The Michael Jordan of birthdays

The big 2-3. Not really the most significant year. At 22 I felt over the hill (well over the 21 hill at least), and I'm sure at 25 I'll begin dreading the approach of 30. But at 23 I was able to enjoy a birthday with barely a hint of introspection, nostalgia, or reflections on my mortality.

It was just a fun day. This was my first birthday out of "the country", and while I missed my friends and family back home in the states, getting together with all the people I've gotten close to here over the past half year made me realize how much of my life has been transplanted in Beijing. By the end of the night I was fending off multiple declarations of love (some from strangers - friends of friends - the others from my basketball teammates).

Beijing - the city - sucks in a lot of ways. Oh Beijing. How do I despise thee? Let me count the ways - foulest of the foul pollution, overcrowding, inept public transportation and screaming banshee bus ticket ladies, grumpy people, other people who stare/laugh/spit/point at you as you walk down the street. Don't get me wrong, there are plenty of things about Beijing that I like (those are more abstract and harder to enumerate). There are just plenty more things that I don't like. However I've settled into a pretty nice life here between work, friends, basketball, and the occasional class or two. And with the weather improving, Beijing is moving closer an closer to a livable city everyday.

Art Review: Marian Heyerdahl - The Terracotta Women

-preface-
I had no intention of attending the opening of Norwegian Artist Marian Hayerdahl's "The Terracotta Women," a sculpture exhibit recasting the famed terracotta warriors as, well, terracotta women. An impromptu trip to an art gallery district in northeast Beijing turned into a wine filled afternoon rubbing elbows with Norwegian Embassy officials. One of the guests (who had actually flown in from Norway for the event) asked me my affiliation with the artist: friend? art critic? guest of the embassy? Errrr, try cheap student with cheap student friends getting some free food and booze. While I didn't use those precise words, I did feel somewhat guilty about crashing this artist's shindig. In a lame effort to ease my conscience, I offer a review of "The Terracotta Women."



Several words come to mind when viewing Marian Hayerdahl's "The Terracotta Women": mini pizzas, cocktail wieners, poofy cheese thingies. The exhibit, which opened at the 798 art space in Dashanzi, Beijing features just the right mix of sweet and savory to appease any art fan.

The pizza crust is just crisp yet not brittle, while the mini sausages are complemented by a refreshingly tangy Spanish mustard. Addressing some critics' complaints over the spread at her Shanghai exhibit, Hayerdahl pulled out all the stops in Beijing, setting up not one, but two food tables and offering an unprecedented 3 dipping sauces.

"What Hayerdahl has done here today is truly amazing," offered one art fan from Peking University. "I never though I'd find a decent cocktail wiener in Beijing, but these things are amazing!" he said as he popped another mini sausage into his mouth.

"This shit's delicious!"

Others in attendance praised the tireless work of Hayerdahl and her associates. "Every time I'm about to finish my wine *hiccup* some dude in a bow tie pops up refills my glass. It's really hard to keep count... I love art!" gushed one particularly effusive art aficionado.

After briefly experimenting with organic and vegan offerings, Hayerdahl returned to basics: poofy cheese thingies. Art fans everywhere are breathing a collective sigh of relief.

Ringing in 4704 - the Year of the Pig

Last Saturday, the 17^th, Chinese around the world celebrated the Lunar New Year. My only experience of Lunar New Year celebrations up until now have come from the Chinese snacks that Jenna Wong’s mom brought in once a year back at P.S. 178 and enjoying a meal of dumplings and bubble tea courtesy of the Harvard Chinese Students’ Association. However, I now realize that Chinese New Year (Spring Festival as it is referred to here) is the Chinese holiday. This comes after living through what can best be described as a collective cultural explosion during this past week. Forget National Day or the May 1^st holiday, which have only been celebrated for a few decades. The Chinese have been ringing in the Lunar New Year for millennia (take that Dick Clark), and the festivities are grander than those of any other celebration on earth. Imagine everything but the most essential transportation and security services shutting down; hundreds of millions of travelers flooding planes and trains to make it home for the holidays; fireworks going off on every street corner for days leading up to and following New Year’s, and you’ll only begin to appreciate the sheers scale of the celebrations.

