Step 10 - I can *so* count to 10! Watch; 1,2,10!

Alright so that was a fairly nonsensical title, but on a creepy side note, it has also been 10 days since my last post. That's over a week! So what have you been missing out on? Gather round children, it's time for another adventure...

Look at me! I'm a block quote!

Yeah, I lied. Before getting into what's new with my life, I'll fill you in on what I'll be doing that's new with the blog. First, I'll be using these dandy little things called block quotes. I think that's what they're called anyway. Just to highlight the important/funny stuff, you know? Also, I'll be trying to get some sort of mini-series action going on, reporting on certain themes or aspects over a few posts, or maybe even many. I don't want to promise you guys too much on that one because, knowing me, I'll probably want to change topic every week. But I'll try be good, okay? Sorry for the lack of pictures in this post, I haven't had my camera on me much this recently.

So, China. The BBQ at the American's apartment has received a further workout, with the 4 of us making pizzas. This is a relatively expensive venture in China, as cheese is pretty expensive. We also had issues in that the flour was... non-gluten flour. So it was pretty crumbly pizza dough action, but in the end, delicious.

On that side note of good times, I'm getting a bit concerned about the amount of time I'm spending out at night. It's conflicting with getting homework done for classes the next day, and as fun as it is to go drinking with them, it's not exactly why I'm here.

On a smaller side note, we turned the card game 'President', aka 'Asshole', into a drinking game (After further reading, turns out everyone has been doing this for a long time. My bad). Basically, every time the deck clears, everyone except the winner of that stack has to take a drink. The Asshole has to finish their entire drink, and vice-Asshole has to finish 1/2. This doesn't necessarily sound like a lot of drinking, until you add in a rule I hadn't previously played with - if you can make 4-of-a-kind at any time, slap those cards down and you win/clear the deck. This happens... really frequently. It also really keeps your focus on the game, waiting for that window to complete a set of 4 and also in terms of strategy. After awhile, players begin to start guessing what cards you're going to put down, so it pays to keep things mixed up.

I've bought a bike.

Okay, so that turned out to be a bigger side note than the original side note. *Cough*, moving on... I've bought a bike. It's a stolen bike, and it's pretty crap. The rear brakes don't work, and it makes strange noises. But the price was okay, and it was kind of a fun experience to buy it. Basically this corner/street has a bunch of people milling around on it, apparently doing nothing. When you walk past, they'll ask if you want a bike etc. In my case, I apparently was asking the wrong person (I wonder what dodgy goods she was selling?), as she laughed and pointed out a woman who was hurriedly running over and asking what kind of bike I wanted.

So I said I wanted a bike, and cheap. She takes me down a thin alleyway and into a series of... I guess almost shanty buildings. Sure, they had 4 walls and a roof, but none of the walls seemed to be constructed of the same material, or particularly complete. We continued around the back and a guy unlocked a door, which  had about 5 or 6 bikes in it. Haggling ensued - he wanted ￥400, I was prepared to pay ￥100-￥150, maximum. In the end, he decided it wasn't worth coming down to my price and, I assume, he'd palm it off on some other foreigner with a more obliging purse. My little guide woman took me through another series of alleyways, to another shed with more bikes. This time a bike and price was agreed on - ￥150. I was getting at least a little ripped off, but I was happy to be getting a bike.

She was telling me not to hang around.

To add to the excitement, partway through the proceedings there was a hushed voice from outside the shed. The salesperson was suddenly turning off the lights, closing and locking the door, and and telling me not to speak. We waited like this for maybe 3 minutes before continuing. My little 'guide' now came into play, as she sells bike locks. Not exactly sure how much you can trust someone selling locks at a stolen bike store though. The bike seller was telling me something in Chinese, but I wasn't really getting any of it. She repeated herself a few times, but it didn't get clearer. So we're leaving, and now a guy comes out and is urging me to go quickly. He starts running, asking me to keep up. He gets to the road, takes a peak, then urges me out. Ah, it was clearer now. She was telling me not to hang around.

So, off I went. I've been enjoying the supreme convenience of a bike, making those previous 'long-walk' distance journeys into a mere 5 minute journey. I'm still not quite used to dealing with riding alongside Chinese cars though, and I noticed pretty quickly that no-one wears helmets.

