Posted by Chuck Vose
Fri, 20 Mar 2009 01:30:00 GMT
Today I had an exam that went well, at least the written part seemed to go well. But the spoken part was fairly dull and my teacher lambasted me for not speaking Chinese enough outside of class. Specifically she said that while all the other students are learning new words outside of class I am not, nor am I learning new grammar structures. Of course she is right so I’m going to make an attempt to speak only Chinese and keep a book handy for new phrases I learn. Maybe next exam will be better.
When a subject matter is inherently multi-person it doesn’t help to be self-taught.
Posted in Life | 1 comment
Posted by Chuck Vose
Sat, 14 Mar 2009 13:54:00 GMT
Stepping off the plane in gloomy Pudong airport I was assaulted by feelings of strangeness mingled with familiarity. My biggest concern, typical for any computer scientist, was that I might be unable to access the Internet during my stay in China. Maybe the firewall was too restrictive or maybe Ethernet is implemented in a different way, that I would regret not bringing my cable crimper. Maybe everything I could access would be in Chinese and I would be unable to integrate without help from locals. Stepping off the plane I immediately recognized the familiar and comfortable signs for Wifi, cat5 jacks in the walls, and many, many laowai using the Internet in the terminal. Now that that was sorted I only had to convince a Chinese taxi driver to drive me to my apartment an hour away in a town that I had never been to where few people speak languages I can recognize; easy in comparison I think.
In a few days I will celebrate my two month anniversary of being in China and I’m proud to say that I can now order food by myself. Naturally, only food that I’ve had often and know the name of (I can’t read the menus) and only at a few restaurants (where they tolerate my pointing at other people’s food). But while I’ve lost some weight from not eating well and not eating any vegetables, which are a luxury here, I’ve not spent any less time on the Internet than I would normally. When I set out I had my concerns about the “Golden Shield” or the Great Chinese Firewall, but it turns out to be pretty easy to circumvent with a proxy. But while I had my concerns I was also very curious to find out how much Chinese people know about their own informational prison, whether they know how to circumvent the firewall and if they do, and how it’s affected their use of the Internet in general. But when it comes down to it China is basically the same when it comes to tech so my general experiences in China end up being much more interesting.
When you learn a new language what do you always start with? Probably something like, “Hello, my name is Chen Se.” Really, a hello world program for natural languages. But do you know the first thing you need to learn to say when you get into a foreign country is really not a greeting, probably the first is more like, “I speak no Chinese but I am very hungry, please bring me something to eat, I really don’t care what.” We rarely consider our needs when they’re being met, I have no idea how to say, “I need air!” in Chinese, the need has always been met, but I know a hundred ways to ask for particular foods and drinks yet I barely know how to converse. Friendship and companionship is so much farther down the list of needs compared to food, water and air that I’ve only begun to scratch the surface of that language.
When you begin to program most people make a “Hello World” program which exposes us to the essential grammar of a language, but like learning “my name is…” it is completely useless to the programmer. This leads me to believe that formal languages like natural languages must also have a way of learning a new language in an intensive way. If I ever learn spanish I will smack my teacher if he tries to teach us “my name is…” I don’t care, I want to learn, “What is that food? Waiter, please bring me this, it looks tasty”. What is the equivalent for a programming language? Is computing Fibonacci recursively closer to what’s needed or are there particular exercises that are necessary for a particular language in order to learn quickly? In Ruby I think monkey-patching String to print out all strings backwards would be a good “Hello World”. Naturally, some languages just shouldn’t be used so there is no “Hello World” program that will help someone program well in that language (cough, PHP). Maybe this is just a case of premature optimization, that “Hello World” has its place and things like Project Euler are there to take us farther.
In my Student Originated Software class we asked what it was that separated natural languages and formal languages, our answer was that ambiguities were the separation. However now that I’ve studied natural language more I’ve come to realize that even if a natural language was specified with EBNF it would still have the spoken component which formal languages do not typically have. For all my training in learning languages, I have learned at least seven programming languages, I am completely incapable of remembering how to say things. My vocabulary is excellent, my handwriting has been praised many times, in fact, anything having to do with the visual representation of the language has been a strong point but the spoken part is consistently difficult. I was unaware that the spoken language section of the brain was different from the written language part, my assumption that study of formal languages would make the study of natural languages easier has only been partly correct. What would be interesting would be to study Chinese Sign Language and see if that’s easier or if we have another language area of the brain for physical representations of language.
