Point China

Passport photos. Everyone hates them not only because they make you look like a dufus but because they are expensive and just annoying. I’ve gone to Walgreens before and gotten some, just to go back to the Immigration Office and find out that they weren’t properly done and did not meet the requirements, forcing me to run back down stairs and do them again! Another time I went to Wolf Camera and had to wait 20 minutes because some guy in front of me was printing 300 pictures! It’s just never a fun process.

Here in China, 8 passport photos cost 30RMB (aka 5 bucks) and they take maybe 5 minutes. You walk in and go straight to take the picture. The place does passport photos and only passport photos so there is very little talking that needs to happen. They take you picture and it gets saved to a shared drive. You walk over to another computer station where they open your picture up with Photoshop, and change the background to the required color (blue in our case), edit your blemishes on your face, and fix any stray hair fuzzies. Then they print 8 copies for you on one piece of paper. Then you walk over to the last station where they have cutting boards and do the cutting for you. As they cut, you pay. Then you walk out of the place with pictures and you go on your merry way.

So quick, so easy, so efficient. I can’t help but award China another point. USA 78: China 2

Qingdao

Here are some late coming pictures from our trip to Qingdao for the Beer Festival. Below you will find the hostel that we stayed at in the old part of town, an old pagoda, and then beer street and the beer brewery.

Point China

Ever step into an elevator and push the close door button to receive no response from the elevator? Yup, we’ve all done and then immediately wondered why was this button put here in the first place?! Well, the button, here in China, actually works! You push it, and bam! Instantly, the door starts moving to close. It’s magic! Granted the elevators here move at the speed of molasses, but the close door works!

As such, I award one point to China. Current standings: USA 57: China 1

We also got stuck in said elevator for ten minutes but I will not let that small hiccup interfere with China's well earned point.

Blue Box Blues

As exciting as the offer to go out to your favorite little hole in the wall restaurant is back home in good old Chicago, the offer here in China does not evoke the same excitement. Rather, it usually involves a sigh followed by a question of “where do you want to go today?” The answer to that question is usually a list made up of names for random restaurants around our school: Big Red, Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon, the Kosher place, dumpling place, or Something VS Something place. As we discover more hole in the walls, I’m sure the list of ultra awesome and creative names will increase. Anyways, along with the short list of immaterially different hole in the wall restaurants, our entre choices usually consist of rice or noodles topped with some sort of meat in a sauce and are usually limited to the scarce number of pictures on a restaurant’s menu.

A little outside eating area we go to often. It's quite cute at night.

Some days we get enough courage to go attempt a new place but doing so requires a true desire and patience. Usually, these new places do not have picture menus at all since we had already discovered those locations earlier on. If we are lucky, when we walk into a potential new regular dining establishment, there will be someone eating something delicious looking that we can point to and say “one of this one please”. Otherwise, we can try and orders an item from my list of 8ish items that I’ve had waitresses write down after voting them as an “I want to eat this again” meal. If we are feeling even more adventurous, we make up combinations of words such as “chicken” and “vegetables” and “rice” as if they were refrigerator magnets and see what happens.

Either way, when you hungry and you just want to go and eat, sometimes this eating arrangement leads to frustrations. There have been many days where I’ve eaten cucumbers and fried rice, or simply nothing at all because ordering didn’t work out: either the food that arrived was awful or I simply couldn’t order in the first place because I got too frustrated with them saying “mayo (don’t have)” or babbling on in Chinese and pointing to other things that I just walk away and deal with the hunger.

Our go to fried rice with ham.

We’ve found a few western restaurants along with an authentic Indian restaurant here, but they are all the way downtown. We try to head down there twice a week or so to get a dose of “normal” food as we call it and kind of recharge our batteries. It’s these little trips to eat western food that keeps us going, well at least me anyways. I was told there are a couple of pizza places within a 10/15 minute bus ride from our school, so I think we will start visiting those too, once we get one of the teachers to show us where they are.

In the worst case scenario, on days when we can’t handle it anymore or are not in the mood to order food like refrigerator magnets, we know we can always cave and go eat Blue Box. We have not yet reached that point, but it’s really comforting knowing that in a few short minutes, we could have a hot steamy bowl of fake covered cheese noodles and they are guaranteed to taste just like home! :)

Total and Complete Avoidance

As I have previously mentioned in my Subway post, people in China pretty much ignore you when you ask them for questions regarding directions, advice, or to take a photo. I have no idea why this is, but some people ignore you, others pretend not to see you and walk by, and others just lie to you that they don't speak English, even though they just told you in English, that they don't speak English!

