Changsha with Nate

So a couple of days after getting back from Hangzhou, on the 16th I headed out to Changsha in Hunan province with another FT, we will call him Fordy. The weather finally turned for the better, unlike Hangzhou, so it was a nice trip. We got sleeper train tickets for the short 5 hour train ride so it was nice and confortable, and quickly found a reasonably priced hotel (120 kuai/night) by the train station which was really clean. A student of mine whose family lives in Changsha met us on the second day and showed us some sights of Changsha. We couldn't climb the Ye Lu mountain since my ankle was still swollen from the twist in Hangzhou, but we went to the walking-shopping street, a cool snack food restaurant, the Lie Shi Gong Yuan-an awesome park with cool traditional buildings (many of these pictures are taken there), and the Yan Jiang Feng Guang Dai-the area along the river which has been recently renovated with various traditional style architecture around the walkways and chill out areas. One of the cool things about Changsha is that many older people hang out outside doing things like water calligraphy, playing various musical instruments and singing Changsha opera (not as famous as Beijing Opera but a bit easier on the ears for some). Check out the 3 videos of all three of these things. Other than that we went to a cool bar appropriately called Cool 9. After getting a bottle, a group of somewhat older people invited us to join their table and we partied with them for the rest of the night (and on their nickel). On the last night we finally found some foreigners by locating Houligans Pub, and within 10 minutes they had our laptop computer card problems fixed.

Hangzhou

From January 5th-10th I went with Fei Fei to Hangzhou, "without doubt the finest and most splendid city in the world", according to Marco Polo (there is a picture of Fei Fei standing in front of his statue). It is a beautiful city and is considered the most beautiful city in China by the Chinese people. We went at the wrong time however. January 6th was hovering at zero degrees with intermittent sleet all day. The Xi Hu (West Lake) is the main attraction at Hangzhou and it's a nice lake with an island in the middle and several peninsulas. It's surrounded by Buddhist temples, mountains, late 19th century European style houses, pagodas, and a botanical garden. I twisted my ankle while sightseeing so we cancelled the hike up to the Lyngyin temple.

The city itself is much cleaner than Nanchang. They even have their own Papa John's Pizza with delivery as you can see--delivery by bicycle. I was finally able to find a reasonably priced (probably fake) leather jacket. For some reason leather jackets are way expensive here and the ones they actually claim are real leather go for at least 200 American dollars, but this shop was shutting down the next day and I got a deal for 280 yuan=40 dollars.
The food in Hangzhou is a bit of a disappointment. Similar to Fuzhou and Xiamen, the close proximity to the East China Sea causes seafood to be the prevalent local food, which I do not partake of. We did manage to find some Sichuan restaurants and they were "ok", but luckily on the last day we found a great one. We wandered by an Irish pub and considered going there one night, but the prices were a bit ridiculous: 60 yuan a pint of Guiness (about $9) and the bar food comparably priced. Overall, the city was quite a bit more expensive than Nanchang. The taxis start at 10 yuan, the buses are 2-3 yuan a ride, even the baozi is 2x the price. I do want to check Hangzhou out again b/c the horrible weather did not give me a fair overview of the city. But all in all, the trip was fun and I enjoyed spending time with Fei Fei before she goes off for 4 weeks to visit her family for Spring Festival.
Most of the pictures are close to the West Lake. The big statute of Chairman Mao is at Zhejiang University which we also walked around.

Xiong Ying and the Pipa

So I have been taking private Chinese lessons twice a week. My tutor is Xiong Ying (pronounced similar to Shiong Yin) is great and turns out she is also very talented. I saw her playing the Pipa, a traditional Chinese instrument, at a show at her college and asked her to play it for me so I can record it. Unfortunately my digital camera sound capture quality is not great and consider that she is playing in a classroom without great acoustics and the temperature is about 5-10 degrees Celcius. All that having been said, I think it still sounds awesome. I put it on Youtube.com and you should be able to watch it directly below (I hope, I am new to posting videos):



If it's loading too slowly jut go to this link and it will go faster: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iRgwDuQ0tL8

Be sure to listen to the last 1.5 minutes, that's where it's really impressive. The song she is playing is a very old Chinese song which describes a famous battle...

Singing and KTV

Singing is really big in China. I often see people just walking around singing a tune, sometimes they will have a cd/mp3 player with a speaker on it that's blaring for all to hear and they sing along. And it's rare to see someone who is shy to sing. I've often asked students in my class to sing a song, and they do it. It's interesting that in this culture where many people seem shy, they are not shy about singing. It's been explained to me that perhaps it's because they are shy that they love to sing: they are shy to express their feelings by saying exactly what they think so instead they sing a song that matches what they feel. And very many of them sing amazingly well.

KTV

Consequently, of course karaoke is very big here. There are numerous karaoke places, generally they are called KTV (I think it's because the very first company that invented the karaoke machine was called that?), but they are way cooler than in the states. Depending on how many people you have with you, you get a small, medium or large room for just your friends which will have one or more couches and tables with a big TV and a karaoke machine and 2-3 microphones. The waiters will drop by occasionally to get you snacks or more drinks. It's a great system b/c even people like me who can't sing at all don't worry about it and do it since you are in your own room among friends. The cost to rent a small room, which is right for about 4-5 people, ranges from 20 yuan an hour ($3) to 200 yuan an hour, depending on whether you want a trashy place in the suburbs or an amazing clean place downtown with strobe lights and lasers and flat panel huge tv and they bring you lots of cool fruit and food and give you your own pretty KTV girl to work the machine for you and who can sing really well also. Though if you go for the nice KTV with a pretty girl route you gotta be nice to her. If the men get too rowdy and grab the girl too much, she will leave and the management will swap her for a KTV boy which is not as cool; it's always embarassing if you see someone's room with a KTV boy cause you know someone's been behaving badly. But all in all KTV is great fun. Everyone seems to love it. Students go to it, businessmen take their clients to it, a boy and a girl will go on a date there and get their little private room, etc. I put up a few stock pictures of some really nice KTV rooms.

