Thanksgiving in Beijing

I never, in my wildest dreams, imagined that I could have a Thanksgiving holiday as amazing as the one I just had in a country other than the United States.

November in America is a wonderful time of year. Christmas is almost in the air, and everyone is just waiting for the extended break they know will come in December. But the fourth Thursday each November has its own magic. Here in China, we don’t see anything of the American holidays. There weren’t any pumpkins out in October, and there haven’t been any turkeys decorating store fronts here. However, somehow the students of CET found a way to bring holiday cheer into the Land of the Rising Dragon.

It all started on Thursday, we all got up and Jamie and I decided to go for a swim. We swam for about an hour and after being really tired went to English club. English club is a club for Chinese students to meet and interact with English speaking foreigners. While there Jamie got a call that there were some students playing football, so we decided to introduce the Chinese to some good old Thanksgiving Football.

After the game, we went inside to help the women cook. It was kind of funny actually, because all of the guys were playing football, and all of the girls were cooking dinner. Haha. Funny. Anywho, we went inside and had the womenfolk put us to work peeling potatoes and buying groceries they forgot. After doing manual labor for a while, they told me they required liquor, so I went and bought some.

By the way, cheap American wine has nothing on cheap Chinese wine. I can get 1.5 liters here for less than 3 dollars. And get drunk off of only 1 liter!

Anywho, needless to say, I was pretty well drunk long before dinner started. When we finally sat down at the dinner table, and all the food was out, one of the Chinese teachers said “他喝醉了” (He’s Drunk) to which I replied “不是啊！！！还没有啊！！” (NO I’M NOT!!! NOT YET!!!) I’m not entirely proud of the situation, although it was pretty damn funny.

I should make it clear that the entire dinner, enough for more than 40 people was entirely organized by CET students. Sophie Xiong, who’s uncle actually owns the restaurant on the first floor, allowed us to use his kitchen to cook in. All the food was bought by CET students (although CET did give us some money to buy it) and it was all cooked by CET students. On top of that, there were 18 pies made for the situation, all of which were entirely handmade by Rachel. She is a goddess in my book.

So we had quite the feast on Thanksgiving: turkey, chicken, mashed potatoes, mashed sweet potatoes, au gratin potatoes, broccoli and garlic, mac & cheese, other assorted pastas, wine, brandy, pecan pie, apple pie, pumpkin pie, and many other dishes that I can’t even remember. The night was amazing, the food was amazing, the people are amazing, and I’m just so damn thankful that I had the experience.

I’m thankful for the friends I’ve made, the level of awesomeness they possess, and the experience of a lifetime that I’ve had here in Beijing. I get a little teary now thinking about it, but I’ve only got about 2 weeks left with these fine folks who I probably won’t ever see again. So I hope they can know how thankful I am for knowing them, and how thankful I am that they’ve colored my experience here with hues of joy, confusion, excitement, frustration, drunken rage, uncontrollable hilarity, and everything in-between. I can’t express what I’ve gained from my stay here, but with only two weeks left to know these people, I feel like I can only be sure of one thing: my time here with them has not been nearly enough.

My Roommate's House

On this past Sunday, I had the honor of visiting my roommate’s home in Chaoyang district and having dinner with his family for his birthday. I was surprised by a few things that night, some of which I want to share.

First, China truly is a place of rapid growth, this is most visibly seen in developing places like Beijing and Chaoyang being a hub of commerce is a great example. On either side of the hutong-like housing that my roommate and his family lived in were giant neon covered buildings that demanded your attention and your money. However, in-between was the small rundown abode of my friend. This very visible and clear separation between development and ownership of money was almost staggering.

Second, was the utter squalor. My roommate’s house, the place he’d grown up in and lived in for the 20 years of his life was smaller than the suite I lived in last year at Kalamazoo. Not smaller by a little bit, but about 1/3 the size. His entire life had been experienced in that place, and he’d not known what it was like to live in a more grandiose, or to me normal, room until he moved to college. He shared a room with his parents, and his bed was a table with a blanket on it. I can’t imagine what it would have been like to live in such a constricting place, and I can only guess at what he must think about me and how I seem to spread out over our dorm room like a blob with all of my stuff.

Third, was the complete and utter warmth with which his family accepted and welcomed me into their home. I was given every luxury they had to spare. Our meal was full of meat, an expensive alternative to tofu and vegetables, and all of the seats I used had cushions on them. Not only that, but the stool I was seated at was directly in front of the electric heater that I’m sure they use sparingly and was larger in all dimensions than the small uncomfortable looking wood blocks they were using. They demanded I eat more food, drink more beer, and tell them more about America.

I’d been told to expect all these things, either by my roommate or by my Chinese teachers, but still the huge disparities and wild exaggerations still caught me off guard. I talked to his parents and him for several hours while we feasted on dumplings, chicken and tofu. We talked about our new president, new opportunities and mistakes made by both America and China.