 I need a haircut, soon. Shave wouldn't hurt either.

I had intended to write more in this post, but I guess I'll leave that for later. For a peak into the future, I'm going to be talking about class in more detail, and my trip to the French sporting-goods chain 'Decathlon'.


I've just had the brain-wave that I should let my readers choose the first topic for mini-series investigation. So please, get your thoughts/votes/comments to me and you'll find out which one is the winner next week.

Step 9 - Mao look what you've done!

Okay so it's been awhile since I've posted, here's what has been going on.

Would have been nice if I had managed to smile.

Classes have started. Initially the level of class I was in too easy, but I moved up and I'm feeling a bit happier about where I am. It's still revision in most classes I have, but when you haven't studied in a class for approximately 2 years, that isn't so bad. Annoyingly, the chairs are hard and uncomfortable, the desks are short and small, and the rooms in general being small, stale-aired and unpleasant. The teachers are generally fairly good at engaging the class and keeping things fun/interesting, but somewhat concerningly, they all speak with a strong Sichuan accent and pronounciation. I wouldn't care except this is a little different from actual Mandarin/Beijing dialect, which has led to confusion on more than one occasion. At this stage I'm thinking that I might move to Beijing, or another northern city after a year in Chengdu. To be honest the thought has crossed my mind of possibly moving even sooner than that, after 6 months perhaps. I'm in no rush to go through the pains of moving again though, so we'll just see how it goes.

Hard to tell, but there's a lot of people and a lot of kids in there.

I bought a phone. It's okay. It has some smart stuff that I like (eg, being able to select which days of the week an alarm will go off for), some stuff that I don't like (eg, the *, 0 and # keys are aligned vertically on the right hand side of the keypad), and some stuff I don't really get (it can use 2 sim cards, at the same time). I'm kind of disappointed that phones aren't as cheap as I had hoped (my phone was $399 kuai, or about $70 Australian). Apparently there are markets where they can be found for cheaper, but I don't know where they are, or if they exist in Chengdu. Time will tell.

Fire-Truck water: The Thirst Quencher.

I still don't have a bike. I'll hopefully remedy this soon. Apparently the best place to buy one is on 'Stolen Bike' street. The name is concerning. Half expect I'll buy a bike and then have it stolen, only to go shopping the next day and buy it back. Till then, I'm walking. I'm not sure I've done this much walking on this frequent a basis before, which leads me onto my next point.

New windows, China style.

I still don't have new shoes. This is bad because my current shoes aren't really good for walking long distances in. The problem is finding shoes large enough - anything over size 9 is fairly rare, and I tend to wear 10-12. At a store yesterday I managed to find a pair of size 11's, but they were in a really lame design and quite expensive ($299 kuai, $50 Aus). Maybe I'm complaining a bit too much when it's only $50 Australian, but I should be able to find/get shoes around $50-$100 kuai - I don't care if they're fake and I don't care if they're not a 'brand-name'. Some fake stuff has amused me. 'Adidsa' anyone?

I'm still pissed off at the general 'authorities' here. I had been told that to be able to use the canteens on campus, I would first need to have my Student ID, then get an electronic canteen swipe-card. Turns out that I actually don't need the student ID, I can just ask for a note that says I'm a student and that will suffice for getting the canteen swipe-card. So I've been here for nearly a month now, having to trek off campus to get decent meals (at greater expense than canteen food), when I didn't need to. Why? Because what the International Student Office told me was just plain wrong. Guess where I got the note for the canteen from? The International Student Office. *Sigh*

 Mao to meet you!

Speaking of contradictions, remember me complaining about mosquitoes and cockroaches in my room? Remember what advice I was given by the front desk of the Overseas Student Dormitory? If you don't, that advice was to burn incense/mosquito coils. Yesterday they inspected the room while we were out, and confiscated the mosquito coils. They called us today and told us that they weren't allowed (fire risk?). *Sigh*

Getting really sick of them bullshitting me. I'm not sure if this should make me feel better or worse, but from the stories I hear, it's not just me rough end of the stick. Everyone has their own stories of how various departments have screwed them around. In short, unless something magical happens to change my mind (maybe they will rescue me from a burning building with flying unicorns, who knows), I would advise people to avoid Sichuan University staff, wherever possible. The less contact, the less chance they have of being unhelpful/misleading/wrong.