Here is a video that portrays this phenomenon very well. Granted the video is an advertisement for South Korea, they pretty much act the same way here. :)

My little peeps

Notice the piles of books. That one pile is for one student. Also what you can't tell is that the books are copies. The school buys one authentic copy of the book, and then sends it to the printers to get copied for the children. Totally legal right?

Ooh China - Poor flowers

If you take a close look at these flowers you will notice that they are not potted. They are simply placed in a nice pattern while still in their plastic little cups/baggies. I have a theory for why they might do it this way. One being that they need to make more jobs, so since the flowers will not last long this way, someone has to replace the flowers weekly. Another theory is..... ummm I have no idea! Plants are meant to be planted! So plant them.

Oooo China, flowers like to eat too. Plant them.

Rainy Xi'an- around town

 Caligraphy brushes. Tons and tons of them.

 China street. In the rain.

 Delicious looking bread in the Muslim Quarter.

 Man hard at work. Lamb skewers.

 Walking in the rain.

 Wild Goose Pagoda. No I don't come up with the names for theses.

Hour long fountain and light show.

Antique market street. Abandoned due to rain.

Why does it have to rain when I go sight seeing! I think I need to have a chat with the big guy... to make sure it doesn't happen again.

Bingma Yong Warriors

To tell you the honest truth, I think our group was a bit underwhelmed about the warriors. It just didn't seem as big of a deal as initially described. Don't get me wrong, I'm glad we saw them, but I think we had more fun trying on different hats in the long skinny street full of merchants trying to sell us stuff. As of right now, the Great Wall is still my favorite.

Subway- eat fresh

Our lovely town, ZZ, of 8 million people does not have a subway. However, Xi'an which is a huge tourist destination does! Having heard that the food near the warriors was bad, we decided to pick up some sandwiches to go. Walking up to the Subway, I wanted to capture this joyous moment on film so I proceeded to ask three separate people to take a picture of us. All three of these people completely ignored us and continued walking. In fact, none of them even remotely slowed down to acknowledge us. Now I know what it feels like to be invisible.

But we didn't let that ruin our fun. Brandon happily took our photo but he is dearly missed from the documentation of the awesomeness that is Subway.

Let’s just rename all the famous places

I want to start this post with a question: do you know what the Terracotta Warriors are? I hope you do, because the Chinese certainly do not. Why, do you ask, do they not know one of the most visited sites in China? Well, let me tell you, because there are no Terracotta Warriors in China! Their real name is Bingma Yong and that’s what the Chinese know them as. We, westerners, have decided that it’s totally cool to rename famous places in other countries to whatever we want to call them. Interesting right? Thankfully, we found this out early in our getting-lost-on-the-way-to-the- Bingma Yong -warriors day. Otherwise, it might have turned in to we-got-so-lost-that-we-never-made-it-to-the- Bingma Yong -warriors day.

Fun Fact, the Chinese will never give you more information than you ask for. For example, we asked the front desk lady of our hostel which buses we should take to get to the Bingma Yong warriors. Our reply was take the 603 to the end, walk over here (points on map), and take but 306 to the warriors. Sounds simple enough but we genius forgot to ask a few clarifying questions such as “how far do we walk to find the 306 bus”. Well, after actually doing it, we found out that walking 20 minutes in one direction was not what we were supposed to do. We ended up in this little plaza that had a bank, market, and a bus stop for every bus but the one we were looking for. With nothing to do but go back, we start slowly making our way back to point A to try out our luck again, when a bus with a huge picture of the warriors on it drives by. The conductor waves, stops the bus, and in an awkward way that makes us do the back and forth dance as we try to figure out if he is shooing us or beckoning us, motions us over to get on the bus. Seeing this as (hopefully) a ride to the warriors we were so set on seeing, we hop on the bus after confirming it wasn’t going to cost us and arm and a leg. Once the bus starts moving, we quickly realize there are no more seats on the bus for us and that we are being starred at by every person sitting in the bus. We are the only white people on the whole bus. O joy. The conductor guy manages to squeeze past all of us and produces two teeny tiny chairs for us to sit on in the aisle. With my life being the huge joke that it is sometimes, I laugh and strategically place my tukis on this tiny chair. Brandon, being the good sport that he is, ends up standing for 30 minutes and endures the curious unrelenting stares in his direction.

Turns out we got on the right bus and made it to our final destination. The stars were aligned for us this past weekend. Lesson learned on this leg of the trip: sometimes looking like a lost confused tourist will get you unlost.

Shuyuan Hostel- Best I-miss-the-US-so-I-need-a-taste-of-Home hostel

To think, a hostel with better mattresses than we have at home. Now that is a rarity.

This is getting back into the groove of being a backpacker. I kinda missed these bunks! They were ultra comfy. The hostel also had a pizza oven! I haven't had pizza that I could call delicious since I left Chicago until I found this place. Needless to say, it was a good weekend for my stomach and taste buds. They also had silly straws and free coffee. The lounge was cozy with different flags. I found North Dakota and three Lithuania flags! Downstairs was a Buddha bar with live music. I call this pretty sweet!

