clinking together and know that the earthquake was starting. Never mind that even using the most advanced earthquake prediction technology in the world there was no way of predicting the day on which an earthquake would happen (let alone the hour). If we even tried to mention that to our roommates they responded that Harbin shared an earthquake warning system with Beijing, which had pretty much the most advanced technology there was, so if they said that there would be an earthquake between two and four A.M., then there would be an earthquake between two and four A.M.

If the earthquake scare was planned, then I must admit that it was a pretty ingenious ploy. Although people were still cramming themselves into line at the supermarket to buy any new shipments of water that came in, they were mostly talking about what they should do when the earthquake hit, rather than how the government knew about the whole water thing for a week and didn't bother warning them. Gradually, the people also built up an atmosphere in which anybody who left town or questioned the government's information was a deserter or a coward. On Tuesday night, the government turned on the water again for a couple of hours to allow people to stock up so that they would have some reserves in order to flush their toilets. When one of my American classmates tried to tell his Chinese roommate that maybe he shouldn't take a shower (as there had already been reports about the rising levels of benzene in the water), the roommate said he didn't believe that because it was from a foreign news source, and foreign news sources all just wanted to make China look bad in order to hurt its development. He only believes the (state-censored) national media, he said, and if the government turned the water back on then that meant it was 100% safe to use. Yikes.

Anyway, so a day or two later, after our parents had complained sufficiently (and after my muscles started atrophying from a diet mostly composed of crackers, peanut butter, and gatorade) our program director decided that we ought to just go ahead and evacuate. None of the universities, ours included, had given the students a vacation, so we had to handle the situation carefully or bring down the wrath of the administration and the bitterness of the other students, foreign and Chinese alike. Our director had to come up with some story about how we were going to Beijing for a "cultural exchange," which we had apparently already planned weeks ago, so it was just a coincidence that it happened at the same time as the whole water fiasco. She even wrote a letter and pre-dated it two weeks, informing the university of the plan. Of course this was all to keep them from losing face, because they didn't want people knowing that their American program just ditched out on them despite their declaration that classes would continue as normal and that there was nothing to be worried about.

We flew out on Thursday (Thanksgiving!). Taking the train would have been cheaper, but all of the train tickets were long gone and there was a rumour that they'd stopped selling more train tickets out of the city to keep everyone from bailing (although who knows if that was any more credible than the earthquake rumours). Our program, CET, also has a Beijing program, so we've been staying in their extra dorm rooms, eating at their cafeteria, and using their extra classrooms. We thought we might get a bit of a break, but our academic coordinator made sure that all of our classes (excluding the one-on-one tutorials) would continue as planned. We brought a couple of our teachers, and recruited a few of CET Beijing's teachers to fill in the gaps. So overall it's been pretty much as busy as usual. We've also been taking advantage of the food available here, the quality of which greatly exceeds most of what's available in Harbin. So far I've had Greek, Thai, Mexican, and Japanese, not to mention a Turkey dinner on Thanksgiving and a Beijing Roast Duck dinner the next day with some of the students from the Stanford in Beijing program (including my friend Pat).

Since I've been in Beijing, the international press has also really picked up on the Harbin story. That, coupled with the fact that I actually have reliable internet access now, helped me hear a lot more about what was going on in Harbin than when I was actually there. The attempt at a cover-up of and "solutions" to the problem were really amazing. When they learned about the initial spill into the river, the Jilin government tried to just release more water from their reservoir in order to dilute the pollutants so that they wouldn't have to inform the public. Eventually the government did tell the people of Harbin and shut off the water in order to keep high doses of benzene out of the pipes, but that was after the toxins had already flowed a couple of hundred miles from Jilin. Nobody told all the people in the villages along the river in between Jilin and Harbin that they shouldn't be using the water. And now the main "solution" to the problem is to let the area of most concentrated pollution flow downstream. Triumphant articles now report that "we won!" because water can be turned back on in Harbin, but what they really mean is that the bulk of it has just flowed past the city and onto somewhere else. That somewhere else is Russia, and the Russians are seriously pissed. The Chinese government did issue an apology to the Russians, who are now planning on dumping 50 tons of carbon into the river (which is called the Amur River up there) to try to absorb the toxins once they cross the border in a couple of weeks.

