Pamela Anderson, Barney, life threatening experiences, and the wedding dress parallel universe

Hello friends and family!
What a week it has been. I feel that traffic in Shanghai deserves more attention than I've given it here so far, as it plays such a major role in my daily life, so I think I'll start there. I'm unhappy to report that my initial "Minnesota nice" instincts have been quickly replaced by an emotion I can only call pedestrian road rage. Let's take today, for example. Imagine a tiny sidewalk by a busy street, crammed with people rushing to god knows where. Now imagine that it is pouring rain (and has been for the PAST THREE DAYS), all of those people have umbrellas which bang against each other and shower the people around with yet more water, cars continually speed through puddles only inches away from the sidewalk, your own newly bought umbrella inexplicably has a hole right in the top, allowing water to drip regularly onto the top of your head, and you have been walking up and down the same street for an hour trying to find an address that will turn out to be nonexistent. I found myself in such a pleasant situation today, when I gave myself an hour and a half to travel to a place only 5km away and still arrived late.

 As I was trudging along, cursing all those around me for simply existing and vowing to never come back to this city, China, Asia in general! ever again, I heard a car blasting its horn behind me, and turned to find that a driver ON THE SIDEWALK was impatient with my walking speed. Pushed to my limits and quickly losing a grip on sanity, I told the driver just where he and his van could go and tossed in a couple of newly learned Italian curse words for good measure, causing the seemingly hundreds of Chinese people to momentarily stop in their tracks to gaze in wonder and fright at the wild eyed foreigner. Realizing that I may have over-reacted just a tad, I lowered my head and shielded myself from the concerned stares with my defective umbrella. Just doing my part to improve America's image abroad.

Do not be deceived-he exists only to give you a false sense of security

Of course, transportation in China is delightful when it's not raining as well.  Traffic lights and turn lanes are mere suggestions. I'm convinced that J.K. Rowling's inspiration for The Knight Bus was the very bus that I had the misfortune of riding in Suzhou. Our driver, who clearly wished to deliver us to our final destination (death) as quickly as possible, pulled out of the left turn lane into on-coming traffic and proceeded to squeeze into the impossibly small space between two buses going in the opposite direction. Complete strangers clutched each other, babies cried, horns blared, memories flashed before alarmed eyes! Miraculously, we missed the buses by mere inches and I am here today to reduce this epic, life-threatening experience to a paragraph in a blog post.

While the journey is often harrowing/maddening, I do usually enjoy myself once I arrive. More accurately, when I arrive I usually find myself in an awkward or absurd situation that I find humor in later. I've been in more of these situations in the past three weeks than ever before in my life. I'm convinced that this thing called "cross-cultural communication" is at least 50% comical/disastrous misunderstandings and 25% uncomfortable, silent staring. Maybe more like 50% uncomfortable staring, if you're me and impaired in the social skills department. For someone who already has a lot of trouble acting like a normal human being, cross-cultural encounters are a struggle at best. So whenever you imagine that doing business in a foreign country is a glamorous affair full of fancy restaurants and cosmopolitan conversation, keep in mind that the people involved are probably sitting at that fancy restaurant in interminable silence for hours on end, trying to decide if it's culturally acceptable to eat another mushroom and racking their brains for something that they can say intelligently in a foreign language.

Recently I had the weird experience of attending a graduation ceremony for a Sino-American masters degree program. I walked into an auditorium full of Chinese families who looked at me suspiciously and mouthed 外国人 (foreigner) at each other (maybe a hot pink shirt wasn't the best choice for someone who already sticks out?). While a professor opened the ceremony by emphasizing that it was for the families, as the families did so much to support the students, he then proceeded to conduct the entire ceremony exclusively in English. While I was the only person who didn't really have a reason to be there, I was also the only audience member who could understand the ceremony.

