Dispatches from the East

One of my favorite neighborhood spots to eat is often a source of entertainment whilst eating. It is the place where I met my German friends, and this week there were two entertaining encounters. The first happened upon returning to my table (replete with little plastic stools for chairs that don’t quite reach up to my knees, needless to say, I look pretty cool while eating there) from getting a beer at the shop. I returned to find a little kid of about 3 or 4 holding my copy of The History of Western Philosophy in his hands. Considering that I have no shortage of difficulties grasping most of the ideas there-within, I can’t imagine that he was faring much better. I don’t think it helped that he was holding it up-side-down either.  After sitting with him for a minute and reading a few words to him, his grandma came over with a good smile and a small cup. She pointed to bottle of beer and indicated that she wanted a bit of it. Not being one to deny a kindly, old granny a drink, I obliged. I was a bit surprised when she handed it to the little guy who promptly knocked it back. It wasn’t much beer, but I still got a good kick out of the whole scene. I try not to contribute too much to the delinquency of Chinese youth, but as far as I’m concerned, granny can do what she pleases with her progeny.

The lad himself:

The second story also involved youngins, but this time there was no underage drinking. You can imagine that a lao wai (do you remember your Chinese lesson from the earlier post?) sitting in an small alleyway restaurant tucked far away from the international hotel chains of downtown would be quite a novelty for young kids. They typically will come up, shout ‘nice to meet you!’ a few times, and then I’ll break out Angry Birds on the phone to entertain them. Last week there was quite a raucous bunch that perhaps got a little too fired up. After showing off and one-upping each other’s antics, the scene devolved into name calling. Two of my favorites were simply, “pig”, and the best, “dog farmer”. They were brusquely asked to remove themselves from the premises by a local shopkeeper. Though I couldn’t understand exactly what she said, she certainly seemed like a woman best obeyed.

The last event came on Friday night. I don’t go out as often as I do back home, but a man needs to blow off some steam every once and a while. Last Friday was one of those nights. There was a British DJ in town who was playing a dubstep set at a local club (kind of a Triple Rock or 7^th St. Entry type place). I’ve never been into the dubstep scene, but it turned out to be a pretty entertaining night. Here is a video clip from early in the night, before things jumped up a notch or twelve:

After the set the shenanigans carried on until the wee hours with all sorts of European miscreants in tow. I think a video my buddy Mark posted of Conan pretty well sums up what people dancing to dubstep resemble:

That’s all for now. Hope everyone ate plenty of turkey in my stead.

OSHA, where art thou?!?

There is a lot of construction, or perhaps demolition is a more apt description, on the old campus of my university. This is where I live. The university sold the old campus property because it is more centrally located, got a fist full of yuan, and moved the new campus further away from central Chongqing. Apparently, this is a pretty common occurence with universities these days, but I digress. What this means is that most of our surroundings look like Dresden, Germany circa February, 1945; i.e. totally shagged. It also means that the campus is constantly filthy from all the dust that is kicked around; whatever.

The reason that I bring this up, is that it affords one a glimpse into the working conditions of the innumerable migrant workers that come to Chongqing city. OSHA would not approve. Take for example the guy I watched standing on the ledge of a 10 story building sans any kind of safety gear. That in itself isn't shocking, but the fact that he was wailing away with a sledge hammer upon the bricks he was STANDING ON made the whole scene an odd mix of one man's willingness to do whatever it takes to better his lot in life and the very real possibility of seeing natural selection in action. In a country of over 1,000,000,000 people, that has a very old social construction that determines who people care for based upon whether they are in or out of one's circle (guanxi, I'll certainly touch more on this at a later date), it is not surprising that people don't have great regard for the safety of others. However, it is surprising when you see what most of us would look at as utter disregard for one's own safety. Not just the example your man on the ledge, but I see this quite often. Getting distracted, back on topic.

Then, a couple of days ago I was coming home from a run with my bowl of fried rice in tow. I was walking up the street to the apartment, when I saw it was cordoned off for about 10 yards. They were about to bring down another on of the old apartment builings. Here again, the difference between safety standards between the US and here is really night and day. You can make a strong argument that all the regulations in place in the US deter economic growth and companies' ability to operate a business efficiently and without interference, but I'm better understanding why we have OSHA, the Department of Health and Human Services, etc., after seeing some of the stunts they pull here, where there is no one to protect the worker. Though they certainly could be streamlined and made less intrusive, those entities are there for a good reason. I digress!

The way they demolish these apartments is thus: they have the lads with the hammers knock out some support within the building, then they get a Caterpillar type machine (Chinese brand mind you, but you'd never know!) with a big old jackhammer on the end of it, and send the unlucky bastard who drew the short straw (I assume that's how it's decided) to drive the machine down and hammer away on the last support pillar until it comes down; a risky endeavor, to be sure. I got lucky with my timing the other day. I joined the crowd of people gathered not 100 yards from where this building was coming down, ate my dinner, snapped a few pics, and got to see it come down. Quite a dinner show.

So, that happened. A good time. Here are a couple of pictures and a short video. They are all on my phone, so not the best quality, but you'll get the picture (get it?).

Before the fall:

Dinner:

After the fall:

Two other things:

1. Thanks a ton to anyone who went out to pick up a bottle of 2Gingers and say hello to my dad. He mentioned he saw several of you, and was glad for it.

