Okay well this is not China related but this shit happens all the time, and today was a particularly glaring example. So long as f*ing USA does it, it's okay, but if anyone else does it, they are terrorists, evil etc. Kinda reminds me why I am glad to be gone from that extreme hypocrisy. So on google.com in the news section there are 2 stories side by side.
One, http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/20/world/middleeast/20iran.html?ref=middleeast
is about an Iranian ex-journalist who had her journalist badge revoked 3 years ago had just been tried and convicted of spying for the US. Because she is a US citizen of course, Obama mama says: "I have complete confidence that she was not engaging in any sort of espionage". How the f*ck does he have complete confidence, how does he know anything about what espionage she may have been doing? I am sure the relatives of the people who have been sitting in Guantanamo without a trial for 6+ years also have complete confidence in their innocence. The woman's father also says that his daughter had admitted the charges “during her interrogation, under duress and pressure.” Oh, so then it must not be true. Sure, I will buy that. But what about the other news story.
The title of it is Planner of 9/11 Attacks Waterboarded 183 Times. http://www.reuters.com/article/latestCrisis/idUSN19326905 The story explains that after his waterboarding he admitted planning the attacks. But yet, no one questions that there is any "duress" or "pressure" there...hmm.
Oh, and one more story is up on google that seems relevant. It's title is Mental damage from CIA tactics is disputed. http://www.latimes.com/features/health/la-na-psychology20-2009apr20,0,139316.story And it goes on to say that Obama does not want any charges to be brought against perpetrators of the interrogation techniques which included water boarding. Hmm, but what about the fact that the USA convicted Japanese after WW2 for water boarding US detainees, and by convicted I mean hanged! http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/11/02/AR2007110201170.html
How great it is to have a hypocrytical one sided media and Obama mama and his whole government as well.
Last week I got the chance to fly my first hot air lantern. We lit ours right inside the college campus and the first one just missed the top floor of one dormitory. These things are so simple but so cool. They only cost 12 Yuan or you could even make them yourselves. I plan to bring several to the US in the summer and fly them on 4th of July and otherwise with whoever may be interested. Though I am sure it's illegal to fly these in the US since it is in essence a flying flaming paper bag and when the parafin fuel runs out it does tend to crash down. And I am sure there will be some UFO sightings reported on the news the next day.
The West thinks it invented the hot air balloon in 1783 in France, but Kongming invented these during the Three Kingdoms Period somewhere between 220-280 AD, and the Chinese were using these for sending messages during battles, sort of a an early version of a slow flare. It's a pretty simple process, when you light the candle or oil, the air in the lantern is heated, so the lantern will fly to the sky. After the candle or oil burns out, the lantern will slowly cool down and descend on the ground. You are supposed to make a wish on it and watch it all the way until the light goes out, which is usually about 10 minutes. Some people also will write their wish on the lantern itself. All in all, it just looks very cool.
Monday was a holiday known as the "tomb sweeping day". Not having any tombs in China to sweep, I and Fei Fei, along with Fordy and Tex Mex, decided to go to Wuhan for the long weekend. Wuhan is a big city, somewhere around the 4th to 9th largest in China depending on who you ask, with around 9 million people. It's really a tri-cities area, the 3 portions called Wuchang, Hankou and Hanyang, taking the Wu from the first, and the Han from the other 2, it's now called Wuhan. We saw some interesting sights. As you can see from the pics, the big attraction is the Yellow Crane Tower right in the middle of Wuchang, but the best part I think was the huge snack street area with multitudinous street food options. Wuhan University was also a beautiful place to see (though I didn't include any of those pictures). At night we went to the Wuchang bar area recommended by a taxi driver (unlike our experience in Nanjing, the taxi driver did not take us to a prostitution KTV joint and I think our girlfriends appreciated that). However, that area was more of an American style KTV bar strip with very loud singing going on and seemed to exclusively be patronized (no pun intended) by older married men and their college girlfriends. So after a little while there, we ventured to a pretty cool dance club, though the music was hit and miss.
