China China China

^I wish this photo was more clear, but this was taken at Janes & Hooch in Sanlitun. I. No name dropping, star fucking, or whining.  II. No game playing, no dice, no cards, no Baskin Robbins 31. III. No split bills.  One table, one bill.  The rest are hilarious.  Check this place out.

Apart from the largely “red” feeling of the capital, Beijing, I have great things to say about Sanlitun (三里屯), which is one of the most diverse and exciting areas in China.  It is a blend of foreigners and locals: German guys playing guitars for Chinese women, a black man walking hand-in-hand with a Chinese girl, and my Italian friend who dates a Chinese guy and although English is not their mother language, it is their Lingua Franca.

After a weekend in Beijing, I went to Jiangsu Province for a week of travel planned by Nanjing University.  Last fall I received the Gold Medal in the Jiangsu Cup Chinese Language Speech Contest, so several classmates and I toured Nanjing (the capital of Jiangsu), Yangzhou, Suzhou, and ended in Shanghai.  The cultural visits are always so “interesting.” Take the Nanjing opera for example.  No one ever thinks to listen to things at normal volumes in China, so the performance was about an hour of shrieking women at ear piercing decibels.

^ Nanjing Opera.  Mmm, music to my ears.

Most of us on the tour had spent a significant amount of time in China, and I think our collective China cynicism got the best of us.  The other Gold Medalist, Julian Panero, insisted on obnoxiously imitating the way Chinese people add little noises to the end of their words and sentences, so every time someone put food on the table, he would turn heads by loudly saying, “谢谢，嗯！” Or in English, “Thank you, UN!” I think we also got a little frustrated with the inability to actual eat anything at the meals they planned for us.  Needless to say, if we were on our own, we probably wouldn’t have ordered goose blood, goose liver, or those little tiny shrimp, which are literally impossible to get out of the shell..

^The great leader Mao (top), and the Nanjing Yangtze River Bridge (bottom), constructed by the Commies in 1968.  Interesting fact from Wikipedia.. This is the most common suicide site in the world.

Silk factories, ancient walls, a pretty Commie bridge in Nanjing (which actually has a huge statue of Mao in it along with his Little Red Books), temples, and gardens; we sort of blitkrieged the trip.  All the spots seem like one continuous theme: story about why the Emperor used to like coming there, where the concubines stayed, picture of Jiang Zemin’s visit on the wall, and some crazy story about how their stinky tofu was the best.  We also heard a lot of proud stories about the great inventions that came from China: compass, gunpowder, papermaking, and printing.  But by the end of the trip, we were jokingly and rhetorically asking, “Didn’t you know Chinese people invented plants?”  But given, that most Chinese people don’t have a sarcastic sense of humor, their reply was usually just, “Oh really? I didn’t know that.”

^Travel buddies at the Oriental Pearl in Shanghai.

Things really picked up when we got to Shanghai, which is my first Chinese love.  One of my travel buddies is rooming with a wealthy Chinese guy (read 富二代) next year at GW, and he was in Shanghai at the same time we got there.  Long story short, his father was closing on a business deal and they were staying in the new Four Seasons in Pudong, so they nonchalantly rented an extra room for us to stay in.  The place was full of Wall Street Journals, Financial Times, Chinese GQ (智族), and the mini-bar was pretty impressive.  Needless to say, I hope my business career leads me back there a few times.

^Lunch time in my friends hometown.

After that we headed to his hometown, a little city called Jiangyan (姜堰), for a few days and got quite the experience.  They literally hosted a banquet for lunch and dinner every day for three days.  If you know anything about Chinese culture, you know that the drinking culture is a little intense.  We were encouraged, even expected, to drink their liquor (白酒) at all meals.  It is customary to cheers everyone at the table individually, and you can expect every person at the table to individually cheers you back.  This is an expression of respect toward the host, or whomever you are clinking glasses with.  This is a great example of the difference between collectivist cultures versus individualist cultures.  In the west, you drink for yourself.  In the east, you drink for other people.  This is also sort of similar to Olympic athletes, insofar as some athletes are there for themselves, but Chinese athletes are definitely there for the collective country.  In any event, good thing us westerners get a good amount of practice on our own and we showed them a thing or two about drinking. #’Merica