Step 22 - Christmas Day

This is what I've come to?

Oh, and on another embarrassing front, I have to admit that I now have a Twitter account. I guess time will tell as to how long it remains active.

Merry Christmas, y'all.


*cough* Not to be a jerk or anything, but seriously people, cheap or free, this game is a bundle of fun. Just don't buy it for your mother.

Step 21 - Humper-knuckles and Griffin-flows

 I love balloons. Or at least, drawing them.

It's another one of those days where I find myself struggling for an appropriate title, and so we have this. I'm not entirely sure how it came to be - perhaps I subconsciously stole it off something?

Alright, getting down to the thick juicy meaty content of this post... we find ourselves actually quite disappointed. Today I'm going to post up some doodlings I've been drawing in my notebook while bored. After that, my increasing feelings of homesickness.

I wonder what could have possibly inspired this one?

Where am I finding the time for these doodlings? Class, of course. I also find myself writing out pages of thoughts at a time. Other people in the class sometimes find this quite curious, as I'm generally pretty coy about the whole operation. 'Hey Liam, what are you writing there...?' with the inevitable reply, 'Yeah, just thoughts. Nothing important'. And I'm right, it's nothing important, but I do find it a somewhat therapeutic exercise. It's an exercise I picked up from creative writing back in highschool - basically keeping pen to paper and writing every thought that comes to mind. This is related to why I don't let people read it - half the time I end up writing a page about the latest event and/or person to give me the shits. It's really not worth the drama of letting someone read it.

Patagonian Tooth-fish?

You could raise the point that if I'm writing private stuff, I should probably do it in private, as I'm very aware it's going to attract the attention of the various other bored elements in the class when of their kind is furiously scribbling away when nothing is occurring in class. Am I doing it as an attention seeking activity? I don't think so. While I know it's noticed, I'm doing it to keep myself occupied and because I actually enjoy it. Why don't I do it outside of class? I don't do it on my own time because I generally place a low-priority on it an, or rather, I've got better things to do. At least, I like to think I do.

Giant ninja heads will mess you up.

More doodlings here.

With my parents arriving in... about a week, I've been finding myself increasingly missing those back home. Friends, family, pets, vehicles, foods, beaches, skylines, sounds, smells... you get the idea. In part I guess this is because my world is still back in Australia. In my day-to-day life, I probably talk to as many or more of my friends back in Australia than I do here in Chengdu. What does this mean for me exactly? Well, in one area it's pretty clear - I really need to be more proactive and expand my social group here. This might be helped when I move out of the dorm - but not necessarily.

Where am I magicking these people from?

I think the best situation for my Chinese study would be having my day-to-day friends being Chinese. That's a no brainer, really. But it's not necessarily easily done. Where am I magicking these people from? Let alone people that would be generous enough to hang out and chat with me on a daily basis. I have Chinese friends online that I'm chatting to every day, but that's not even nearly the same thing. And it really shows - while I find my language improving, it's most noticeable in a MSN window - in real life I'm finding myself performing quite poorly and in a very shy manner. There's some pretty obvious reasons for this, on MSN there's no pressure on me to respond immediately, and I understand exactly what words they're saying; a character is much harder to mistake than a sound. And if there's a word I don't know, I can easily look it up.

This doesn't make it any less forgivable that I'm essentially not improving in the area I want to improve - face to face conversational Chinese. I end up feeling a slight feeling of awe/jealousy as my friend engages very easily and casually with Chinese people, in Chinese. Invariably, they're also very impressed. He has taken pleasure a few times in telling them that my Chinese is actually much better than his, and they look at me with somewhat surprised expressions. Can it be true? This guy with a concentrated look on his face and whom has barely spoken; he is the better one? I tell them I'm not, and in the very process of doing so they already know I'm not.

Bad Liam, bad bad bad

I wouldn't say that it gets me down, I just know there is a lot of work to be done. This recently has been a bit of a problem, and somewhat relates back to homesickness - with my parents arriving so soon, I'm finding myself less and less motivated to do... just about anything. It seems I pretty much want to kill time until they arrive, through any means other than study. Bad Liam, bad bad bad. There's a bunch of new policies I want to engage, New Year's resolutions if you will, but I'm finding myself in a sticky position as to when and how to implement them. I'm planning on moving in to an apartment around mid-late January, and the fresh location would work well with some fresh endeavours... or re-commitments... whatever.

