beautiful beijing

i've been a bit slow in getting these pictures up, but unlike the good ol' blogger block back in 2005 i can't write to the blog except through the proxy at work, which needless to say has slowed our blogging progress considerably. even clark recently expressed an intention to blog that had been stymied by the internet censorship.

anyway, two or three weeks ago was a day with probably the worst air quality since i've been here. so i figured i'd take some pictures to show people how bad the air can get. the first picture is from that day, while the second picture is at the same spot on a remarkably clear day a couple weeks later, for contrast.

while that first picture does look bad, i do want to caveat it by saying that i think a lot of the poor visibility was fog, which may get me a lot of flack from the cynical expat crowd. the air was definitely bad (the u.s. embassy's air quality monitoring station gave it a 500, which is pretty off the charts), but there was the close-in damp feel that you get with fog, not pollution. though i'm no meterologist, i'm willing to bet that there's some sort of correlation between fog and super bad air days, either the fog holds the pollution in or the still air that leads to fog also allows the pollution to just sit there. or something. anyway, the air was bad and now you can see it.

my brother and sister come to china and create mass havoc

as durrell mentioned in the previous post, my brother and sister did in fact come to visit me last week(end). but rather than write about it here i'm going to take the lazy route and just point you in the direction of my sister's blog. she has done an excellent job of writing up the trip, complete with many pictures in which i of course look pretty damn good, but michael as always looks better. i'll just add one more picture not on julina's blog, courtesy of marjorie:

for future internet continuity, julina's posts are here: part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4, part 5

Chinese Wedding and Chinese Baseball

(this post was actually written by durrell, but since blogger is blocked in china he asked me to post this through my proxy at work - BEN)

After taking a hiatus, I am back. A lot has happened since I last wrote anything, so I will not try to catch you up on everything, because I mostly don’t remember. I do remember that a lot of Middlebury people and Golzes have come through the Jing and it was great to see them all. Calvin, remember you said that I could be in your cabinet once you are president.

Our beers that we started brewing a few blog posts ago have matured well and are pretty good, some better than others. I have had a hard time picking a favorite, but my current favorite is our ginger beer (my favorite tends to be whatever I am drinking at the time), which has had mixed reviews by people. One person said it tastes like soap and others said they want to buy it.

Not last weekend but the weekend before that, I went to a Chinese wedding. It was the only Chinese wedding I have ever been to and not like anything I have ever seen before. As I have not been to a lot of Chinese weddings, I did not know what to expect and I do not know if the one I went to is how things are normally performed (I tried to think of a better word than performed, but I can’t because it was definitely a performance). The wedding started with the groom popping out from build a television screen like a host would on a game show, the announcer announced his entrance and I am pretty sure that announcer said Leeeeet’s get ready toooo rummmmmbleeeee in Chinese. As he comes out clouds smoke shoot out from the sides and the lights start flickering and the music changes from slow to something more uptempo, it felt like watching Shaq come out during an all star game. When I get married I definitely want to have an announcer and when once I kiss the bride I am going to spike the bouquet and do an end zone/wedding dance. After the announcer announced the groom it was the brides turn. The way the music changed and from the excitement in the announcer’s voice, I was almost positive that she was going to fly from the ceiling. However, she came down holding her dads arm to some slow Chinese pop music. It was very sweet. Then, they played the tradition wedding music and the father gives the bride to the groom, all the while the announcer is announcing everything. Once they are on stage, the announcer administers the vows; the announcer is a cross between a minister and a hype man and Michael Buffer. After the vows are exchanged more smoke, cake cutting ensues, pictures with everyone at the party, more smoke, pouring out the champagne, more smoke and then the bridge and groom comes around to toast everyone individual. A lot of alcohol was consumed by them, it was quite impressive. I may not have done a good job describing it, but it was a very beautiful event. Once China stops blocking my access to blogspot I will add pictures.

After the wedding ended, Señor Bacardi and I met up with Golze and went to a baseball game to see the Beijing Tigers vs. the Tianjin Lions. It was a great game. The Beijing Tigers had a substantial fan section complete with Chinese drums, baseball chants and raucousness. We were basically the raucousness, Señor Bacardi is a bad influence on us, the Chinese fans were relatively tame except for the drummers. At one point during the match, I saw this girl with a baseball glove and turn to Golze and say do you think she can use that? And she turns around and glares at me and says yes (I often forget that Chinese people can speak English). If Señor Bacardi wasn’t there I might have felt more embarrassed. Anyway, with some stellar defense and good at bats, the Tigers rallied to come back and defeat the Tianjin Lions in the bottom of the 9th. I forget to mention that the Tigers uniforms are pretty sweet, if anyone knows how to get a jersey let me know, I tried to buy one from the players and go shot down. They kept saying something like we need them, we are still playing in the game or some other nonsense. After the game was over Golze and I were not sure how we were going to get back to Beijing (the game was not played in Beijing, it was in some small city just outside) or at least back to the train station (the train station was pretty far from the field). So as we are talking to a guard at the guard station at the entrance to the ballpark a car pulls up. And ask if we want a ride. We are like hellz yeah (we are in China no one is going to kidnap us and take us to candy mountain). Once we get in we realize, on snap, the driver is the girl with the glove. Awkward! After some chat chit, we discover that the driver and the other passenger are reporters and that the girl with the baseball glove works for Time and that their English is much better than mine. I think it is pretty safe to say we will never make it on the Time blog roll now.

