watching a tv commercial just now i honestly thought to myself "wow, it feels like i'm in china or something."
...
Thursday, June 14, 2007
Tuesday, June 12, 2007
Mangosteen fever and scooter envy
i can't stop eating mangosteens. they're the most delicious fruit i've ever had and i missed them when i left china last summer. i have no idea why they're not everywhere. and why they're not in every beverage and/or smoothie. ryan tells me that smoothie king uses them in some of their smoothies... i guess that mediocre establishment just gone up a notch in my book from "sucks big time" to "meh". anyway, i've just learned that if you use a knife instead of your hands to eat them it gets rid of all the mess! perhaps the only downside to the fruit. i mean, you still come away with slightly purple hands, but it's well worth it. wondering how you eat it? think it just looks like a fungus-y plum? (that was my first impression.) well it's not at all what you think!
You just rip off the top part and split it open and there's this white orange-like mini-fruit inside! it's perhaps the most surprising fruit i've ever come across and i'm surprised i'd never heard of it before. in fact, i only just learned the name of it from anisha in shanghai. even then i thought it must be wrong... what a dumb name.
the other topic i'd like to address is how badly i want a scooter. after riding on ryan's back in charlottesville once, i was intrigued. after seeing them EVERYWHERE here in china.. i'm hooked. in fact, a small part of me was hoping my dead car in north carolina wouldnt be fixable so i could buy a scooter! here they're less than US$300... which isn't too shabby. i wonder what they cost in the states?
All I'm saying is if this woman can drive a scooter, so can I.
Kunming: the Highlight Reel
so my week in Kunming is coming to a close. My last full day here is at a slow start (mostly because I'm being a bum and doing stuff on the computer) so I thought I'd check in with my blog.
this week was cool, kunming is different from other cities. it reminded me a lot of Chengde. just in its size and feel. it definitely has tall buildings and city centers, but it still has a small town feeling to it set against a backdrop of mountains everywhere you look. (i'll post pictures once i get back to beijing and have my computer.) Amrollah was in Istanbul until Sunday so Norma and I went out to a different area of the city each day.
so the "English Corner" seems to be an established event around kunming where chinese people can go to practice their english. i've heard mention of them in different places around kunming and every chinese friend i meet seems to know what it is. this could also be because the hemmats have met most, if not all, of their chinese friends through the english corner... so my exposure to it might be biased.
Highlights of the week:
on thursday Jack showed up with his car/bus thing and we drove about 30 minutes or so to the bamboo temple. While most buddhist temples here are basically the same, this one had 500 carved statues of the "luohao" or those that had escaped the cycle of life and death...? i guess they'd reached nirvana.. i dont know, i'm just going by my guide book. anyway, they were cool because each one was completely different. at the time that they were carved (by a sculptor and his 5 assistants) they were seen as so unsettling that the guy was forbidden from creating anything ever again! apparently a lot of the sculptures were thought to be charicatures of his contemporaries... i guess they weren't happy about that.
after the temple, Jack took us to this huge random park nearby. the only cool thing about it was the long suspension bridge we walked across to get there (picture to follow). we just walked and walked and walked and then went back to the car. Jack then dropped us off at Green Lake Park and went to meet his mother for dinner. Norma and I wandered through shops buying little trinkets here and there before heading to a Dai restaurant for dinner. Dai food is... interesting. we got this chicken and pineapple dish (which i asked for and loved hehe) and then this sour-lemony-chicken stuff, a mint soup (that wasnt too bad), some vegetables and rice. we strolled through the park some then went home. the park was cool, there were so many different areas. there were people selling stuff, people walking, even a little rollerblading area for kids. (again, pictures coming)
on friday we decided to go to this huge kunming expo thing that was going on just this weekend. it was the huge complex of about 6 or 7 buildings with wholesale people sitting in booths and stuff trying to sell everything from fruit to jewelry to electronics to whatever else was in the other 4 buildings i didnt make it into. after the whole thing i came away with... a charm for my cell phone! it's really cute and made of pearls. Norma bought some jewelry for her business and then we went home and... to another Dai restaurant! haha, i'm being too mean here... the food is fine, just not something i'd eat every day. anyway, apparently the food wasn't as good as it used to be (Norma ordered dishes she'd had before and liked) so at that point we decided no more Dai food :)
one night we went for foot massages. though foot massage is not at all an exclusive term, apparently. i got a neck, shoulder, arm, leg, foot massage! for like.. a few dollars. not too shabby! they did this crazy thing with my hands though.. they like pressed this point on my arm so that my hand lost circulation and went all white and then they released it and i could feel and SEE the blood rushing back into it. soooo weird.
