Robot Monkeys

It rained constantly today. I was going to go out site seeing, but I didn’t. Today was an utter waste.

Met up with Geng Xiubo. I should have taken my camera, but I decided against it at the last minute. The two of us, and another friend of hers, went out to the Botanical Gardens near Xiangshen. Xiubo’s advisor was having a party for the lab out there today.

Meeting up with Xiubo was a bit of an adventure. The night before we IM, and she tells me to take a cab out to her apartment. No problem. She tells me to show this to the driver:

到青年公寓，在中关村东路上的海淀交通支队附近
过了海淀交通支队向北几百米，看到天桥停车就行

It means something about taking me to a specific pedestrian bridge near the Chinese Academy of Science. She says she’ll meet me there, but I should call her when I arrive. I tell her my phone doesn’t work, so she tells me to show the driver this:

他想借用一下你的手机，给我打电话，让我来告诉你他要去的地方

So go outside, hail a cab and show the driver the first card. No problem. I see the pedestrian bridge, and he (apparently) says something to the effect of “That’s the bridge.” He pulls over at a taxi stand, and I pay him. Then I show him the second card. He just stares at it.

Uh-oh. The cabbie shows it to two male university students that want the cab. They just stare at it as well and hand it back to me. Oh shit. It’s not working.

I get out. I look around and don’t see Xiubo, which I knew wouldn’t be there. I have to stop someone at random on the street and borrow their cell phone. I stand on the bridge for a several minutes trying to figure out a way to avoid this predicament, and to gather up the nerve to borrow a phone from a total stranger on the street. This would be embarrassing enough in an English speaking country, let alone one where I don’t speak the language.

Jackpot! I see another white guy on the street. He’s bearded, balding, and in his mid 40s or early 50s. I go up to him and say in English, “Hey. I can I ask a favor. I’m supposed to me meet my friend here, but she’s not here, and she ask me to call her, and gave me this card so I could borrow someone’s phone since mine doesn’t work here, and it didn’t work when I tried before. Do you have a phone I could borrow? It would only take a second.”

To which he responds in a French accent, “I’m sorry, but I do not have a phone.”

Damn. Eventually, I chose some college guy that was walking alone back from shopping. I try to ask him in what little Mandarin I know, but he just stares at me befuddled. I give up, and show him the card.

Amazingly it worked! He gives me his phone! I have never felt so relieved in my life.

Shit! Pressing the buttons don’t work, and I can’t read the screen! He takes the phone back and dials the number for me. Xiubo answers “Wei?” and after an initial moment of confusion on her part, and a code-switch to English, her and a friend meet me on the bridge. Success!

The three of us grab some warm soy milk and some breakfast jiaozi from a street vendor and then we catch another cab out to the botanical gardens. We spend the day walking around, look at of all things, irises, hostas, zinnias, marigolds, and tulips. Nothing like traveling halfway around the globe, and seeing the exact same plants you grew up with.

In the afternoon we met up with her lab. Technically, I believe it’s the lab that she’s starting in, not the lab that she already was in. Their get-together was in the words of Andrew Leung, “very asian.” A picnic, followed by a game of essentially duck-duck-goose, card games, and some penalty kick soccer. Only a few people spoke to me. Xiubo said it was because most of them were embarrassed to try their English. The ones that tried spoke fine, so I don’t know.

That evening, Xiubo, her friend, her friend’s boyfriend Tianchen, and I go out to a Chinese barbeque joint in the university district. It’s good, but completely different of course. Chicken wings are cooked on bamboo skewers over a flame grill, and rolled in pepper seeds for spice. Xiubo tells me that she’s got an internship at MSR-Redmond at about the same time I do. Awesome. The dinner ends, but of course no one lets me pay, so I tell Xiubo that I’ll buy her dinner when she comes to Seattle, and she agrees.

Xiubo and her friend are tired and head back to their apartments, but Tianchen agrees to show me around. We walk down to Tsinghua and Peiking Universities. He’s an interesting guy. He asks about the US and how we view China. How the China compares to the US, and other things. It was a really good conversation.

Occasionally, you can tell that he grew up in a monoculture. For instance, he believed that all black people spoke poor english and committed crimes, because of what I can only assume is watching their very skewed portrayal in American popular culture. He also made comments about how poor Chinese people are poor because their lazy. The irony of such a social Darwinist idea flourishing, if only superficially, in a socialist country, wasn’t lost on me. Strange. If I got back to Beijing, I’ll definitely have to look him up.

I went exploring a bit today. In fact way more than I intended to. I went out intending to find something to eat, and I got lost. I had sort of a guess of where I was, but I couldn’t find any of the streets on my map.

While I was out wondering around the north and part of Chaoyang (unbeknownst to me at the time, I basically followed Beisihuan lu (”4th Ring Road”) from the north (beisihuan zhonglu) to east (beisihuan donglu)), I noticed a few things.

Beijing is not what I expected. I don’t know what I expected, but this wasn’t it. However, part of my experience so far is exactly what I expected.

The part of Beijing I’m in, is not a walking city. It’s designed all around driving. The city blocks are large, and instead of alleys, there are essentially access roads with guard houses on them. As far as I can tell, the interior of the blocks are apartments, and perhaps a few hotels and businesses located on the first floor of apartment buildings. These blocks are at the same time very dense, since everything is like 15 stories, but the roads force space around each building. It’s kind of like walking in an office park, only with taller buildings and more disorienting.

There aren’t sidewalks. There are bike lanes, access roads. The few sidewalks that do exist are blocked with either piles of brick and sand to finish the sidewalk, or cars. Cars just drive up on the sidewalk and park.

