The story so far...

Word of the day: fu2 wu4 yuan2 (服务员) = waiter

I can post in this blog, but not look at it. How difficult....

So far:

-Last Wednesday, 6/6, arrived in Shanghai. Got ripped off by taxi, paid 168 yuan for half hour drive to Maggie International Youth Hostel. Met up with Charlie and later Forrest, met Christopher. Christopher came to China with a Daoist tour group and after that just went to Shanghai on his own to look for jobs, but then he decided not to stay in China and just keep touring for a few more weeks. He met Charlie at the hostel on Monday and we all made friends. Travelers have a marvelous sort of fraternity that is not just between Americans - I think I understand why the international students at MIT often stick together even if they're from different countries. Waited at bank to exchange traveler's checks for more than an hour. The girl behind the counter had a money-counting machine and casually picked up a stack of $100 bills and counted 100 of them. Suddenly I understand why people rob banks. In the bank they were showing TV ads. In one, a Chinese girl has a pimple and then a hot guy walks past her and stares at her. Then she washes her face with anti-acne cream, and then her features come out looking whiter, and then the guy walks past her and smiles. That evening, we went to the Bund, and asked a middle-aged white guy to take pictures of us. He took us out for beers (and a strawberry smoothie for me) at an expensive rooftop restaurant with a nice view of Shanghai. Whenever I try to ask people what to see in Shanghai, all they tell me is "the skyline." Shanghai buildings are much prettier and more creative than American buildings. Shanghai Pudong, which has the greatest concentration of fancy buildings, was all built in about 8 years. The tallest building in Shanghai is being built right now so currently the tallest structure is Shanghai is a crane. Shanghai is kind of like Manhattan except the extremely fancy buildings that you find in a few blocks in New York are spread out all over the city. I am impressed by how cheap everything is because of the 7:1 exchange rate but later realize that Shanghai is quite expensive.

-Thursday, 6/7: I take a whole bunch of pictures. See facebook to find out what I did. I eat green tea cheesecake at Starbucks even though I don't like green tea (which I am afraid to admit in China) because there is no green tea cheesecake in America. We met other tourists in the city center who said they were Korean but actually they were Chinese and their grandparents were Korean or something like that. We ordered spicy green beans because of me and Charlie and I made the mistake of eating all the dried red peppers in it which are a lot more potent in China than in America. I had to stop halfway through because I felt like I had a hole in my tongue and felt embarrassed because apparently I was making pained faces and looked like I was going to faint and everyone fussed over me. The guy across from me scoffed his in about a minute.

-Friday, 6/8: Delicious breakfast for 2 kuai. It's a soft tofu skin wrapped like a burrito around veggies and crispy tofu skins and delicious sauce on the inside. I want to try and make something like it when I get back to America. We went to try and buy permits to go to Tibet at 500Y per person. They insisted on also making us pay for a guide for 200Y per day while we are in Tibet and a car to pick us up from the train station at 5Y per kilometer for an absurd total of 4250Y between the four of us. When Christopher and I got to Xining, we found out we had been ripped off. This whole process took us hours and the only concession we got was that they didn't make us pay for a Jeep for 100Y a day while we were there. For dinner, we ate at a fancy restaurant and it cost about 50Y a person but it was a relief to have food that wasn't fried. Then we went looking for clubs (we kept asking people for a "disco") and we wandered into this one place where no one was dancing except for these girls on tables who were like strippers who didn't take their clothes off. Charlie and Forrest and Christopher kept trying to get a crowd of people dancing, but the most we got was a couple of the waitresses. All the Chinese people were super fashionably dressed and sat around and drank and watched the dancing girls and fancy flashing lights and listened to the pulsing loud music and smoked and played dice. I felt like the flashing lights (they had cool green lasers where you could see the lines in the air, although maybe that was because of all the smoke) and loud loud music were kind of annoying if you weren't going to dance. When we left, we met a middle-aged guy who was one of the owners of the club and he directed us to a "disco bar" which was mostly foreigners but where everyone danced and they had a sign inviting people to dance on the bar, instead of having non-strippers doing so. Charlie disappeared and the other three of us looked for him for 45 minutes before deciding to ditch him and go back to the hostel, where we found him talking to Yi Lifang, the pretty girl who works behind the desk at night. Anton, who works there during the day and is maybe the owner, is super nice and speaks English fluently and does everything he can to help us.

