NingBo Hold-overs

So there were two gems from the Ningbo Hat Tournament that I forgot to add to my last post.  The first being a wonderful new song, a real pump up beat.  Enjoy...




Next time you're having an outdoor dance party crank this up and wonder about why none of us can make money writing music.

The second was an analysis of the movie Avatar.  One of the guys from Beijing had his Chinese students watch the movie and then discuss it is in class.  To anyone from America or Europe the sometimes overbearing theme of colonization and the oppression of indigenous peoples was obvious.  To one of this guys students however it was not, presumably because China does not have such an extensive history of colonial rule.  His conclusion? If you can get a big bird you'll get a girlfriend and be important and successful.  "Big bird" or 大鸟(da niao)...think about it.

Dave Plays Frisbee

  Yesterday was the Chinese Qingming Festival, where you go to the graves of your ancestors to remember them. It's one of the more important holidays in China so everyone gets a day off, from school and work, all across the country. Due to my job only being half a real job, we get Fridays off, this holiday gave us foreign teachers a little vacation. Some of the other teachers decided to go down to Hong Kong to indulge in some comforts from home, see the ocean perhaps, and in general take a break from the monotony that Taigu can sometimes be. A couple weeks ago Nick let me know about an Ultimate Frisbee Hat Tournament in Ningbo that would be happening Saturday and Sunday. I like frisbee, I wanted to go somewhere warm, so I decided to tag along.

  We decided to first stop off in Shanghai on the way down, catch some friends of ours on Friday, hit up the tournament Saturday and Sunday, spend the holiday back in Shanghai and get some good western food (I've been craving Mexican, we settled for Tex-mex), and then get back to school Tuesday.

  Our preferred method of travel? Train! It's cheaper than flying, you can get an overnight and arrive in your destination with just as much time to putz around as if you flew in the night before annnnd you don't need to get a hotel, + + and +. Plus the soft sleeper cabins are plush, little mini-TV, reading lights, and the ever scarce western style toilets.

  Anyways, we got into Shanghai at 9:30 or so in the morning and began our attempt at meeting Dan (our Shanghai friend). To those who don't know, and I think this should be most of you, Shanghai is hosting the World Expo this year and the Pavilions will open on May 1st. So, just like Beijing for the Olympics, the Shanghai Municipal Government has been encouraging citizens to be extra helpful and courteous to travelers who will be visiting Shanghai in huge numbers next month. We got to get a little taste of that hospitality firsthand.

   This gentle old Chinese man standing in the picture with Nick was our own personal tour guide of the Shanghai Metro system. At first, when he very loudly asked us, "where are you from!" on the street, we were kind of apprehensive. On a separate occasion we were asked the same question by another old man, who admittedly was much more poorly dressed, only to discover when he walked away that his ass was hanging out of his pants. So we kept our distance, but to our benefit he was quite persistent. He squeezed "Meiguo (美国）" out of us, which means "American," then what we were looking for, then which metro line, then our final destination in the city. Eventually he made it his personal duty to escort us into the metro stop, onto the metro, and see us safely on during our transfer from line 1 to 2. But before we departed we had to have a picture with him. I remember a time when my family went to New York City and my brother got stuck on the subway while the rest of us got off, my Mom got quite upset. Well this time I failed to get on the train after Nick because I was too busy putting my camera away. This old man, who we had just met an hour or so earlier, had almost the same reaction as my Mom. He didn't pound on the doors at all but I did have to reassure him several times that I would be fine before he settled down. When the next train showed up we shook hands, smiled and he most likely went off in search of the next pair of un-interested by ultimately happy foreign tourists.

  From there it was off to buy cleats, meet Dan, eat good food, buy costumes, eat more good food and then jump on the Party Bus with the other Frisbee players down to Ningbo and the 2nd Annual University of Nottingham Ultimate Frisbee Hat Tournament. The bus ride was a riot, a couple shirtless shotguns, some "Shanxi Famous Brand" fenjiu cocktails, lots of beer and a general disregard for the next day's games. 

  We saw this guy on the walk to the field Saturday morning. You could honestly create tomes of photos of overloaded trikes in China (see the trike in Shanghai from Gerald's video, posted in early March).