What was most interesting and most striking however was something seemingly small and insignificant that my roommate’s dad said to me. He told me he was afraid that when I came to their house he was afraid I would 看不起 (kan4bu4qi3) them. I’d learned this grammar structure before, but I wasn’t aware of the special meaning behind this phrase. 看 means to look 不起 means to not be able to afford. So the three together effectively mean “Not able to afford looking at.” It means colloquially, to look down upon someone because of their poverty. I told him that that would be impossible for me to do, mostly because the food was so good! But joking aside this really struck a chord with me.

China is full of those that are in extreme poverty. They know it, and yet they still live on in a happy existence with none of the amenities we believe are necessary for life. When he said that he was afraid I would look down on them because of their poverty, it made me very sad. It made me sad that he assumed I would do that, but it made me sadder because if I didn’t know them at all, I probably would have.

I don’t know what that means for me now, but I do know that it changed something, fundamentally. I had a similar experience this summer working in a factory for my dad, watching and befriending people who lived paycheck to paycheck, often because of circumstances far beyond their control. These are still people, and they never asked for this kind of life.

Staggering experiences aside, my roommate’s family is amazingly gracious and I had one of the best meals in China at his house. I only hope I can repay them in the future for the gift that they gave me.

Although, I still think that eating the bones as well as the meat, especially with chicken, is weird as hell.

Shanghai!!! Hangzhou!!!

Well then, I’ve been very effectively neglecting writing in this for a long time...

The last month and a half, I’ve been living in China, and it’s been amazing. Between travelling and bar hopping, sight-seeing and eating the cheapest tastiest food ever, I haven’t had very much time to write down any of my thoughts.

Ok, that’s a lie, but at least I’m honest.

So then: China. China is beautiful and the people here are amazing. The students that I’m studying alongside are fantastic and the roommates that we were assigned are really friendly and a great help when we are doing homework! The food here is cheap, rarely makes you sick (unless you eat American food), and very tasty. It seems like no matter what I’m doing here it is something new. Just riding the public bus is sometimes a little confusing and new, even if it’s a route that I’m fairly familiar with. The constant newness is excellent because I was afraid before I got here that I would settle down into the slovenly apathetic way I live in Kalamazoo. Here, that’s not possible.

Now, it would be impossible for me to remember everything that I’ve done since the last time I wrote, so I’m going to start with our trip to Shanghai and Hangzhou two weeks ago. We got up early on a Saturday morning after a long night of drinking and dancing to catch our train. Thankfully, none of us were too hungover, so we only left 30 minutes later than planned, which put us a full hour ahead of schedule. We grabbed a taxi, which was a pain in the ass because for some reason everyone and their mother, literally, were exploring CNU that weekend. We think it might have been a family weekend or something. Anywho, we eventually escaped from the frantic confusion that was CNU and got into a cab on our way to the train station. Sadly, we didn’t have enough time to eat breakfast, so we were all pretty hungry by the time we got on the train.

On the train, we found out that Dave had packed a box of ritz crackers, a jar of peanut butter, and a jar of jam. Those mini PB&J’s were some of the best things I’ve ever tasted. After eating we slept, a lot. The trip was a total of 13 hours, so we decided to spend the majority of it unconscious. When we all finally woke up about 7 hours after the beginning of our ride, we explored the train a little. There were several sleeper cars, the eating car, and then the seat cars. We had soft seats, which were pretty much like airplane seats except with about 3 times more leg room. We went to the food car and got some of the most…interesting food I’ve ever eaten. Imagine airplane food, except a little more questionable as to what it is you’re actually eating.

When we got off the train in Shanghai, we realized that we didn’t actually know how to get to the hostel we were staying at. Nor did we write down an address, or a phone number, or anything except for the English name, which wasn’t very helpful. We knew that Dave had a confirmation email with all the information in it so we went to a travel agency in the train station and asked if we could use their computer. They basically refused to help us in any way unless we booked a new hotel room through them, so we left discouraged. We spied a pizza hut across the road from the train station, and that sounded pretty good after the train food we’d eaten a few hours earlier, so we decided to eat first and then find an internet café. However, due to my awesome Chinese skills, II happened to see a 网吧(internet bar) sign right before we got to the pizza hut, so we went there first.

After we wrote down all the information for all of our hostels we proceeded to spend far too much money on some pizza and fries and corn chowder. It was delicious. We got to the Hostel a while later, and watched an episode of Dexter before going to bed. As a side note, I want to mention that I’ve become obsessed with the Shotime series Dexter. It’s about a serial killer cop who runs around cutting people into pieces like a psychopath. Awesome.