another highlight of the week was going to see the Muslim Quarter of the city. It's full of pedestrian streets that are cool to explore. Norma told me that there are a lot of Muslims in this area of China, but a lot of them don't know what it's really about. For instance, while muslim restaurants are said to be cleaner than others, a lot of them serve alcohol. oops.
While in the muslim quarter we stumbled upon the Flower and Bird Market, which sells so much more than that. It also has lots of little alleys to explore and little stalls to bargain in. Perhaps the most exotic of the birds I saw were the red, orange and green dyed little chicks amassed in cardboard boxes (pictures to come, i swear). Do you think they'd grow up to be green chickens? or have green eggs? these are the things that keep me up at night.
yesterday (Monday) we went to the Stone Forest (Shi Lin). It's this area about a 2 hour bus ride away that was under water 200,000,000 years ago. Because of this there are all these crazy limestone formations everywhere. Amrollah, Norma and I got a woman dressed all up in minority clothing to take us around in a little car (we got there kind of late and there was no way we'd see anything on foot!). She'd let us out to explore and take pictures at times. About half way through, Amrollah's camera ran out of memory, but we still had mine. Unfortunately, my camera chose that precise moment to run out of battery. So Amrollah erased some pictures to take a few more, so I might have to wait a bit before I get those pictures. Anyway, the place was awesome. While exploring at times it seriously did feel like walking through a forest except, well, instead of trees there were ginormous rocks.
After we got back to town, we took a bus to a city center area and walked around. I could have kicked myself for not charging my camera! It was full of people and cars and huge buildings and traditional chinese gates and blind masseurs and everything! aka, the stuff I love to take pictures of. oh well, there's always next year :)
Dinner tonight was a nice mix of cultures... we had some chinese stirfry noodles with vegetables, some persian rice with meat and then good old fashioned spaghetti with meatballs. quite the spread. anyway, now i'm packing up my room to go to the airport in the morning now... i'm getting a little worried about the amount of stuff i'm going to have accumulated by the time I leave China... last year I didn't buy hardly anything... perhaps I'm making up for it now... I wish I could get rid of all this business attire I have with me from the first month... no way I'll need it again. anyway, back to work!
this week was cool, kunming is different from other cities. it reminded me a lot of Chengde. just in its size and feel. it definitely has tall buildings and city centers, but it still has a small town feeling to it set against a backdrop of mountains everywhere you look. (i'll post pictures once i get back to beijing and have my computer.) Amrollah was in Istanbul until Sunday so Norma and I went out to a different area of the city each day.
so the "English Corner" seems to be an established event around kunming where chinese people can go to practice their english. i've heard mention of them in different places around kunming and every chinese friend i meet seems to know what it is. this could also be because the hemmats have met most, if not all, of their chinese friends through the english corner... so my exposure to it might be biased.