2. I heard a pretty funny story on the BBC the other day. I was unable to find a link to just the particular segment that had this story (the whole episode was 30mins+), but I found a related news article on The Guardian:  http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/nov/17/butt-out-pakistan-telecom-text-ban

Toast one for your boy

Just got word from my old man that 2Gingers is hitting liquor stores.

I haven't had a drop of whiskey in over two months. This saddens me. If you have any love for your old friend Seamus, head down to your nearest store, pick up a bottle of 2Gingers, and have a drink for me.

Added bonus: whiskey makes you strong, handsome, and eloquent. Trust me, I've put in years of research into this phenomenon, and I can unequivocally state that this is a fact.

www.2gingerswhiskey.com

Happenings

-The whole experience of my first haircut is a decent story unto itself, but I’ll just stick to the results here. It reminded me very much of my previous international haircut this year while in Belize for Micah and Nicole’s wedding. The (totally understandable) method employed by the barber is the same one he would use to cut and style the hair of his local customers. However, my hair is a bit different than the average Chongqinger’s. I wish I had snapped a picture of it, because similar to my experience in Belize, I walked out of the barber’s shop rocking a hairdo that would have allowed me to pass as a local; if one ignores the white skin, blue eyes, and lack of prerequisite local linguistic faculties necessary to speak to most people here. Regardless, after some serious work with a blow dryer and hairbrush, the barber tamed my curly hair into the ubiquitous ‘do seen here. I was impressed.

-As part of the local governments efforts to promote their city, there are signs espousing different benefits of living in Chongqing all over town. The signs (which are in both English and Chinese) say thing like “Healthy Chongqing”, “Safe Chongqing”, etc. But my favorite of the signs is the “Unimped Chongqing”. The sign has a picture of an open highway (clearly photoshopped, as I have yet to see one of those), so I think they meant to say unimpeded, but this is merely guesswork. Regardless, it is my favorite sign because every time I see one of them I imagine how far the city has come since resolving their pesky imp problem. Now if only they would lift the stoching ban...

-I’m going to be a bit of a downer here for a minute, but stick with me. The lack of sunshine here is something I hadn’t thought would be a issue. Turns out not seeing the sun is a bit of a bummer. Even during my year living back in Ireland a few years back I saw more sun. It turns out that one of Chongqing’s many nicknames is “Fog City”. It make sense, considering that it is a mountain city centered around the confluence of two major rivers. This, coupled with the air pollution that is unlike anything I’ve ever lived around, makes for a perpetually gray sky. I had not thought much about it until last week when we had two days of sunshine. It was glorious. The city looked totally different, you could see mountains and other parts of the city that most days are fully obscured by fog and smog, and it made for a fun couple of days. Which bring me to my next point.

-Anything that I do in class that is out of the ordinary elicits a shocked and elated buzz from the students. On Thursday and Friday last week (the two days of sunshine) I took two of my classes outside. When I told them what the plan was for the day, the first reaction was confusion. Then I tell them to get their stuff together, stand up, and follow me, and the “Waaaaaaa!!!” (see previous post) chorus begins. Fortunately two of my five classes those days were easy enough to conduct outside, and though the students were slightly distracted, I still feel that it was to every one's benefit to go outside those days. I know I enjoyed it.

This week's miscellanea

My regard for the copyright and intellectual properties laws of the States fought a losing battle the other day against my penchant for the political intrigue in Westeros. That is, I bought a bootleg DVD of the Game of Thrones first season for less than $5. Any misgivings or guilt I had for the fact that my money did not go into the pockets of the right people was quickly washed away when I popped in the first episode. Sword play and political intrigue are apparently my Xanax.

There was an interesting in class experience in two of my freshmen courses this week. I broke the students up into groups of four, within each group there were two pairs. The groups of four would choose a topic that the two pairs would debate, than the pairs would separately write their arguments. That was the idea. In practice what happened, with every single group in both classes mind you, is that the group of four would create the two sides of the debate together. When they got up in front of the class to present their arguments, their debates were no less spirited than if they had written the arguments separately. I recommended to both classes that they write their debates separately (which would have been the automatic assumption of most US university students), but I did not prevent them from working in the groups of four as it didn’t ultimately negatively impact the goal of the lesson: get them speaking in front of class. This experience reminded me of a quote in an article I read earlier in the week stating that amongst Chinese students, “ individualism is anathema”. I’m not meaning to denigrate the students’ methods, only comment on the distinct classroom behavior between what I am used to, and what I see before me every day as a teacher here.

In my American Culture classes with third year students we had great discussions on the American family. We covered a range of topics, including: the nuclear family, divorce, single parenting, same sex marriage, interracial marriage, etc. The students handle the topics maturely (sometimes a challenge for students here, especially the lads), and we had some great conversation. When told them how most of the topics we were discussing in class were present in my family (don’t worry fam, most of the skeletons are still in the closet), they all did their “waaaaa!!!!!” (translation: “Wooooowwwwww!!!”) sound. An interjection I hear quite often when I say, what to myself and most of the people I know, are seemingly mundane things. Always fun to have glimpses into what is unusual or amazing to someone with a vastly different set of life experiences.

Was my first burger in two months as good as a juicy lucy? Hardly. To me, was it still a welcome experience, akin to putting on one’s favorite sweater in the fall after its summer in the closet or seeing an old friend after a few years apart? Yes. But one must understand, I love cheeseburgers more than the average man. Pictured below: fleeting bliss.