Since the story has been getting so much press, China is trying to put a positive spin on things, highlighting how they managed to keep Harbin supplied with drinking water throughout the week and how they (eventually) offered information on the incident to international organizations. Premier Wen Jiabao even spent a couple of days around Harbin trying to boost morale. I heard tell he came to HIT (our university) and visited some of the dorms. In another attempt at morale boosting, the governor drank the first cup of water out of the filtration plant when the water was turned back on on Sunday, although he cautioned that experts had not yet said that the water was safe to drink, but he was doing so in order to "fulfill the government's promise." He also mentioned that the water "was a little hot but tastes very sweet," which is not exactly reassuring to anyone who read the CDC toxicology report describing benzene as "a colorless liquid with a sweet odor." (The governor's quotes are from xinhua news itself)

As for my current situation, it seems that my program will stay in Beijing until the water is 100% up and running. The government turned the water back on on Sunday, but cautioned that it is pretty much useless for anything but flushing the toilets, as a week without use have left the pipes rusty. Once all of the rust is flushed out, then it will be "safe to use" and we'll be on the next plane back up there. But some people have (probably appropriately) raised the question of whether we can actually believe that everything is as safe as the government says it is, especially as they were eager to show results and a quick turnaround to normalcy after their embarrassment at the initial poor handling of the situation. Not to mention that they haven't really addressed the level of benzene that may have seeped into the groundwater or been frozen into the ice chunks that are forming as the weather gets colder and colder. Maybe it will be perfectly fine (goodness knows the river was already polluted before this and none of us got extremely sick), but nobody seems too keen on being used as a guinea pig to find out.

So, I guess I'm not really sure what to expect, especially as we only really have three weeks of the program left. I'm tempted to just call it quits now, especially as I don't need the credits. I've learned a whole lot since I've been here, but the language pledge is unravelling fast and I'm getting less and less out of the classes, as everyone is just trying to get the last couple of weeks over and done with. I've definitely been spoiled by a 10-week quarter system, so now a three-and-a-half month symester is pushing it. We'll see how it goes...

**********
A bunch of articles on the situation in Harbin are at:
-The New York Times
-The Washington Post
-Google News

(If those links don't work, just go to the newspaper websites and do a search for "harbin")

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A very sad zoo

On our first planned weekend activity after the mid-quarter vacation, we all went out the Siberian Tiger Park outside of Harbin, which "protects" several species of tigers and claims to plan to reintroduce them into the wild. Touring that park was one of the most depressing days I've had in China, especially highlighted by the fact that the government considers the park a shining example of their efforts to protect wildlife and the environment.

The tigers are fenced up into small enclosures of dead grass where tourists drive through in caged vans to snap their pictures. There are also a fair amount of tigers (and some lions) that are being held with two or three other animals in cages that couldn't have been more than 5 meters X 5 meters. Everywhere there were ads about the "wildness training" that the tigers were receiving, with pictures of (not particularly healthy-looking) tigers jumping through the air to catch a chicken or a goat. However, when we asked our guide, she informed us that none of the tigers had succesfully been reintroduced to the wild - big surprise. One particularly disgusting aspect of the park is that tourists are allowed to buy meat ($1 for a strip of beef, $6 for a chicken, $50 for a goat) to throw to the tigers - just like in the wild, I suppose. Some of the guys in our program bought a chicken and found it entertaining to watch the tigers fight over it until one of the slightly less diseased-looking ones won out. I couldn't wait to get out of there.



[1-A tiger approaching a van of tourists, 2-Not the most expansive territory]




[1-A lion and cubs, 2-The tiger who won the fight for the chicken my classmates bought]

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China: A Whirlwind Tour

After midterms a month ago, I had a one-week break, so my parents decided to come and see the most they could of China in the least amount of time. In the two weeks that they were here (they arrived half a week before I got out of classes, and left half a week after I started back up again), we made it to Beijing, Xi'an, Guilin, Shanghai, and then back up to Harbin. Phew!

In order to get to all of these places, my parents had booked everything with a travel agent before they came. At first I was not a big fan of the idea of being escorted everywhere by tour guides and staying in big, foreign-owned hotels the whole time, but after midterms I was just glad to stay in comfortable rooms and let somebody else worry about where we were going.

