- Blogspot, for one, is a no-no.
- You can find international headlines about controversial Chinese issues, but if you try to delve further about Liu Xiaobo’s Nobel Prize, for one, those pages do not seem to exist.
- You can still get to Google, but the page is littered with Chinese characters and it is routed through Hong Kong.
- The government definitely will not tell you that a certain page is censored. You find out by the spinning pinwheel of doom or messages that say “The page was reset while loading” or “The network is taking too long to respond.” Aka you can wait to see this page, but you will be waiting until you get out of the country.
So let’s just pretend that these posts written during this period were posted when they should have been, this one set on October 2nd.
On Chinese National Day, we did some of our “lasts” in Tianjin. Last day in Xinancun – we’ll really miss this convenient and amazingly tasty food village with, as Alek described, “dirt cheap prices, especially because sometimes there is dirt in your food.” That’s what you get with street food, but we got to watch our food being made, made friends with some of the people we purchased from on a daily basis, and nobody got sick as far as I know! We ate our baozi and chuanr on the step while chatting about fantasy novels, and then since we had some time to kill in the afternoon before our night train, Rob, Alek, Kellianne, and I decided to take a spin through parts of campus we had never seen before. 
On our way back home, we stumbled across a National Day fountain show in the pond we normally pass by daily! The water was timed to music, but rather than Chinese music, the selections played were Star Wars and other European classics!
Another funny trend that Kellianne picked up on is that a lot of people really go out of their way to not sit on the ground in China. This man would rather sit on his water bottle to watch the show! It does make sense though, as old men spit everywhere (you know the situation is not great when there has to be a sign inside the train station that says “No casual spitting.” How about formal spitting?), and parents help their little children go to the bathroom just about anywhere (I’ve seen a mother help her perhaps six-year-old pee in a bottle while walking in line, at least it wasn’t on the ground!).
Our last meal in Xinancun with one of our favorite dishes: Xihongshidantangmian. Literal translation: tomato, egg, soup, noodle. Melt in your mouth tomatoes with scrambled eggs over slightly sweet, frighteningly long noodles in tomato broth.
Our bags were packed and my travel group of Alek, Kellianne, Max, and Rob grabbed two taxis for the Tianjin huochezhan, train station. Max’s and my ride was lovely as we were able to function in a conversation with our kind-hearted and curious driver. We got dropped off and called the others and thankfully found them because attempting a second call everyone realized their phones were either out of minutes or battery! We all made it, the scenery and breeze outside the train station were lovely, and we jumped in the line to go through security into the station, wondering why so many people were just camped out and milling about outside. We soon found out, as inside was packed and sweaty, so we grabbed the only empty table in KFC to await our train with snacks and air conditioning.
Our train experience kind of mirrored the inside of the train station on that hot holiday weekend night. Thankfully we had seats, but our car was packed, leg room was pretty much nonexistent, and there were plenty of people who had standing room only tickets and thus crowded around seats to find inches to lean upon for the night. We chatted a bit with the two girls we were sitting with and then attempted to sleep as much as we could in that cramped environment that made for some lovely bonding time of all sweating together.
About 6:30am we arrived at our destination, Tai’an. With everyone a little bit out of it, we attempted to get our bearings to tackle our most pressing issue: finding housing for the next two days on short notice in China’s busiest travel season. Luckily we talked with an extremely nice young woman at the Tourist Information Center right outside the huochezhan, and she called around to nearby hotels within our student budgets, found us a couple open rooms, and even walked us there! On such short notice, our hotel was much nicer than we expected even though the surrounding area itself wasn’t too great. The three boys had to share a double and we didn’t get our hot water to work for a while, but the rooms were decent and circled a nice courtyard.
Errand run number two: breakfast and then cell phone minutes for those who ran out. We found a cute place on the corner to eat, and I was particularly amused watching this woman bring giant slabs of doufu, tofu, into the restaurant. Kind of like the old days in the US when ice blocks had to be delivered to homes.