Highlights of the week:
on thursday Jack showed up with his car/bus thing and we drove about 30 minutes or so to the bamboo temple. While most buddhist temples here are basically the same, this one had 500 carved statues of the "luohao" or those that had escaped the cycle of life and death...? i guess they'd reached nirvana.. i dont know, i'm just going by my guide book. anyway, they were cool because each one was completely different. at the time that they were carved (by a sculptor and his 5 assistants) they were seen as so unsettling that the guy was forbidden from creating anything ever again! apparently a lot of the sculptures were thought to be charicatures of his contemporaries... i guess they weren't happy about that.
after the temple, Jack took us to this huge random park nearby. the only cool thing about it was the long suspension bridge we walked across to get there (picture to follow). we just walked and walked and walked and then went back to the car. Jack then dropped us off at Green Lake Park and went to meet his mother for dinner. Norma and I wandered through shops buying little trinkets here and there before heading to a Dai restaurant for dinner. Dai food is... interesting. we got this chicken and pineapple dish (which i asked for and loved hehe) and then this sour-lemony-chicken stuff, a mint soup (that wasnt too bad), some vegetables and rice. we strolled through the park some then went home. the park was cool, there were so many different areas. there were people selling stuff, people walking, even a little rollerblading area for kids. (again, pictures coming)
on friday we decided to go to this huge kunming expo thing that was going on just this weekend. it was the huge complex of about 6 or 7 buildings with wholesale people sitting in booths and stuff trying to sell everything from fruit to jewelry to electronics to whatever else was in the other 4 buildings i didnt make it into. after the whole thing i came away with... a charm for my cell phone! it's really cute and made of pearls. Norma bought some jewelry for her business and then we went home and... to another Dai restaurant! haha, i'm being too mean here... the food is fine, just not something i'd eat every day. anyway, apparently the food wasn't as good as it used to be (Norma ordered dishes she'd had before and liked) so at that point we decided no more Dai food :)
one night we went for foot massages. though foot massage is not at all an exclusive term, apparently. i got a neck, shoulder, arm, leg, foot massage! for like.. a few dollars. not too shabby! they did this crazy thing with my hands though.. they like pressed this point on my arm so that my hand lost circulation and went all white and then they released it and i could feel and SEE the blood rushing back into it. soooo weird.
another highlight of the week was going to see the Muslim Quarter of the city. It's full of pedestrian streets that are cool to explore. Norma told me that there are a lot of Muslims in this area of China, but a lot of them don't know what it's really about. For instance, while muslim restaurants are said to be cleaner than others, a lot of them serve alcohol. oops.
While in the muslim quarter we stumbled upon the Flower and Bird Market, which sells so much more than that. It also has lots of little alleys to explore and little stalls to bargain in. Perhaps the most exotic of the birds I saw were the red, orange and green dyed little chicks amassed in cardboard boxes (pictures to come, i swear). Do you think they'd grow up to be green chickens? or have green eggs? these are the things that keep me up at night.
yesterday (Monday) we went to the Stone Forest (Shi Lin). It's this area about a 2 hour bus ride away that was under water 200,000,000 years ago. Because of this there are all these crazy limestone formations everywhere. Amrollah, Norma and I got a woman dressed all up in minority clothing to take us around in a little car (we got there kind of late and there was no way we'd see anything on foot!). She'd let us out to explore and take pictures at times. About half way through, Amrollah's camera ran out of memory, but we still had mine. Unfortunately, my camera chose that precise moment to run out of battery. So Amrollah erased some pictures to take a few more, so I might have to wait a bit before I get those pictures. Anyway, the place was awesome. While exploring at times it seriously did feel like walking through a forest except, well, instead of trees there were ginormous rocks.
After we got back to town, we took a bus to a city center area and walked around. I could have kicked myself for not charging my camera! It was full of people and cars and huge buildings and traditional chinese gates and blind masseurs and everything! aka, the stuff I love to take pictures of. oh well, there's always next year :)
Dinner tonight was a nice mix of cultures... we had some chinese stirfry noodles with vegetables, some persian rice with meat and then good old fashioned spaghetti with meatballs. quite the spread. anyway, now i'm packing up my room to go to the airport in the morning now... i'm getting a little worried about the amount of stuff i'm going to have accumulated by the time I leave China... last year I didn't buy hardly anything... perhaps I'm making up for it now... I wish I could get rid of all this business attire I have with me from the first month... no way I'll need it again. anyway, back to work!
