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