Over and Out

Is the semester already over? Really? But, really, seriously? I demand a recount!

In the past few days I have been in Osaka, Kyoto and Tokyo in Japan. I'm presently in Shanghai waiting to get on a plane that will go to Toronto and then Chicago so that tomorrow I can get in a car with my fam and my bestie and drive to Minneapolis. I might be the luckiest person on the planet. And in 48 hours, I might also be the most jet lagged person on the planet.

This semester has been unbelievable. When I got on the plane in the fall, I could say hello in Chinese. Badly. A few days ago, I was in a bar in Japan with two of my buddies speaking only in Chinese. It was Rachel (who's British), Yue who's Japanese, and me. We all go to Chinese school together so for us, it's the least common denominator language-wise. The waiter came over and asked Yue in Japanese what language we were speaking. She said Chinese. And then his head exploded.

Man. I feel like I've been so far away from home for so long. That part sucked. It's hard when you can't just pick up a phone and say hello. And 13 hours is such a weird time difference. And you can't drink the water. And you don't remember how to say "go left" or "What is this green thing in my food?". And you don't really have any reason to be China in the first place. But it also makes you feel like if you can do this, you can do anything.

Until five minutes later when you realize you're lost and you've miscalculated the bill because your brain doesn't do conversions very well and you've spent the past few months calling taxi drivers "waiter".

Being in China is the weirdest. Everyday, I oscillate between feeling totally empowered, absolutely competent and virtually pre-natal (pre-natal being the dominant state of being). But I wouldn't change it. Living here has truly been one of the most treasured experiences of my life and I'm so glad I got the chance to share it with you all. Thank you. For reading and writing emails and keeping in touch.

Over and Out.

Mr. Roboto

Ahhh! I am totally in Japan right now.

We were planning on going to Thailand after school let out in China- we bought the tickets, bought a travel guide, couldn't wait to plan it all out- until Thailand went totally batshit crazy and closed all the airports and started a coup d'etats (is that how you spell that? is that what I mean? Im currently typing on a japanese computer so Id spellcheck but I dont know that Id get anywhere).

Luckily, everything was recovered and refunded and rescheduled and we are totally in Japan right now! Ahhh!

Im travelling with my buddy Rachel. We just left Tokyo. Heavens. Tokyo. Wow. I once thought that New York was the coolest city on the planet- a city to rival all others- but I was sorely mistaken. Tokyo is lightyears beyond cool. Everything in Tokyo looks like its from the future. Its amazing. Its like Logans run with Asian people. Also pretty much anything doubles as a stuffed animal. Oh, you thought this was a just cell phone? Boom! It is also a hello kitty doll. And everything is so clean! I think Japanese people must have higher occurances of OCD than just about any other nationality on the planet becuase everything sparkles. I mean, I would gladly eat my dinner off of this hotel lobby floor right now. No question.

And the toilets! First of all, not to go into the specifics, but for all intents and purposes Chinas toilets are not much more than holes in the ground. And those are the good ones! Those ones are far better than the ones where you tinkle into a troft (is that how you spell that? Again, my condolences) Plus, in China, they dont have toilet paper in the bathrooms so you have to buy it at the supermarket and then carry it around with you wherever you go. In Japan, the toilets are like big robo potties. They play music and have seat warmers and give you a back massage. Theyre amazing.

Right now we are in Osaka. We are visiting our buddy Yue, who is from here but studies Chinese Opera with us at the Shanghai Theatre Academy. Se was in the movie Battle Royale so shes pretty bigi in Japan- literally. Shes pretty much the greatest. She just took us to one of those sushi restaurants where everything goes around on a little conveyeur belt. Great fun. And soon we are going to Kyoto. Ill write again when I can!!

Chinese Opera

Last night was our big Chinese Opera performance. It occurs to me that I haven't written much- or anything- about Chinese Opera even though it's the primary focus of my studies in China. I guess I haven't written about it mostly because it's very strange to describe. As I'm sure you can observe, it's not much like the western theater we know.

The singing is often high-pitched, nasal, shrill- frankly, difficult to listen to. The movement- all of it from your eye balls to your toes- is highly controlled and calculated. It's choreographed to the second in time with music.

But the most interesting thing, i think, is the design. Everything is extremely ornate. The make-up takes an hour at least to apply and each piece of hair is applied individually to your head. There's a photograph of it above, I think. Anyhow, they take chunks of hair and soak them in sap and then glue them down to your head. After that, they put on a face tightener. Those are the white straps in the picture. They're excruciatingly tight pieces of tape that are meant to stretch your face. They pain is incredible. Our teacher told us that when she trained as a little girl, the first time they tried on the face tighteners, all of the students began to vomit. It's really, really awful. But it looks pretty cool.

I'm fairly certain that I have no future in Chinese Opera but at the end of the semester, I have a lot to take away from studying it. Telling a simple story can be incredibly complicated, it's often nice to have a right and wrong answer, if you have to, you can assimilate to almost anything, and everywhere you go, people are mostly the same but the subtle differences of mannerisms and language and perspective are the most interesting parts.