the dentist in china

my mother will be happy to know that i made a trip to the dentist this past week. i get　(i think) one free cleaning and checkup a year through my health insurance at select dental clinics in beijing. so of course i just picked the one that was closest to my office, called "Care Plus". i didn't really know what to expect, but several friends, i believe clark included, had been to the dentist, and said it was just the same as in the states. really at this point i'm way past being surprised when anything in beijing meets western standards, and the dentist wasn't an exception. everything was clean and all the equipment was modern. but what really struck me was how much nicer of an experience it was than in the states.

first of all i scheduled the appointment only two days in advance, whereas for the dentist i went to growing up it's so crazy you almost need to schedule your next appointment in six months time before even your current appointment. they even called me up to change the time to make sure there was an english speaking staff member to do my cleaning, which i graciously accepted because i don't know any dentist vocabulary but turned out i didn't need. and everybody was extraordinarily friendly, especially after i awed them with my ability to speak and write chinese. (the best way to really impress a chinese person is to write something in chinese, as most people in beijing now are pretty jaded by foreigners who can speak. luckily i only had to write my address, which besides my name is about the only thing i can write from memory in chinese anymore).

but the kicker was at the end of the cleaning, where the girl who cleaned my teeth (they called her a "doctor" in chinese but i'm not actually sure if she was a doctor in the english sense) told me "your teeth are really great!" a far cry from in the states, where the end of a cleaning usually results in some heavy admonishment, about how you should floss, and then once you start flossing about how you are doing it wrong, and then about how you're brushing too hard or too straight or not for long enough. i mean i take ok care of my teeth (i actually floss everyday), but i suspect most of her praise was due to some pretty weak competition from the locals on the dental hygiene front. still, i walked out of there feeling pretty good, which is more than i can say for any trip to the dentist back home.

a goldilocks moment

considering that i don't have any mexican friends, it was only today that i finally felt some effects of the A/H1N1 flu pandemic. mainland china has its first suspected case of the flu now, and so they're pulling out all the stops to keep us safe at my fancy ass gym (corporate membership). they take the temperature of everybody that comes in the door and if you're above 37 degrees they don't let you in.

however, i have my doubts about the efficacy of the procedure. when i arrived today, there was a lady with what must have been some kind of infrared thermometer, about the size of a small flashlight, a bit of technology i had never seen before. it apparently works by taking a reading off your skin. the first reading she took was off the top of my wrist, which returned a 33 (too cold, she said). the next was off my forehead, which returned a 37 (she told me to a wait a second to cool down). finally i rolled up my sleeve, and the reading off my forearm was an even 35 (perfect, according to her). later i overheard a guy in a locker room saying the same thing had happened to him. let's just say that if the pandemic arrives, the gym won't be the first place i will be taking refuge.

tianjin and china's stephen colbert

two weekends ago i took an afternoon trip to tianjin with a friend to visit a former teacher of ours from summer school. we took the new bullet train, which costs less than 10 dollars and covers the 70 miles between beijing and tianjin in only 25 minutes. apparently the CRH trains, which are clearly ripped off from the japanese bullet trains, are the fastest conventional trains in the world. ours didn't go the full 350 km/h, but the 332 km/h speed we did reach was fast enough as far as i'm concerned.

tianjin is a decent city, but the i share the major complaint with most other people in that there's not much going on there. we went to lunch and wandered around the part of town with a lot of old architecture from when there was a large european presence in the city in the early 20th century. it was a cool mix of quite large single family homes and small apartment buildings. it looked like a neighborhood you might find in an old inner suburb of boston or new york.

but the highlight of the trip was lunch, when i ticked another animal off my list of things to eat: ants. i wasn't too keen on it but gave into peer pressure and tried. as you can see from the picture, it came in a small martini glass with a maraschino cherry. they had much more texture than flavor, crunchy but also light and airy. it was like eating hundreds of teeny tiny pieces of popcorn. apparently they are good for virility, but i can't vouch for any immediate effects.

fun story: durrell and i, on our way to my place to watch lost, stop in to the corner store right outside my building so i can get a drink, and the guy working there, who sees me all the time, looks at durrell and asks me "is he your little brother?" i look at him for a second, then ask "does he look like me?" and the guy says "yeah, you look a lot alike." honestly it was refreshing, after meeting so many obliviously racist people in china, to meet a guy that is clearly blind to race.

plants and shame

somewhat unsurprisingly, my post about my plant received much more interest and many more notes of concern than when i almost killed myself. but i am happy to report that my plant has rebounded, sprouting some new leaves and even some flowers (blurry in the photo) that are very fragrant already. i still have no name for the plant, but am open to suggestions.

in other news, i can check something else off my list in china: i was told that i was "hurting the feelings of the chinese people." it actually took me a while to figure out that was what my coworker was saying to me. the short of it is that this developer in beijing is offering a discount on units in its new development if the buyer manages to woo and marry one of the sales girls. so of course i had to write that up as a headline for our monthly news publication, and when i passed it to my coworker for translation he informed me that i was bringing shame on 1.3 billion people. though my protestations that it was already in the news fell on deaf ears, he dutifully translated it. hopefully it will make it through the censors in our shanghai office.

weekend picture

workers cleaning the side of SOHO shangdu