On the second evening we took the ferry to Hankou (only 2 Yuan a person) to what Fordy was claiming would be a great outdoor restaurant neighborhood with musicians playing for the diners. Well all of that was accurate except he didn't know that the musicians would all be charging at least 30 Yuan per song and that they don't like to take no for an answer, and that there would be dozens of them walking by our table perpetually offering to play a song on some kind of instrument or to sing some songs or both. This would still not be so bad if it wasn't for the other street vendors. Women trying to sell flowers keep coming to the table, putting the flowers in front of our girlfriends and standing there looking sad for at least 10 minutes each and no amount of "bu yao" (don't want!) will make them move. Add to that random people walking around trying to sell cute toys and other people selling Baijo bottles, and this was perhaps the most frustrating dinner ever! But all in all, the trip was a fun experience.
So everyone knows you can buy fake purses and watches in China but the level of fakeness does not stop there. Whenever I buy napkins in a store, I should carefully check to see if the Chinese brand is the real napkin brand or a knockoff of the Chinese napkin brand. If I get the knock off by accident, which looks exactly the same on the package except the color is more faded, then the napkins won't be scented (even though the package claims they are) and they will break apart very easily. There are apparently even fake Ferraris.
Generally whenever you buy anything in China, you should assume it will be "fake". The question is not whether it's fake but how fake it is. There is a whole culture of buying things that you definitely know are fake, it's known as "shanzhai" in Chinese. If you want to save money (and generally everyone does) you will simply move down the ladder fakeness. For example, if you buy a Louis Vuitton purse on the street and you pay 20 Yuan (~$3) for it, then the quality will be very shoddy and it will look terrible. Instead, you could choose to buy the purses that are advertised as having been stolen from container ships coming in from Taiwan, which may very well be "real". You could also find the higher quality knock offs which are found in nicer looking stores or the purses that are really close to being "real" since they are made at the same factories where they make the purses for export to the U.S., except that the purses are made at night and are shipped out the back door of the factory, though unfortunately often bypassing the quality control department.
You can't just look at the price either. There are stores that say Gianni Versace on the door and look very nice and professional inside and they will sell shirts for over 1000 Yuan (~$150) a piece that really appear to be the real thing except they usually fall into pieces after the first wash. It may also be helpful to find out that Versace does not have any authorized stores in China.
In regards to DVDs, you can buy real DVDs at places like Walmart but that's silly since there are plenty of vendors selling copies. They have the new compilation DVDs where they can fit 8-12 movies on one DVD and sell that to you for 5 Yuan (80 cents). Because of the problem of determining which DVD copy will be of a good quality, some companies have emerged, the best being DVD9, DVD19 and HBO. My favorite is HBO, they use the same logo as the movie channel but have absolutely no affiliation. Instead, this HBO merely makes good quality copies of DVDs. The problem happens when other companies fake the fake HBO label and sell you shoddy quality movies.
Well January 21st was my birthday. Even though my girlfriend was still away at her folks still for the holiday, I had a blast. I went out to dinner with Manchester and his girlfriend, Fordy and his girlfriend Tex Mex, Dundee, Canada and my Chinese tutor and another student Xin Xin and her boyfriend. Manchester is another teacher at my college who has been here 5 years and owns a bar (which is actually rather common, I would guess 50% of all foreigner who live in China more than 3 years end up opening or buying into a bar). I would have invited several other students and other peeps as well but all of them are out of town for Spring Festival. We had a pretty good dinner, Manchester and girlfriend had to go to open his bar, but the rest of us headed to the KTV!!! That was a good time all around (involving 4 bottles of vodka, but of course I did not drink; note, my parents read this blog). I think most of us lost our voices by the end of the night. We got to sing some good ole favorites like Country Roads remix and Backstreet's Back (Alright!), which are currently the most famous dance songs in China, since Backstreet Boys are the most popular western group here. Our Chinese friends, who could actually sing, of course embarassed us with their singing ability. Here are some pics.
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.
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.
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...
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!
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.
So I decided to make a list of things I like and dislike about China.
