Nightlife in Loudi

  The Chinese aren’t big drinkers. Don’t get me wrong, they do like to drink but not like the Western culture. That being said, the bars here can be pretty fun; I didn’t realize that until Emily came to visit last weekend. After taking our advisors out to dinner, one of them (David) took us to one of the “fun” bars in Loudi. Just to set the right tone for this story, the bar was called Night Impressions and Vogue Club…swanky. We walked into the decorative and decent bar but it was still early so the mood was calm. Though I was struck by the huge Donald Duck portraits on the walls and the very American rap music. After looking at the beer bottle shaped menu we decided we would go with what the server recommended…the “buy 12, get 6 extra free” deal. There were 4 of us so it seemed right. About 8 bottles in the place suddenly became very crowded. All at once people were everywhere dancing….on the speakers, in front of the DJ booth, on platforms near the walls. In China it is perfectly acceptable for guys to walk around shirtless due to the heat so a number of guys were dancing bare-chested. It felt like Spring Break Cancun. The whole night was a whirl of meeting people, making friends, dancing…it is a side of Loudi that I never knew existed. A great side. So good in fact that it’s hard to describe. I’ve got an entire photo album dedicated to it so maybe you can check it out. I’ve done a bad job at getting across the full experience because you really had to be there. There will be more nights like it though so look for more details in the future.

Gearing up for National Day

  Ok, this is the third of three installments I’ve written in a row today so bear with all of the rambling. I’ve been sitting in a pagoda-shaped gazebo outside of my apartment and enjoying the cool weather so it’s a good writing atmosphere. This one is about what’s coming up instead of what’s happened though so it should be pretty good. October 1st marks National Day in China, and with nationalism being a hammered into the culture, it’s a big deal. This year is especially important as it marks the 60th Anniversary of the Cultural Revolution. The streets are exceptionally decorated in every city.

Loudi is decked out in red lamps, China flags, and elaborate works of flower art (a pagoda made entirely of flowers is being built in Louxing Park 6 blocks away from my apartment). National Day marks day one of the Golden Week holiday. It’s 7 days of holiday for the Chinese people and it is usually celebrated by people traveling to see family and friends. Our plan is to visit Xi’an and the Terracotta Warriors. That’s the final plan, it’s gone through a couple of revisions but hopefully it’s set now. On top of normal travel difficulties, China has no central reservation system for buses or trains. This means that we can buy a ticket to Xi’an but can’t buy one back until we get there. Risky. Alright, that’s inconvenient but we can work past it. Also, our Dean’s daughter works and Xi’an and she warned that Xi’an has experienced a couple of cases of Swine Flu. Big deal? I don’t see the problem. In fact, even Loudi has had a couple of cases of Swine Flu break out. And by “break out” I mean symptoms appeared in some younger kids and they were immediately treated. As a precaution though, our Dean advised that we may want to just stay in Loudi during the 8 day vacation while everyone else leaves and has at least some degree of fun. She clearly doesn’t know Americans very well. We’ll risk life and limb just to say we did. In a country of a billion people, 2 cases of swine flu in a city aren’t gonna scare me.

  This is in no way related to this post, but as I write, another inexplicable fireworks session is going on. I call it a “session” instead of a “show” because no one can really see them. They occur all of the time (maybe 4 in a day) and are always inexplicable. Someone knows why; someone probably got good grades or married or found a lucky penny or something. China would be a much quieter place if they’d just give cards like Westerners do. That’s it for today. Tune in next time for the more thoughts from the far end of the world.

Changsha (The Quick Version)