On to more positive stuff - I walked to the centre of the city (Tianfu Square) with an Austrian chick, and found it relatively nice. While there's a lot of unattractive concrete, there are some trees/gardens around, with a few statues etc. Including of course, the ever-present spectre, Mao Zedong. The main attraction of the place for me was that it was quite eerily quiet. The sounds of the city and traffic suddenly become muted and distant, making it an awesome place to have a seat and rest your legs. On a side note, plenty of security around. Their camoflaged uniforms and serious weapons (shotguns reminding me of Spaz-9's) were quite eyecatching next to the flower gardens.

Went to a whole-sale store yesterday with Jonas, Mike and Patrick. It wasn't that much cheaper for many items, but the sheer size of the place and the range of products made the trip worthwhile. We bought everything from a coal-fired barbeque to spirits to meat to chicken nuggets to a phone. In short, there's a lot there. The other major drawcard is that membership isn't open to that many people - it was the shortest time I've spent in a queue in China yet. You either have to own a business or be a foreign student to be allowed access. I'm guessing it's because we are interested in imported goods and have the money to buy them. The downside is that with shopping bags being banned in major food outlets, we had to perhaps several canvas shopping bags to transport the !!2000!! kuai worth of groceries back to the apartment. Probably the most amusing purchase was 2 cloves of garlic, at a cost of 7 fen, approximately 0.0127 Australian cents. There was some relatively cheap vodka - a bottle Stolichnaya for 80 kuai/$14 Australian?

Not exactly sure what the building is, but they sure light it up nicely.

Anyway, the evening progressed on with us constructing the BBQ at 10pm, cooking fish and nachos and frying some chicken nuggets and cheese and toast sandwhichs, all downed with hearty helpings of drink. Concerningly, the Chinese don't often use tin-foil, which was kind of essential for our plans with the BBQ. Mike had to visit something like 6 convenience stores before finding one which stocked a small roll of the stuff.

That's enough for now, see you all later.

Step 8 - Hate other people. Go on, do it

Hey y'all. It's been awhile, I know. Have you missed me? No, I'm sure you've all been busy with your own lives. Let me fill you in what has been 'the haps' with my world.

I'll get the rant out of the way first. Computers and networks can be troublesome beasts, but it would seem especially so when you're not in control of what the other people are doing. More specifically, multiple routers on a LAN network. None of them configured properly, it would seem. Only reason I'm on the internet now is because of default logins and passwords. So that's the primary reason I haven't updated in awhile.

The second is that my room only has one ethernet port, and we currently don't have a hub/switch. The room-mate says that he will buy one, which is great, because I really don't want to. Particularly when he wants a wireless access point for his iTouch, in a room that's about as big as some people's bathrooms.

The third reason is that I've been either out partying, or home sleeping it off. Saturday... was a big night. Let's get a close up on that...

Starts maybe 7 or 8, we (Pat/Mike/Jonas) go out and get some grub. Following the meal (Jiaozi, yay), starting getting some drinks going. Whiskey and coke, not my usual taste but it's good to mix it up now and then...? Did I mention they were free drinks? Though I should probably buy them a bottle of something as thanks. Probably had that much of their booze already anyway. Alright, back on topic - We had drinks on the Friday night too, but people we had expected to meet hadn't come through, so we just took it relatively easy and boozy. Saturday though, they came through.

First stop was the 'Panda club'. Cute name, crap club. A constant rotation of performing girls (not the skimpy type) with music too loud and overpriced drinks (20 kuai for the cheapest beer - 3 kuai is what you might pay at the store). So we (actually about 15 people now) soon left there and got a cab to Babi II. This was more like what I remembered of Chinese clubs. Crazy loud music, tables everywhere covered with Chivas and green tea. This place didn't actually have a dance area, so people were just going nuts between the tables, generally getting in the way of anyone and everyone. But that's what makes it fun dancing there...