My issue here is that.... while it would be convenient to start things then, another part of me tells me that there's no reason to wait. Sure, it will mean more stuff to pack up and take away and reorganise once I move, but that's not a huge issue. There's no reason to put it off, is there? Easy vs hard, wrong vs right (or perhaps, perceived worse vs perceived better. Maybe they may as well be the same thing). I'm still deciding.

In other news, I now have mutton chops. You may leave offerings of gold, frankincense and myrrh neatly at the door, thank you.

Oh, one more thing. Apparently it's common for young people to congregate in the centre of town on Christmas Eve and bash each other with inflatable toys - I haven't found anyone that knows how or why this got started as a tradition, but apparently it's been running for 5 or 6 years now. I hope to be there with camera in one hand and maybe even a giant inflatable mallet in the other

Yes, my chin is getting fatter. Yes, I do need to get back to the gym on a more frequent basis.

Step 20 - A blog in time, saves nine?

Saves nine what exactly though? Blogs? Because I wouldn't be making nine blog posts to make up for one that I missed or was too late getting to.

I'm going to go out right now and take some pictures of the dorm, thus completing step one of the 'Places I Go' series.

Okay, I'm back, let's get this baby in motion...

Or not. Check the photos here. No point in posting it all here again...

Wow, that was much easier than expected.

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.

Step 18 - The ugly side...

Originally this post was part of a larger review of the past few days, but I feel it's important enough to warrant a dedicated post.

For reasons that will be clear in the next post, I had been out at a bar/club with some friends. It was getting late and I'd decided to go home. Mike was with me and we were past the South Gate when I noticed a girl sitting on the pedestrian path alongside the road. She was crying. She looked and sounded young and so did the guy standing next to her. But he was just standing there as she cried. We continued walking, but I kept glancing over my shoulder. It's somewhere between midnight and 2am at this point, the streets are relatively empty and the night air was cold, crisp. Sound was traveling pretty well so I noticed when the guy started talking... raising his voice to a shout and then... the worst thing.

He kicks her. I don't mean he nudges her with his foot - he kicks her. The only thing possibly worse is my response - I hesitate. I look to Mike and ask him, 'Hey... should we help her?'. He had apparently been in his own world up until this point, as he looks around, focuses, starts shouting and running back. I'm with him and stand alongside as he launches into his second tirade for the night (again, more on that next time), experiencing an entirely different reaction to the first one we had that evening.

The guy was almost entirely passive. Speaking in low tones, I wasn't sure what he was saying but my impression was that it was along the lines of, 'Hey, no trouble here guys, no trouble. No problems. Calm down'. The girl is still on the ground, sitting there and crying. And so we stand there, noone talking. This lasted for what was probably only a few minutes, though it felt like an age. Him, standing over her, waiting for us to leave. The relative silence is finally broken when she starts shrieking at him between sobs, and starts kicking back at him. Not fight-hitting, but hitting all the same. It pissed him off and he shouted at her, but he didn't do anything, not with us there.

I don't know what ended it. For some reason, we finally turned and slowly walked away. He didn't do anything to her again, at least not in eye or ear shot, but it has been a really... horrible experience. I have really weird feelings and thoughts about that night and that incident. By intervening, did we just make things worse for her later on? The only thing we stopped was another kick, another push, another shove at that moment in time. There's so many things I don't know. Is this common in China? Is it normal for those two people? What is their relationship? I'd guess that they are/were boyfriend and girlfriend, but I don't know that.

One of the worst things for me is what I found in myself. 'Should we help her?'. How could I have even asked that? What a terrible hesitation. What a terrible hesitation. I don't even know how to explain it. Why did I think that, why did I ask that question? There's no nice way to think about it. The best possible reason I can think of is that when I'm with Mike, I take my lead on how to approach situations from him. He's been living in China for over a year, and has a much better grasp of just about everything here. But what if that wasn't the reason? If he had said that we should leave it, for whatever reason, would I have just walked away? I don't know. I guess it's impossible to know without being forced into that exact scenario, but gods...

I'll leave that there - suffice to say, it's not resting well on my mind.