ChiWan

So this story didn't even make it to the front page of google news, but I think it will soon have some world-wide impacts. Mainland China and Taiwan have just signed some landmark trade agreements. As of 1 hour ago, people in mainland China can send direct mail to Taiwan and later today the first direct passenger flights will commence and direct sea travel will again be permitted. All of this is the stuff of history since none of this has been permitted since 1949. To transport cargo from the Mainland to Taiwan will now take less than 1/3 of the distance and time because no artificial detour will be necessary. Add this to the trade agreements signed earlier in the fall effectively removing various tariffs and quotas on trade between these 2 entities, and I think the picture is becoming clearer...China and Taiwan will very soon be One again, in practical effect if not officially (there are some who think this won't happen, such as the 0.5 million protesters in Taiwan who opposed Chen Yulin's visit to Taiwan last month). When I was in Macro Economics class back in 2001, our teacher was telling us that at around the year 2020, China's economy is projected to become the largest in the world. I think it will happen much quicker. China has successfully pulled off the Olympics this summer, last month sent men to space, has just effectively normalized relations with Taiwan and the Shanghai World Expo in 2010 is another grand project in the pipeline http://en.expo2010china.com/ expecting 70 Million visitors and the participation of 228 countries. If you consider the GDP alone, China is neck and neck with Germany and behind the US and Japan. If you look at the PPP and consider the perpetuated undervaluation of the RMB (Yuan) b/c it is still being pegged to the dollar (even though a fraction of its valuation is permitted to float), the size of the economy may already be number 2 in the world (even considering the 2007 World Bank PPP revisions). Also if you consider this headline from today about the official 2nd largest economy: http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601068&sid=auPaBwMwwGtg&refer=home (Sentiment among Japan’s largest manufacturers fell the most in 34 years, signaling companies are likely to cancel spending plans and cut more jobs, pushing the economy further into recession.) and any headline from the US, and then note that China appears to be the only large economy not headed into a recession, and it began aggressive spending on massive infrastructure improvements earlier this year, before the bank collapses even began...and then the expected benefits of massively improved trade relations with Taiwan (and perhaps eventual unification)...and I think the U.S. and the World has a big wake up call.

The Beggar Master

You see beggars in China as you do everywhere. The beggars in China, however, are always either really old and/or handicapped. This is certainly different from the US where they are almost exclusively able bodied grown men. So I do give a kuai (1 yuan) to these beggars when I see them, which is not all that often. They don't hang out in the suburbs/village area where my college is located, but there are quite a few in the downtown area. A friend of mine, who I will call Dundee, gave me more information about the beggar scene and I have verified this with some Chinese friends. Apparently, the beggar scene is quite competitive and is largely controlled by organized crime. In the big cities, there is a usually a quite powerful mafia boss--the Beggar Master--that controls the beggar population and approved begging locations. His minions go to the villages and find severely handicapped people. They will give a sum of money to their relatives to be allowed to take the handicapped people away. The handicapped will be provided a bed and rice to eat, and in return they must of course go beg all day. Most of the money they successfully earn through their beggary must go to the Beggar Master and his minions. This arrangement is not quite the land of milk and honey as it may seem, b/c apparently there is a quota of how much each beggar must earn depending on the quality of the real estate he is provided and if he does not reach the quota he will be severely beaten. Apparently the same system exists in India, except the Beggar Master there has even more power since India has such a huge population of beggars. If a shopkeeper pisses off the Beggar Master, the BM will bring hundreds of his beggars and have them sit around in front of the shop and hang out inside, basically scaring off all the customers. So don't mess with the Beggar Master!

The G-friend

So I got a girlfriend now, officially. Here's a few pics. Things are a little different over here. For one thing, if you hold a girl's hand that means you are asking her to be her boyfriend, so I didn't quite realize that I was getting a girlfriend when I did, but it's cool, b/c I think it would have happened anyway soon. She's a student at a nearby university and her short name is Fei Fei, which means "fly" or actually "fly fly". She's 20 or 21 years old (no she's not in elementary school even though she's on a swing set in one pic) I am not sure b/c in China you never know how old someone is since some people use the standard method of measuring age but others consider you to be 1 year old when you are born, yet others consider you 1 year old at the time of the Chinese New Year, so depending on the date of the year you are born your age again would be different, so I still gotta figure this out. We've been seeing each other about 6 weeks now and I was thinking of visiting her family in January for the Spring Festival/Chinese New Year; however, she let me know that her family is very traditional which means that if a boy visits a girl's family it's only to plan the wedding. So of course that quickly changed my plans for Spring Festival. Instead, we are probably going to go for a few days to Hungzhou, probably the most romantic-beautiful city in China before she goes visits her family. She's a nice girl who I find very attractive so we will see where it goes. She's extremely tiny too, 39 kilograms (86 pounds) so that's pretty cool.