goodbye Qingdao

Tomorrow morning we're flying to Hong Kong to meet my family, to start a two week trip before returning back to the states. After our trip we'll go together to Portland OR, and then two weeks later I'll head east to hang out in the Philly area, visit friends, and scope out affordable nyc housing. (By the way, anybody else going to live in nyc next year?) Britta's plans are still a bit vague, but she'll be staying in Portland longer. We should have another post or two from our last trip, and maybe I can rope a family member into writing a guest post. So don't give up on us here quite yet.

bad news about hot pot

I'm in my last week of chinese classes (we're going to be leaving the city june 20th), so my classes have turned into a free-for-all of (mostly) chinese language conversation. Recent topics have included grilled meat, corruption, american political parties and curse words, among many others. Today at one point the topic turned to Sichuan hot pot.

I'm pretty sure I've talked about hot pot before, but for what it's worth: hot pot involves a (usually communal) bowl of boiling broth to which you can add veggies, starches, and most importantly thinly sliced meats. Sichuan style hot pot is particularly famous, the broth has lots of hot peppers, spices and peanut oil in it.

This style of hot pot, I learned today, is also referred to as "saliva pot." The broth, with its precious peppers, spices and oil, is just too valuable to throw out each time that a group of customers finishes dining. Instead, this broth, which has been infused by the flavor of countless diners' chopstick-spittle, is served again to the next guests. The only place in town that doesn't follow this practice A) is prohibitively expensive, and B) in a grossly unethical move sells its used broth to cheaper restaurants.

The lesson to take home is: DO NOT EAT SICHUAN HOT POT.

Back in Qingdao

So we just got back from a trip to the far north-east - what used to be called Manchuria. I should probably write about that, but I think I'll just write about some curious things I saw today.

The first was when I went to lunch. Many restaurants here pick truly ridiculous uniforms for their servers. The one I went to today manages, even in this company, to be a standout. Servers wear an apron that says (in English) "Pretty Doggi" and has a large pocket in the middle with a picture of a... well I think you can guess. Today I was served by a man, and he was wearing one of those aprons.

This evening Britta and I went to a neighborhood called Taidong, a place where many people go for budget shopping, to pick up some clothes she had had made. Unfortunately her tailer was closed, so we just wandered around a bit. Taidong is pretty big and dispersed, but it has a core shopping area along a wide walking street. The only problem is that the walking street is broken at one point by a 5 lane road, and THERE IS NO LIGHT! Urban planners, avert your eyes.

Last Weekend

None of this is especially groundbreaking cultural stuff, but I thought I would write a bit about a night out last weekend.

I met up with a friend at a local bar with cheap beer and a free pool table. With him was a friend of hers, a Chinese-American girl with family in Qingdao. She gets a phone call, and it turns out to be from her grandmother's doctor. The doctor is a relatively young woman, who sometimes goes clubbing with her. So the doctor shows up with some of the nurses she works with, and after settling down at a table she comes over and offers all of us packs of cigarettes (not individual cigarettes, packs of cigarettes) and then they settle down at a table with about three beers each.

Almost all of this story sounds really strange, perhaps even more strange given my experiences with Chinese culture. Nightlife, going to bars and clubs, is relatively new in Chinese society, and as far as I can tell hasn't sunken in outside of the most westernized cities. So I was a bit confused as to what all these nice Chinese women were doing out hours past a typical Qingdao bedtime. It turns out that they had come from a fellow coworker's wedding celebration, which explained some of it.

As for the beers per woman ratio at the table, that made more sense. Chinese people typically eat in, but when they eat out with company they order much more than they could possibly eat. To do otherwise would seem stingy. (Then, if they are relatively pure and frugal, they have to find a way to finish it anyway.) So it made sense that girls out on the town would fill the tables with beer. But then, after exchanging pleasantries and refusing most of the several beers that were pushed at us, we learned that they had already drunken about 4 tall beers each. I'm terrible with remembering liquid measurements, but I think those beers are about a liter each. So we were lead to the conclusion that while Chinese men can't drink all that much, Chinese woman are truly formidable.

Massage

Yesterday Britta and I went to get a massage. Massages in China aren't seen the same way as they are in America, instead of being a form of pampering for wealthy people they are considered a medical treatment for everyone. There are two main consequences of this: they cost much less money and hurt a whole lot.

