Step 19 - Teahouse Times

Alright peeps, here's the other events that happened around my last post.

Cultural enough yet?

Friday, it was a nice enough day. The weather in general lately has been quite nice actually. Mike had sent me a SMS asking if I wanted to play some tennis or do something 'cultural'. I've mucking around with a bit of a cold at the moment so I figured something cultural was probably a better call, though what that exactly entailed I wasn't exactly sure. Turned out that Mike wanted to check out the Wuhou Shrine (Facebook album here, hope it works) - I'll give you the official description (as appears on the ticket, spelling mistakes and punctuation errors intact), followed by my account...

The Wuhou Shine in Chengdu was initially built in 223AD,now covers 140000 square meters. It consistes of Liubei' s Huiling and the temples of Zhuge Liang and other ministers in Shuhan of the Three Kingdoms. The State department has chosen it as a leading protected entity of cultural relics in 1961 and a museum was set up in 1984,In 2008 the shrine appeared on the first list of the national top-class museum,As the shrine to the Three Kingdowns,the Wuhou Shrine has been opening for over 1780 years uninterruptedly and the cultural accumulation is very rich and generous.

Yeah, that's about right, but I can do it quicker.

It's a big walled-in park, with a bunch of big buildings dotted around inside. There's some pretty gardens. The end.

I'll be a tad more serious, and provide some 'actual' details. A few of the buildings are undergoing heavy renovations. Inside these buildings there's general historical artifacts - bronze items, paintings, giant paper-mache models of important historical figures (for all intense appearances), so on and so forth. Nothing particularly exquisite, but mildly interesting nevertheless.

I thought these guys were pretty cool.

The main attraction is just walking around the gardens. It seems this is a good time of year to go - many trees are losing their leaves and there's a nice Autumn feel in the air.

Any resemblance?

There's also a bonsai garden section, and I'm not sure but you can probably buy them. There's a lot of the usual touristy junk in shops inside the park, but they are, courteously, not too in your face. There was a store with some really nice polished wood stuff, but as you would imagine - really nice equals really expensive. Several pieces were 30,000RMB and above. Curse my lack of income, curse it!

Big Bonsai.

Anyway, Mike and I wandered around till we grew tired and hungry, and proceeded onwards and outwards in search of food. This materialised in the form of pizza, strangely. For some reason, nestled amongst the shops of the Tibetan district is an Italian-themed restaurant. The name actually evades me at the moment. They did a fairly nice pizza by Chinese standards, though the location prohibits frequent visitation! Blast!

Little Bonsai.

As it happens, there was actually a party occurring in the dorms on this night. I think I mentioned this in my last post, but a large group of the American population of Sichuan University is about to leave. As such, they held a graffiti party. It was surprisingly good - I guess the offer of free beer and food in part led to a good turnout, and being located in the dorms did the rest. Oh, and beer pong. Beer pong helped. Things were drawing to a close there sometime around 11pm, and people were going either to a large Chinese club (Sucre) or a smaller club attended by a largely foreigner clientele (Paname). I ended up going to Paname, though I've just remembered that it wasn't without drama.

You see, Mike and I caught a cab to the club. As it happened, a Chinese woman jumped in the cab at the same time, and it turned out she would be getting out along the way to the club. Great, no worries yet. So she gets out nearly three quarters of the way there, and gives the cabbie approximately half of the fare. Still no problems yet. So we get to the club, and Mike (much better at Chinese), starts arguing about the price. He's saying we should pay the fare minus what the cabbie already got paid. The cabbie insists we pay full fare. This is where things start getting touchy. We get out of the cab and start walking away - Mike hadn't appreciated the guy trying to rip us off. The cabbie jumps out and runs up to Mike and grabs him pretty roughly - kind of around the throat - later inspection reveals the guy actually cut Mike's skin with his fingernails. Bad idea. Mike spins around and shoves the guy hard while shouting furiously at him in Chinese and closing in on him. We're making a scene - people in the restaurants around us are stopping and staring. The cabbie is pretty startled but still pretty pissed off - thankfully he backs off to the cab. He follows us along the road as we go though, and shouts something. Mike makes a comment like, 'Yeah, now he says we can pay part-fare', and we actually do give the guy the appropriate amount of money at this stage.

Hopefully that's the last I hear about that

But the thing is, he's still following us in his cab as we walk away. He's speaking into his phone and watching us pretty keenly. So Mike decides we'd better lose this guy and we disappear into the buildings and make our way to the club. Mike explains to me later on that the cabbie probably would have made a bigger deal outside the restaurants, if it weren't for the fact he'd have been on the losing end of any fist fight. At least based on appearances and numbers anyway - while the only fights I've been involved in are the ones where I've been trying to break people up, he didn't know that. That was quite possibly what the 'following' and the phone call was about - getting backup. Or the police? Either way, hopefully that's the last I hear about that issue. The funny thing is that there was a scuffle over something like 12 kuai. Buying a pint at the club that night cost me 20 kuai. Had I known where it was going, I really didn't care about paying the much.

I don't have any club related pictures, so have this one instead.

