The blog entry I wrote yesterday didn't go through, for some reason. Don't worry - you didn't miss much. Today's doesn't promise to be much better, as I've been wasting incredible amounts of time so far just looking at random stuff on the Internet - mostly because I'm actually supposed to be doing research. We're supposed to be researching the effect that missionaries had on Chinese education in the late 19th century... I am reading the Drudge Report.
One of the advantages of studying in Harbin (?) is that we are close to the Mongolian border. At least, closer to the Mongolian border than I've ever been so far. As such, yesterday I saw my first Mongolians. For some reason (and this is really kind of dumb), I always envisioned Mongolians as still wearing the clothing favored by Genghis Khan - fur kilts, long spears. I know - this is completely wrong. (but wouldn't it be cool if it were true?) I was kind of disappointed, though, to find that Westernization has even extended into Mongolia - I've always dreamed, for some reason, of Mongolia being the last Wild Frontier - this is probably extremely ethnocentrist and ignorant, but still... White Sox caps? where is there left to go to get away from it all???
In other news, today I finally succeeded in getting a new SIM card for my phone. This was not achieved without some stress, and would never have been possible without my roommate (I really like my roommate). So, our first stop this morning was the campus phone office, home of the Woman I Don't Like. She was actually also very unhelpful to my roommate, so nice to see she's an equal opportunity ignorer. The campus phone office didn't have the cheapest card (which my roommate knew about because she'd helped a friend of hers buy one last weekend) so we headed into town to a bigger China Mobile office in search of the widest selection of SIM cards (buying a SIM card is similar to buying a calling plan in the United States - imagine if there were only Verizon, and they had about 50 different plans with 50 different options, some publicized, some not, and not available in every store. This is really what makes China interesting!) Anyway, about five minutes after we arrived at the store, a shouting match erupted between a woman waiting in line and a security guard. Apparently (this I learned from my roommate), the woman accused the security guard of pushing her down when she was standing in line. I have never seen a grown woman kick a grown man in the shins before - until this afternoon. If I could only have understood what she was saying, I would have learned a lot of new and interesting words. As it was, I could only watch her yell.
When it came to be my turn, my roommate did all the talking. At first, they made a copy of my passport, as every Chinese citizen who wants to get a SIM card has to provide a copy of their official ID (called a Shenfenzheng). Since I don't have a Shenfenzheng, I used my passport instead. This was all fine, until we found out that if you want the cheapest plan (8 kuai a month, or a little over $1.00), you can't use a foreign ID. This seemed unfair to both my roommate and me, until the woman behind the counter offered an alternative - if I paid an extra 20 kuai (a little over $2.50), I wouldn't have to provide any ID at all. I'm not quite sure how this system works, but such is the way with a lot of things in China - if you can't go through the door, go through the window. So, long story short, I have a new cell phone number, and I will post it shortly.
OK - now off to get actual work done (maybe). new contact info to follow shortly.
