home again

This is by far the comfiest I've ever been while posting to this blog. Right now I've got my laptop on my lap, my feet on the coffee table, and a mug of tea within arm's reach. Life is pretty good right now - pretty jet-lagged, but still pretty good. I headed out to Target yesterday to look at all the stuff they've got (amazing!) - where else can you get laundry detergent, a toothbrush, plastic hooks, and season one of Prison Break all in one place? (yes - pirated Michael Scofield made it back through customs, but I thought the picture quality of the "real" version might be better - though I think I'm going to miss the horrible picture quality, random Chinese characters scrolling across the screen, and the random and unexpected volume changes between episodes... or maybe I won't...)

In any case, it's wonderful to be home. My flight back was pretty uneventful, though I really lucked out - we were two hours late taking off from Beijing, and I was totally stressed out about the possibility of missing my connecting flight and having to spend the night at O'Hare, but in a wonderful karmic moment, my connecting flight was also two hours late, so I had plenty of time to read three trashy magazines and wander around the airport in search of food. How to choose between pizza and hot dogs? I actually bought a sandwich in the end, but it was a major dilemma. I had a brief time where I was viewing all the Americans around me as some kind of alien race, but that quickly wore off, and I accepted my status as one of them, for better or worse. As of now, I'm back on the team.

So far, I've driven my car (totally forgot all the clutch points, and almost stalled in the driveway), gotten Dunkin' Donuts coffee (and my two favorite donuts - plain and apple spice, though I haven't been able to bring myself to eat the apple spice one yet - I seem to have lost my taste for gooey apple filling in China, though hopefully it will come back soon). I downloaded all my pictures to my computer, did three loads of laundry (one still needs to go in the dryer), and am starting to get back in touch with my friends (though my cell phone is still in the closet back in my apartment, which hinders communication somewhat, seeing as all my numbers are on it).

So... I survived life in China. I can't think of anything profound to write here right now. I never intended this to become an everyday type blog, where I write about what kind of cereal I had for breakfast, and how bad the traffic was on the way to work. The likelihood of me crossing paths with random chickens in the future has dropped to almost zero. I suppose I'll miss the random craziness of life in China, but when it all comes down to it... it's good to be home.

goodbyeeee!

Just to note one thing: I was up dancing until 4:00 in the morning last night.  I can't remember the last time I did that -- but then again, I very rarely have reason to celebrate that late into the night.  It was a very fun evening -- began with 58 kuai roast duck -- an extreme bargain, given that most places start at 138 kuai.  It was good, too!  We then headed up to the bar district to begin celebrating in earnest.  I now fully support the consumption of roast duck as a pre-party meal, as after drinking a mojito, two vodka shots, a couple other random shots, and shotgunning my first-ever beer, I am still doing fairly ok this morning, apart from the requisite sledgehammer headache.  Also still really tired from all the dancing.  I still can't believe the size of the crowd at the club on a Sunday night -- that, and the quality of the music really puts Beijing in a completely different class from Harbin. 

 

Coming back to Beijing really highlights the differences between the two cities, which goes much deeper than just a superficial sampling of club music.  My friends and I noticed when we took a cab out to dinner last night that the surfaces of the roads are smoother -- better quality paving.  The buildings are newer, and there are a LOT more Westerners here.  I'm going to have to make a concentrated effort when I get to Chicago not to start staring at all the white people. 

 

So... well, this is my last blog entry from China.  I will definitely write something when I get back home, just to recap the trip, and talk about adjusting to being back in the US.  It has most definitely been a wild and crazy time.  I can't even begin to process it all right now -- not only am I pretty tired right now, but I'm also extremely hungry (slept through breakfast), and all I can think of right now is how awesome it will be to sleep in my own bed tonight with the skylight open, the coyotes howling at the moon outside, and everywhere, all around me... home.

 

 

Rumble at the KFC

I swear, part of me is going to miss this place.  I mean, where else can you go to KFC to get a morning coffee and find yourself in the middle of a shouting match between a woman furious because she thinks someone cut her in line, and very apologetic counter people?  I honestly still don't know why she got so upset (people cut in line all the time here -- two guys cut in front of me while I was backing away from the furious woman).  Fortunately, she didn't say anything to me -- I just got sort of a furious glare -- and I got to learn several new words, none of them polite.  The coffee was good, too.

 

I finished watching Prison Break this morning -- you may think that 8:30-10:00 AM is an odd time to watch the last two episodes of season two, but if you think that, then you've never seen the show... it's enough to get you out of bed just so you can see the end.  And in doing so, I've totally abandoned the friends I was watching it with, which I feel kind of bad about, but... I just wanted to see how it ended!  Now I just can't wait for season three... now have one more TV show to watch in addition to Antiques Roadshow.