This was my first and Britta's second professional massage. She had previously gone to this place and got a card for 10 massages that costed just over 26 dollars total. Britta had told me that I should expect more pain than pleasure, but still I wasn't completely prepared.

Most of it consisted of finded a place that was tense (in my case it was just inside and above my shoulder blades) and trying to dig a hole through to the other side of our bodies. Meanwhile the masseuses would be making denigrading comments on our dietary habits and the states of various internal organs, or so I gathered from Britta later. I would just lie there, trying to will him to pick another spot while repressing the impulse to scream. There were occasional moments of pleasure, but mostly of that false kind that comes from the temporary absense of pain.

It's nearly 24 hours later, and I'm still pretty sore. The problem is that Britta has 7 more massages on her card, and we have 6 more weeks in Qingdao.

bad man!

So today is the day we send our magazine to the publisher. Before it can be published however, we have to take it to a government censor, where they read through and check the content. Despite our best attempts at self censorship, we still had ran into a little problem. In our review page, we reviewed a Qingdao rapper, Sha Zhou. It turns out that he is a "bad man" who uses swear words and denigrates the countryside. Nevermind that we gave him a negative review,even the mention of him is too much in our magazine. Luckily we had a backup review, but still, welcome to the world of publishing in China.

yunnan!

Dan and I are back in Beijing from our trip in Yunnan. We had a great time seeing an area of China completely different from the one we live in. For a quick recap, we flew into Kunming, the capital,and then spent a day in the surrounding area. We then took a night train to Dali, several 100 km north in the foothills of some mountains (which I think of as the Himalayas, but which are technically probably not.) We spent 2 and a half days here,and then took a bus to Lijiang, about 3 hours north, and also up in the mountains. From Lijiang, we flew to Kunming and then from Kunming back to Qingdao. We spent a total of 8 days there, though two were travel days. Ultimately, 6 days was not enough time to spend in this amazing region, in the future I would like to go back and spend a month or so bumming around the province. Yunnan, for those who don't know, is in SW China and borders a bunch of countries including Laos, Myanmar, Thailand (I think) as well as Tibet (which to be clear, I am not listing as a separate country). Southern Yunnan, where we didn't go, is very much like SE Asia (or so I've been told), with lots of SE Asian ethnic minorities. Northern Yunnan is much more Tibetan culturally, and there are many Tibetan-related minority groups living there, including the Bai and the Naxi (pronounced Na-shee in Chinese and Na-hee in Naxi, with a gutteral h).
Dali, the 2nd city (or town) we went to, is a Bai minority town, though in truth it is probably more culturally hippie, as it is jam packed full of small shops selling hemp draw string pants, tie-dyed jackets and bongs. Also, the number of dreadlocked/crunchy/hiking booted backpackers almost equaled the number of Chinese inhabitants of the city. Although slightly irritating (it felt like a Tibetan-themed Oregon State Fair), it did mean that we could indulge in guilty pleasures like the "Dali Lama's grand slam breakfast" of pancakes, eggs, and yak bacon, or muesli and yogurt, and of course, cheap fruit smoothies and coffee. While in Dali we went on a boat cruise and saw a temple and an incredibly touristy Bai village, where we were served "the Bai traditional three tea service," one tea being a bean tea with bits of Cheese floating on top, which does actually taste better than it sounds. The highlight of our time there was a hike we took up a mountain to this Buddhist temple. The hike was a steep hour-long scramble through old cemeteries and a beautiful forest, which reminded me a little bit of the Pacific NW with evergreen trees and wild flowers.
Lijiang is the largest city of the Naxi people, who unlike the Bai have retained much more of their cultural distinctiveness from Han chinese people, including their own written language and religion. As such, their tourist racket was also more highly organized, and the entire traditional city of Lijiang felt like some place in the Epcot center run by a cartel of grandmothers (the Naxi are matriarchal). Tourists in Lijiang tended to be Chinese, which is probably worse in my mind than hippies, because it meant the entire town was full of cheap trinkets and people in costumes harrassing you on the street trying to get you to buy something/ride a yak/take a picture with them, all things that Chinese tourists seem to enjoy but hippies tend to shy away from. Interestingly, most of the non-Chinese tourists seemed to be older Westerners or Japanese back-packers.
In Lijiang, the highlight of the trip was definitely meeting our shaman friend, who offered us an apprenticeship. Switching into anthropological mode,I asked him all about the Naxi religion, which is called Dongba (the word also means shaman, as in our friend is a Dongba). I am not totally clear, but basically the Naxi worship nature, and believe that everyone has a totem, which is determined based on astrological signs. There are deities, but they exist more as spirits than as omnipitent gods. Becoming a shaman is hereditary, our friend is a 18th generation shaman, but also depends on your own astrology, for example, out of all his brothers and sisters, he was the only one trained as a shaman because he was the one with the gift. As a shaman, you must master five fields of learning: astronomy, geography, art, law, and philosophy, as well as writing. Naxi is the last hieroglyphic language in use, and it was interesting to meet someone for whom it was their only written language. The dongba was illiterate in Chinese, so he would write things either in Naxi or using hieroglyphs as a phonetic transliteration of Chinese sounds. After training, a dongba must build up a following of people who want him to perform religious ceremonies for them, and as such, along with taking us around,our dongba spent much of the time we were with him networking with the random locals we met along the way (though most already seemed to know him). He would always introduce us as his apprentices, and then offer us and any various other people around, usually waitstaff or an idle tourguide, a lesson on reading Naxi. Most Naxi are illiterate in their own language, writing the hieroglyphs is a sign of prestige and high learning. It was interesting to see the combination of incredibly traditional (a shaman chanting hieroglyphs to uneducated laymen) and modern (the dongba was constantly on his cell phone, and collecting numbers, which he wrote in hieroglyphs in his little note book.) He made me teach him how to say, "I'd like some wine please" in English, and then transliterated it into Naxi. Besides teaching Naxi, copying ceremonial texts and performing ceremonies, his other source of income is from artwork, which he makes himself and sells. His ultimate goal is to start a school where Naxi traditional culture is passed on to the younger generation. He sells paintings on which he carves/paints traditional images and hieroglyphs for 180 yuan, or about $23. (I agreed to be his agent in Qingdao and America. If anyone is interested, e-mail me at ingebretson@gmail.com or dongba18@hotmail.com)