This makes me want to create a spoken programming language or a manual language but I’m not sure what these would look like.
As I write this last journal entry the Internet has crashed again. I can no longer communicate with America and I find myself wondering whether the Internet actually crashed or if google was just blocked, you always have to check multiple sites when in China because google has no more political clout here than anyone else; in this way it is a very equal-opportunity country. My understanding of the Firewall is that the border routers, the last routers before the end-user, have filtering software which searches through requests and responses before delivering them for illegal words. If a border router finds something it dislikes it will sever the connection and the user is presented with a generic network connection error. Further connections will be blocked for a few minutes however if the border router finds the bad text again from that website it will block for (a few minutes)^2, each time doubling the amount of time the border router blocks the entire site.
CCCP has been pretty brilliant about their scheme. A big warning page about illegal searching would be intrusive and scary, would scare a lot of people off the Internet entirely and sow discord. As it is now institutions that publish politically sensitive things just appear to be unreliable, which would make me question the sites ability to present accurate information also. As it is a blacklist system there are always holes and ways around the firewall, but they are a pain in the ass and for most things there are other news agencies and websites that may present the information in a way less objectionable to the border routers; this allows CCCP to make certain websites preferred. In addition China has been know to change the DNS of major ISPs so that their preferred sites are represented. For several months, when Google and China were fighting, all requests to google.com pointed directly to baidu.cn the search engine that the CCCP likes best.
The CCCP is masterful at minor manipulations which change people’s opinions, under Mao the second most powerful and prolific organization was the department of propaganda. While this department is significantly less powerful now the knowledge remains and students who graduate from college with art degrees are well versed in the psychology of propaganda. In the US I believe we call this Advertising or Marketing but the differences are not large.
Curiously, in my survey of foreign students 77% have known about the Chinese Firewall while only 13% knew how to get around the Firewall with a Proxy. Among the four Chinese people I was comfortable talking to half have known about the Firewall and one quarter have known how to get around it. I believe that the number of people who know about the Firewall is significantly lower in China because all information about the Firewall has been blocked (including my blog) and because it affects US sites much more than Chinese sites.
But do we know much more in America? I find myself questioning the American government much more here than I did at home. In many ways China is exactly like America, we both have a lot of corruption, we both have egregious human-rights violations, we both have the death penalty, but China is more blatant about these things. If Chinese people don’t know about the Firewall, because the CCCP is so good at what it does, does it make sense that the American govt. is any different? How do we know that there isn’t a Great Firewall around America? We had behind the excuse of the free-market but China’s market is much, much more free than America’s so I have to wonder whether our freedoms are being restricted without us realizing it. And if we do realize it are we really capable of doing much more than the Chinese citizens? We can demonstrate, something the Chinese people can’t do, but this seems to be effective at removing small players from politics when something really tragic happens like the WTO protests. The WTO still exists, the only thing that happened was a lot of Americas got gassed and hurt and one mayor lost his job.
When I stepped off the plane I stepped into a country remarkably similar to America. The Internet is the same except slightly more annoying in some regards, the animals we eat are mostly the same except they may have some more bones, and the government is still intrusive. My journey to China has taught me many things, but mostly it has shown me a little more about myself, my country, and my government that I hadn’t seen before. Only when you learn a powerful programming language do you finally understand how impotent your previous languages were in comparison and vice versa. It’s the comparison that is enlightening, not the new language. Visiting China has given me perspective on America, has shown me the things that I love and dislike and has made me question the motives of the US Government, whether they have our interests in mind and whether we are even capable of influencing policy. It has been enlightening.
Posted in Life | Tags China, exam, internet, plane | no comments
Posted by Chuck Vose
Wed, 04 Mar 2009 07:55:00 GMT
Someone pointed out the other day that most people in Shanghai have been driving less than a year, many for around nine months as that’s how long the test takes to prep for (iirc). Imagine a city with about 1 million cars on the road, all of which are driven by people with the same experience level as an average 16 year old. Now try riding on the back of a taxi-motorcycle! :)
Posted in Life | 1 comment
Posted by Chuck Vose
Wed, 04 Mar 2009 07:29:00 GMT
Today is a free-day and I am feeling a little lost. I woke up at about 2pm or so but unlike Saturday I’m not hungover and unlike Sunday I slept until 2pm, something the cleaning ladies regularly (and thankfully) prevent me from doing. But no hangover and no cleaning ladies today. My anchors are gone and I’ve been plunged into a radical world to fend for myself.
Like all heroic men I have been playing video games and reading Wired all afternoon.
Tomorrow we have a test and Friday I will embark on a journey with my fellow alliance people to the city of Nanjing. Nanjing is a few hours outside of Shanghai but from what I’ve heard is a wildly different place. It’s also the place where the Japanese invaded China to rape and pillage wildly. Japan still denies this and China still wants an apology so I worry about our friend Go who is pretty obviously Japanese. I know that he can handle it, he tells stories sometimes about his time in Wuhan (inner China) where people would give him crap for being Japanese and some of his students quit his class after finding out he was Japanese.
In other news I was playing with a Hanzi lookup program which sorted Hanzi characters by their parts (called radicals). I spent probably two hours doing this and got through 2 sentences of a book but today I looked at characters and instead of seeing images all wrapped around each other I saw each individual radical. I still don’t know what any of the Hanzi mean when I see them, but like being differentiate words from each other when I hear them I was excited to transition into a new stage in my Chinese language.
For today’s mind-blowing experiment please look no farther than the following link. I fully intend to try to build a TSM and at the very least participate in the OpenStim project to see what other people discover about themselves. This is the first project that I’ve been truly passionate and curious about in a long time and my housemate will hopefully be able to help me in my endeavors.
http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/2009/03/neuroengineering2
It is a 2 part article but the previous part describes a method of brain alteration much more complicated than I am party to.
Posted in Life | Tags China, Hanzi, OpenStim, Radicals, TSM | no comments
Posted by Chuck Vose
Sun, 01 Mar 2009 02:50:00 GMT
Firstly I’d like to thank Panasonic for making such and excellent toothbrush as the Sonicare. Not only has it lasted almost an entire month without needing a charge, it’s also really good at what it does. Secondly, I’d like to thank Mitch Hedberg for giving me the humor to realize that like many electricity driven mechanical devices (escalators, toothbrushes,... okay that’s really it), when they break they still work for their original purpose.
This brings me to an excellent point: in America if an escalator was broken it would be roped off so that nobody could mistake it and stand there for an hour getting mad about their lack of movement. In China, except at Wal-mart (big surprise really), not only do people still use dead escalators, any efforts to rope them off would be ignored. The only thing that seems to stop people from using dead escalators is a huge blockade of shopping carts which can’t be navigated around. I’m still unclear whether this blockade was created by confused customers or employees.
(For background, the escalators at Wal-mart are inclined planes with some sort of attachment mechanism for carts so you don’t have to hold them all the way up or down the escalator. We’re unclear about how this works but I’m theorizing that it could have been confused customers trying to get up the escalator then getting their cart stuck on it, panicking, and ditching the cart for a nearby one and sneaking off into the shadows hoping any of the thousand people around them didn’t notice their snafu. Of course it could have been employees too but that’s much less amusing.)
Okay, so escalators and blockades: check. No wait, one more story about electric walls. It’s a little hard to explain the Chinese fascination with electric walls but I’ve come to believe that there is a deep-seated desire to surround yourself with glass or metal cages that beep at you when you’re too heavy, holding the doors open, or just because a beep is necessary. Usually the beeps are polite but sometimes the makers of the cages are more creative and build in a horrible wail or a screeching buzz just for added effect. In essence, I spend probably 2/3 of my travel time walking by/through, or riding in a very cramped metal cage that likes to beep, buzz, or wail at me at random moments. I think it will probably be one of the things I miss most when I go back to the states because there is nothing that keeps you on your toes quite the same way.
Today I’m going to the fabric market with a friend. I’m excited to see how the whole thing works though I lack the money to actually purchase anything at the moment until my paychecks come in the mail (crosses fingers).
I’m also going to start carrying around a little book to write down my realizations when I’m around town. I have lots of things to blog about but usually by the time I’m home they’ve all been forgotten. So instead I write about my electric toothbrush which is the only interesting thing I’ve seen in the last 20 minutes.
So yeah, in case you were wondering, things are going well. I’m broke but that will hopefully be fixed soon and my sister is coming to visit me on March 27th so I’m very happy. But of course this means that if you want her to bring something back you should put in your orders now. :)
Wishing you all well!
Posted in Life | Tags Beeping, China, DTA, Electricity, Shanghai | 1 comment
Posted by Chuck Vose
Mon, 23 Feb 2009 03:23:00 GMT
Today I learned several things, but the most important is a skill I think I will probably be able to use with success for the rest of my life: how to turn off my brain’s gag reflex. Tied to the important message of never asking what it is I’m putting into my mouth and who it used to belong to I believe that I will experience many, many more foods in the future.
Also, I didn’t know that real bananas are extremely small. I bought my normal amount of bananas today but it to get the required volume I had to buy like 30 bananas. Too big to be the weird purple tiny bananas I see in the states, too small to be the genetically modified things we call bananas in the states. I haven’t tried them yet but I’m getting excited about the prospect of it already.
Also, I saw a feral kitten playing in a grocery store. It was under a table playing with the table cloth like kittens do. For some reason I assumed that feral kittens didn’t play but I guess either my original assumption was wrong or it’s actually the clerks kitten and I just totally misunderstood the situation. I smiled either way and the clerk looked at my confused when I tried to tell her that the kitten was cute. Stupid tonal language: I probably told her that I loved the hat dispenser or something.
Posted in Life | Tags China, food, Kitten | 2 comments
Posted by Chuck Vose
Fri, 20 Feb 2009 23:37:00 GMT
I’m hung over as hell today. It’s Saturday and I consumed about 30rmb worth of beer last night. $4 goes a long way when you’re drinking Tsingtao.
Anyways, last night one of the Chinese roommates commented that he liked my hand warmers. Like any good American I explained that my girlfriend is part of the craft movement. But explaining the craft movement was a little odd for me, compared to the citizens who are desperately trying to survive on their crafts and barely staying alive our craft movement feels extremely childish. We’re striving to reduce consumption while many Chinese are striving to increase their ability to consume, at least to the point where they’re fully fed.
Consumption has been the word of the week in all of my classes except language class. In ECON we’re talking about how much consumption has increased per capita and in Society and Culture we’re talking about the switch from everything being about increasing production in the 50s to the late 70s and how it switched shortly after the 70s. This paragraph isn’t nearly so eloquent as I would like but consumption and globalization have been on my mind a lot.
On a side note, since this blog is actually supposed to be about how Chinese people use the Internet, I found out some juicy details about how some native Chinese people perceive the Internet. There’s this assumption that everyone in the world knows about the Firewall but it turns out that in China many, many people do not know about the Firewall at all. Many do not know they are being censored and one Chinese roommate didn’t know that they Internet was driven almost entirely by porn (which is blocked by the firewall). On the other hand, another native Chinese (name never requested) not only knew about the Firewall but knew how to circumvent it.
It is also interesting to talk to foreigners about what they think of the Firewall and how it affects their usage of the net. I’ve noticed that almost none of my colleagues are really affected by the censoring so it actually makes sense that people don’t know about the firewall. It’s really just more annoying than anything, you never know which days cnn.com is going to work. I think if anything the Firewall is probably succeeding in making Chinese people go to Chinese news agencies because they are more reliably present on the Internet.
There’s a machine outside my window that sounds like my cat. I’ve been assured that he has not walked all the way here and is in fact still at home with E, but it makes me miss him anyways.
I’ll write more when I can gather my thoughts.
Posted in Life | Tags China, consumption, Crafting, Firewall, Tsingtao | 2 comments
Posted by Chuck Vose
Thu, 19 Feb 2009 03:21:00 GMT
Today I write my blog flushed with the successes of the day. Today, for the first time I have successfully ordered a meal and purchased some clementines (or so I hope) without embarrassing myself or needing the assistance of someone more skilled than I. Granted, when you’re offering money to someone they rarely scoff at your pronunciation and the menu was entirely pictorial, but I feel good regardless.
I believe that I can stop studying now. :)
No, there’s still a lot left to do. Incidentally I never mentioned my official goal for China. Months ago Erica asked me to pick up some nice tea cups in China and I have found them. They are perfect, subdued but colourful, modern paints but ancient style. And the best part is that they are marked at $100 each. This is completely ridiculous of course; it’s at a very popular tourist mall and the value of ceramics is extremely low in China.
So my goal, my thesis for China, is to purchase these cups for a reasonable price, perhaps $10 each, and bring them to my lady as a fitting prize for my serenely beautiful woman.
I will have to harness all my charm and wit to bargain down 10x. Being white means that my price is already twice as high as the price for a Chinese person if not four times as much. Perhaps I will have to go full bore and befriend the owner of the shop in order to really get that good of a price. But I’m confident that by the end of four months I will be prepared to do this very thing.
Baby steps for now. Our first test is tomorrow so we’ll see how far I’ve really come.
I hope you’re all doing very well and I’m eager to return and tell you all about my journeys.
Posted in Life | Tags China, food, Language | 2 comments
Posted by Chuck Vose
Fri, 13 Feb 2009 08:07:00 GMT
Last night I heard protesters outside my building. Or at least I thought I did. It was typically windy and traffic was going crazy like normal when I heard megaphones blaring Chinese phrases repeatedly. Of course my Chinese roommate didn’t bat an eye. When I asked what the megaphones were saying he listened closely for a bit and said, “Ah, it’s just a reminder to be careful and turn off your gas and electricity when you go to sleep”.
I’m in a fucking weird place indeed.
I think there are pheromones in the water too. Everyone in the program has just come to the realization that they aren’t going to get laid for four months at least. Those that broke up with their SOs are hunting like mad and those that didn’t are reminiscing about their old favorite sport in part just to see the wide-eyed expressions of the Chinese roommates. They do not talk about sex at dinner but that seems to be all the the Americans talk about at any point in the day. I’ve tried to explain the situation but I think things are getting lost in translation.
So here I am, thinking about my lady, in my living room, in the dark, eating candy and posting my thoughts on a blog that I happen to know attracts very few views. But I’m not sure that I would trade it for the alternative of sitting at home in the dark blogging about absolutely nothing. :P
Week 1—Check
So week 1 has come and gone and I’m exhausted. Naturally, like the young whipper-snappers that they are, everyone has decided to go out to a bar that’s cave themed. One the one hand I want to go because I’m sure it will be a blast but on the other hand I’m feeling exhausted and depressed and basically just want to drown my sorrows in beer at the local “pub”.
Enough pity-fest, let me tell you all about what I learned this week. I’ve learned that Chinese people are easy to surprise and that direct translation of silly American phrases into Chinese just leaves everyone in the dust. They assume, “Penguins are sometimes eaten by Lions” must have been a mistake. All I wanted to do was make the class slightly more amusing but I think all I succeeded at was getting Chinese dictionaries banned from class.
That is of course all an exaggeration. Dictionaries haven’t been banned and I couldn’t even begin to say that sentence, but I would like to. For now I have to satisfy myself with, “I am a lion” and make the appropriate clawing pantomime for clarity. Chen lao shi thinks this is just about the funniest thing in the world and sometimes I’m worried that she has fainted on her podium until she finally wipes the tears from her eyes and breathes again.
Ah! I’m developing a test also. It’s called “n ways to determine whether you’re in a polluted city or not”. Maybe not the best title but it seems fitting. I think if you answer yes to more than about n/2 you’re probably in Shanghai or its equivalent. If you answer more than about 2n/3 you’re probably in Beijing or the equivalent. Or maybe it’s just fucking foggy where you are. With that I present:
N ways to determine whether you’re in a polluted city or not!
- Do you have to brush the roof of your mouth in order to remove soot?
- When you wipe your face with a refreshing wet towel does it come away slightly blackened even though you do this at every meal?
- Do people wear face masks when they traverse traffic?
- Can you see the tops of buildings?
- Can you see stars?
- Can you see your own hand in front of you?
- Is the tap water drinkable or do you have to fear growing breasts or becoming infertile if you drink it?
- Can you find exhaust pipes laying beside the street on occasion or have the junk sellers already picked them up?
Okay, that was just an exercise really. Some of those are actually true of Shanghai though which is a little weird and worrisome. I hate to think what the inside of me looks like right now; can’t get at that with a refreshing towel. I’ve tried though. Oh how I’ve tried.
Okay, I hungry. I’m going to go try to order some food now. Wish me luck.
PS. I don’t proofread this before I post and I’m usually exhausted. Please forgive my spelling errors.
Posted in Life | Tags China, Chinese, food, pheremones, Pollution, protest, Shanghai, study, water | 2 comments
Posted by Chuck Vose
Mon, 09 Feb 2009 21:03:00 GMT
Program Description
The most common question I received when I decided to come to China was about the structure of the program. A close second was what was Fudan University like. Naturally, being the lazy ass that I am I couldn’t answer these questions but I am now prepared to state that I got lucky as hell.
Fudan is a fantastic college. Fantastically huge campus at least. We saw an aerial model of the thing and at 1:1000 scale it takes up about 100 sqft; that’s more than a good apartment in Shanghai. I believe that you would need a bike or taxi to get from one end to another. But it is also fantastically beautiful though probably not quite as beautiful as my first college. We have our own floor in the 25-story Guang Hua building with safe drinking fountains (!) and a little zen garden for smoking. I think that you have to work pretty hard to convince people to smoke outside here, so we get a zen garden.
The program is structured like you would expect any good uni to be, we have 12 credit hours of Chinese per week with 1.5 credit hours of Culture and 1.5 hours of Politics or Economics. We are taught by graduate students who are very, very young. I have been assured that by the end of the year 2/3 of them will have hooked up with their students at least once. Lacking this option to get ahead however I will rely on petty bribery and hard work to get good grades.
Outside of the language class there are some other learning periods that I haven’t experienced yet as we are just entering our second day. Something about a language lunch and some 1-on-1 time but I’m never quite clear which things are for just the intensive program and which apply to me. The Alliance has been miserable about organizing this aspect, nobody has any idea which classes they’re in and up until yesterday probably half of us hadn’t signed up for a class.
There are also 2 divisions of classes, intensive and cultural. The cultural program is more about learning some Chinese as well as experiencing as much as possible. The intensive program is a little crazy; they spend something like 20 hours doing Chinese and are required to take a language pledge that they will not speak any other languages during the semester under penalty of being suspended. I am extremely glad that I didn’t decide to do this because I would be very lonely for a long time. Naturally, this aspect of the program was documented nowhere on the website that I saw.
Big Man in Little Korea
My biggest fear about traveling to China was that I had a 10-ish hour layover in Incheon Korea so that I would arrive in China at a reasonable hour in the morning instead of getting to the airport at 3am. But what the hell do you do in an airport for 10-ish hours? The Internet yielded no interesting ideas to me and the thought of taking a cab into the city was appealing but very expensive; the nearest hostel was 1.5 hours away by taxi so would have been quite expensive.
So I did what anyone would do, I decided to just meditate on the problem until it fixed itself for me; this took about 10 minutes until I realized that I was sitting in the same row as Becca and Dan Lanaghan from UPS. They live in Seoul. Why didn’t I think of this?! Fortunately we hadn’t spoken in about 3 years so we had enough to keep us talking for the entire 14 hour flight. It did make me realize that I really don’t stay caught up with facebook nearly well enough.
They have new kitties. Oh man it was sweet. It’s hard to be mad about getting woken up in the middle of the night when it’s because a kitten is weaseling their way under the covers with you. God damn I’m such a cat lady.
After a long sleep Dan and Becca taxied me to the bus stop where I promptly realized that I couldn’t read the signs and had no idea when to expect the bus. I ended up waiting for about 50 minutes panicking silently that I didn’t know how many buses I was missing that would take me to the right place. Turns out that I hadn’t missed a single one but had arrived about 3 minutes after the bus I was supposed to catch. Luckily a fellow showed up with luggage like my own and I decided to follow him to the airport. As it turned out he also spoke very good English so we chatted the whole time about the Internet, Korea, and business. And like all the Asians that have shaken my hand so far he wanted to hold my hand for a surprisingly long time.
Oh, when I say bus I actually mean multi-passenger limousines. They’re really damn sweet. No jacuzzi but it does have reclining cushy seats and plenty of room for luggage. They cost about 13k won which I believe is about $13 though it may be less now that the Korean economy is dying a painful death at the hands of their American masters.
First Post!
I believe that I was the first to arrive because nobody at my apartment had any idea who I was or what I was doing there. It seemed a fitting way to start the day considering how easy it was to get a taxi to take me to my apartment (150RMB btw, about $20). It could also be that I kept talking to the guy who looked to be in charge but spoke absolutely no English whatsoever.
Eventually the front desk found our program coordinator, Ella Ding, who turns out to be a totally fantastic lady. She helped me get checked in a day early at the modest cost of 70RMB (which puts the apartment at about $300/mo). I thought it was hilarious that she was totally amazed that I had made it all the way from the States by myself without speaking any Chinese or Korean at all. I guess things could have gone way worse but I’m refusing to ask her what she thought might happen.
When I got up to my building I was a little worried from the outside. It’s a 14-story, bland, pink building that like all Shanhai buildings looks like it’s starting to fall apart. When I got up to the room however I was taken aback by how completely gorgeous the place is. My first impression was that it was furnished with a big TV, chairs and couches, nice coordinated furniture, a kitchen with an actual stovetop, washing machine, and not only running water, but hot water at that (the maintenance ladies were especially proud of this bit which scares the hell out of me to think of their house).
And to this day I still think the place is nice, certainly worth ever USD, but it’s also all fake and low quality like everything I’ve seen in Shanghai so far. The wood flooring is fake, the coordinated furniture is extremely fake, the washing machine’s pipes were fake (.5mm thick piping which rusted through and fell off the machine), the Internet cables were fake, and the heaters were so clogged that I spent the first night at about 8 degrees C (in Fahrenheit this is “butt-ass-cold”). Most of these things have been fixed but every single person that moved in has a similar story of their apartment having something completely broken be it the heater, the running water, the washing machine, the shower heads, etc.
My theory is that Shanghai is either planning obsolescence in a way that puts America to shame (“50 years until things fall apart!? Make it 10! We’ll show those Americans!”) or it’s really impossible to buy quality products. It could be a little of both but I can say with some certainty that there is no place like home depot here where you can buy a new pipe, you just buy it from the guy who’s biking around with the stack of oddly shaped pipes on the back of his tricycle. He in turn bought them from a bigger dirty-broken-pipe vendor or stole them off of a construction scaffolding which means it’s already half rusted through from the corrosive salt and lack of water-proof coating.
Pipes are a great one but paint is the same way, all the paint is peeling in Shanghai making the whole city look mottled. Except for the suburbs of course, where everything is pristine and looks exactly like an American gated community (or so I hear, I refuse to go there on principles).
So yeah, where was I?
Ah yes, first night was spent freezing my ass off. They fixed the heater the next day but I bought a blanket anyways. It cost about 3 dollars and is worth exactly that. I’m unclear on whether the blanket is the cause of my minor sickness or if it’s the dust in the heater, normal bug from being around people, or the pollution in the city. Certainly the blanket is extremely uncomfortable to sleep under so I thank my lucky stars every day because Erica was nice enough to make me a sheet pocket before I left. I use it every night and love the hell out of it.
Serves me right for buying a blanket at Wal-Mart. I was assured that Wal-Mart was different in China, and it is in a LOT of ways, but it’s still shitty, child-labor manufactured bullshit items for the most part. Where you find good blankets is still a mystery to me right now.
I’ll have to write more about my first day tomorrow. Jesus this was a long post. Time to go to class and get ready for the day!
Posted in Life | Tags Alliance, China, Education, for, Fudan, Global, Shanghai | 2 comments