The first leg of the trip was Beijing - my parents had already been there several days when I arrived, recovering from jetlag and doing all of the touristy stuff (Great Wall, Forbidden City, Tiananmen Square, Ming Tombs, etc). Instead of joining them, I spent most of the weekend haggling with electronics dealers and trying to get a hold of things that were hard to come by in Harbin. What should have been relatively simple transactions turned into a hassle - every time I think something should be easy, I just have to remind myself that I'm in China, and there usually is no easy, convenient way of doing things. For example, my first day in Beijing I bought an external hard drive, only to go back to the hotel room to find that it doesn't work with my computer, my camera, or my mp3 player. So I went back the next day and tried to get them to let me return it. After walking fifteen minutes to their company headquarters with the salesclerk (who calmly explained to me that they do not under any circumstances accept returns, even if the merchandise does not do anything it is advertised to, and even if she said the day before that I could bring it back if there were problems), I then spent the next three hours demonstrating that the frikkin thing did not work in any way. And then once they admitted that the thing didn't work, it still took them another hour to agree to give me a refund, because apparently it is against their company policy to give refunds even if a customer can conclusively prove that their product is a piece of junk. A nice and relaxing start to the vacation...

After that I tried to refrain from running errands (although I must admit that I looked in every town for a good electronic dictionary), and instead just tried to focus on enjoying the vacation. When I wasn't yelling at salespeople, the time in Beijing was more relaxing - on Saturday we went out to dinner with Christy and Matt, who used to work with my mom and who now works in Beijing (they were also the ones who let me stay at their house on my occasional stays in Beijing). On Sunday we wandered around the lake at Beihai Park near downtown, ate Peking Duck with my friend Pat (who is studying in Beijing this quarter) and then went out to see some Beijing opera, which was a bit screechy for my tastes. On Monday we flew out to Xi'an in the afternoon. First, though, we took a pedicab tour of the Hutongs, Beijing scenic back-alleys. On the way we stopped at the home of a family who had decided to make some dough by opening up for tourists so that we could see what life along the hutongs is like. The mother was good company, and had some funny responses when my parents asked about her family and whether it was really all that great to have her mother-in-law living with them all the time.

We were only in Xi'an for two days, but it definitely had some good sites. Our tour guide was also pretty entertaining; my dad likened her to the Chinese version of a valley girl. She was a bit ditsy, but in an amusing way, and we didn't get stranded anywhere so I guess she did her job. The first site we went to was the Big Goose Pagoda, which was originally built to house the 1,335 volumes of Buddhist scriptures brought back from India by Xuan Zang, a Chinese monk. Next door was the Tang Dynasty Arts Museum, which had some interesting exhibits on the original layout for Xi'an, the symbolic meaning of the dress and makeup of Tang dynasty concubines, and examples of the brightly colored "farmer paintings."



[Me and my parents at the Big Goose Pagoda]

That afternoon we made it out to Xi'an's main attraction, the Terracotta Warriors. The Terracotta Warriors were commissioned over 2,000 years ago by the first emperor of the Qin dynasty, Qin Shihuang, who united the country and, as it usually goes, also massacred and enslaved lots of people. The main focus of the site was the three vaults, which contain over 7,000 terracotta soldiers, all lined up in formations of officers, bowmen, infantrymen, and cavalry. In addition to all of the terracotta figures, they have also found two life-size chariots with accompanying horses made out of bronze. The largest vault was discovered in 1974 by a farmer digging a well - now that same farmer still sits in the gift shop and gives signatures to people who buy his book. He doesn't seem particularly happy with this arrangement, as tourists are constantly trying to get his photo and he's taken to holding a fan in front of his face at all times to prevent them from doing so. I wonder why he doesn't just leave. Anyway, despite the unhappy ex-farmer and the hordes of tourists and hawkers, the place still managed to maintain a historic and even kind of mysterious atmosphere. I think I can say it was my favorite sight on the trip.




[1&2- The Terracotta Warriors, 3-One of the bronze chariots]

We still had another morning in Xi'an, so we spent it downtown, banging drums at the Drum Tower and attempting to eat slippery dumplings despite our limited chopstick skills, which gave the locals a kick. Then we went on a scavenger hunt to find the Great Mosque, only to find that it was right behind the Drum Tower the whole time. It was a pretty interesting place, with more historical artifacts than they seemed to know what to do with, but we ended up spending a lot of the time there cursing the guidebook's completely inaccurate directions and our resulting sore feet (especially my Dad). Then it was a quick cab ride back to the hotel (after a protracted attempt at actually finding a cab that wasn't trying to charge us about 5 times the actual rate), and we were on our way to the airport to go to Guilin.

