I actually dreamt that I accidentally killed a man here because he was being creepy! paranoid.
Oh yeah, they won't wash our "particulars" so we have to hand wash everything here. They also told us that there are flies that will lay eggs in damp clothing, and the offspring will then burrow into your skin... so you have to iron all your underwear, bras, etc.
Weird.
I've also never seen so many stray cats anywhere. There are hardly any dogs.. just cats. cats run this town.
Saturday, May 29, 2010
Thursday, May 27, 2010
no makeups at the office
I've noticed PLIZ (and plis) is commonly used here instead of PLZ. Also, the ABC song is different--- they slow down the LMNOP part but speed up the end, and Z is pronounced "zed."
the wet whistle
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I move back to campus a week from now, so for two weeks I've been finding things to do at home and enjoying the suburbs as a 21-year-old. Here's Kiri the exotic fire-breathing belly dancer who I paid a 5-dollar cover to see at the bar of a country club located behind our local supermarket. Who even knew Cheltenham had a nightlife? And how.
So I guess I have a stalker
When I came back from work yesterday, my fellow interns told me that some guy (presumably the masters student who followed me back the other day) was perched outside our dorm and asking them questions like "Where's Linda? She lives here, right? Is she back yet? When is she coming back?"
Not cool.
Not cool.
Wednesday, May 26, 2010
HELFEST2010
One of the many internships I'm juggling (and gradually dropping) is a writing gig for an online music magazine based in Shanghai. I'm acting as one of their Beijing correspondents along with two other writers. I met one of the others at the INTRO Electronic Music Festival, and the other I was to meet at this other show. She briefly mentioned it in an e-mail, without divulging any particularly descriptive information, so I headed towards the venue assuming the show was just another Chinese rock band, that is to say, a tired, worn-out sound and performance.
A side note: Beijing is a fairly homogeneous city in its architecture, which makes navigating unfamiliar areas extremely frustrating. As I was trying to find the venue, my co-writer was giving me directions on the phone, describing landmarks to help guide my way. The homogeneity of Beijing's buildings makes it so that every building can only be vaguely described by a few characteristics (color, size...) and you can almost always find a building that somewhat fits a description, even if you're on the other side of the city. So I found all her landmarks, but they weren't at all arranged in the way they should have been, and after resigning to meet at the subway station, I realized I had gotten off on the wrong stop and had spent the past hour wandering around in the wrong neighborhood.
Coming from Philadelphia, I'm entirely unfamiliar with the phenomenon of venues and clubs being located on any floor but the first. This venue was on the third floor of monolithic structure reminiscent of the Kaaba, and as we climbed the stairs towards the muffled music it became clear that my assumptions were all wrong. The merch table had sprawled across it posters boldly announcing HELFEST2010, and on stage were a bunch of manic musicians dressed as Vikings, playing what sounded like extremely triumphant renditions of old Irish jaunts.
I had no idea what the fuck was going on. It was a seizure of strobe lights and double-pedaled kick drums. There was a scraggly ent-of-a-man wailing on his axe, braided beard and all, some Swedish girl twiddling on an accordion, a crazed man on the fiddle, and some other instrumentation that I didn't really pay attention to. I'm not well-versed enough in metal subgenres to understand their nuances and reliably distinguish between them, so I can't with any confidence state the type of metal fest I was at. But what I can say is it played out exactly as I ever have expected a metal gathering to, with Satan horns flung out above the raging crowd, a hoard of tightly-gripped fists and untameable sweaty hair reaching high into a whirlwind of fog and lights.
At one point, the singer announced that he was splitting the audience into two sides. Holy shit, I thought, this is my one chance to be in a wall-of-death. So from the fringes of the crowd I push myself to the front of one side, ready to charge. But then it turns out to be some lame side-vs-side singing contest. Not. Metal.
oh, and also
It turns out that it wasn't just the airport people--the men here are quite forward! Three guys approached me on the way back from work yesterday (like a 5 minute walk) to ask me for my number. It's not just that they ask-- they like won't leave you alone or take any excuses. One of the guys was a masters student at the university, and he FOLLOWED me all the way back to the block of dorms I live in (and then asked me if I wanted to smoke with him and his friends...)!
It would be really fun to hang out with the locals, but we've been warned so many times to be careful because they probably just want to take advantage of us and our money. It would be such an experience, though! But not a smart idea... and I can't think of any other intern who would be up for that risk. It's also weird because the other interns were saying that they actually find the men here really reserved, so either I am just really naive/not used to this, or I just look easier than them to approach/harrass (because I haven't heard any of them say anything about creepers following them/trying to get numbers)... The masters student also kept throwing out words like "exotic" in our conversation, which made me feel really uncomfortable, so maybe it also has to do with the fact that I'm Asian...