The next morning, on Sunday, I was awoken at 6am by one of the Hostel staff. He informed me that my friend had been asking for me and was in the bathroom. I arrived to find Alana collapsed by a toilet, and apparently she’d been vomiting the entire night and had gotten one hour of sleep. So we called an ambulance and then in broken Chinese told the Paramedic that we wanted to goto an international hospital. I got to ride in my first ambulance in Shanghai, woo!! I also got to watch as the paramedic installed an IV into a crying disoriented Alana who wasn’t quite sure how she’d gotten onto a stretcher and into an ambulance.

When we got to the hospital Dave and I were immediately separated from Alana and were not able to reunite with her until the administration was sure of how we were going to pay for the services rendered. Luckily, Dave had his parent’s credit card, so we didn’t have to worry about spending all of our money on saving Alana’s life.

We got into the ER that Alana had been wheeled into. A doctor who almost spoke Chinese was there and we explained to her that we didn’t think it was food poisoning as we’d all eaten the exact same foods and that we didn’t know what could have been wrong with her. They gave her an anti-nausea shot and started her on some antibiotics while also taking a blood sample. We waited and eventually an orderly came and wheeled her away to the ICU. Almost immediately after she was admitted there, another orderly came and got her out of her bed into a wheelchair for her to have an ultrasound. The ultrasound showed nothing wrong so we came back and waited for the results of the blood work.

It came back showing that her white blood cells were abnormally high, as well as something else which I couldn’t figure out what it was but both indicated that she most likely had an infection of some sort. They gave her more antibiotics and said that hopefully she’d be able to leave before nightfall. Sadly that turned out not to be the case. I headed back to the hostel and picked up Dave’s laptop and cleacned up a little bit and then Dave and I sat for the next several hours alternating between playing card games and watching Dexter. We played Gin Rummy to 1000 points. We tied at the end at 1005 and had to play a death match winner takes all. It was epic. We ended up having to spend the night and Dave got the chair while I got the floor. I’m not sure who was more comfortable.

The next morning she was feeling much better and after a few more tests and finishing an IV, she was allowed to leave. We went back to the hostel and had a celebratory nap because none of slept well the night before. That night we decided to go to The Bund with our fellow Kzoo cohorts who happened to be in Shanghai at the time. It was damn pretty. We were going to do a cruise down it, but I ate some bad gelato and ended up having to find a toilet right as we were supposed to be boarding. Alana, as she’d just been discharged, decided that she wouldn’t board either, so we got to look at the Bund from the edge, rather than from within it.

The next day we went to the Jinmao tower, the second tallest building in Shanghai. It used to be the tallest, until a year ago when they built a new tower right next to it that is taller. To go to the top floor costs money, but the floor right below the top floor had a bar and was free to visit. When we arrived, it happened to be happy hour, so we got several martinis. The view was fantastic and the ambience was very relaxing, a nice alternative to the nasty emergency room we’d been at just a day before.

After drinking for a while, we decided to goto the sex museum of Shanghai. More of a tourist trap than anything else, this exhibit was still fairly interesting. There was a statue there that had an erection larger than Alana. I laughed hard. After that we went to the French Concession and ate a meal that was far too expensive for what we got, but was still really good.

The next morning we got on the train to Hangzhou, a city known for the giant lake at its center. Now being from Michigan, the lake there didn’t seem too big, but I guess things are different in China. It was very pretty, although I probably would have enjoyed it more had Dave not gotten sick.

I want to say now, that buying tickets in China is the stupidest most irritating thing on the planet. In order to buy any ticket, you must do it either at the station, or from a travel agent. You can’t buy it yourself online or over the phone unless you are very fluent in Chinese. Most websites charge you a ridiculous amount of money as a “service fee” or you just can’t find the ticket you need regardless of availability. The entire system is really backwards, and getting anywhere is almost impossible. That being said, we were unable to buy tickets from Hangzhou to Beijing in Beijing, so we had to wait until we arrived in Hangzhou to purchase them, and by then, most were sold out. We were VERY fortunate to pick up some soft seats, as they were almost sold out. However, it wasn’t without much difficulty that we even picked those up as we had to go to 3 different places to find them. At the station we couldn’t figure out the cryptic way to purchase tickets, and people who we asked to help demanded a ridiculous service fee. At a travel agency listed in our guidebook, they told us they only sold airplane tickets, and couldn’t help us get train tickets even though the book said they could. Sorry, had to rant.

At the hostel we played a lot of pool, and it was impressed upon me just how horrible I am at that game. There was also a little white satanic dog that bit everything it could. It was actually kind of funny. After checking out the lake, and playing even more pool we headed back to Beijing.

All in all the trip was interesting, and even though we didn’t get to do everything we wanted to because of the detour to the hospital (we wanted to goto 4 places and only ended up at 2), I can’t say that it was anything other than fun. I had a great time and got really close to Dave and Alana which makes everything worth it because they’re awesome people. And besides all that, now I know how to deal with hospitals in China, a useful skill to have I think.

Love and miss all of you and hope you’re doing well!!