Wednesday, June 6, 2007
Wenzi chuanr...
so i'm in Kunming! i arrived today around 4 and Norma picked me up at the airport. i think i need to share my thoughts on chinese airplanes though.
they suck. i don't know what it is, but every single domestic flight i've taken this summer has been unnerving. the planes just don't feel right. today, for instance, the seat was too short. i mean my head went too far above the head rest to be comfortable. what's with that? and when the landing gear goes in and out you'd swear the plane was getting ready to launch missiles. beyond that, i've experienced more turbulance than i ever have before. there are enough random bumps and drops and turns to make anyone religious, atleast for a minute or two. this also leads me to believe that GE sucks. here's my reasoning. besides my whole Rolls Royce turbine engine education from the comm school, this is what i know (we had a GE company visit in Shanghai): 1) GE supplies a crapload of engines to chinese airlines/planes whatever. 2)chinese planes SUCK. therefore, GE sucks too. ok i'm done with airplanes.
on a happier note, i'm really happy i came to Kunming, it's going to be a really nice visit. the Hemmats are close family friends. their son Kaveh was friends with my brother Stephen from like 6th grade and they introduced my parents to the Baha'i Faith. i used to go to their house on fridays when they had firesides and hang out with their other daughter Michelle (she's a year older than Andrew i think.) anyway, i hadn't seen Norma in a very long time. her husband Amrollah's in Istanbul until sunday, but i'll see him when he gets back :)
Norma made some noodles with tomato sauce that was really good and we just talked for awhile. the more Baha'is i meet over here the more inspired i get. every one has an amazing story as to how they found themselves here and then have so many wonderful stories to tell about the people here and how receptive they are. if nothing else it's making me rethink my plans for what to do when i come back next year to live (hopefully).
We went to "English Corner" which they've started to meet local chinese people and help them with their english. it seems like they've all become pretty good friends and invite eachother over for dinner and studying and other things a lot. We talked about dreams we'd had and sang some songs (Norma and i even busted out some Red Grammer!). Norma had bought this new crazy invention which looks like a badmitton racket, but when you press a button it become electrically charged and you can swat at flies and mosquitos (wenzi) and kill them instantly... charring them like a kabob (chuanr), hehe. anyway, after a little Chinese speaking ("Chinese Corner") for us foreigners, we parted ways. fun evening though. tomorrow one of the friends (Jack) is going to pick norma and me up to go to the Bamboo Temple outside of town. should be fun. i'm really excited to go exploring. Kunming seems like a big city, yet different. it's right in the middle of a bunch of mountains and there's a nice big blue sky and even the people are different. this province is home to 25 of China's 50something minority groups. makes for an interesting mix. anyway, off to bed i guess! wan'an, ya'll.
they suck. i don't know what it is, but every single domestic flight i've taken this summer has been unnerving. the planes just don't feel right. today, for instance, the seat was too short. i mean my head went too far above the head rest to be comfortable. what's with that? and when the landing gear goes in and out you'd swear the plane was getting ready to launch missiles. beyond that, i've experienced more turbulance than i ever have before. there are enough random bumps and drops and turns to make anyone religious, atleast for a minute or two. this also leads me to believe that GE sucks. here's my reasoning. besides my whole Rolls Royce turbine engine education from the comm school, this is what i know (we had a GE company visit in Shanghai): 1) GE supplies a crapload of engines to chinese airlines/planes whatever. 2)chinese planes SUCK. therefore, GE sucks too. ok i'm done with airplanes.
on a happier note, i'm really happy i came to Kunming, it's going to be a really nice visit. the Hemmats are close family friends. their son Kaveh was friends with my brother Stephen from like 6th grade and they introduced my parents to the Baha'i Faith. i used to go to their house on fridays when they had firesides and hang out with their other daughter Michelle (she's a year older than Andrew i think.) anyway, i hadn't seen Norma in a very long time. her husband Amrollah's in Istanbul until sunday, but i'll see him when he gets back :)
Norma made some noodles with tomato sauce that was really good and we just talked for awhile. the more Baha'is i meet over here the more inspired i get. every one has an amazing story as to how they found themselves here and then have so many wonderful stories to tell about the people here and how receptive they are. if nothing else it's making me rethink my plans for what to do when i come back next year to live (hopefully).