  I can say with certainty that I felt more sore after the four games of ultimate on Saturday than I have in a very very long time, it's gotta be the whole "not in college anymore" thing. You know how if you run for a long time without stretching properly your calves tend to feel like rocks afterward, kinda pushing out on your skin but unwilling to move, forcing you to walk flat-footed. Well that's how I felt from my knees up to my belly button, plus a bit in the calves too. Diagnosis: Out-of-shape, another "round and fleshy twenty something" as my old high school phys. ed. teacher used to ever so eloquently put it. 

  And I plan on going to more of these in the future because despite the aching it was a ton of fun. I got to meet a bunch of cool people, play in some really fun games, see some cool places etc... etc... On the con side however, this tournament has ruined Lady Gaga for me. What was once a stable and enjoyable guilty pleasure has been beaten to death. Between repeating songs on Saturday during the games, to more repeating at the club that night, to an entire neglect of playing anything but Lady Gaga on Sunday at the games I think I've heard Poker Face, Bad Romance, Just Dance and a couple other songs, such as Tik Tok by Ke$ha almost 30 times a piece.

  Here are some choice photos courtesy of yours truly from the tournament.

You Know You Want It Too

That's right, it is a house in a cave, siiiiick.

Startling Revelation of the Day

   So there are two Peach Blossom Trees outside my new house.  To clarify, Peach Blossom Trees are the ones with the pink flowers that you see in all kinds of Asian paintings, also it is the state flower of Delaware.
   So anyways, as I was walking back from lunch today I heard the buzzing of a bee as I walked towards my house, then more buzzing, then a lot more buzzing.  I looked up into the tree and there must have been a couple hundred bees buzzing around all the newly opening blossoms, like a whole hive all in one place.  The sound was like one of those typical swarm scenes in movies, like The Mummy or Wickerman, but without any screaming due to the bees contented pollination efforts.
   I just hope they don't try and take up residence over our porch, I was planning to do some reading and day drinking on a fairly regular basis.

Chinese Brand Sniping

So I'm sure you've all heard of this phenomenon before, either from me or the media, but I just want to reiterate that the idea of a trademark or intellectual property is almost non-existent over here.

That being said I was walking to lunch one day a couple weeks ago and I saw this logo on a car parked in the lot.

Bold and daring.

 

If it looks familiar to you that's because it should.  Whether it's because most of us watched rap music videos on TRL in middle school or because the brand is so synonymous with wealth the Bentley logo is instantly recognizable;see below.

Classic

 

And if that weren't enough the Chinese company has even gone to the lengths of naming their brand "Riich."  What a shameless play at materialism.  The ironic thing though is that the car I saw this logo on looked like this one below, but yellow-greenish.

Hardly the ideal of wealth and fortune.

 

A dinky little two door sedan that looked more in company with a Volkswagen Bug of the 70's than a Bentley.

That is the kind of car I would have someone else drive for me.

 

You be the judge.  Next up Oreo's.

A Taste of Home in Taiyuan

 Our Group down by the locker room, post-game.

 It's been one week since the other teachers, some of our friends from the university and I went to go see the provincial basketball team play their final game of the season and I think my voice and throat have finally recovered. To anyone that has ever watched a sporting event with me, on TV or at the game, can attest I can get very loud and this time was no exception. Our group was mentioned in the local newspaper as being the "main energy in the stadium." The second paragraph is the one pertaining to us if you care to stick it in Google translate.  Gerald has some videos but I'm too lazy at the moment to try and get them from him, maybe later.

The attraction for us was watching Stephon Marbury, formerly of the Celtics, Knicks, Nets, Suns and Bucks, play for the Shanxi Brave Dragons. The Brave Dragons,known in Chinese as the 山西汾酒 (Shanxi Fenjiu) which is the local liquor specialty I mentioned in my last post, are probably one of the worst teams in the league. Before Marbury's arrival 6 weeks ago they were an abysmal 3-13. How they have fared since I don't know. But regardless, on Wednesday night they thoroughly trashed their opponents to the sound of 123-90 someting.

There he is, number 33. Whether he is more fun to watch then Grizzard I don't know.