***Things I like***
1. The freedom to drink anywhere you want and as much as you want.
2. The niceness and reasonableness of the police.
3. The beautiful girls.
4. The fact that the beautiful girls find me very handsome.
5. People are very friendly.
6. People are not fat.
7. Everyone loves children. In some countries they are often seen as an annoyance. Here, a baby may cry like crazy on a train and everyone is just happy that the baby is alive.
8. There is no promotion of manly-macho insecurity, i.e. there are no "rules" about what a real man should or should not do.
9. The families are very close. A few examples. Grandparents, since they are retired, view it as their duty to take care of the grandchildren as a help to their children who have jobs to do. A father may have to work two thousand kilometers away and only see his family 3-4 times a year but this will not make his children bitch and moan later about how dad didn't spend enough time with them.
10. No tipping-anywhere, not in restaurants, not for cab drivers, not doormen. Well except the guys that massage your back in nightclubs when you take a piss at the urinal, you're supposed to tip them but if you don't that's ok too. I, for one, no longer use the urinals in night clubs and go for the closed door stall b/c I don't enjoy a back rub while taking a piss, but to each his own.
11. No racial tension.
12. The food. (though I am not a fan of dog meat, silk worm, skorpion, tiger penis, bird puke soup, live monkey brains, bear bile wine, rotten poisonous snake wine, endangered bird dishes, aborted baby soup-no I am not joking, I will discuss this one in another post)
13. The communal eating style in the homes and restaurants. Everything that is ordered is for everyone at the table, so if you have 4 people will probably order about 6 dishes and everyone pulls what they like from each plate into your personal bowl to put on top of the rice. Also, everyone gets as loud as they want and it's all good.
14. The street food vendors--stinky tofu or one of 8 kinds of noodles or corn on the cob or sweet potato or various steamed/boiled/fried dumplings or various pancakes or sugar cane or barbeque of your choice of 15 kinds of meat and seafood--it's all super cheap, anywhere from 17-34 cents an order. There are also meat options but that's not for me.
15. The trains. It's a great train system and really cheap. They are also putting in new lines of fast trains that cost a bit more but are 2-3 times faster. You can get anywhere by train and a sleeper ticket is cheap, you get a (relatively) clean bed and the train is smooth and quiet.
16. No political correctness. This may be the best one. Just say what you want and what you mean. You think someone is fat, tell 'em.
17. It's much easier to talk to people even with the language barrier. There seems to be much less second guessing of what someone means. This is certainly an overgeneralization, but here if someone gives you a compliment, they mean it, if they criticize you, then they just criticize you, they don't need to be sarcastic or beat around the bush about it and secretly harbor resentment.
18. The shops. There are small shops everywhere. It seems that they are approximately 2 small shops for every person in this city. Every street is lined with tiny shops and they all have friendly people with something random for sale. You can pick any street in the city and just walk and look around.
***Things I don't like***
1. The weather in Nanchang. Always hot or cold and often all in one day. But this con doesn't necessarily apply to all of China.
2. The air pollution--at night you can usually only see a few stars, sometimes none. When the pollution is really bad, you can't see any stars during the night or day--and that's really bad, b/c you really hope to see at least 1 star in a 24 hour period--the big one that's in our solar system.
That's all.
So I almost forgot about this aspect of living in China until last night when a neighbor set off fireworks right outside my window that were so loud I was sure someone was shooting off fully automatic weapons outside. They also gave off a ridiculous amount of smoke. In China, you hear fireworks go off about every 2-3 hours-seriously. Fireworks are set off to celebrate moving in somewhere, moving out of somewhere, getting a new job, having a baby, being happy, the night beginning, the day beginning, it being 9 o'clock, etc. My college sets off fireworks at 9pm every night just for fun. The college next door sets off fireworks at 11pm every night. The college across the street sets off fireworks every morning at 6 am!!! And this doesn't include all the students and residents that set off their personal fireworks. I almost don't notice it anymore but apparently when Spring Festival takes place-that's part of the Chinese New Year in late January and February, for the entire ~30 days of Spring Festival, everyone will set off fireworks many times per day and night. Oh and fireworks are illegal here because they could start fires, but of course "illegal" is a flexible term which in this case means completely legal.