The family members slowly tuned out, some falling asleep, some talking with each other, others playing games on their iPhones, others turning to stare unabashedly at me for uncomfortably long periods of time. 80% of the speakers clearly had to work hard to speak in English, a language which the family members did not understand. Why, I thought, when 95% of the people in this room can speak Mandarin, is this ceremony in English? And why am I the only person who seems to think that this is ridiculous? When I asked, I was told that the graduate program was in English, so they did the ceremony in English. My comment, that this did not mean that the graduates' family members spoke English, was met with blank stares. To add to the absurdity, at this ceremony they also played the American national anthem, which apparently has not one, but four verses! So the first time I heard the entire national anthem was at an official Chinese government ceremony. Such is my life.

"Venice of the East"

Sometimes, however, my life is absurd in wonderful ways. For example, I met a new friend from Italy in my dorm kitchen (read: a broken microwave and one pan), which has been a huge blessing, as eating alone is hell in China. We decided to go to Suzhou, a city famous for its gardens and canals. So I had the pleasure of touring Suzhou, the "Venice of the East," with a native of Venice, Italy. When we got there, after, you guessed it, hours of transportation mishaps, all we wanted to do was get some lunch. Now seems like a good time to mention that the Chinese retail philosophy is that stores selling the same type of goods should all be in the same area, resulting in entire malls devoted only to camera chargers or whole streets selling only ukuleles. Which is extremely convenient if you are looking for camera chargers and you are in the camera charger mall, but inconvenient if you want anything else, like, for example, sustenance. So back to Suzhou. Starving, road-weary, we searched for food. Any food, even those deep fried chicken feet normally sold by sketchy men in weird smelling alleyways, would do. But alas, we were in the wedding dress area of town. Streets with nothing but wedding dresses stretched for miles around us. It was like something out of a science fiction movie.

Wouldn't you just love to walk down the aisle wearing this (tie-dyed?) gown?

Finally making our way out of the wedding dress parallel universe, we dodged men trying to convince us to take their "taxis" (unmarked black vehicles with tinted windows-even I'm not that dumb) and had a nice lunch. We toured the nearby tiger hill temple, which was filled with gorgeous bamboo forests and a sizable mosquito population. Aside from being chased by a horse and asked by a stranger to model for his camera (god knows what these people do with my picture), I had a lovely time at the temple. Travelling with an Italian is definitely the way to go. After a leisurely walk around the grounds we sat down for two hours of tea and relaxation. 

The leaning tower of Suzhou

Well this post is getting pretty long, so I won't go into too much detail about how the rest of life has been this week-I'll only say that it has involved thousands of fireworks spontaneously going off in front of my dorm (I was the only person concerned about this, of course), dinners of only green beans and dried kiwi (ah, the joys of vegetarian life in Shanghai), making a child cry (child to her mother: 她是外国人！she's a foreigner! me:对，我是外国人。你是中国人吗？Yes, I'm a foreigner. Are you Chinese? child: begins sobbing) , riding on a Hollywood themed ferris wheel, observing hundreds of Chinese professionals shop in upscale stores while bobbing along to Justin Bieber songs without a trace of irony, pretending to be a 25 year old hip hop aficionado, and more. I'll leave you with some more pictures:

My friend Signe ordered a hot dog at the "American Carnival Food" stand expecting it to come in a bun with ketchup and mustard...and got just the hot dog, on a stick.  

The Chinese retail philosophy at work...Barney stuffed animals as far as the eye can see. 

 Why wouldn't Pamela Anderson be on a Ferris wheel in China?

My entire dinner, before and after. Eating only a plate of spicy green beans for dinner has excellent gastrointestinal consequences. 

"Fire is in a safe hand, and we are in a safe world"

A sign in Suzhou that I found oddly comforting. Not sure if it is an ancient proverb or just a weird way of saying "no smoking."

That's all for now! Thanks for reading :)

Maria

The worst dressed person in China lumbers around Shanghai

Hello again!