And now, for your reading pleasure…Traveling in China…so far. I could write all day long about the quirks, annoyances, and joys of traveling in China but I’m going to limit it to our recent experiences and immediate plans. I was just in Changsha two weekends ago. Changsha is the capital of the Hunan province (the one I’m in) and houses one of the best museums in China, the Hunan Provincial Museum…which we didn’t get to go to. We were on a bit of time crunch since we got there Saturday morning and were then told we had to be back by Sunday night. Let’s cover the bus trip for a minute. The bus system in China is reasonably good, but weird. Of course there are main bus stations in the cities but buses will also stop for people along the road in the countryside. Basically anyone can flag down the bus and jump on as long as there are seats available. Otherwise, they have to flag down the next bus. On top of those stops, buses will seemingly stop for any whim, seriously anything at all. We stopped to let a man pee on the side of the road. We stopped so someone could buy a water. That being said, oftentimes the bus is faster than trains because of all the mountains in the region. We arrived in Changsha and made it to our hostel only to find that the electricity was out due to construction and no one knew when it would be back. Awesome. It was 5pm by then so the museum was closed but the park next to it, Martyr Park, was still open. Martyr Park is a sprawling, beautiful area with tons of gardens, a permanent carnival, and a huge monument in the center. We wandered around the monument, which was under construction (like everything else in China), and eventually ended up in the carnival. Feeling the urge to ride at least one thing, we chose the Hot Air Balloon ride. You step into a metal cage shaped as a hot air balloon and slowly rise up high enough to see all across the park. Then you suddenly drop towards the ground, and as the pavement hungrily speeds toward you , you suddenly stop and begin to rise again. It’s basically a safe way to experience the worst hot air balloon scenario possible. After the park we went back to the hostel, still no electricity so we went to eat at a nearby KFC (don’t let the “Kentucky Fried” part fool you, it’s all still pretty Chinese tasting). Finally, at 9pm the lights make a miraculous comeback and Kirby and I are so excited about it that we go to bed about an hour and a half later….come on, it had been a long, hot day. Next morning we woke up to tackle Yuelu Mountain. Nothing overly special about the place except that there is a chute that lets you slide down the mountain from about ¾ of the way up. Kirby was too scared to do it, so I chivalrously abandoned her to go slide. Well worth it. The real struggle though was the bus ride from Yuelu back to the hostel. All of the station signs are in Chinese and apparently the way there isn’t necessarily the way back…which we learned after an hour on the bus. After a corrective taxi, we race into the hostel, grab our stuff, and hail a taxi to try to make the 25 minute taxi ride and catch the bus that leaves in 30 minutes. Good luck with that one. Our taxi driver stomps on the gas and ignores all traffic laws (which is the standard behavior for all drivers in China apparently) and manages to get us to the station with 5 minutes left. We rush to buy the tickets and God smiles down upon our sweaty, worried faces by allowing us to catch a 3:50 bus that we didn’t know existed. Temporarily relaxed, we crowd onto the bus. Two and half hours later we reach Loudi only to bombarded by phone calls from our Dean telling us that we will be having dinner immediately after arrival. So sweatily, smelly, and tired we enter the nice restaurant and politely apologize to everyone for them making us cut our trip short and show up to dinner with our bags in tow. Sorry, mandatory dinner guests. But then again, it was free food.
So that was the whirlwind trip to Changsha and I left out some of the details about the heat, the dust, and the 15-20 people who came up to us for the sole reason to yelp that we were American and that their English is “so poor.” It really is like being a B-list celebrity.

Hungry?

Where did this blog leave off last time?  I’ll just start in the middle of things.  Lately Kirby and I have begun to get sick of rice and noodles all the time.  Of course we’re branching out towards rice with eggs, noodles with chicken broth, rice with eggs and vegetables, whole wheat noodles…yeah, it can be dietarily boring.  So instead we decided to launch into the wide, strange world of Chinese restaurants. 

   The quick description is this:  Your basic Chinese restaurant is comprised of a bottom floor featuring a number of small tables set with a few chairs and, generally, washed and shrink-wrapped dishes.  Evidently there is a service that goes around, picks up these dishes, shrink wraps them, and delivers them back the next day.  Handy.  The upper floors are usually private rooms complete with a large, circular table, a couch, and always a television.  I’m not sure who goes there to sit on the couch and watch TV but apparently it’s a common thing.  One of the quirks of these private rooms though is the fact that the seat directly across from the doorway is the seat of honor.  It completely ruins the Western ideal of equality with a circular table.  There is a lazy susan that spins food in the center of this large table and the food comes at you Italian family style with everyone sharing the huge dishes.  In China, vegetables are really the main dishes with splashes of meat thrown in only to spice things up.  And in Hunan, they truly mean “spice.”  This province takes a ridiculous amount of pride in their peppers and spicy food.  The word “la” means spicy so it can be pretty amusing when people cry out how hot their meal is with a “la, la, la, la, la!”  Kirby and I have been sitting in the bottom floor s.  We’ve found a few favorite restaurants now and are fully employing the “point and pick” method successfully.  We know enough Chinese to delineate categories of food and after that we just point at an item on the menu.  It’s working well; we’ve had some delicious stuff.  Though at the same time, we’ve encountered some terrible dishes too.  No problem, you can always just orders something else since a general meat dish here is about 18 Yuan or less than 3 American dollars.  Vegetable dishes are only 10 Yuan, or about $1.50.  Recently we’ve been big fans of the Beijing Jiaoziguan, or loosely the “Beijing Dumpling House.”  It seems to be the Chinese equivalent of a surly American diner.  I’m pretty sure that our waitresses are all single mothers just trying to get by.  The food is great though. 

   This post seems to be all about restaurants so I’ll throw this last bit of trivia out there.  We recently ate at a restaurant called Maojia.  It’s a franchise restaurant in China started by the former personal cook to Chairman Mao.  For those uninitiated, Chairman Mao was the leader of China during the Cultural Revolution and is revered as basically a demi-god.  There is literally a small shrine to him in this restaurant, complete with offerings of his favorite dishes at the altar.  Again though, it was delicious.  Alright, enough for this post; this blog format is so narrow that you probably feel like you just read War & Peace so I’m breaking it up a bit.  Next installment:  Travel in China.