I had a very international Chinese New Year’s Eve, passing the few before and after midnight with a Russian classmate and his friends in a Korean restaurant. There’s no single fireworks display in Beijing for Spring Festival. Instead families set off their own in parks and courtyards throughout the city. At midnight on the 16^th, all we could hear was the deafening pop, pop, pop of fireworks all around us, as flashes of light illuminated the fog off into the distance. I often complain about the cold, austere streets of Beijing, devoid of personality and losing the spirited street-life that lend Chinese cities their character. During Spring Festival, the people take back the streets, putting on a series of massive, week-long street fairs. Lots of greasy street food, carnival games, and vendors. It also hasn’t hurt that this year’s celebration coincides with the best weather Beijing has seen since October. Spring Festival has been a nice break from work and a chance to have fun with friends and family before heading back to school. However, it’s also reintroduced me to some of the things I loved about Beijing, but have lost touch with over half year I’ve been living here.

Beijing rush hour commute - my daytime nightmare

Last week I began an internship at UNDP here in Beijing. I've been considering working in the diplomacy or development fields and thought it would be a good opportunity to get some firsthand experience. I'll be helping out with communications: writing and editing press releases, gathering development news for other UN agencies, helping to plan media events, etc. It'll be the most responsibility I've been asked to take on in an internship, and, to be honest, it's a bit daunting. The only thing more daunting than the work itself is the commute from Peking University.

I only live a few miles away from th UN Beijing headquarters, pretty much a straight shot down the north Third or Fourth Ring roads. However, thanks to traffic congestion and the absence of any real highways in the city, the trip takes over an hour by bus (a little over 40 minutes on the express bus). While this may not sound too bad, imagine this scenario: You first have to find the correct bus stop. It doesn't help that there are often multiple stops with the same name serving different bus lines. Buses normally arrive in packs of at least 3 or 4, meaning you regularly have to sprint 20 meters in either direction of the designated stop to catch the bus before it speeds off. Between 6 and 10am and 5 and 10pm every bus is full, yet you somehow have to find a way to squeeze on.

Now this is all par for course in a developing metropolis like Beijing. However, the city compounds the problem of overcrowding by insisting on putting ticket collectors on every bus. I really do pity the ticket collectors. They make about 1300 RMB (about $160), spending countless hours every day weaving their way through a tightly packed mass of commuters. However, the fare collecting system is inefficient at best, and utterly dysfunctional during rush hour. Most commuters (about 9 in 10) use electronic swipe cards to pay their fare. Simple enough. The rest have to purchase a ticket from the ticket seller, posted at the back of the bus (probably to keep people from sneaking in through the back door). Thus, when someone needs to purchase a ticket during rush hour, either the ticket seller or the passenger has to somehow make their way through a densely packed human mass, stepping on my feet and jabbing my ribs in the process, to make the transaction. Add this to the Banshee-like wailing of the ticket seller repeated between each or 20 stops (Passengers move in! Buy a ticket if you didn't swipe! Exit out the back door! No smiling on the bus!) and you get a transportation experience only slightly less painful than 20 consecutive tooth extractions.

I'm moving to an apartment along the light rail loop soon, and will be taking that into work starting next week. The commute will be more manageable. I've decided to take the long way around to avoid some of the passenger crush. It would be ironic, yet not surprising, if plenty of other passengers already have the same idea, creating a longer yet no more enjoyable commute... Will keep you posted

-Edit-
So I continued having some pretty nasty commutes my first week, but the trip on the light rail seems to be the way to go. The fact that I can always get a seat and can read/listen to music in peace makes up for the extra 20 minutes of commuting time. I'm going to get a bike for the trip between the subway and my office so that the only contact I'll have with buses is the occasional rear-end collision.

I'm Back (again)

Back in Beijing after 3 weeks, back on blogger after 3 months. Before coming home for the holidays I averaged a major illness or injury every 2 weeks: food poisoning, followed up by a severely sprained ankle, not to be outdone by a bout of the flu. All around the end of the semester sucked, bringing my total number of Beijing hospital visits to 6 (not counting follow-up visits).

Since then I've been healthy and happy and traveling, first to the Caribbean with my family and Vietnam and southern China during my winter break.

Vietnam was the perfect respite from the cold and pollution in Beijing I went to there with few expectations or preconceived notions. I simply knew it was close (to China at least), cheap, and not as heavily touristed as Thailand. What little I had read and researched about the country didn't really prepare me for my trip. Vietnam is incredibly beautiful, so beautiful that it breaks your heart to leave. The people we met were warm and outgoing (even when they're trying to squeeze a couple extra dollars out of us). Wherever you go there's an infectious energy in the air (besides bird flu) that lifts your spirit despite bone chilling winds in the north or sweltering heat down south.