Just as an aside, most of the Chengdu people who've now heard this story think the cabbie was pretty lucky that it was Mike and not another foreigner. Is everyone in this place quick to violence or something? Or are they all just 'talk'? I imagine so, but then fights at the bars aren't all that unusual it seems. Hrmm...

As it happened, the club was fairly crap anyway. It's somewhat a fusion of club and bar, and I really don't appreciate the attempt to combine them in a space not that much bigger than a large two-car garage. I finally put names to the faces of some DJ's, unfortunately finding that two guys that one of my friends likes, I really don't like. Just to be childish and put in the boot, one of them plays alright music but doesn't use it very well, and changes tracks too quickly. You'll be dancing to a tune for thirty seconds and already he's changing it to something new. Thirty seconds later, it happens again. Sure, as my friend points out, he uses some good songs. A lot even. Too many. The other guy, I don't even know what his story is but as far as I can tell, he's not actually a DJ but a bodyguard for the guy I just mentioned above. It doesn't help that I know the guy deals drugs too, though that isn't that much to raise an eyebrow about.

I saw people using an apple as a bong

On a quick side note, I'm quite surprised about the availability of drugs here. There's a lot of people using them really openly, both foreigners and locals. For example, I saw people using an apple as a bong while they were sitting on the sidelines of a football game. I laughed. An apple? I'm inclined to believe that they didn't have any other appropriate apparatus available, but who knows? Maybe fruit adds flavour? And it's not just weed that I've heard is available, apparently there's strong stuff is around too. All this, while in the back of my head, I'm quite, quite certain that China can and often does apply the death penalty for drugs trafficking.

This guy was so stoned...

 It's at this point that the events of my last post occurred. Obviously there was an entire post devoted to that, so I'm going to move straight on.

Getting back to the dorm, it turned out I'd locked my keys in my room, and at 2am I couldn't be bothered waking up one of the staff to open my door, so I went back to Mike's. That's not a huge issue for me - the couch at his place is bigger and more comfortable than my bed, and we ended up rewatching the Star Trek film. I still quite enjoy that film - I think as a simple sci-fi no-brains adventure, it performs really well. Just don't think about the plot very hard and you'll enjoy it... probably. It helps I enjoy space-battle scenes with decent special effects, which this film delivers.

 Enjoyable, if brainless.

More thoughtful, still brainless, less enjoyable.

The next morning when I woke up, I watched another film, Inglourious Basterds. I felt quite let down by this film. It's not that the film was bad per-se, it was that I felt the trailer and promotional material had lied about the film. The impression I had gotten, and obviously I only speak for myself, was that the film was along a violent nazi-killing romp, carried out in comedic manner sort of vein. Grindhouse, but replace zombies with Nazi's. What I got was something else. Three fourths of the film was quiet talking, the rest was fairly average action. Now, it's not like the talking scenes are bad. There are some quite interesting characters, and the interactions are sometimes dramatic and amusing. Like I was saying before, it's just not what I expected. So... I don't know. I didn't really enjoy it but maybe that's because I expected something different

I went home and brought some bread along the way, as it was about 2pm and I hadn't eaten yet that day. Eventually Mike gave me an SMS and checked what I was up to - he was going to hang out at a tea house with a Chinese friend of his and wanted to know if I would like to join them. This is exactly something I did want to do - I haven't yet spent much time at tea houses, and I'm looking to make a lot more local Chinese friends, so off I went.

Funnily enough, the place we went was right next to the Wuhou shrine, so that was my second trip there in as many days. I didn't have my camera, and to be honest probably wouldn't have been taking that many pictures anyway, so I'll try describe this particular teahouse for you. A large long room, with big windows on both walls, aligned comfy booths running down the sides. The booths have large tables and comfy couch/lounge type chairs at either end. Running along the middle are smaller tables with smaller chairs. In general, the room feels quite open, while remaining private within the booths. A variety of potted plants add appeal, as does the warm ambient light. Possibly the only real negative is the haze of cigarette smoke, but this is China after all.

Teahouses aren't a 15-30 minute affair

For those unaware, the procedure is pretty simple. You buy whatever flavour you want from a large variety over a range of prices, and they'll bring it out and keep your pot filled hot water. Basically you can then chill and do whatever you want for as long as you want. In other words, they're really good places to chill out. I'd say I like it even more than cafes back home because the Chinese equivalent seems more dedicated to... relaxing and killing time. Teahouses aren't a 15-30 minute affair - I think we spent a good 2 hours there. Maybe I just didn't have a nice cafe back in Perth... I guess wasn't looking for the same things as I am here.

So we wander through, find his friend and join their table. It's just the 4 of us, Mike, Chinese guy, his girlfriend and myself. They're about our age, and students also. Nice people, though the girl was really shy. Anyway, we got some random tea (lemon) and chatted, watched life go by from the window, and played cards (Palace, specifically).

Finally, people had to make a move so we grabbed some dinner at a random noodle place. Wontons were pretty delicious actually... but anyway. The rest of my night was fairly uneventful. I went back to the dorm, watched some Seinfeld, studied a bit and went to bed.

In other goods news, yesterday a friend of mine booked tickets to come spend 2 weeks traveling around with me in China. I'll talk about it more in a later post, and maybe detail how we're using Google Wave to organise travel plans.

Caption unnecessary.

Later peeps.