Hm.
It would be really fun to hang out with the locals, but we've been warned so many times to be careful because they probably just want to take advantage of us and our money. It would be such an experience, though! But not a smart idea... and I can't think of any other intern who would be up for that risk. It's also weird because the other interns were saying that they actually find the men here really reserved, so either I am just really naive/not used to this, or I just look easier than them to approach/harrass (because I haven't heard any of them say anything about creepers following them/trying to get numbers)... The masters student also kept throwing out words like "exotic" in our conversation, which made me feel really uncomfortable, so maybe it also has to do with the fact that I'm Asian...
Hm.
Tuesday, May 25, 2010
everyone's so excited!
so i leave for new york in 5 days. 5 DAYS. i've also gained like 5 pounds from just eating, sleeping and reading scifi novels (i'm working my way through the entire Ender's Game and Ender's Shadow series. go me.)
since i have nothing more to say, i've included a picture of my backyard. enjoy ya'lls first glimpse of tuscaloosa, AL:
since i have nothing more to say, i've included a picture of my backyard. enjoy ya'lls first glimpse of tuscaloosa, AL:
i found internet!
I think I am actually going to get along with the people here a lot better than I initially thought I would, so I'm pretty pumped.
I was the last of the interns to arrive, so I missed the interns' "let's all drink in the dorms and get to know each other" session. Sad, but we spent all day together yesterday at our orientation + safari trip + 30918 course meal. The meals here are filled with delicious foods but extremely heavy-- lots of meats (beef and chicken mostly), beans, breads, rice, pasta, etc. Our safari guide also gave us welcome drinks--aka champagne or orange juice for the non-drinkers. Obviously we just all made mimosas instead, though it took a while to convince our helper from univ of Botswana that people do actually drink these in the mornings. (This is kind of like when I tried to get an iced coffee at a cafe here and spent 20 minutes explaining that I literally just wanted regular coffee with ice in it, not a latte or frap-- in the end they just gave me a cup of coffee and a separate cup of ice. It worked, I guess.)
The temperature range is ridiculous. In the afternoon, it feels like summer in Philadelphia, but at night it's absolutely freezing. Yesterday my feet were numb for a good 3 hours.. I thought I was going to die.
Umm yeah. I'm at work right now. I just had to complete an online training course for biomedical ethics. Boring. I also apparently have to be at the hospital at 7:30 every morning for rounds and don't get off until 5. These are going to be some longass days. I kind of peeked in the hospital wards today-- it looks like one of those hospitals during wartime, with just a big room set up with beds and curtains in between. Going to be interesting.
I was the last of the interns to arrive, so I missed the interns' "let's all drink in the dorms and get to know each other" session. Sad, but we spent all day together yesterday at our orientation + safari trip + 30918 course meal. The meals here are filled with delicious foods but extremely heavy-- lots of meats (beef and chicken mostly), beans, breads, rice, pasta, etc. Our safari guide also gave us welcome drinks--aka champagne or orange juice for the non-drinkers. Obviously we just all made mimosas instead, though it took a while to convince our helper from univ of Botswana that people do actually drink these in the mornings. (This is kind of like when I tried to get an iced coffee at a cafe here and spent 20 minutes explaining that I literally just wanted regular coffee with ice in it, not a latte or frap-- in the end they just gave me a cup of coffee and a separate cup of ice. It worked, I guess.)
The temperature range is ridiculous. In the afternoon, it feels like summer in Philadelphia, but at night it's absolutely freezing. Yesterday my feet were numb for a good 3 hours.. I thought I was going to die.
Umm yeah. I'm at work right now. I just had to complete an online training course for biomedical ethics. Boring. I also apparently have to be at the hospital at 7:30 every morning for rounds and don't get off until 5. These are going to be some longass days. I kind of peeked in the hospital wards today-- it looks like one of those hospitals during wartime, with just a big room set up with beds and curtains in between. Going to be interesting.
Sunday, May 23, 2010
BJ CITY!
It took an indignant 24 hours before I finally stepped foot in Beijing, 4AM local time. I hailed a cabbie who was pushing his car along with his hands and rode into a city who's smog became more obvious the harder the sun tried to push its way through.
On Saturday I took part in an ex-pat analogue of the Critical Mass bike movement as part of this effort to raise green awareness in a city that doesn't really give a shit about the environment. The message of our team of six riders was lost on the city's other millions of inhabitants who don't care about what some laowai have to say.