 

I'm heading out of here now to go back and finish up packing - they're picking up all of our luggage today at 1:15 in order to ship it down to Beijing -- if all goes well, it will be at our hotel on Sunday.  We're heading out of here tomorrow night, and taking the night train down to Beijing, arriving at 6:30 Sunday morning.  We have all day free on Sunday (last chance to explore Beijing), and then I'm flying out of Beijing at 4:00 on Monday afternoon (miraculously arriving in Chicago twenty minutes later... at least according to local time.  I am NOT looking forward to the jet lag...!) 

 

OK - time to get out of here and get home packing -- especially since someone sitting near me just started blasting the Backstreet Boys.  America, I'm coming home!

I'm DONE!!!

Just finished my last final... hooray!  I am now off to go get dinner, and possibly celebrate a bit later on.  Also, watch Prison Break.  We are currently up to episode 17 of season two, and as one of my friends said, "We are going to finish this thing before we leave China."  I was honestly planning on writing more before I got here, but now I just want to head out and run around a bit - I'm done!!!  hooray!  and in three days.... I'M GOING HOME!!!!

Brief Update

I really need to get back to start studying... one oral report tonight (the final word on Chinese intellectual property law!), two exams tomorrow, and then I'm DONE!  I really need to start packing, figure out what else I need to possibly mail... and also start worrying about what I'm going to say on my U.S. customs form when it asks me if I've been exposed to poultry during my time in Asia.  Does tripping over chickens on my way to the computer lab count as possible bird flu exposure?  I say... no!

Through the Wormhole

I escaped from campus last Friday afternoon to go mail packages and do some shopping.  I've come to realize that I have enough stuff here that needs to be shipped home that I am going to have to do it in shifts.  Last Friday was clothing - this afternoon it's going to be books.  Carrying my parka to the post office was a piece of cake - I am NOT looking forward to the dictionary, however!

 

Between writing papers, preparing for exams, and watching the entire first season of Prison Break, it's been a pretty busy weekend.  We've already started watching Season Two (I've managed to get a couple of other people hooked - it's nice to be able to discuss/rationalize the plot holes with others: "WHY, when the capital of Illinois is Springfield, does the governor always seem to be in Chicago?"  "Maybe he has a second home..."  The show is not exactly anchored in reality, but it's great fun to watch, and much more interesting than studying Chinese - sort of the equivalent of all the Mario Kart I played during exam week senior year in college.

 

OK, skip forward in time to the afternoon - it is now six hours later than when I started typing this blog (ran out of time before class), and I just got back from the post office.  I don't know why - I think it's some sort of karmic accident - but the people who work at the Harbin central post office have got to be some of the nicest, most patient people I've met since I've come to China.  I went down there this afternoon with one of my friends, who rolled into the post office with two suitcases full of clothes, books, a random scroll, and a painting, and said, "I want to send this all to the United States."  The guy behind the counter just looked at him, nodded, and went to get an enormous box.  He then adjusted the box, using a utility knife and a lot of tape, when it was discovered that the scroll was too long to fit in the box in its original shape.  The painting was in a glass frame, which turns out is not OK to send in a box like that - it's too easily broken.  Not a problem, as it turns out - we took the painting out of the frame, and the guy said he could throw the frame away for us.  As for my enormous box of books, I'm just keeping my fingers crossed that the postman back home won't have a heart attack when he staggers up to my front door in three months (or whenever it makes it across the ocean on the boat).  I think the best part of the mailing process is the fact that, according to the receipt, my box has a total weight of 15600克。I'm still not sure what that means, but in any case, it's pretty heavy.

 

There is a new coffee shop right next to campus which just opened up, and I headed over this morning to check it out.  It's actually pretty nice - very friendly people, and very real coffee - but the prices were ridiculously exorbitant (at least for China).  They were having a half-off sale as part of their grand opening, but selling a 20 kuai cup of coffee for 10 kuai is still not cheap - at least not for the vast majority of Chinese.  There is a HUGE income gap in China, and nowhere is it more apparent than places like that coffee shop, which shouldn't be exclusive but are, just because of the prices of what they're selling.  It becomes a place not to drink coffee, but to show off your money - a different kind of thirst here.  Saturday night we went out to a restaurant featuring performances of songs from the Cultural Revolution -- and then on the way back to the dorm, passed a guy driving a Porsche.  There are a lot of forces here at work in China, not all of them good, but all of them incredibly dynamic -- it's what makes this place so hard to understand.  I swear, China runs in four dimensions -- maybe to understand the effects of the economic reforms here, you just have to imagine what happens when you put an entire society through a wormhole.  What remains the same, and what changes?  What is thrust 20 years into the future, and what reverts to the way it was 100 years ago?  When you start thinking about how things were during the time of the Cultural Revolution, and how things are now -- it just defies rational explanation -- for how ARE things now, really?

 

ok - too many question marks, and not enough answers.  When I start thinking about all the problems Chinese society is currently facing, it just keeps me up at night -- and when I start thinking about possible solutions, I fall asleep immediately from the sheer impossibility of it all.  Man, I'm leaving in one week (one week!) and sometimes I think that instead of understanding this place more, I'm understanding less and less each day.