End of Week One

  It's Thursday today which means tomorrow marks the last day of our first full week in Loudi (pronounced Loh-DEE).  After talking to Emily, it seems my college prefers the "do it yourself" approach to settling into a new town.  We've been cooking, cleaning, shopping, and doing everything else so far basically on our own.  Our contacts are more than happy to help us if we have any questions but as for the actual action, that's all on us.  Which is good; makes us feel more a part of the city.  Though it does make for slightly more complicated situations frequently.  We've been to KFC twice (which I think are the only true Western fast food places in Loudi).  That's right, we broke down and decided we needed something at least vaguely similar to home.  After a series of gestures, pleads, and pointing fingers we managed to order some chicken sandwiches and french fries.  No soft drinks though.  Soft drinks in the bottle here are great.  In the can are great.  Out of a fountain drink machine?  Awful.  It's like they never had carbonation added to them, completely flat and lifeless.  It's like drinking coca-cola flavored kool-aid.  No problem though, gotta push through.
  So in that spirit of "do it yourself" we bought our bus tickets today to see Emily tomorrow morning.  So far, if we're not walking somewhere in Loudi then we're taking a taxi (we're working on getting bicycles).  I'm pretty good at telling them where we want to go, but not so much at telling them how to get back.  I must be messing up the word "college" or something because they just aren't getting it.  Every time I try though.  So we got to the bus station, asked a local to point us in the right direction, went up to the gate and bought two tickets.  Evidently, two tickets that left in an hour.  Whoops.  So we paged through our Chinese phrasebook to find the words "tomorrow morning" and wrote down the date we wanted to travel "2009-09-04" on a sheet of paper.  Amazingly it worked.  Our luck has been holding up on things like that so far.  So now we're the proud owners of two tickets that leave tomorrow morning at 8:30am to where we can only hope is Hengyang.  We still have to open a bank account and set up cell phones though so that should be fun.
  Alright, I wanted to wait to write about this later when I have some good pictures and maybe a video but this has to be shared.  I can post some media later but maybe this will serve as a good preview.  There are a number of parks near our college.  One is called "Shima" or "Stone Horse" Park.  It's a cool park; a big pond stands as the center with trails all around.  The equivalent of a small carnival takes over one corner of the park with bumper cars, a skating rink, a haunted house, and a very rickety ferris wheel among other rides and games.  The first day we went we even saw pony rides and men with long brushes drawing water calligraphy on the stone tiles.  Ok, all of that seems relatively normal for a park.  We were also told that people go there at night to "dance."  They didn't say it with those quotation marks but once you've seen the "dancing" then you have to say "dance" like "dance."  We're walking home from Wal-Mart (one of only 3 in China) and stop by the park to be greeted by the most unlikely sight I have seen so far in this country.  At least a hundred people had gathered in the main stone entrance of this park to "dance" what seems to be some kind of line dance.  Everyone in the group was doing little skip steps, then a turn, and then waving their arms side to side above their heads.  Not waves like "hi!" waves, waves like "Throw your hands in the air like you just don't care!" waves.  Very weird.  And they knew multiple dances; music (whose source I still haven't found yet) would change and these people would all begin "dancing" another "dance" in unison.  So strange.  I promise I'll put up a video soon since it's a sight you have to see.  And the strangest part is that this isn't a weekend event, it's an every night event.  Nightly, people say to one another "let's go 'dancing' at the park. Let's just get out there and let loose with completely uniform boogie-ing."
  Last thing before I post this.  Kirby and I finally found what is always at the heart of every Chinese community, whether it's a Chinatown in America or Loudi in the China motherland.  We discovered the seedy back alleys that sell everything from imitation leather belts to Victoria's Secret clothes to cell phones to dvd's. Basically, we found where all of that stuff that "falls off the truck" ends up.  There it was, right across from the bus station.  It was subtle though; you take a few steps toward and all you see are fruits and vegetables.  But then the glint of a necklace briefly catches your eye on a table.  Wait? Is that what I thought it was, that doesn't belong in a farmer's market.  Then you move closer and you begin to see the outdoor stalls filled with cheap toys, cheap watches, and cheap souvenirs.  Ok, cheap trinkets, no big deal.  But, oh wait, is that the open garage door of a large, seedy warehouse filled with stalls of knock-off and possibly stolen goods?  I think so.  Heck, I hope so.  ...and it was.  Don't get me wrong, it's not the junk I love, though from time to time you can get some good stuff in those back alleys and dark warehouse/flea market type places.  I love the people who work those things.  Most are either bored with blank looks on their faces or just flat-out sleeping (which is strange, are they not worried about theft? I guess they assume the stuff is already stolen, what more can happen to it.)  But the people who are awake and alert have completely unassuming looks on their faces.  As though it's totally natural to have a complete inventory of Adidas wear just hanging up in this no-name shop.  Needless to say, we had to buy at least one thing so we bought a watch for Kirby.  We haggled some but in the end we used the shopkeeper deathblow technique...the "walk-away."  Only the rare and incredibly stubborn shopkeeper can resist it.  If you walk away, you'll either get the price you're asking for or at the very least you'll re-open negotiations.
  So that's it for today; I know there were no pictures, that must be disappointing for you.  Next time though.