The other thing I like is the free drinks from random people at tables as you walk by. Within about 10 metres of entry, I was doing some shots with random Chinese guys and another foreigner (who I later find out is a student like me, he just happened to walk in about 5 minutes before me). So that's pretty much how it stayed, for I don't know how many hours. Dancing and drinking, drinking and dancing. Eventually something compelled me to leave? I walk/stumble? out the front and Jonas is brawling on the street with some guy. I don't know specifics, but I do remember trying to pull people off other people, and falling backwards. I had a sore and grazed shoulder that backed up my story the next day.

Little did I know, but it turns out this thing had been going on for awhile, and inside the bar as well? An English guy got a glass bottle broken over his head, apparently for trying to help Jonas out. I'll have to try remember it's possibly not worth running in to save an American who probably deserved it. Apparently he gets into that sort of trouble a fair bit.

Anyway, I made my way home - a receipt in my pocket and some money gone tells me I bought something, don't ask me what it is though. I like to think it was a big bottle of water. I woke up with not much of a hangover, so it's possible. But then... I don't know what the receipt says. I should look it up. I remember having conversations with people on my walk home, and that's about it. I don't remember opening the door, but apparently it happened.

I woke up at 4pm, feeling pretty good. Strange. Current hypothesis is that I wasn't sober yet. I went and had a huge dinner, and felt better again. Then I finally started coming down.

And I'm just about all written out, for now. Classes have started, and they're going fine. Looking to move up as it seems a bit easy at the moment. Will write more soon, assuming no internet troubles.

Lots of <3 people, keep it real.

Step 7 - Maybe I should Bathe more?

 

 Tuition money, or as I like to call it, 'Big-wad-o-Cash'.

Maybe we already knew that, but it seems be particularly pertinent right now. My Nepalese medical student room-mate (Did I ever mention his name? I don't think so; it's Dilip. Apparently his nickname is Liam. Spooky.)  has moved out. This was not entirely unexpected - he had mention that he was trying to get into another dorm that was closer to his classes, which from here are about a 20 minute bike ride. The way he told me was interesting though.

"So, I am thinking this will be my last night here."

Cheers for the warning..? But it was all good. He didn't even sleep here on that night anyway - So basically he was the room-mate that I saw maybe... for 1 to 2 days, from the 18th of August till the 1st of September. Feels kinda like a bit of shame really, but as they say, one door closes and another opens. In the morning Dilip collected his stuff, and in the afternoon Patrick moved in. He's from Canada, I'm not sure how old. Let's just say approximately my age, and pretty tall. He's also a language student, though I'm not exactly sure what kind of level his Chinese is at. Oh, and he's not around at all either. He came across with some buddies, who apparently spent the last year in Beijing, so they've been out somewhere a lot. Mike and somebody Jonas ... I forget his name. Anyway, maybe I'll get to know them more later on.

Fun job there, sport.

Speaking of Chinese skills/level, this morning we had the placement tests. Basically this is a written test and a quick ( <=5 minutes ) chat with a teacher so that they can figure out what class you should be in. I think I went... okay? Obviously it's not a test that you exactly get a grading on, but a few people think I should be in level two (intermediate). I think I should be too, but the problem is that I'm not confident enough, I'm rusty and my listening has always been poor. The results will be out on Sunday, with classes beginning Monday.

I've been thinking of getting a bank account here, so I don't continue to get pummeled with fees. Bankwest currently slug me $5 per withdrawal, on top of a 2% charge on the amount I withdraw. I have no idea on the amount, if any, charged by the Chinese bank/ATM owner.

Small parks like this are all over the Uni campus.

Part of the problem at the moment is choosing a bank. China has like a billion it seems, though there are a few major ones. I'm trying to pick between Bank of China (BoC), China Construction Bank (CCB) and Industrial and Commercial Bank of China (ICBC). I've had CCB recommended to me by Dilip, because it has a branch on campus and has plenty of ATM's around.  The same goes for the two other banks I'm thinking about. CCB has an agreement with Westpac that means no transfer fees, but I'm not with Westpac so that's pretty moot. I'll check with Terry and see what she thinks...

That's a wrap.