THANKSGIVING!!!!

Last week was Thanksgiving and there was so much to be thankful for!

Everyday, the Korean girls and Japanese girls cook five star meals in our dinky dorm kitchen. The American kids are really good at cooking instant noodles.
But we knew it was Thanksgiving and so we rallied together, invited all the other foreign students to the V.I.P. room and cooked up a thoroughly impressive Thanksgiving dinner. We felt like real grown-ups!

The day before Thanksgiving, I skyped my grandmother to ask her advice about the meal. I told her we didn't have an oven. We only had a hot plate and a microwave and did she have any helpful pointers on how to throw it all together. She furrowed her brow, thought it over for a second and screamed"It's Impossible!"



This is a tradition I took from my cousin Nora. Every year, we make paper chains and write what we're thankful for on them. Then, later in the evening, someone reads them aloud and we all guess who wrote it. This year, it was a little trickier though. With paper chains in Chinese, English, Korean, Japanese, Swedish, and Russian, we had to switch up the readers and add a few translators in the mix.

We did it!!!

And then at about 11 pm someone said, "Hey. Don't we have a Chinese test tomorrow?" There was a brief period of panic followed by the level headed and genius decision to pile up a plate of turkey and take it to our favorite Chinese teacher. We batted our eyelashes like champs and informed her about the sacred, precious American holiday of Thanksgiving and how special and mandatory it was as an American to eat massive amounts of turkey, drink massive amounts of Nouveau Beaujolais and stay far, far away from Chinese textbooks.

The test was postponed until Monday.

Beijing

So last week we went to Beijing! We'd been warned again and again how disappointing and unbeautiful and industrial it was but I am happy to report the exact opposite. It had all the charm of a sweet, Midwestern city. Tons of families, very clean, fairly quiet for a city, and the bluest skies. Apparently, Beijing is still working hard to keep the skies clear since the Olympics and it shows.

The Great Wall! It's certainly one of the greatest walls I've seen, as far as walls go. The plaque in the middle of the road was put there by Mao Ze Dong and it says whoever climbs the great wall is a hero. So, not to brag or anything but...

We chilled with this guy for a bit although, I think we had a little more fun than he did.

Clout the knockers!

That is the Temple of Heaven. It is awe-inspiring and gargantuan and intricately painted and totally gorgeous. Really breathtaking.

However, there is a limit on the amount of pagodas a person can see and thoroughly appreciate. The limit is a million. And we exceeded it a month ago. Rachel and I agreed that at the beginning of the trip we were totes pagotes but by the time we got to Beijing, we were notes pagotes. So, we went out and had a beer.

At this place. Which was sweet! The dance floor was bouncy moonwalk material and there was a guy who was inexplicably dressed as a pirate! We were all a little sad to leave.

Guilin!

A few weeks ago, we went to Guilin in the south of China and I never really said anything about it. Here are some pictures.

So, we got off the airplane and headed to the hotel where we were greeted by this:

Disinfected, eh? Now...it never would have even occurred to me that this toilet had been infected if not for the pageant-style sash it was sporting. And what, one might ask, had the toilet been infected with? We had so many questions.

Below is a picture of my friend Sarah holding some monkeys in kind of adorable, if not Peta-approved, outfits. Some guy handed them to her really quickly so she couldn't disagree. And as I'm sure you know, it's not so easy to escape when you have two outfitted monkeys crawling all over you.

We learned in no time that this was a scam. We learned this because apparently you must pay to take photographs of people with these monkeys and apparently this photograph that you are looking at right now cost 10 yuan I didn't pay. When we managed to wiggle out of this situation and get a little further down the street, the monkey man ran after us screaming all sorts of obscenities and possibly even threatening bodily harm. Although, it's hard to say. My Chinese isn't that good yet.

This is a stalactite.

These are some of the many mountains we saw on our trip. Lovely scenery. And Dylan, if you're reading this, it made me think of you a lot. All over the place were mountains and fresh air and crunchy hippie dreadlock dudes. It made me think that Guilin must be the closest thing China has to Boulder.

And before we left, we even made a few new friends. Like this kid.

My Parents are Very Famous in Hong Kong

My Rents came to Shanghai this weekend! That's us at a tea shop.

That's us at the M50 Art Galleries.

For our Chinese Culture class this week, we took an excursion to a nearby dance studio. This is a photograph of a rehearsal put on by the very first privately owned dance company in China- which is to say, the very first dance company not controlled and supported by the Communist Party. The company was created by a very famous male to female transsexual contemporary dancer named Jing Xing. I wish I could explain what this afternoon was like in great detail but there's no way I could possibly do it justice.

This guy cleaned out his chamber pot in the street.

And this lady was in a Chinese Opera performance we saw. When we saw her backstage she was kind of a diva but our little battle axe Chinese Opera teacher insisted she was "very famous in Hong Kong". Our teacher then proceeded to describe every subsequent person as being "very famous in Hong Kong.