July 9, 2007

Beijing Opera 2, originally uploaded by eiratansey.

I know I’m becoming something of a broken record, but this trip has made me realize how much I actually do love Western culture. Today has been a very “You can take the girl out of America, but you can’t take the American out of the girl” kind of day.

So Friday night was our big dance party/Goodbye party for Eric and Alfred. We (well, Nick and Alfred were the main organizers) got tons and tons of beer, lots of wings from the Wingmaster (the guy who runs this delicious wing shop next to the university), and soda and some snacks. The party started around 6:30, and when I headed down around 6:40, there were about forty people all sitting around the couches (it seemed that most of Alfred’s three classes show up), and they all had beers, but very few people outside our group were dancing.

This is the first thing we learned about Chinese students at dance parties: the vast majority of them are clueless. It wasn’t like at an American party where you have some wallflowers and the usual “I don’t dance” people. It was frightening, almost, how many were just sitting there watching instead of getting up and moving. Very slowly, we were able to get a lot of people up – what was funny was periodically everyone would be up grooving, and just as fast, everyone would be down on the couches again. A few Chinese students were surprisingly brilliant dancers (my theory is they’re all secretly from Shanghai and go clubbing) – one guy in a tank top was getting a little freaky at times (picture a gangly ostrich getting electrocuted and having a seizure), but he was quite an entertaining dancer. He had a (male) friend in a beige shirt who was kind of cute – I actually was kind of jealous that beige shirt dude didn’t dance with me more. And they had a female friend that was awesome at breaking it down.

Watching the majority of Chinese students though… it was like middle school, but everyone was over eighteen. Sometimes it seems miraculous to me that people in this country are so shy, but they managed to boink at least one billion times. Several Chinese students told me this was the first time they had ever danced. Wow. I guess at one point, Nick told a guy to just go ask a girl to dance, but he was like “No, you ask her for me…” I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: I usually like shy boys back home in the States, but the shyness that Chinese boys have make the guys I’ve dated look like James Bond.

The other thing that has really struck me about Chinese youth is their attitudes towards drinking. I’ve found a lot of them have this attitude like “If you drink, bad things will happen” – but because very few of them drink frequently, when they do drink, they go overboard – and then their attitude becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. This has made me realize that having a huge drinking culture – even a binge drinking culture – has its silver lining: you learn very quickly what your own personal levels of sober-tipsy-drunk-smashed are. Every American student I know who drinks can tick off exactly how much alcohol (whether it’s beer, wine or liquor) it takes to get them wasted. They might ignore these lines, but at least they are aware of them. Not many Chinese students I’ve met have the same personal awareness. At the party, towards the end, we cut off the beer. A couple of people got sloshed and puked after only a few beers.

Anyway, it all turned out pretty well. We cleaned up and managed to drink the rest.

On Saturday we rode into Dalian to see some of the sights. Along the ocean there is a very large park, and at one end is this big concrete structure that looks kind of like an open book, but the pages are pointed up. According to Jade, it was originally built at a viewing platform when George Bush (the first, I imagine) came to Dalian for a visit. It’s quite fun to walk up, except as soon as you get up towards the top, you start to slide back down.

After seeing some more things around the park, we took a scenic drive around the rocky coastline of part of the city. Apparently that route was formerly used as a military route. For part of it, we got out of the bus and walked a short way. I had to pee really bad, but my, am I glad we took our little roadside walk – Dalian has a lot of random sculptures around, and what did we see on a grassy bank but a GIANT SNAIL!! I proceeded to flip out and ran across the road with barely a glance in either direction. Dumb, I know, considering it is China. The snail sculpture was huge – probably at least six feet long and four feet high. I sat on its neck and took some pictures with it. Awww. I can now say I sat on a giant snail in China. I think everyone in the group was amused (or horrified?) by the scale of my snail obsession.

After our walk we went to a hot pot restaurant (lamb for me, again). Then we went to see a Beijing opera, which was very cool. They performed excerpts from three operas – Farewell my Concubine (lots of warbling and high-pitched talking, generally sad), a story about a matchmaker and a jade bracelet (warbling, all parts played by men, generally comedic), and the Monkey King (action packed! fight scenes! the best costumes! generally exciting!). As evidenced by the very punctuated description, I enjoyed the Monkey King the most. We arrived at the theater a bit early, and got the chance to see the actors put on some of their makeup, which was cool. I really enjoyed it, even the more boring first two acts. Beijing opera is unlike anything I’ve ever seen before, and the makeup they use to convey character attributes is pretty fascinating. Our music teacher taught us about the color symbolism the previous day, but unfortunately I didn’t remember much of it when we went to see the opera.

Alfred and Eric left us on Sunday. I went down to the lobby that morning and saw them, but I had been under the impression that we were seeing them off at the airport. So I didn’t really properly say goodbye to either of them, and didn’t realize we weren’t actually going to the airport until Jon enlightened me after Alfred and Eric drove away in the program director’s car. Oops. Well, at least I got my picture taken with Alfred, and Eric should be at the reunion picnic.

We went into Dalian again yesterday (with several Japanese people from the hotel on the bus too) and went to this great HUGE market. It was like the Silk Market in Beijing, except without the irritating shop owners and no touristy overtones. The place was enormous though – I picked up a lot of great stuff – Jay Chou cds (a very popular Taiwanese singer), a calligraphy brush and ink, and a set of the translated Journey to the West (the Monkey King). I had been thinking of buying the book when I got home, and though I now cringe at how much room they’re taking up in my luggage, it was very hard to resist the four volumes for 50 yuan (about $7). I also picked up possibly the worst Bad English phrase shirt yet… Chris and I dipped very close before our meeting time, and kept running past stalls trying to find inappropriate shirts (“not weird enough!”). But I struck gold – the shirt is so horribly weird and offensively suggestive (suggestively offensive?) that I had to buy it – without even trying it on. It says, “Upgrade Me!! Violently” and in the middle is the female symbol angled the way the male symbol usually is, and across that it says “I feel fantastic!” with some other random gibberish on the shirt. Oh my. Unfortunately we couldn’t find an equally ridiculous shirt for Chris. We also randomly met a fluent in English young Japanese dude who accompanied us to McDonalds and Starbucks (God, I can’t wait to be back in the US where I don’t have to travel one hour to get a decent cup of coffee). We hit a couple more stores, and I have now officially put the brakes on buying stuff. I have something for everyone back home, though to be honest, most of the stuff I bought is for myself.

I’m getting a bit nervous about my luggage for the return trip – I’ve quasi-packed (mostly all my new stuff I’ve bought), and there isn’t a ton of room left for the clothes I came here with. I’m afraid I might have to throw some out – I haven’t seen a Chinese equivalent of Oxfam anywhere, and I imagine there might be some cultural rule against giving your clothes away to someone – there doesn’t seem to be much charity in China. Maybe because of its Communist past? I dunno. Charity does seem to be a product of capitalist guilt.

There is a scale in the lobby that I’ll probably borrow briefly – just to weigh how much I’ve already packed and what I will have to throw out here. Argh! I really hate just throwing out perfectly usable stuff, but I really don’t know what else to do. Jade says that because we’re traveling as a group, they’ll be more lenient about the weight of each individual’s luggage, but I don’t really want to hedge my bets.