The sight of hundreds of people crammed into a subway car, faces pressed against the windows and arms in danger of being severed by the closing doors, no longer alarms me, so I think I must be getting used to life in Shanghai. This past Friday I started my internship with the Bureau of Education. The day started off more than a little surreal as I was met by a black official Chinese government car at the subway stop and whisked past security guards to a nearly empty building. My hosts were extraordinarily welcoming and taught me a lot about China's education system (Here's the inside scoop: it's better than ours. Shocker, I know.) Interesting as it has been to get an inside look at the education system that will clearly be the downfall of the American Empire, I have a lot more time on my hands than I had thought I would. So my time over the last week has mostly been about finding ways to fill the time. After I exhausted Hulu's supply of Daily Show episodes (yes, there are hundreds. don't judge.), I hit the streets in search of M50, Shanghai's up and coming art district. 

Grafitti China style: This wall is actually officially approved of by the government

I got yelled at in Chinese for taking this photo

There I inadvertently walked into (literally) what was apparently a rap music video. Just another day. The art was pretty cool and made for a nice Saturday afternoon. Next, I decided to go get a massage, which leads me to the top six things about life in China:

1. Massages, by far. While finding a good massage place can be a bit sketchy, as brothels and legitimate massage parlors have similar signage, I decided to take a leap of faith and go into a massage place, knowing that I would either come out with relaxed muscles or a good story. Thankfully I got a legitimate massage-$8 for an hour anyone? And I had a great time teaching my masseuse some English. Back massage=背部按摩

2. GREEN BEANS. This one borders on unhealthy obsession.You will never have more delicious green beans than the ones you can get in China.  

3. Street food. Nothing I like better than buying a 30 cent dinner cooked on a grill that may never have been cleaned. 

4. Public transportation. I can go anywhere I want, anytime I want, and it won't cost me a fortune. What a novelty! 

5. Gift giving. People just give you gifts all the time, seemingly without reason. Wonderful. 

6. Bubble Tea. YUM YUM YUM. 

On the other hand, the worst thing about life in Shanghai is being relatively obese and perpetually under dressed, which brings me to this week's episode of Times I Wish I Didn't Understand Chinese. My friend Cathy, taking one look at my outfit one day, made the executive decision to take me shopping. In the mall we discovered that my feet are too big for nearly all the shoes (Saleswoman in Chinese: Wow! Those are huge! Like a clown's feet!). Then we progressed to finding me a shirt. Cathy asked the saleswoman for the biggest size (尺码)possible, and all the saleswomen came up to determine whether or not the biggest size would fit me. (Saleswomen in Chinese: Do you think it will fit? No she's too fat. Too fat for everything in our store!) My attempts to convince them that I am actually a small in America were met with skepticism by the tiny Asian women, and eventually we had to give up. Ego bruised, the giant American lumbered out of the shopping mall. 

My ego recovered quickly the next day, returning to its normal state of over inflation (the result of years of awards for coming in last in swim meets, no doubt-did you know that 11th place is a brown ribbon? I could wallpaper a room with those), when I went to visit a middle school.

A big welcome!

I got to hang out with some middle school students and they got to practice their English with me. 

That excursion was interesting, but only lasted two hours. So I had the whole rest of the day to continue to explore Shanghai and find something to do with myself. What I did that day may or may not have involved buying a cheap ukelele and skipping down the streets of Shanghai singing "I have confidence" from the Sound of Music. In the last two days I taught myself a song on my purple ukelele, taking advantage of my nearly empty dorm and infinite free time. Due to popular demand, and by that I mean one person I talked to on Skype, I have posted the video below for your viewing pleasure.

You and Me by Zee Avi

Things have picked up recently, as I went to a DELICIOUS vegetarian (素菜) restaurant with a Chinese professor and Cathy, found a swing dancing group (absolutely in love with West Coast Swing), and have been hanging out with a friend from Olaf for a couple of days. 

The view of the Pudong side of the river from a classy bar on the Bund

I've loved getting to talk to many of you this week! Check back for another update soon.