The route was from Wudaokou, which is a little north of where I'm staying, in the western part of the city, to the 798 Art District, which is on the opposite side of the city. The city's pretty enormous, so the ride ended up taking us 1.5 to 2 hours. I cruised it on some old Chinese-European crossbreed my grandfather gave me and helped me fix up.
While the official objective of Critical Mass is to raise bike awareness, the only thing it's really ever accomplished is raising the awareness of how cyclists can be huge assholes. That's lost on Beijingers, however, because everyone here is an asshole on the road. Navigating the city's streets are like playing a demented game of Frogger, where meticulous timing is necessary to avoid being swept off in a river of steel and blood. At one point a bus stopped inches from my left side when I neglected to look that way because I was too preoccupied with another car rushing towards my right. It hadn't honked or anything.
Because so many Beijingers use the bicycle as their primary means of transportation, Beijing has a solid bicycling infrastructure, with bike lanes on every main street, divided from main traffic by concrete islands. But physical barriers are little deterrents for Beijing drivers, so the bike lanes often become populated with impatient cab drivers and reckless bus drivers. Buses stop in the bike lane, and frequently you'll find yourself threading between two of these steel behemoths, like looming waves about to crash down on you from both sides.
The endpoint of the ride was at Beijing's premier art district, 798, where an electronic music festival called "INTRO" was taking place. For doing the ride, we got free admission, but of course the legion of guards plotted all over the district made things as difficult as possible for us, first denying us entry, then not letting us bring our bikes in, until the woman who organized the ride came and explained everything. Then I found out that we weren't comped on the after parties, which was part of the main draw for the whole thing. I can't believe I biked 10,000 miles for this shit.
The festival itself was alright, I'd never been to any big electronic gathering, but I saw the crowd that I had expected to see. A lot of foreigners - club kids and rave heads, fans of the "international DJ scene" according to the festival's brochure. Sprinkled among the crowds of stereotypical dance freaks were a few middle-aged Chinese mothers, there with their spawn, I assume, although I never saw them. I'd like to think that they were there for their own enjoyment.
There wasn't any booze, save for a small stand run by Absolut where they sold Chinese takeout soup containers filled with a weak vodka cranberry mix for a pricey 50 kuai each. The police had shut down the other bar in the area that was selling beer. So I finally broke and went to Absolut's tent, but found out that they had run out of ice and vodka at 4PM.
Later in the night we somehow ended up backstage, where there were many bottles of cheap Russian vodka, kegs of cheap Chinese beer, and of course, baijiu ("white liquor"), which is basically Chinese rubbing alcohol. I spoke with a man who had just eaten a bag of mushrooms, which he got as payment for doing a photo shoot - the last thing I had expected to hear in China (drugs are extremely illegal and hard to find here). We also ran into this old Chinese punk that I moshed with at a show the night before - apparently it was his party we were crashing, but he didn't seem to mind. With his blessing, we stole some grilled kebabs and drank our fill of liquor, and wandered off into the rest of the evening.
On Saturday I took part in an ex-pat analogue of the Critical Mass bike movement as part of this effort to raise green awareness in a city that doesn't really give a shit about the environment. The message of our team of six riders was lost on the city's other millions of inhabitants who don't care about what some laowai have to say.
The route was from Wudaokou, which is a little north of where I'm staying, in the western part of the city, to the 798 Art District, which is on the opposite side of the city. The city's pretty enormous, so the ride ended up taking us 1.5 to 2 hours. I cruised it on some old Chinese-European crossbreed my grandfather gave me and helped me fix up.
While the official objective of Critical Mass is to raise bike awareness, the only thing it's really ever accomplished is raising the awareness of how cyclists can be huge assholes. That's lost on Beijingers, however, because everyone here is an asshole on the road. Navigating the city's streets are like playing a demented game of Frogger, where meticulous timing is necessary to avoid being swept off in a river of steel and blood. At one point a bus stopped inches from my left side when I neglected to look that way because I was too preoccupied with another car rushing towards my right. It hadn't honked or anything.
Because so many Beijingers use the bicycle as their primary means of transportation, Beijing has a solid bicycling infrastructure, with bike lanes on every main street, divided from main traffic by concrete islands. But physical barriers are little deterrents for Beijing drivers, so the bike lanes often become populated with impatient cab drivers and reckless bus drivers. Buses stop in the bike lane, and frequently you'll find yourself threading between two of these steel behemoths, like looming waves about to crash down on you from both sides.
The endpoint of the ride was at Beijing's premier art district, 798, where an electronic music festival called "INTRO" was taking place. For doing the ride, we got free admission, but of course the legion of guards plotted all over the district made things as difficult as possible for us, first denying us entry, then not letting us bring our bikes in, until the woman who organized the ride came and explained everything. Then I found out that we weren't comped on the after parties, which was part of the main draw for the whole thing. I can't believe I biked 10,000 miles for this shit.