So I visited Nanjing with another FT (foreign teacher) last weekend. That's him next to me in one pic. We took a 12 hour overnight train and were able to get a sleeper so that was great. You go to bed on the train, wake up in the morning and you've arrived. Nanjing (literally: "southern capital") is the capital city of Jiansu province and is the former capital of China. It has many historic places though we only had 2 days to spend there so did not get too see many places. We did go to the Japanese Invasion museum, a huge free museum which focuses on the Japanese invasion of Nanjing in 1937, known as the Nanjing Massacre. One pic with a cross shows the front of the museum. Over a period of 6 weeks the Japanese invaders killed about 300,000 Nanjing residents, burned down many parts of Nanjing, raped over 20,000 women, etc. This museum was rough, it's entirely black in color, has the most forboding music and lighting possible and has absolutely grotesque exhibits. There are pictures people being cut up and shot, women being raped and there are some mass graves that have been opened and the decomposed bodies are now on display. All in all, I am not sure I would recommend going to this museum. There are many beautiful places in Nanjing though. There's a huge lake in the middle of the city with many very old buildings and to the east part of town there is a large scenic mountain to climb. The thing I did not like about Nanjing is how many foreigners there are. It's very similar to Beijing, everywhere you go you see at least 1-2 foreigners. There are many foreign stores and restaurants, we went to an Irish pub and there were at least 50 Europeans, Australians and Americans there--I felt like I was not in China. It was cool being able to drink Guiness which was as good as it was in London (better than in the US) and cost about as much as it did in London. We also went to a 50% foreign nightclub and that was pretty cool (see pic), but overall I wasn't digging it. I have gotten used to being the only foreigner everywhere I go, so this was all a little strange. It also seems that when you are around foreigners in China who are large enough in number to have their own community they are more likely to be complaining. That seems to be the main topic of conversation--bitching about China in one way or another: "the Chinese spit on the floor...the Chinese are stupid...the air is bad...the weather is bad...blah blah blah". It's really rather annoying, you gotta wonder why they left their homeland to begin with. I like China so much I definitely couldn't get into the complaining spirit. But overall it was an interesting and fun short trip, and I successfully was able to find the cga card for my computer that I had a tough time finding in Nanchang :-)
So this is a pic of my current pimpin' ride, a Junlu mountain bike. It looks cool and was only 300 Yuan (~$45). It has the special shock absorber which is nice, but of course it's made in China so in the 5 weeks I've had it, it has seen the repair shop 6 times. The pedals both broke off within 2 weeks and had to be replaced, it is now only a 1 speed bike instead of the original 18 speeds because it just won't change gears, the seat had to be replaced, one tire started doing such bad figure 8's that it would no longer spin through the mud catcher thingie, the squeaking got extremely annoying, the chain is now completely rusted, etc. But anyway, I went today looking for scooters and am considering either buying a gas powered scooter or a motorcycle. The prices are rather reasonable--scooters are between 2000-3000 yuan and very nice motorcycles are 4000 (~$550). Some issues I have run into, to drive gas powered vehicles you must get a license plate and have a driver's license. As for the license plate, the way that China is trying to help the environment is by putting in effect a law 3 months ago which states that no one can get any new license plates for an indefinite period of time. The only way to get a license plate is to buy a very old scooter/motorcycle that has a plate and you can use that one. However, I asked the scooter salesman if there is another way and he said of course, the store 2 doors down sells fake license plates for only 10 yuan and I can have any number I like. Problem solved! Regarding the driver's license, a foreigner can only get a driver's license after being in China for at least 1 year. To deal with this annoyance, there are 2 methods. The shop across town sells nice looking fake driver's licenses for 100 yuan but that's not a good idea because fake government identifications can get you in trouble, so he recommends I take the second method. If I see a policeman, either act calm and drive normally and he probably won't notice me in a sea of other scooters (80% of which also have no driver's license and a fake license plate) or try to get away from him which is not hard to do because the police never go very fast because they don't want to endanger the public by chasing someone very fast (an eminently reasonable idea that perhaps should be exported to the U.S.) so I can definitely outrun him. If somehow neither of these ideas works out, then it's still not a problem because then I can just speak English to the cop and he will realize I don't understand anything and just let me go. At absolute worst, there is a 300 yuan fine for having a fake or no license plate and a 300 yuan fine for no driver's license, but usually you can just give the cop 100 yuan cash on the spot to avoid these troubles, but foreigners are almost always let go for free for any violation because the paperwork is very annoying for the police to deal with, plus the foreigner will usually not pay the fine since for some reason (hmm) foreigners never figure out the right place to pay it, and moreover the policeman will lose face for having made China look unfriendly to foreigners.