-Saturday, 6/9: Christopher and I want to go ahead to Xining in Qinghai province instead of waiting the 5 days for the permits to be issued, while Charlie and Forrest want to see more things around Shanghai. I want to get out of Shanghai because the air pollution is so bad and things are pretty expensive. I also decide it would be cool to see somewhere more rural and western like Xining (Shanghai has a lot in common with America) so I decide to go to Xining with someone I've known for three days. Christopher and I buy train tickets to Xining for Sunday morning and Charlie and Forrest leave the hostel to go visit some town near Shanghai. Christopher and I buy lychees which are delicious and sticky and called lizhi in Chinese.

-Sunday, 6/10: Christopher and I leave the hostel at 7:30 am to get to the train station for our 9 am train (a 30.5 hour ride). I accidentally leave my delicious 2Y breakfast burrito in the cab and feel very sad. Our "hard bunks" (ying wo) are actually quite soft and come with a mattress and a pillow and a quilt. The 30 hour train ride was pretty nice. Christopher and I had bottom bunks (there's bottom, middle, and top) so we could stow our stuff on the floor and use the little table and get up really easily. Also the bottom bunks have enough head room to sit up straight. The train ticket was about 450Y, or about $65. I slept a lot on the train, and listened to music and Chinese lessons on my mp3 player, which has an inexhaustible battery life, and ate and talked to people and daydreamed, and read a depressing fantasy book where people keep dying and so many people do really bad things like drop kiddies out of windows just because they eavesdropped. I am now a master of going to the bathroom by squatting over a hole in the floor (on the train, you could see daylight coming up the hole so I think it went straight onto the tracks, which is why they locked the bathrooms at all the stops). On the train, in the two bunks above us there were these two young Chinese people, Xiao Kang and Xiaofeng. Xiao Kang is 21 and studying in Shanghai. Xiaofeng is 27 and has a cleaning job I think. He's from Shanghai, but Xiao Kang is from Henan. They met in Shanghai because they live in the same apartment complex I think, and they were traveling to Henan so that Xiao Kang could visit her parents and they were also visiting Saolinshan, which is a mountain where people do lots of wushu (we managed to figure all of this out using my botched Chinese). They gave us their addresses and phone numbers. They were only on the train for the first 11 hours, but Christopher spent a lot of those 11 hours lying on his bunk looking up at Xiao Kang (who is quite pretty) with this big goofy smile. After they got off he sent her a text message which I had to write because he doesn't speak Chinese (it was cool using a phone to type in Chinese characters) and then she messaged him back, and they might meet up again later if he decides to stay in China. I will post pictures of Xiao Kang and Xiaofeng (who got a little bit ignored) later, when I find a high-speed internet connection.

Monday, 6/11: After our new friends got off, a very very loud chubby old man and his friend got on and took their bunks right above us. The old man took his shirt off, which was slightly distressing because he was fat and old and he lay there under his blanket and stared at us because we were foreigners. He talked really really loudly in a constant stream to his friend who said a few words every 20 minutes or so. Christopher thought he was on his cell phone but he wasn't. He got on in the middle of the night. There were also two adorable small children who occasionally screamed but on the whole they were more adorable than annoying. The little girl danced with me when music came on the speakers. She must have been teething because she tried to eat absolutely everything, including my toes. I woke up in the middle of the night because the little boy pulled on my feet.

Our hostel in Xining is cool. It's 35Y a night. It has a very Tibetan look. Right now I am sitting 3 feet away from a ram's skull with a big yellow ribbon on it. They have two golden retriever puppies which they keep in a little pink cage and let them out to eat noodles and tofu and run around biting the bottom of your pants. They also peed in someone's room in the morning. Yesterday after getting to Xining we first tried to buy a ticket to Lhasa at the train station, with no luck. The first available ticket was for the 18th, but we need to get on the same train as Charlie and Forrest on the 15th, because back in Shanghai when we paid for our permits to go to Lhasa they also made us pay for a guide for certain days so we don't want to get there later. Plus Charlie and Forrest are bringing our permits on that train. In Xining it is very hard to buy tickets to Lhasa, which legitimately can only be purchased at the train station, because people buy the tickets way ahead of time and then resell them on the black market for twice the cost. Even though stuff is really cheap here (meals <= 5Y), money can go really fast. Mercifully, it goes a lot less fast than in Shanghai, because Charlie and Forrest are not naturally pinch-fingered like I am and wanted to go to relatively expensive bars and things (plus everything in Shanghai, while cheaper than America, is much more expensive than Xining).