There is construction EVERYWHERE. Every street is having work done to it. Buildings are being erected. I even found some really old single story houses being demolished for a high rise. (I didn’t take a photo of it, because I didn’t bother to bring my camera. I honestly thought I would be gone only a couple of hours. Instead I was gone like five.)

Crosswalks are few and far between. People just wait for a bit of a pause in the traffic and cross the street. It’s jaywalking, but more intense since none of the cars slow down. If you’re lucky, they just wail on the horn.

Everyone wails on the horn. Out my window is a constant cacophony of automobile horns. Its so common, that the access roads have “no horn honking” signs. I haven’t seen any accidents yet, but it’s surprising since no one slows down for anything.

The air is most foul I’ve ever breathed. You can taste it. You can see it. You can see like maybe one and a half city blocks. There’s just a constant grey-yellow haze in the air. You can’t see the sky at all. Cars that have been left on the street a while are covered with a fine yellow dust. My mucus is tinged with black, and I can feel it on my skin and in my hair.

This trip is going to take five years off my life. I can’t imagine running a marathon in this environment. With respect to air quality, Beijing was clearly the worst place to hold the Olympics.

While walking down the street today, two college aged guys came up at random and started to chit chat with me in English as I walked down the street. “Hello.” “Where are you from?” “Are you staying in Beijing?” “How long are you here?” “May I take a picture with you?” I certainly hope they go home and blog about it saying, “Today, I met whitey.”

Andrew would describe Beijing as “very Asian.” There’s really modern building being put up everywhere, and then at the same time some things just seem a bit off. I can’t really describe it.

When I got lost, I ended up stopping and eating at a “P.C. Lee California Beef Noddles King.” Funny. I’ve never heard of him before. Mr Lee’s, is sort of like a KFC, but with noodle bowls. You go in, a girl, maybe high school age, directs you to a table and you order off a picture menu (score!) She places your order by texting the kitchen, and then you pay her. She comes back with your food, and then you leave.

I went into Li Xiansheng, because I was hungry and it was at the intersection of Beisihuan donglu, and some other street that looked major, but I couldn’t identify. (Which brings up another thing. Finding street signs is very difficult. I found one sign in the middle of the block that identified Beisihaun donglu, but nothing at the corners to identify the cross street. Even the subway and bus stations simply have timetables, no maps. I guess you just have to know which street is which.) I asked the waitress if she could point on the map where I was, but she couldn’t. She pawned me off on to some other girl, who also had no idea where she was.

Damn.

Eventually I asked a security guard at one of the nearby access roads for help. He couldn’t/wouldn’t point at the map, but left me with an impression of where I was. He did confirm roughly which part of Beisihuan lu I was on, and which way north was, so it wasn’t a total loss. In all honesty, he was helpful. Thanks to the impression he left me with, I was able to navigate back to my hotel.

The whole experience this afternoon left me realizing just how helpless I am here. In Europe, I could at least order off a menu. Here, I can’t even do that. I have to resort to random guessing. I figure there’s enough common structure to a menu that I can at least avoid ordering, “A 15% gratuity will be added to all parties of 6 or more.” Actually, it’s worse than that. I can only order off of menus I can point to. If the menu is over their heads, I’m screwed. I might be able to mangle a pronunciation of like 1/5 of the characters I need.

It’s bad, and pretty scary.

So I’m sitting at gate 102 at SFO wasting timeuntil I get hungry enough to buy some food with my credit card since I converted all my cash to renmebi, $180 - whatever fee and the crappy 6:1 exchange rate (the actual exchange rate is 7:1). (Yeah airports are ripoffs, but I need the cash immediately in Beijing. Yi said, “anything over seven is good,” but the dollar is so weak, it’s trading at 6.9 so…) My plane is at the gate getting serviced or something. Right next to it another 747 pulled up that’s named the “Spirit of Seattle II.” Kind of makes you wonder what happened to the first “Spirit of Seattle.” Probably nothing, and United is just reusing names; as in the first one is currently boarding in LA or something. It’s more fun to think that first one crashed and this is its replacement.

UPDATE: 10:57 am China Standard – Somewhere over Kampuchea

When I was waiting to board, I ended up sitting next to these two American guys. A 59 year old photographer from San Diego and some mid-30s guy that is a computer parts distributed that outsourced his software to China.

The 59 year old guy was talking about his 29 year old girlfriend in Beijing and how he always goes to China and gets several girls because they’re hawt and easy. Then he commented about how this one asian girl looked at the airport. Don’t get me wrong, she was definitely pretty, and I noticed her before, but his comment creeped me out. Especially how the computer guy went along with the photographer’s stories about going to massage parlors and stuff. It was like that while they differed in degree, they were kindred spirits, and I didn’t want to be associated with either of them.

“Highlights” of the conversation included:

1. Chinese girls don’t know how to open mouth kiss
2. Chinese girls will suck your dick if you’re circumcised

Great. And somehow this guy was confused on why these girls didn’t want immediately marry him.

By sheer coincidence, the photographer is sitting behind me on the plane, telling the American woman sitting next to him about his 29 year old girlfriend, and how he’s had some transplant and is afraid to tell her, and basically thinks he’s going to die soon.

Not soon enough.

Paper got accepted to WWW 2008. That means I’ve got an all expense (well up to $2500 at least) trip to Beijing. w00t!

The best part? The week I submitted it, I had chinese food. My fortune I left in my desk just in case this got in:

You will soon be crossing great waters on a fun vacation.

I’ll have to take Geng Xuibo’s offer to show me around.