To say nothing else the experience was well worth the pain of the next few days.  It had to be one of the most fun days I've had since coming here, this semester and last.  Our seats were second row almost right behind one of the baskets so we could see all the action right up close.  Our goal was to cheer loudly enough that any other Americans in the stadium would know that Anne and I (at least) were from Boston, and that maybe, possibly, we could get the attention of and finagle a picture with Marbury.  Sadly the latter was not achieved and we can only speculate on the former.

Our team sans-Marbury sadly getting stuffed.

On a side note, as one of our friends informed me "cheerleader" is translated as 啦啦队(lala dui) for the phonetic sound of "la-la." Though they are more of a dance team since they don't do any actual cheering during the game and their dances don't involve any singing.  During time-outs and in-between quarters they have a performance routine but after those they just sit in their seats on the baselines and wait. Anyways, they were fun to watch.

Getting Acquianted

Who is my new housemate? The term "a character" was most likely invented for him.

I've known Matthias Meyer since the first day I got here. We, with Nick, went to an all you can eat and all you can drink barbecue joint just off campus the night of my arrival on September 3rd, and at 30 yuan a person or roughly $4.50 we've been back frequently. Following dinner we took advantage of the absence of open container laws and had a street party where thankfully I did not meet any of my students-to-be. After the beers for the street party were gone we made our way back to Matthias' house (where I am living now) and continued to imbibe all variations of alcohol. From what I can recall now there were shots of 1/3 Baijiu (the infamous Chinese grain alcohol nicknamed "white lightning" by many foreigners) 1/3 coke and 1/3 Soju (a Korean Rice wine along the same lines as Saki). There was of course more beers, some Fenjiu (a special kind of Baijiu special to Shanxi province) and several concoctions of which no one was really sure what the contents were, juices, wines, what have you. And so on my first night here I was convinced to drink sufficiently enough that on my first morning here I had to throw it all back up. I'll hock that up to a combination of jet-lag, a hang over, and an insufficient diet for the 48 hours preceding the evening, but that's still just an excuse.

Matthias, Anne and Daniel at Golden Hanz, the German microbrewery, Brazilian barbecue,Chinese buffet restaurant in Taiyuan.

Since after our initial debaucherous encounter Matthias' character has continued to evolve. He is German and as my first night would elude he loves his beer. He regularly asks Nick or I to order him 90 or 120 or even upwards towards 200 beers at a time from a local shop. These he drinks himself as well as grudgingly parcels out during his many parties. Part of his teaching curriculum is to invite his classes to his house (almost every night of the school week) to eat and drink and converse in German. I say he asks Nick or I because his Chinese is extremely poor, despite the fact that he has been here for a year already. From what he told me he used to attend Graduate School in Australia but was repeatedly failed on papers and the like because his English was not good enough. He was then told by a friend about the program in Taigu and decided to come here to teach German. Since then ironically he says his English has improved tremendously.

He is rather eccentric. Aside from the 200 bottles of beer, at 600 ml each, stacked across a wall in his kitchen he also has 20+ McDonalds hamburgers in his refrigerator. He has boxes of t-shirts to market his product the "Cuddle-Beer" which is essentially a thin beer koozie with a smiling face and pillow hands for the over sized Chinese bottles. He has an enormous beer belly, upon which he rests his cellphone which he slings around his neck on one of those key-chain straps that bro's in high school used to let hang out of their back pockets. When he isn't texting he enjoys using it to play loud German techno music every once in a while, at home or at a restaurant. He has over 300 people on his QQ lists(a similar program to MSN Messenger or AIM) that he has divided into 5 tiers which you may ascend if you talk to him enough, I'm unsure which one I reside in. He is 36 and has been in the military, worked as a nurse, managed a nursing home, managed his own hotel, has written 3 books and is now working with us in Taigu and calls himself the only real "taigu ren" 太谷人 or person from Taigu. At a whim he'll tell you how in Germany he would regularly drink, boot, nap for 20 minutes (sometimes under park benches) and then rally. I am extremely excited to see what this next month or more will bring to say the least.

I think in the future the other fellows and I will be making "Jesus Matthias" shirts and the next German Party is this Monday and I don't know how many more beyond that.