We went to "English Corner" which they've started to meet local chinese people and help them with their english. it seems like they've all become pretty good friends and invite eachother over for dinner and studying and other things a lot. We talked about dreams we'd had and sang some songs (Norma and i even busted out some Red Grammer!). Norma had bought this new crazy invention which looks like a badmitton racket, but when you press a button it become electrically charged and you can swat at flies and mosquitos (wenzi) and kill them instantly... charring them like a kabob (chuanr), hehe. anyway, after a little Chinese speaking ("Chinese Corner") for us foreigners, we parted ways. fun evening though. tomorrow one of the friends (Jack) is going to pick norma and me up to go to the Bamboo Temple outside of town. should be fun. i'm really excited to go exploring. Kunming seems like a big city, yet different. it's right in the middle of a bunch of mountains and there's a nice big blue sky and even the people are different. this province is home to 25 of China's 50something minority groups. makes for an interesting mix. anyway, off to bed i guess! wan'an, ya'll.
Tuesday, June 5, 2007
last day of work...?
So I've decided to make today my last day at CHUEE. I bought a ticket to Kunming for tomorrow... Calvin's not even in the office so I don't really think anybody would miss me if I didn't show up. They've stuck me in an office down the hall from everybody else so I don't even see anybody. Yesterday it wasn't until about 4:45 that someone sent me a press release to proofread and then they left at 5. That was cool. I also managed to lock myself in my office for awhile... I was just watching a movie and didn't want to make the office look bad by being a lazy intern (you have to walk by my office to get to everyone else...) so I closed the door and then discovered an hour or two later that I couldn't open it. That was fun. Obviously I got out eventually... but not until after freaking out about the empty office and my isolated location and my lack of a cell phone with minutes (I really should take care of that...)
Over the weekend I found this sweet place called Beijing Bookworm. It's a bookstore/library/coffee shop place where you can just go and grab a book off the shelf and read for awhile. I studied a bunch of Chinese while having the first legit smoothie I've had in China. I'm considering going back today to read. I'm in the middle of The World is Flat by Friedman (Brad Brown would be proud) and curling up in a chair there sounds nice. There's nothing to do here anyway. If there is, they'll just email it to me and I can do it from wherever I am.
Last time I was at BB, I sat by the "self help" section by coincidence. I think their shelving system needs work. There was everything from "The Yeast Connection" (whatever that means) to "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance". There was also "The Idiot's Guide to Homeschooling". As I told Andrew, I'm not sure that book should exist... we really shouldn't encourage idiots to keep their kids out of mainstream schooling and spread the... idiotness.
anyway, I'm off. Thinking about getting some last minute stuff for my trip to Kunming (I'm really excited to see the Hemmats!) and then just hanging out at Maryam's to pack and stuff. zaijian ya'll.
Over the weekend I found this sweet place called Beijing Bookworm. It's a bookstore/library/coffee shop place where you can just go and grab a book off the shelf and read for awhile. I studied a bunch of Chinese while having the first legit smoothie I've had in China. I'm considering going back today to read. I'm in the middle of The World is Flat by Friedman (Brad Brown would be proud) and curling up in a chair there sounds nice. There's nothing to do here anyway. If there is, they'll just email it to me and I can do it from wherever I am.
Last time I was at BB, I sat by the "self help" section by coincidence. I think their shelving system needs work. There was everything from "The Yeast Connection" (whatever that means) to "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance". There was also "The Idiot's Guide to Homeschooling". As I told Andrew, I'm not sure that book should exist... we really shouldn't encourage idiots to keep their kids out of mainstream schooling and spread the... idiotness.
anyway, I'm off. Thinking about getting some last minute stuff for my trip to Kunming (I'm really excited to see the Hemmats!) and then just hanging out at Maryam's to pack and stuff. zaijian ya'll.
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