Lesson learned: it is possible to find home away from home. You just have to look.

Run in with the PoPo

A while back in the land of camels and Sahara Desert, Brandon and I met a Brazilian couple who quit work and decided to go travel around the world for a year. They have since hit 200 days of travel! Congrats! Anyways, as luck would have it, they were coming to China right when we would be here. Having stayed in contact since Morocco, we decided to go to Xi’an this past weekend because it would correspond to them being there and hence, us being able to have a mini reunion. So the ridiculously overpriced high speed train tickets were purchased and bags were packed! Xi’an here we come!

As a little side story, after having been in China for a month, early last week it was our duty to go submit our passports to the Exit and Entry Office of Zhengzhou where they would hold our passports for a week so they could fasten our residency visas inside. Easy enough right?

Anyways, we made reservations at the coolest hostel in Xi’an and proceeded to head on over there. Upon arrival, since Brandon and I did not have our passports with us, we find out that our photo copies were not enough; they also needed our visas. Ok, easy enough, we had both taken pictures of our visas when we first got them and had them stored on our cameras. Well, after having submitted that, we find out that that was STILL not enough. They wanted to see the stamp that we got upon entry into China. After ten minutes of my trying to explain to them that no one can enter the country without a stamp, so why not go ahead and assume that I have a stamp and just let me check it, I gave in and called our school foreign coordinator, Samantha, to help us out. Thankfully, she had copies of this information in the office and emailed it to us.

Great, so at this point, I have moved past the bitchiness of the woman checking us in and have settled down to enjoy a Qingdao beer while my email containing our visas loaded (world’s slowed internet at this hostel) so I could forward it to the hostel. Thirty minutes go by peacefully as I sip my beer and chitchat with fellow travelers. Then the bomb drops.  The lady at the check in counter states that our visas are expired. This was obviously news to us since we had just turned in all of our paper work to the Chinese Government and had our residency visas processed. After confirming to ourselves by checking the Chinese Consulate Website that the visas were in fact not invalid, but actually 100% legit and ready to go, we started to state our case to this now even bitchier check in lady. After an hour of this and me being on the verge of tears, Brandon over hears the lady talking to someone in Chinese basically admitting to having been wrong, but was "trying to save face" and not backing down from her original stance.

Frustration and fatigue set in and there was nothing to do other than leave the hostel after an adieu containing a few not so nice words to the entire hostel staff. Tired and hungry we went wandering looking for any place that would take in two “illegal” foreigners, as dubbed by stupid check in lady. Now, usually, my navigation skills are on par with gold medal standards, however, due to excessive emotional turmoil, I now can admit, that I lead our tired and angry little threesome in the wrong direction for longer than I want to admit. We ended up wandering down a dark abandoned narrow street on the verge of collapse. All hope of finding our next intended hostel gone, we helplessly walk up to the only people on the street: a bunch of guys sitting around playing poker. They were highly amused by our giant backpacks and giant guidebook and had no problem chatting (aka speaking Chinese to us while we stare back with blank faces repeating over and over Shuyuan Hostel) with us as they passed our guide book around trying to figure out where we were trying to go. At one point, it became obvious to us that they had reached a consensus about something since they stopped randomly saying the three English phrases they knew to us and started saying Shuyuan over and over again. Then out of nowhere, they all get up and walk out of their little poker room and start gesturing to us. Confused, we just kind of stood there and watched one of the men walk up to a car and open the driver’s side door. He waved to us to join him. Now I can say this was a bit of a scary moment; to enter a stranger’s car or not, but after exchanging the “look”, all three of us decided to go for it and hope nothing movie-like happens to us.

Driving with this guy was a whole different adventure, but I’m glad to report that I made it out alive. After being in the car with our driver and watching his turns, it came to me that I had been lost and led us in the totally wrong direction. Feeling better and encouraged that we were finally making progress, I started enjoying the crazy ride this guy was giving us. At one point, our driver stops at a red light and start fiddling with his pockets. We were ultra confused and a bit concerned until he whips out his wallet, or should I say badge! He flashes his shiny gold emblem and all of a sudden his friends hand motions and random gestures now make sense! We had gotten into the car of the Chief of Police of Xi’an! No wonder his friends kept saying FBI!

So to make a long story short, we got a ride in the back seat of a cop car to our hostel in Xi’an. Believe it or not, but I swear it’s true. I’m not lying; this stuff does really happen to me. :)

*note: we were not able to meet up with the Brazilians as they hit a few transportation problems. :( Perhaps in another country another time.