The festival itself was alright, I'd never been to any big electronic gathering, but I saw the crowd that I had expected to see. A lot of foreigners - club kids and rave heads, fans of the "international DJ scene" according to the festival's brochure. Sprinkled among the crowds of stereotypical dance freaks were a few middle-aged Chinese mothers, there with their spawn, I assume, although I never saw them. I'd like to think that they were there for their own enjoyment.
There wasn't any booze, save for a small stand run by Absolut where they sold Chinese takeout soup containers filled with a weak vodka cranberry mix for a pricey 50 kuai each. The police had shut down the other bar in the area that was selling beer. So I finally broke and went to Absolut's tent, but found out that they had run out of ice and vodka at 4PM.
Later in the night we somehow ended up backstage, where there were many bottles of cheap Russian vodka, kegs of cheap Chinese beer, and of course, baijiu ("white liquor"), which is basically Chinese rubbing alcohol. I spoke with a man who had just eaten a bag of mushrooms, which he got as payment for doing a photo shoot - the last thing I had expected to hear in China (drugs are extremely illegal and hard to find here). We also ran into this old Chinese punk that I moshed with at a show the night before - apparently it was his party we were crashing, but he didn't seem to mind. With his blessing, we stole some grilled kebabs and drank our fill of liquor, and wandered off into the rest of the evening.
botswana!
My butt hurts from all the planes/sitting around, but I’ve finally arrived in Botswana! We don’t get internet in our dorms and have to walk quite far to get it, so... sucks. Also, I lost my luggage. Sucksx2.
Creepy men here/in the Johannesburg airport. A man who claimed to work for Delta asked if he could buy me a beer or at least a coffee. He kept asking me the same questions (obviously we weren’t communicating very well), and then he told me he noticed me messaging on my computer earlier. CREEP ALERT. So I replied, “Actually I need to finish working on my computer, so I’m going to go. Bye!” BUT THEN HE FOLLOWED ME!!! Thankfully he eventually fell asleep and nothing really happened, except he kept waking up for 3 seconds to tell me that I should sleep. I got kind of paranoid that he was waiting for me to sleep so he could steal my stuff... but I felt bad about leaving him in case his stuff got stolen. Anyways, this morning he asked me what gate I was going to so that he could wait with me... I lied and went into the bathroom. Thankfully he did not follow me there.
After I escaped from Delta man, I went to find coffee... The man working the coffee counter asked me where I’m from, and then he straight up asked, “Can I get an e-mail from you?” What? And then he scribbled his name, cell phone number, and email on the back of a receipt and gave it to me. I just hope that this is just a weird creepy-airport-men-in-South-Africa thing and not indicative of what life will be like in the next 2 months...
By the way, I have an embarrassingly hard time understanding people’s English here (here meaning South Africa, but I suspect the same will be true in Botswana). Also, even more embarrassing: I keep saying South America instead of South Africa. Out loud. Yikes.
Creepy men here/in the Johannesburg airport. A man who claimed to work for Delta asked if he could buy me a beer or at least a coffee. He kept asking me the same questions (obviously we weren’t communicating very well), and then he told me he noticed me messaging on my computer earlier. CREEP ALERT. So I replied, “Actually I need to finish working on my computer, so I’m going to go. Bye!” BUT THEN HE FOLLOWED ME!!! Thankfully he eventually fell asleep and nothing really happened, except he kept waking up for 3 seconds to tell me that I should sleep. I got kind of paranoid that he was waiting for me to sleep so he could steal my stuff... but I felt bad about leaving him in case his stuff got stolen. Anyways, this morning he asked me what gate I was going to so that he could wait with me... I lied and went into the bathroom. Thankfully he did not follow me there.
After I escaped from Delta man, I went to find coffee... The man working the coffee counter asked me where I’m from, and then he straight up asked, “Can I get an e-mail from you?” What? And then he scribbled his name, cell phone number, and email on the back of a receipt and gave it to me. I just hope that this is just a weird creepy-airport-men-in-South-Africa thing and not indicative of what life will be like in the next 2 months...
By the way, I have an embarrassingly hard time understanding people’s English here (here meaning South Africa, but I suspect the same will be true in Botswana). Also, even more embarrassing: I keep saying South America instead of South Africa. Out loud. Yikes.
Friday, May 14, 2010
our contact in france
in case your fb sleuthing skills are not as accomplished as mine, i present to you:
Wednesday, May 12, 2010
HELLO
Guys- feel free to suggest a new name/url for this. I was excited to make it but also not awake enough to be very creative about anything. OKAY WOoooo get excited
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