Guilin is in southern China, in the state of Guangxi. It is known for its natural beauty, although that reknown has ended up turning most of the place into a tourist trap. The whole town was accustomed to having foreigners around, and had figured out how to best use us, either for our money or for our language - we didn't wander outside once without someone coming up and wanting to shepherd us somewhere in order to practice their English with us. But I was just grateful that we were in the south, where the weather it was much warmer than in Harbin, way back up by Siberia. Anyway, we spent our first full-day on the Li River cruise. The Li River is famous for it's big, dramatic limestone peaks. One particular landscape even made it onto the back of the 20 yuan bill, which we found out as we saw everyone pulling out twenties at once and running to the back of the boat to take pictures. The cruise was cut short because the river level was extremely low - we could see the river bottom for most of the trip, not to mention hear it when the boat scraped at certain points. But I suppose it was a good thing that we only went along part of the river, as our abbreviated cruise still took about 5 hours (not to mention the bus trip to even get out there). Despite the general haze, it was still pretty scenic, although not as scenic as the coffee-table books that they kept trying to sell us (which must have been photosphopped pretty severely, having seen the actual place). At the end of the cruise, we got off in the tourist town of Yangshuo. Walking around Yangshuo, I realized we could have just as easily been in Panajachel in Guatemala or in any small town that has built itself up to host the backpacker traveller types who are willing to shell out for brightly-colored souvenirs and chocolate pancakes.

On the way back, our guide tried to convince us to stop off at Shangrila, some tourist-trap of an island where you can see "native life" or something like that, but nobody on the bus was having it. Yet an hour later, despite our clear collective grumpiness, she stopped the bus and announced matter of factly that "Now we all go see the peh-ting zeer." Nobody knew what she was talking about, but the couple next to us wagered that we were at a petting zoo. Turns out it was a painting museum. At first we all mutinied and refused to get off the bus, but then one German lady got off and spoiled it, so we all figured we all go ahead and get it over with. The result was that we got to sit through the exact same presentation on Chinese calligraphy and freestyle painting that I have seen in every other city I've been to, and then walk around pretending to look at all the paintings on display. We eventually got home, but not nearly soon enough.




[On the Li River Cruise]

The next day we spent touring some smaller sites. The main focus was the Reed Flute Cave, which is an underground maze of stalactites and stalagmites with multicolored lighting added for effect. It was pretty cool, and we managed to fit ourselves in between the large tour groups so that we could see the formations without 100 people in front of us, elbowing for a view. We also saw some interesting smaller parks around town, including one with a big elephant-shaped rock which is apparently quite well-known. It was a nice, relaxing half-day, and we even had enough energy that night to go see a song and dance performance by some of the local indigenous groups at the theater next to our hotel. The whole thing was set in the countryside, and most of the song lyrics were about farming and nature and traditions, but most of the actors were teenagers or young adults who looked like they couldn't bale hay for the life of them and had probably grown up in the city. It was a bit strange - I tried to imagine the indigenous residents of the town I lived in in Guatemala going to the city to start a show where they sung about how happy they were to work in the coffee fields, and that made it ever stranger. I guess I can't really make a social commentary on it, considering I was in Guilin for all of 2 days, so I really don't have enough of a grasp on the situation to say anything insightful.



[The Reed Flute Caves]




[The indigenous groups' performance]

After Guilin we had about a day in Shanghai. I hadn't really wanted to go in the first place, as I'd already spent 5 weeks there over the summer, but it turned out to work well as an overnight stop on the trip. We walked along the Bund (the bank of the river in the old German concession), ate at a nice restaurant (M on the Bund, which I'd been to once over the summer for a heavenly brunch), and enjoyed the view from the hotel. Then the next day, Sunday, we flew up to Harbin. My parents were staying at the Longmen Guibin Lou, an old European-style building where the last emperor of China had apparently lived for a bit while he was being used as a puppet by the Japanese. It was a huge, empty place, and my parents remarked that it was just right for Halloween. I started classes again on Monday, but my parents managed to find their way around just fine without me and without speaking any Chinese themselves. I spent most of my time with them going out to eat, and we had a couple of good meals with my roommate and suitemates. Then on Wednesday morning they were on a flight back out to Beijing and then the states, and I was back off to the daily grind.

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California Dreaming...

...on such a winter's day. And I do mean winter - it's been below freezing since October, and still slipping. Maybe that wouldn't be so bad if there also weren't gales of wind blowing in my face every time I step outside. And maybe the gales of wind in my face wouldn't be so bad if it weren't for the dust everywhere that the gales pick up. Oh well.