Maria

Globalization is eating mashed potatoes with chopsticks

My life is nothing if not varied-this experience in Shanghai could not be any more different from my summer in Northfield. I have now been in Shanghai for over four days, and I have to say the word I have used the most so far is 多(many/a lot of/more/in excess). Shanghai is an assault on the senses: so many people, so many escalators, so much honking, so many tall buildings, so much pollution, so many fashionable outfits, so much money! 17 million people is something that has to be experienced to be understood. As I am more of a wide-open-spaces kind of a girl, the big city life has taken a little getting used to. Luckily, I have a fabulous guide who has helped me navigate the city and get set up to live here for a month. Cathy, as she calls herself, has been absolutely indispensable as a source of information about the city and also is really interesting to talk to. Our conversations (conducted in Chinese!) range from the influence of Western standards of beauty on Chinese women, to the debt ceiling debate in the U.S., to China/Japan relations, to young people's attitudes toward money, and more. Yesterday Cathy took me on a tour of the city, hitting all the tourist spots. While the museums we went to were interesting by themselves, they were all the more interesting because I was able to hear Cathy's perspective on them as a local.

Cathy and I at Yu Yuan 

One of the things that I can not help but notice is the omnipresence of advertising (广告). Consumption really seems to have consumed the Chinese people-it's like America on steroids. Entire buildings are turned into flashing billboards, every bus and train is equipped with TVs constantly streaming ads, and everybody you meet wants to sell you something. The only place you can find communism is on the signs everywhere celebrating the 90th anniversary of the first meeting of the CCP. What's amazing to me is how straight forward the ads are-there are ads that literally say (in Chinese of course) "You must have this product to be cool" and "Love is buying diamonds." Most places I go I seem to be the only foreign person (外国人) around, except for the ads. Probably around 75% of the ads feature Caucasian women. No wonder so many Chinese women think that the way they were born isn't beautiful and elect to have eye surgery! In addition to surgery, women carry umbrellas at all times to keep their skin as white as possible. What's encouraging to me is that not all women buy into this; Cathy is quite secure in her appearance and self-confident (自信). 

Shanghai at night

High fashion at Xintiandi

Today I managed to work up the confidence to venture out into the world's biggest city alone. In an attempt to escape the honking (喇叭) and exhaust fumes, I decided to try and find what is reportedly Shanghai's best park, Fuxing Park. After navigating the subway system relatively easily and then wandering around holding my map upside down for a good half an hour, I managed to find the park, which was really beautiful. Having not spoken with another person for some time, I decided to try and see if people would say hello to me if I smiled at them (I miss Minnesota Nice!). Sometimes Shanghai seems to thwart my every attempt at being sociable-I was just starting to smile at the next stranger I passed on the street when a gigantic black bug/bird hybrid came out of nowhere and hit me right in the mouth! Feeling defeated and more than a little grossed out, I trudged toward a small store to buy lunch (Dried kiwi and crackers). Sitting on a park bench alone, I popped a handful of crackers in my mouth, only to shortly discover that I had bought the Wasabi flavor. With mouth burning and eyes watering, I wondered whether I had just better call it a day-and then the sky started pouring rain. I ran towards the shelter along with the forty or so elderly people hanging out at the park. That's when my day began to turn around. Huddled under the shelter, I quickly made friends with an old man holding a Minnie Mouse fan who was excited to practice his English with me and hear about America. Once the rain let up, the old people turned on music and began to ballroom dance, right there in the middle of the park. 

My new friend insisted that I come and dance (跳舞) with them. Who could have predicted that I would spend all afternoon listening to songs from the Sound of Music turned techno/Latin and learning how to jitterbug, tango, waltz, rumba, and cha-cha with seventy-plus year old Chinese men? Once the one man started talking with me, everybody else in the park became interested and came over to talk and dance with me as well! We must have been quite the sight, as tourists actually came up and started taking pictures of me dancing with the Chinese men.  I can now confirm my long-held suspicion that nobody knows how to have a good time like the elderly Chinese. They come to the park every day to listen to music, dance, play games, exercise, and hang out with each other. We all had a great time getting to know each other, and I definitely intend to come back!

Me (holding the Minnie Mouse fan) and my new friend

Favorite place in Shanghai so far!

I start my internship tomorrow-should be a very interesting experience. Hope to talk to you all soon!

Maria

Off to Shanghai

I'm off to Shanghai in the morning and planning to blog once a week-check back here for updates about my wanderings in China!