So I think I finally figured out the drinking traditions in China. The alcohol situation in China is rather different from the States. There is no minimum drinking age. A popular drink is homemade fermented rice wine which can be anywhere from 5%-30% alcohol content and tastes extremely sweet. Families often let their children drink it, but usually they must be at least 6 or 7 years old. Beer usually tastes bad here, there is never draft beer unless you go to Beijing/Shanghai and the local brands of bottled beer only make light beer that tastes kind of like Natty Light, Beast, or Old Pile, but it's still ok. You can really splurge and find some Pabst Blue Ribbon in a few stores though. The real man's drink though is Baijou--see the pic on the left. It's usually at least 50% alcohol and tastes like some kind of odd mix between kerosene, butane and Everclear. There is a couple of FTs here that like it, but most of us kringe at the mere sight of Baijou. There is no way to mix it b/c it will at once overtake the flavor of any mixer and even half a shot will give you a terrible hangover.
Drinking is an important resume builder here. One of my students is allergic to alcohol (he gets red rashes on his body the next day after drinking) and his parents are very worried about his employability and are trying to teach him to drink. Many people routinely inquire as to how many bottles of beer someone can drink. If you say more than 10, you get major respect. If you can't drink, you can't really make it in business here, people will think you have something to hide. The more you drink at a business gathering, and the more loud and obnoxious you get, the better. If you try to get a girl to drink more than one bottle of beer she may say that unfortunately she is not experienced in drinking a lot of beer, she has not had enough training.
Drinking in bars or restaurants is certainly encouraged, as is getting as plastered as possible. Restaurants will not close until you are ready to leave. A place that usually closes at 10pm stayed open for us until 4am one day just b/c we were still enjoying their facilities. If people get rowdy, that's cool too. Some students next to our table had a few too many bottles of beer and started breaking the bottles against the wall. The restaurant owners would come and clean up the mess with a smile.
Drinking and driving is certainly a lot looser here. The general rule is that so long as you don't hit anyone, no one is looking to catch you for drinking and driving, unlike America where the pigs look for trouble/look to create trouble by setting up road blocks and taking similar kinds of measures. If you do get caught drinking and driving here, usually being nice to the cop or giving him a cigarette will settle the matter. If he's a hard ass, you probably gotta give him 100 Yuan, but he will probably give you a ride home as well, so it's like a taxi service.
Here are various pictures from my trip to Fujian Province. In one pic you can see me and my student who was my guide for this trip. Most of these pics are from sites I visited in and out of Fuzhou-the capital city. We climbed up a mountain on the Warrior Trail-called that b/c it's 2500 meters up stairs and definitely wears you out so you can see down to the city below from the pics. The first few temple pictures are from a Buddhist temple at the top of the mountain and the others are from a different temple in Fuzhou. Take a look at the blurred picture of the Indian Buddha. You will see the ancient symbol of protection, aka Swastika, which was later used by Hitler.
There is also a pic of a not-so-clean toilet on the train. 
These are some pictures from Xiamen, the beachfront city in Fujian. One pic where I am next to a big bullet is from the island off the coast of Xiamen where the PRC began its ill-fated attack on Taiwan. There is also a pic of me sitting in front of the monument to Chairman Mao Tse Dong in Xiamen City.