Well, it's been a long time since I've updated; schoolwork and the lack of a convenient internet connection ensured that. Things have been busy since the last time I wrote, mostly with classes. We had midterms about a month ago, and then we had a week of vacation (my parents came and we travelled around China - I'll write about that in the next post...). Anyway, so now I'm back in Harbin, and I've finally managed to put off my homework for long enough to sit down and finish this post.

All of my classes have been going pretty well, and I'm managing to hang in there and even improve my grades. In the Business Chinese class now we're discussing topics that I probably wouldn't be able to discuss knowledgeably in English either, like stock market regulation and determining interest rates. In literature class, the short essays we are reading are getting more and more interesting as our reading ability improves, and I think my knowledge of characters has also improved by leaps and bounds. Our one-on-two drill class continues to be just that, a drill class. We've also done a couple of field trips to places like the fruit market and the hospital in order to make us use some of the specific vocabulary we've learned.

My on-on-one class (a tutorial on the topic of Women and Sports in China) is also getting more and more interesting. We finished the history part of the class, and now we've started to take trips to actually see the Chinese physical education system in action. Initially I sat in on elementary, junior high, high school, and university gym classes - now I've started taking trips out to the area's specialized sports schools and professional sports training centers. The class itself is a nice break from the formula followed by the other classes of memorizing long lists of new words, discussing the text, and then having quizzes every day. I still have to learn a lot of new specialized words, but then I get a chance to go out and use them in interviews with people rather than taking quizzes on them. The one part of the one-on-one class that I was dreading, though, was the essay. During midterm week, we had to turn in a 1500 word essay on our topic, and then give a 15 minute presentation on our essay. It took me the better part of a week (and multiple revisions by my teacher, my roommate, and my roommate's friends that she called in for backup) before it was at all presentable, but to look at pages and pages of words in Chinese and think that I wrote all of it makes me pretty proud. At the end of the quarter we have to incorporate the midterm essay into a longer, more developed one. Once I've finished writing that, I'll translate it and put it up on the web, in case anyone wants to read it (hey, who knows?).

Outside of class... I do homework. And excercise. And occasionally sleep. By the time the weekend rolls around I tend to be too tired to do much interesting. I mostly just watch movies in the dorm with my suitemate when I have a chance to rest, so I still haven't seen all that much of Harbin or the surrounding area. But I'm not too bothered by that, as I figure that the main point of me being here is to learn Chinese, not to be an expert on Harbin. Luckily, though, our program recognizes that we're all too tired to go out and do much exploring, so they usually plan some sort of optional activity every weekend that we can sign up for. I'm not normally one for planned group activities, but I'm really too busy to get out any other way. And we usually don't end up with a super-huge group anyway, as most people choose to sleep instead.

Close to the beginning of the quarter we went on a trip to this Cultural Revolution themed restaurant where all of the employees dressed up as the red guard, carried around Mao's little red book, and chanted slogans. It was pretty entertaining, especially as a lot of the people there were old cadres who got up to drunkenly sing the propaganda songs on stage with the performers by the end of the night. The big drawback was the incredibly high volume - I think most Chinese people must be half deaf by the time they reach adulthood because of the constant exposure to overamplified sound. Another, quieter trip was a day of hiking out at Songfeng Shan, a mountain a couple of hours outside of Harbin. It was a nice, relatively easy climb. The leaves were great autumn colors, and it actually kind of seemed as if we were somewhere in New England. The most elaborate weekend activity was a three-day trip to Dalian, a fairly developed city along the coast. Our group made up an entire train-car full of people, including all of us foreign students, our roommates, and several teachers (as well as a guide who didn't do much but get paid to stay in a nice hotel with us and eat on the program's expense account every day). Dalian was a good break from Harbin. Most imporantly, as it has a lot more foreign investment, it also has a lot more nice restaurants, which we spent the entire weekend availing ourselves of.



[1-Holding up Mao's Little Red Book at the Cultural Revolution themed restaurant; 2-The view from the Hike at Songfeng Shan]

For a change from my general weekend laziness and dependence on other people to plan activities, or maybe because the weather wasn't depressing enough, one weekend I went up to the museum at the concentration camp that the Japanese ran in the Harbin suburbs during World War II. One of the classmates I went with is Japanese, so she spent the whole time pretending to be Korean. It was an worthwhile experience, even if the place was mostly full of clay figurines of Japanese people throwing Chinese people into furnaces or harvesting their organs. The concentration camp's main purpose was to carry out medical "experiments," putting people in freezing rooms and seeing how long it took for them to get frostbite, for example. (Other examples: removing various organs and playing around with them to see how they worked, infecting people with diseases in order to try out cures, etc. etc.) The museum had just a teeny-weeny bit of propaganda, so some of the exhibits didn't really actually demonstrate much, despite the emphatic captions ("These were the boots a Japanese soldier wore when committing atrocious crimes." Really? Did you see the guy wearing these boots?). But chilling, nonetheless.