I couldn't help but draw comparisons between China and Vietnam, two "communist" countries embarking on projects of economic reform and opening up. While China is wealthier and growing faster than Vietnam, people there aren't as hurried or harried as people in Beijing (I've got a lot of gripes about Beijing, but their are enough of those to fill a book). People in Vietnam seem to make it a point to enjoy life to it's fullest, whether they farm in the rural Northeast or own a business in Ho Chi Minh City. These are simply generalizations from about a year living in China and 2 weeks in Vietnam, but I'd readily take another trip south of the border, sooner rather than later. Here are some highlights from north to south:

Beijing Hospital - Part Deux

Making progress on my tour of Beijing university hospitals, I paid a visit to the Beijing Language and Culture University Hospital this past Friday - having been the recipient of a large Japanese elbow to the lip during basketball practice (the elbow belonging to my friend and teammate). Here's the play by play: I was guarding Fumi on the low post; he fronted up to the basket; I backed off to try to throw him off balance then came back to contest is shot; I didn't see anything that happened after that, but something big and heavy slammed into my face. I came away with a sore jaw and deep cut to my lip that required 8 stiches . Doc said it should heal up in a week, but I'm going to the Beida hospital to get it checked out again today. Right now I'm just taking it easy and trying to keep my situation moisterized like P-Diddy. I'll post updates on my recovery and spare everyone the post-op pics.

I'm Back

Mmmmm, I just had some mad good Cantonese for dinner.

Hello! Sorry for the lack of updates as of late. I want to say that I’ve been too busy to post, but that would be only half true (the other times I’m just too lazy). I think I’ll ditch the weekly blog and just write whenever something interesting pops into my head (which hopefully means I’ll be posting more frequently?)

So the past few weeks... I finally settled on plans for the October holiday and actually got around without any major transportation difficulties. I visited a few sites in Shanxi Provincefor a few days with friends and friends of friends from PKU. For a more detailed (and far more eloquent) account of our trip, check out Shelley's blog linked on the left (I'm not going to tell you which it is). The cities we visited – Datong and Taiyuan – were incredibly dusty and chaotic - the dust largely attributable the coal mines in the area while a total disregard for traffic laws created the chaotic atmostphere. I thought the main tourist sights we visited were pretty interestersting but nothing too remarkable. I really enjoyed exploring a broken down section of the great wall. There was nobody there but us and a group of curious kids. Here are some pics:

Rachael in the Yungang Buddhist Grottoes - one of China's UNESCO World Heritage Sights and home to thousands upon thousands of Buddha sculptures (I wonder if anyone has tried to count them all)

The six of us in front of the Hanging Monastery near Hengshan, one of the 5 holy Buddhist mountains.

Shelley admiring the sunset from the Great Wall ruins.

Where I live

Not a whole lot going on these days besides classes and studying. I'm in class for SIX hours a day every Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday. Somehow, listening to a teacher for that length of time is much less tolerable than it was 4 years ago. Sigh. I've still found time to join a couple of IM teams. The international students all play for the "International Team" - go figure. The volleyball team I've joined consists of Japanese, Korean, Singaporean, Hong Kongorean people - and me. I don't think news about the team's existance reached any other Americans (maybe we were too tall to hear the converations - SNAP!). The basketball team is a lot more diverse - a couple of Italians, a handful of Japanese and Koreans, a few of Americans, and a Mongolian to boot. We played for 2 hours straight on Sunday night. The most fun I've had balling in a long time.

To make up for the lack of interesting things in my life at the moment, I've decided to share some photos around Beida campus. This is my room (in its natural, i.e. messy, state):

That's Nobu watching 24 on his laptop. For the past 2 days, I've not walked into the room and not found Nobu watching 24 oh his laptop. I figure if the season is 24 hours long he'll be done by tomorrow morning.

This is my building - Shao Yuan Building 3.

I bought a bike a couple weeks ago. They say if your bike isn't stolen in the first couple of weeks, chances are pretty good that it will be stolen in the next couple of weeks. After that you're supposed to be safe though. I never have trouble finding my bike since it's the biggest one in all of Beijing:

The mini-mart where I buy groceries:

"No Name Lake" in the northern part of campus (that really is its name):

Random-ass Cervantes statue: