Eating in China is very interesting. It's a communal affair. Many dishes are ordered and are brought to the table and placed in the middle and everyone reaches with their chopsticks and gets all they want and either puts it in their mouth or puts some on top of the rice that's in the little bowl in front of everyone. So you do get your own little bowl of rice. Since you lick the chopstics, this may be a bit unsanitary, but I've not gotten sick yet. The food is amazingly good and bears very little resemblance to Chinese food in the US. I don't know if I could even eat at Chinese restaurants again in the States. I don't eat meat, but those that do run into one unfortunate practice of Chinese cooking. When an animal is cut into pieces, it is literally cut into pieces--meaning that a big knife is used to chop a chicken into whatever size pieces are desired, with no care as to the location of the bones. So if you order any meat dish, you will find randomly assorted pieces of bone throughout your food. And yes, some foods are a little exotic, at least for those eating meat. I've been in one restaurant which for various reasons which will become clear, was hidden from view and you had to knock on the door to be let in. Once inside, you may order a number of unusual meat dishes, such as dog, donkey, scorpion, silk worm and various endangered birds. The endangered birds are illegal to kill and hence the restaurant is hidden from view, but the other members of my party apparently liked the bald eagle or whatever it is that they ate. Another popular delicacy are "Century Eggs". See the picture below of century egg and cow stomach soup. These are normal chicken eggs that--while still raw--are buried into the ground for 100 days. At that point they are nice and black as you can see and then they are finally cooked. Apparently the flavor is rather foul and sulphuric but is very delicious?!
Some things that are similar and some things that are different about the college life here...the dorms are very similar except that students must get in before 11pm every night when they lock the outside doors. Also guys are never allowed in the girls' rooms unless it's "you brother or he only stays for 20 minutes to get something done". When I said that should be enough time to "get something done", they didn't really understand...There is no drinking age so everyone can drink, but all the students seem to be too focused on studying to get hammered all the time like they do in the U.S. Parties are pretty rare. Many boys don't want a girlfriend b/c it costs too much to have one and takes too much time away from studying...Some other things...I played basketball today with several guys I met at a nearby college. There are about 20 outdoor courts there and no one ever keeps score, and I am actually a very good player here! I am almost always the tallest one and can drive through everyone since I always have at least 50 pounds on anyone. Things that are different about basketball here: no one keeps score, if a cell phone rings, all play stops and you must check who called, a break may randomly be called b/c someone gets tired, when a water break happens, several guys will smoke a cigarette. It seems about 30-40% of the guys smoke and no girls ever smoke, that would be very unattractive and terrible. Girls generally don't like to drink beer but if they do drink they try to drink very little b/c of a very important reason: they are afraid their cheeks will turn red!?
Who says China is not super environmentally friendly? For one thing, you can't get a plastic-or any other kind-of bag at any supermarket or Walmart without paying 10 jiao for each one. For another, take a look at this to-go method. Chinese restaurants don't waste cardboard or styrofoam boxes and instead just shove everything you ordered into one little plastic bag (that you hope has no hole in it)...
Well my trip to the DVD store was rather interesting. An American I met here showed me the DVD store downtown. At first it looks like a normal store, just extremely small with only about 30-40 movies for sale and they all seem rather expensive (about 40 yuan each or $6, so perhaps that's not all that expensive). No one seems to be interested in any of these movies. But for some reason one wall of the store has no movies on it, but instead has a very large hanging painting. The American pulls back the cloth painting and we see a much larger back room with many more movies and many people perusing. Here the movies are only 8 yuan or $1.25 each and many new releases are available, including Dark Knight and others that are still in theaters in the States. All are very professionally wrapped and sealed as you can see on the pictures below. And all are available in English with Chinese subtitles. One thing is different though...click on the Evan Almighty picture below and you will note that the movie description must have been translated from Chinese. I wonder why they keep all their newest releases that cost so little in a hidden back room? I am sure there's no reason besides keeping away the thieves or perhaps pirates.
So this is the (in)famous Chinese squat toilet. Almost all the toilets in China are like this. Only a few places, such as the Beijing international airport and foreign teachers' (like mine) apartments have western-style toilets. It is of course very good for your elimination to use such a toilet since it forces you into the "primitive man" pose whereby the fecal matter can excrete much more efficiently; this pose is physiologically correct way to move the bowels and is of course much cleaner since your ass does not actually touch anything. You almost need not use any toilet paper when defecating in such a position (ever wonder why dogs and cats don't need to wipe their butts?); perhaps this is why I never see toilet paper in Chinese bathrooms? However, I don't think this toilet would be a big hit in the US of A for several reasons: (a) Americans are used to having copious reading material by their toilets at home and this precious reading time would be gone, (b) the American diet often leads to constipation and this toilet definitely works your leg muscles and one would get very tired if the shitting took too long, and (c) many Americans are very fat and would fall in the hole after a few seconds of squatting.
So as you can see from this picture on my campus, Chinese girls do not like catching a tan. On this very sunny day (or as sunny as it can be here, considering the pollution), most girls carry an umbrella. When I asked one of my new Chinese male friends whether the boys also use umbrellas, he laughed at me and said of course not, the boys are manly, instead of umbrellas they get skin nourishing and pore cleansing lotion for their face to keep their faces nice and smooth in the sun...
Finally got the internet up and running again after 4 days offline. According to my Chinese co-worker who I am supposed to call whenever there is a problem, the internet people on campus do not know what the problem is and they need to negotiate with a third party but the third party says it is not their fault. After hearing this for 3 days I told him to just call them again and tell them just to get my internet to work because I must have it for class. He suggested we walk to the office where I paid for the internet, and when we did it turned out they merely lost my information (?) Anyway, now it is working and I can catch up on some posts. I was surprised to see exactly how few people speak English and also how difficult it is for Chinese people to understand anything I say in Chinese. Many of them completely shut down and seemingly do not even try to understand me. The good news is that there always some English major students who do speak fair English and are extremely motivated to learn. There are 7 universities all within a 4 square mile radius and whenever I am in the area at least one student will run up to me and want to "be my friend". This has been very helpful since they take me around the city to wherever I need to go, plus they insist on paying for everything, no matter how hard I resist. When I do go the supermarket by myself, I have to try to understand what something is by the feel and look of it. The few products that do have some English writing on them are clearly not translated by good English speakers. Take a look at the translation on this bag of sugar free oatmeal (click to enlarge):
What exactly does this mean: "the finger does not increase whatever external sweet copy"? The money situation is rather interesting as well. Similar to the Eurodollar (€), the RMB aka Yuan aka Kuai comes in notes of 100, 50, 20, 10, 5 as well as a coin for 1. The similarity ends there. There are also paper notes for the
Jiao which are the smaller denomination, each Jiao is worth 1/10 of a Yuan. There are 5, 2 and 1 Jiao notes. Here is a picture of a 5 Yuan note and one of a 5 Jiao note. Apparently sometimes tourists who try to be tricky by exchanging money on the street at "better" rates are given Jiao notes instead of Yuan notes...
To add to the confusion, there are coins for both the Yuan and the Jiao, see below. The top right coin is the 1 Yuan coin worth 10 times as much as the 1 Jiao coin on the top left and 2x as much as the 5 jiao coin on the bottom right. Also, as you can see the 1 Jiao coin has been changed in recent years to be much thinner and smaller than the old 1 Jiao coin, but about 3 times as heavy. To further add to the confusion, there are also Fen, which are worth 1/100th of a Yuan and they also have paper notes of 5, 2 and 1 as well as coins of the same value. There is apparently a big problem dealing with all these small denomination coins, so much so that there is a big shortage of coins and banks now charge a 1 Yuan fee for every 50 coins they count and many vendors will only give you change in napkins and candy! Here's the link: http://english.hanban.edu.cn/english/China/232499.htm maybe someone can help me do an embedded link, I've tried some scripts but keep getting errors.