[In what was once the frostbite lab at the Japanese concentration camp]

Speaking of propaganda, another interesting experience was the anniversary of the founding of the Chinese Communist Party. All Chinese students got the week off (we still had classes), and the week before there were innumerable formal functions to celebrate the CCP turning the big 5-6. We had a reception for all of the foreign students at our university, where we were all subjected to three hours of (you guessed it) overamplified sound and inane "cultural" performances. The free food wasn't even that great either. So I wasn't too inclined to accept when the next day our director came around looking for someone to volunteer to represent our program at Heilongjiang University's reception. But nobody else would do it, so I ended up getting stuck with the job. Heilongjiang University is the public provincial university here, so their reception had a lot of party officials and other high-up types. Of course I showed up in blue jeans and my rugby jacket, as they had only told me that afternoon I had to go, and I didn't have time to find someone to lend me nice clothes. It ended up being quite the affair - it was held at the fanciest, most expensive hotel in Harbin, with an incredible buffet and four stations with chefs preparing Peking duck, sashimi, and some local dishes. And all I had to do was listen to a 15 minute speech on how all of Harbin's foreign friends have helped the city's economic development... bla bla bla... cooperation... bla bla bla... progress. That was probably the best meal I'd had in months.

Another cool sight (besides concentration camps and decked out government events) is Fuzhuang Cheng, or "Clothes City." Fuzhuang Cheng actually consists of two buildings, one selling ready-made clothing and another where you can get your clothing tailor-made. It's the latter building that's really the most interesting. The first floor is completely made up of fabric vendors, either in stands or their own little open-front stores. Fabric is sold either by the meter (for the kind of fabric you might make a nice suit out of) or by the kilo (for the kind of stuff you might make a t-shirt out of), and there is everything from bright purple fake fur to tweed. After picking out the fabric you want, then you take it up to the second floor, where all the tailors have set up shop, each with examples of their work hanging out front. Once you've picked a tailor and explained your requirements, it usually takes about 4 days to a week before you can come back and pick it up. I haven't actually had anything made yet, but I'm planning on getting a pants-suit made because it's just so much cheap (comparatively, anyway). The other interesting bit about a trip to Fuzhuang Cheng is the food vendor stalls surrounding the complex. Last time I was there I got suckered into eating a chuanr (i.e. a shishkebob) of barbecued silkworm larvae. Mmmmm.



[A bird's eye view of Fuzhuang Cheng, on the row where they sell buttons and lining]

It also turns out that the main campus of Heilongjiang University (the state university) is across the street from Fuzhuang Cheng. Normally this wouldn't really mean much to me, but it turns out Heilongjiang University is the best place in town to go swimming for cheap (8 kuai each time, as opposed to 200 extra dollars to get access to the pool at my health club for three months). I found out about this from my one-on-two teacher, who is also the assistant director of our program. She comes in pretty handy, especially every time I want to know where something is in town (from a good Japanese restaurant to a cheap swimming pool to a place to find an electronic dictionary). She can usually tell me where the place is, what buses I can take to get there, what time they open and close, how much it should be, anything else I ought to know/bring, and then draw me a map of how to get there from the bus stop. Anyhoo, her swimming pool recommendation turned out really well - despite the communal showers and the Chinese people who like to stare, the place is clean and usually has lots of open lanes. Partially because of the dearth of places I can go running inside as the weather gets colder, I've managed to go swimming a couple of times a week.

So, I guess you can say that the couple of months haven't exactly been eventful, but they haven't been uneventful either. I've settled into the rhythm of classes, found some places to work out, and even managed to get out and about on a handful of occasions. I know, not terribly exciting (despite the fact that I still managed to write a short novel for this post), but that's what I've been up to. Sometimes I miss the freedom and the sense of exploration I had while in Tibet and way back when I was in Guatemala, but I know this is really the best way to actually learn Chinese, which has proven to be just a tad bit difficult. I'm sure the rest of the semester will be more of the same, but I'm sure I'll still find something to write (way too much) about.

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