Chickity China, the Chinese children?

A stroke of luck allowed my dear friend Max and I to find ourselves caught up in one of the coolest tennis environments in the world, but now it's settling down to business. What we missed because of our escapades was thankfully not the first day of classes, but rather the opening ceremony and a campus tour of Tongji: a model of paradoxical China in and of itself, we soon learned. Mandarin classes were in one lou, building, where it seemed everything creaked. And bathrooms are usually a good standard upon which to judge: you couldn't get too close to these unless you dared to go in, and while each stall was divided, instead of pleasantly having your own hole to squat over, everything washed, er, downstream to the hole at the end of the trough. And, as always, the “bring your own tp” rule applies.

Mulling over this with other students led us to conclude that to us, because of the standards of living we are used to, basically everything is really cheap, but nothing is free.


But photos of Mao are free! A statue of the chairman hails to everyone who enters Tongji's gate, one of the few Mao statues left in China as he apparently ordered most of them to be torn down, not wanting to be idolized and all that.









One of the premier universities known for its architecture program in particular, the converse was also readily apparent. Modern, fresh, new: the site of our Civilization class and our culture classes. Mango smoothies for 15 kuai (about $2) in the café on the first floor are an enticing accompaniment to their free internet, zooming up the elevator to the 19th floor gives you ceiling-to-floor windows for a great peek of the city, not to mention nice study spots in this light wood and glass ambience that seems to expect library-quiet.



As amazing as this class building is, Zhao Laoshi, with his wisdom that learning Chinese society happens not only within a classroom, took us on a field trip!




It took us back to our kindergarten days, as we giddily followed our fearless leader… to a kindergarten! A haven for the children of Tongji Daxue professors, I was astounded by the setup. With bright colors everywhere, this clean-cut building with more than enough class space, toys, and resources seemed to be a pretty swanky environment for these munchkins.






If you Americans remember your naptime in kindergarten, you probably received the child-size equivalent of a yoga mat to lie on, right? Not so here. Each child gets to lie in a child-size wooden bed with a mattress!




They did not know what to make of us of course, but they sang songs and did their little gongfu (kung fu) drills for us, and then it was playtime! Although surrounded by niceties, upon getting the chance to hang out with the kids and see if they could understand our zhongwen, these children were not spoiled brats that can result from that kind of environment, but pretty obedient as well as silly and playful.






Thankfully the kids put up with our struggles to think of more things to ask them than "Ni ji sui? Ni xihuan zuo shenme?" How old are you? What do you like to do? Game time made it easier for everyone to get silly and ignore our imperfect Mandarin. The fact that this pose is just a reflex for most Chinese kids whenever they see a zhaoxiangji (camera) somehow never ceases to amuse.


Title: Reference to "One Week," Barenaked Ladies, late 90s. Attempt that raokouling, aka "to entangle, mouth, order," aka tongue twister, only if you dare.

As if the Chinese children weren't great enough, our week will get EXPO-nentially cooler on Friday!

"In (Shanghai), concrete jungle where dreams are made of, there's nothing you can't do..."

Point of warning:
Only growing up in a home where if tennis is on TV (which it really seldom is, aside from the Tennis Channel) would I have been exposed to as many famous tennis names as I have been, so apologies if you haven’t heard most of these names previous or following that I am currently gushing about.

The men’s ATP Master’s tourney is in Shanghai this week, which I learned even before coming to China, so I was super excited to purchase some student discount passes for what amounts to about $5 and go with some friends to see some of the best male players in the world. But getting closer to the date, Max said that his uncle is one of the high-ups in Heineken, one of the tourney sponsors, and he was going to try to get us tickets.

What ended up happening was Max received invites for himself and a friend (thanks Max for picking your tennis friend!) to the pre-tourney party on Sunday night where (after finding out the hard way that Shanghai has 2 Ritz Carltons) we met Charles Smith (tourney director), and Wayne Arthurs (retired pro, now head of the Australian tennis program or something of the sort), Heineken had its worldwide debut of a glow-in-the-dark bottle, and Ivan Ljubicic showed up! At the party, Max’s uncle heard that I played tennis too and since he loves to play, he invited me to hit on Monday and they we could stay and watch matches. We had a lovely evening and bid him goodnight.








Other tidbits:
- Ljubicic seems a little shy, he mostly just hung out in the corner
- Wayne Arthurs is a bit of a crazy dancer when he has a couple Heinekens in his system
- Once the dance floor got going, we watched on from the comforts of conversation as people got into one of my favorite songs, “Empire State of Mind,” by Jay-Z and Alicia Keys. Only they took some artistic license to ignore the fact that the song is entirely about NYC back in our homeland and substituted “Shanghai” for New York in the chorus (see blog post title).

So Max and I met his uncle at his hotel on Monday morning, where we were picked up in a tournament Cadillac and driven the hour to the tourney site, we hopped onto Court 9 outside and played a match (and a few random people even showed up to watch).


Our tournament car.




Underneath Center Court.



Center Court from the outside.


The grounds and hitting with Max's uncle.






















Following, I got escorted in a golf cart all the way to stadium court 2 to have the whole player locker room to myself to shower (because all the guys were using the one in Center Court).

Coming back from showering, I saw a huge group of people in suits walking towards us and in the middle of the crowd was Federer and he smiled at me! I’m such a dork. Max and I were given passes that let us go anywhere the players could go, so we hung out under Center Court and saw players going in and out of the locker rooms too.







I spotted Mirnyi and Querrey down there, and as we were walking with Max’s uncle and Charles Smith, they chatted with Bhupati – he seemed really nice. They even took us to the player lounge to eat lunch! It was a pretty cozy room, and I knew my players better than Max, so I got to secretly point out Roddick, Baghdatis, Robredo, Davydenko, Gasquet (who got dessert next to me!), and Tipsarevic who wasn’t wearing his crazy glasses for once. Unfortunately I have no proof of this experience because I restrained my tourist urges and didn’t sneak pictures of the players while I was a guest in their lounge.


And we didn’t get normal tickets, but were directed to front row Center Court in the Heineken box where we watched Tsonga and Lopez, Yang and Melzer, and De Bakker and Verdasco. And where my parents watched Max and me on the Tennis Channel all the way in Minnesota for about six hours! We even were able to keep practicing our Mandarin by listening to the player intros and post-match speeches in English and Chinese and also learned some tennis vocab in our language focus: game point=赛点 (sai4dian3), deuce=平分 (ping2fen4, even points), break point=破发点 (po4fa1dian3), etc.











An interesting feature of the grounds was that there were bronze statues of the top eight players in the style of Xi'an's famous terracotta soldiers! If you check out my previous blog entry, I have a photo of me with a (fake, outside of a restaurant) terracotta soldier unintentionally similar to the one below of me with the Chinese warrior version of Djokovic!











Max and I experienced it all: warm-ups and matches, sun and a rain delay where we watched them close the roof over Center Court (in about half the time Wimbledon’s roof takes), fabulous seats and some outer court action. We also saw Rafael Nadal practicing because when we were wandering the grounds we saw a bunch of Chinese people running off to a court and followed them – not even security knew Rafa would be there because he was supposed to be golfing on his day off!




















And for good measure, one of the photos my momma took of the TV while Max (a friend I now owe big time!) and I were on the Tennis Channel. (You can click on the picture to see it bigger if you so choose)


An unforgettable, unrepeatable experience.

Shanghai: concrete jungle where dreams are made of.