After being unable to buy tickets at the train station, we waited for someone from the hostel to pick us up. Christopher went to the bathroom and then all these middle-aged and old Chinese men converged around me from out of nowhere in this big circle. Even though the circle thing felt like a movie scene where the evil gang circles up around their next victim, I think they were just curious. They asked me questions in Chinese like where I was from and established that I could speak a little Chinese (my understanding of spoken Chinese is very poor). They said I was "piaoliang" (pretty) and I understood that, and then when Christopher came back they told him that I was piaoliang even though he doesn't speak a word of Chinese, because I think they thought he was my boyfriend.

After checking in at the hostel we took a bus (only 1Y) into town to eat. At the place we ate we met a Korean man who's an interior designer and has taken a one month vacation into China by himself, not knowing a word of Mandarin, to visit a lot of different places on the Silk Road.

Tuesday, 6/12: I slept until 10 am and then took until 11 am to get ready to go, so I felt bad because I think Christopher was up at 8 or 9. We went to Beichan Temple, which is a Daoist temple on the side of a mountain. I've only been gone from MacGregor 4th floor for about three weeks and already I got very out of breath going up the stairs on the side of the mountain. Mountains here are different from East Coast American mountains. They have sparse, desert-like vegetation and are very steep and muddy. At the Daoist temple they made tons of narrow terraces on the side of the mountain so that they could grow small trees and rose bushes. There were temples for lots of different gods at Beichan. I was very excited because one of them was for Chenghuang, which means the city god, and I recognized the characters because we read a story in which a river ghost saved a mother from drowning even though she was supposed to replace him as the river ghost so that he could become human again, and so he got promoted to be a chenghuang.

On the way to Beichan I bought a tea thermos for 11Y. It's very exciting. It comes with a screen you put near the top so that the tea leaves don't get in your mouth. A ton of people in China have them. I will use it at MIT too. Good purchase.

After the temple we wandered around and found this market that stretched for blocks and blocks and blocks in multiple directions, just plopped down in the middle of the city in between apartment buildings and things. We ate noodles for lunch at a stall there (3Y each) and bought a scallion pancake for 5 mao, or half a yuan (they're so delicious fresh!). Then we wandered into a fancy-looking mall where things cost hundreds or thousands of yuan, and everything had an English name brand except they weren't real. There was "G&P, Guardian Penguin, UK style," whose mascot was a penguin in a royal guard outfit (this was my favorite but the cheapest thing they had was socks for 22Y). There were brands like "Gandidoni" and "Masticot of Paris" and "Chrisdien Deon from Italy" and all these others. I wonder if the Chinese people shopping there knew that these brands aren't really from the Western hemisphere.

The schoolchildren all wear uniforms. Christopher doesn't like it because it's a symbol of trying to force everyone to be uniform, but I think they're cute.

We met up with a Canadian girl who's staying at the hostel, Andrea, on the street in the middle of the city. We ate dinner together (4Y a piece) and wandered around. We bought tasty strawberry ice cream floats at KFC, which is more expensive than other food here (9Y for one float).

I had my first thief today. Only he was a bad thief, so I caught him. He came up behind me and tried to open my camera bag (which also has my money in it) but the seal is velcro so the bag lifted up and the velcro made a noise and I turned around and swatted his hand and said "Ni zuo shenme?" which means "What are you doing?" and then in Chinese he was all "I don't know what you're talking about" in Chinese and backed into Christopher, but luckily didn't steal anything from his Mexican man-purse and said to Christopher "Ta hui shuo Zhongwen" (she can speak Chinese) kind of trying to brush it off and then he walked away really quickly. Afterwards I felt like I should've gotten much madder at him and balled him out but the only things I can say in Chinese when I'm angry are "thief!" and "you're a bad person" and "your mother is not proud of you" which is kind of funny and probably would have made him laugh. Andrea, whose parents are from Shanghai and who speaks Cantonese but only a little more Mandarin than I do, reassured me that I probably scared him because I was talking so slowly like I was really mad: "Ni. Zuo. Shenme?" but that's just because I'm not very good at Chinese so I always speak really slowly. It was exciting, all in all, especially because he didn't get anything.