Perhaps this is just the area by the train station (which is supposed to be a more sketchy area of a big city in general), but Tai’an is more like I expected from China. Dirty, smelly, horridly hazy. And yet there are signs of new, fresh, developed. The more downtown area was of course cleaner with a modern flare. We had a good conversation over some baozi and zhou (basically Chinese porridge with little taste, mostly filler) about how it seems like China wants to surge ahead to the huge buildings, lightning-speed trains, and cell phones with a lot of nengli (features). They jump right to the shiny new cars without dealing with the lack of good sewer systems. Two cell phone complexes blast their competing music fifty feet apart with as much fanfare as possible while rounding the corner you find yourself in a street lined with shacks all selling the same variety of nut from these huge sacks and dumping waste into a grate in the ground.
And who fixes up everything? It seems like people keep holding on to the old and dirty with the expectation it will soon get chosen to be fixed, thus why maintain? Demolition is faster and easier right? But the people who need these construction jobs created for them also need places to be. There is always shigong going on in China, and this country is still in the place in the cycle of development where a lot of hands, not machine claws, need work. So conveniently their lodging pops up where construction pops up, like in Tianjin when we saw tents appear out of thin air and stay on a sidewalk to Xinancun for a few days until the sidewalk was dug up and fixed as new. Work becomes home, and perhaps vice versa. That’s how China is able to get stuff done. This country is in a tough spot balancing prosperity and humane sanity, as we all are.
Other China observations:
- It’s fashionably and socially acceptable to wear those kind of surgical masks over your nose and mouth, especially if you are out in the air a lot.
- The Chinese don’t really drink water. The drinking water isn’t safe, so people order Xuebi (Sprite), shuiguozhi (fruit juice), or jiu (alcohol), but a lot of our group tries to stay hydrated by carrying around huge jugs of water, but the most I’ve ever seen the Chinese carrying around to prevent dehydration is an itty bitty water bottle.
- I was excited to see natural bamboo here, but I didn’t realize bamboo is also eaten in vegetable dishes!
- It is much simpler to verbally agree to something in Chinese. We contort our mouths to say “yea” or force out “mhmm,” but the Chinese simplify that even further with a single-syllabic “mm.”
- There is a fascination with Snoopy and Mickey Mouse here. I, for one, love seeing Snoopy, Minneapolis's hometown cartoon, everywhere here!
We soon learned figuring out how to top up everyone’s cell phone minutes was a much more challenging task than finding decent food in China, but eventually everyone’s phone was happier (mine is still depressed because it doesn’t even have a SIM card yet, I’ll figure that out in Shanghai…), and we all ended up crashing for a few hours back at the hotel. When we woke up it was basically dinnertime, so out we went again.
The faux pas of the day was that Max ordered chicken, and what arrived on the plate was every single part of the chicken that apparently could reasonably be considered as food arrived and was placed before us. Every day you learn something new.
We found a convenience store to stock up on fuel for the next day that proposed to be a long one, tackling Taishan, Mount Tai! Rest and relaxation were also a necessity, so after hanging out with some games and then a Miyazaki movie, we called it quits.
9:30am out the door is perhaps not early for eastern China, but it was early enough for us. We set out for the tourism office to ask the best route to get to the mountain for our day’s adventure and then headed downtown to catch the Number 4 bus to the temple at the base of the mountain. It’s a great feeling that we can ask questions and figure out public transportation in this foreign language that we really haven’t been studying very long!
Max just happened to be wearing his Carleton Social Dance Club tshirt when we came across this sign for "Dancing Food!"
From where we got off the bus, though, we didn’t exactly realize it would be another 45 minute walk to the mountain itself, but we kept working our way towards the mountain in the beautiful sunlight and then set off climbing!
