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.