Besides befriending a shaman, we also went on another hike, this objectively one less strenuous, although the altitude, above 12,000 feet (4050 m) above sea level, made even a simple walk quite difficult. We went to Jade Dragon Snow Mountain, a mountain of about 17,000 feet (it's 5500 meters) above sea level. We took a chairlift to a meadow, with stunning views of snow capped peaks clouded in mist, although the experience was considerably marred by people in native costumes hawking photos, horse rides, trinkets, etc. There was a wooden board trail meant in a loop where we were supposed to 'hike,' although we stepped off for a picnic lunch and also as a little detour, where we found an amazing trail with utterly stunning views. Unfortunately with the altitude began to do us in, and we were so tired and lightheaded we weren't able to do much more than just walk around the board.
On the whole, Yunnan was a gorgeous place, I can't wait to go back and do more serious hiking, as well as see more of the SE area.

guest blogger

So as you may or may not know, I, Sarah Cohodes, have been traveling with the illustrious Britta and Dan throughout Yunnan after spending a few days in Qingdao. We've moved on from Dali, and are now in Lijiang, which contains fewer loopy crunchy white tourists and many Chinese tourists. But the city is really cool with cobblestone roads and canals. Of course, maybe it was all "reconstructed" in 1996, but we're still enjoying it. We capitalized on Britta's penchant for meeting and chatting up random people and ended up hanging out with a Naxi (the local minority) shaman for most of yesterday. He reads and writes Naxi, the last hieroglyphic language still in use, but not a bit of Chinese. Britta seemed to understand his Mandarin very well, however. Anyway, he invited me to come back to Lijiang and be an apprentice in his shop and said he'd find me a Naxi husband. As tempting as it is to make books and live in China, I think I'm going to pass up on the offer -- he's a total chainsmoker.

Off to Beijing tomorrow (for me, B and D are going home). We'll see how I manage with my beyond rudimentary Chinese.

EDIT: This is Britta here, Sarah asked me to add her highlight of the trip, which in her sleep-deprived state she forgot to include. Sarah went to the family of the boy I tutor for dinner one night. The grandmother was concerned that Sarah, a newly-arrived American, wouldn't get enough to eat, so during the meal, she kept force-feeding Sarah lettuce dipped in sauce (the grandma's favorite dish). If she caught Sarah not personally stuffing lettuce in her face, she would grab a piece and stick in in Sarah's mouth.