What we didn’t realize was how touristy it would be. I don’t know how the rest of the world climbs mountains, but the Chinese have definitely made their gorgeous scenery accessible to the masses with paths of stone steps inlaid all the way to the peak. Perhaps this makes climbing easier than it really is though – among the National Day throngs attempting the hike were way too many youngsters and oldsters, at least in my opinion. For a good part of the way up, the course was lined with tourist shops to buy walking sticks and almost Texas-style hats, there were way more small children than we expected, and who knew you had to pay to climb a mountain? Thank goodness for student prices!
We started our ascent at about 11:15 and alternated climbing chunks with snack breaks. With all of the people on this mountain, foreigners really were few and far between, so had plenty of chances to think up and practice our joking retorts to whispers, shouts, and points of the “lao wai” and “waiguoren,” two phrases we’ve grown accustomed to, basically meaning “old outside” and “outside country person.”
It was really fun to get some good exercise, enjoy the beautiful scenery, and entertain some munchkins despite the ridiculous crowds. We also climbed at a similar pace with a couple college-age guys who chatted behind us about how they wanted to try and speak English with us but were embarrassed that their English was horrible. At one point we got a head of them, took a snack break, and then we caught up to them again and joked with our new climbing buddies. I chatted with them in Chinese and they asked about a couple English words, and I noticed that one of them had the name Jason Kidd on the bottom of his sweatpants. He thought my question of “Ni xihuan lanqiu ma?” (Do you like basketball?) was out of the blue but gave the affirmative, and he said he had no idea he had an NBA star’s name on his pants when he bought them but that he does like NBA ball. They were set to do the traditional Taishan activity that we once contemplated but realized we didn’t have time for: climbing the mountain by day and sleeping up at the peak to see the sunrise the next morning. Unfortunately we couldn’t do sunrise Taishan because we have a train to Wuxi tomorrow morning, but the day trip was definitely worth it.
To get to the peak itself was how I imagined the classic Chinese experience. The stairs were surprisingly packed for a good chunk of the way, and everybody is literally funneled through this tiny archway to reach the landing at the top. We held on to each other and I felt like I was floating – once you make the decision to go through the arch, you become one of the masses moving as one (while pushing, shouting, shoving) and you are no longer able to move of your own accord. Don’t worry, China is crowded, but the usual is about fifty percent of that severity!
Definitely worth it: looking out from the top of the mountain was absolutely gorgeous.
Next order of business: getting down the mountain. Rather than climbing all the way down, we were enchanted by the idea of being suspended above the mountain and thus shoved ourselves into the line for the gondola ride down. The line, though, was packed, and it took us longer to get down the mountain than it did to climb up! We reached the shanding (mountain peak) at about 2pm so we climbed up for about 2.5 hours, but we finally got out of the Taishan grounds at about 6! What made waiting in line feel much quicker was the fact that they had a big people’s line and a small people’s line, so all the adults crammed into the left line and the cute kids ran around waving their walking sticks and bubble wands adjacent to their families. Max, the resident silly person, and Alek the music major busted out their various talents that kept a couple munchkins (and us) giggling for a good chunk of the waiting in line.
Finally it was our turn to hop into a gondola and free fall down Taishan a bit, and I am so thankful we waited in that crazy line for the two and a half hours to see that view all around us.
The gondola dropped us off about halfway down the mountain, and from there we just walked the rest of the descent.
It was pitch black already (6pm…), and on our walk home we were approached by a very rexin (enthusiastic) girl from a nearby university who just wanted to practice her English with us and asked if she could tag along for a while. Her English name was Lois, and here English really was quite good! She talked with us about everything and asked lots of questions comparing the US and China, and she even came with us to McDonald’s (Rob especially was craving some US food after having been here since the beginning of summer too) and walked us all the way back to the hotel.
We got some protein in our systems after a long day and already it was time to pack up our things because tomorrow the group is headed to Wuxi for leg two of midterm break week!
More back-in-time updates when I can!
