China

One thing I've discovered: Just because you're in a foreign country doesn't make holidays any more interesting. At least when classes were on here, there was something to do, something to make me get out of bed for, get out and about and make me do start moving for the day. Now, there's not really much but lunch. The trouble with not having a lot of money left and an unfortunately extended stay in the country is that I haven't been able to get around and travel until the end of my stay here.

That said, the boredom won't last much longer, as I'm off to Guangzhou in ten days!

And okay, I'm not really bored. Just that most of my activities seem to center around food, which is fine because Chinese food is awesome and probably the thing I will miss most about the country, but it makes me feel a little lazy. I've done a few things, but they're not particularly interesting. I'll let you in on the highlights, because detailing the time I spent five hours watching Battlestar Galactica with Malcolm doesn't really make a good story.

AUSTRALIA DAY 2007!

It doesn't really deserve a big header like this, because it was a pretty standard evening, but I thought I'd highlight it because it was probably the most interesting thing to happen this week. Which isn't really saying a lot about the rest of my week, but that's all right.

Early on in the day, I went into the admin office here at the Chinese language program to pick up my grades (average of 80 all around) and get the low-down on my visa stuff. Mr. Wang said I could just take my stuff in and they'd fix it right up, so I got the address from them, got my pieces of paper together (of course, I hadn't bothered to find a place to photocopy it the day before, but there were plenty of places in the city). So I caught the bus with a Japanese classmate of mine who was going to get some professional photos taken of her because a friend had given her a free pass (they look expensive, usually used for wedding photos), and managed to find my way around to this mysterious place.

Once I'd gotten my photocopies done, filled out my forms, gotten a receipt and everything, I was told that it was too early to put it in! The woman behind the desk told me I could come back later, three days before I left the country (impossible, but I figured I'd explain it there), and fix it up then. So all that trip and worrying for nothing! Even though Mr. Wang said he had called the office up to let them know I was coming in. Oh well!

That evening, celebrations started late. We went to a hot pot restaurant, but we got there a little late so we were waiting around for a long while. As we were waiting, this little toddler kept walking around us with her mother, and after a while, encouragement on both sides, he decided it was all right to wave at us. After that, he wouldn't stop looking at us and waving. It was adorable, and of course I can't resist when babies wave at me, so I was there waving and making faces while everyone else in my group sort of stared at the kid and wondered what it was staring at.

The hot pot was good, as usual, and we found out that beer was included in our fee, so we all had a few beers and were a little tipsy by the time the evening came to a close. We discussed many things, amongst them Australia and the way civilizations seem to evolve and why they all evolve differently (we of course lacked Niki, the anthropologist...), and decided after dinner that playing video games would be a good way to spend the rest of the night. So we got some whiskey and mixers and went back to Sarah's room to play Katamari for what was near to six hours.

So there wasn't a barbecue, warm weather, pool activities, boat races, or fireworks, but at least there was beer?

OTHER THINGS

During this time frame, I:

1) went out with a girl Mr. Wang had introduced me to, named Yvette. I took Malcolm, Sarah, and Luca out with me and we had a great lunch filled with snack-type food, had a walk around the city, and spent hours in an all-you-can-drink tea shop playing Chinese checkers, connect-five, and chess. Made our way home via the large supermarket which lacked any DVDs I was looking for.

2) looked for DVDs for my family. They put in an order the last time we spoke for me to pick up as many Oscar nominated DVDs as possible, so I went on three separate attempts to find as many as I could (I had a short list and got 18/26!), at our local guy, at the Saige Computer City (where Malcolm picked up his repaired camera), and out at Xiaozhai. It was fun to go on a scavenger hunt, and I picked up a few other ones I was looking for along the way.

3) finished Fever Pitch, which was an absolutely great book. It sort of justifies a lot of the obsessions I've had over time, and just little parts of my personality, though maybe it shouldn't, but I've really enjoyed it. It's sort of frustrating, as a young person, to read someone's autobiography like that though, because I keep wondering when I'm going to get that sort of perspective. Maybe I'm just impatient.

4) downloaded lots of music (such good music I will probably buy the CDs when I get back to Australia), played around with my Facebook, and also started watching Battlestar Galactica with Malcolm. These things are known as "time wasters".

5) got my Chinese travel agent friend to get me my ticket to Guangzhou, which was today, and it was a pretty good deal. Y420 (+Y50 fee for him) for a 26 hour train ride on hard sleepers around Chinese New Year? I think that's just about perfect, really. I have to get another ticket on return from Guangzhou (which I wasn't actually expecting to do, but the expense won't be bad), and figure out someone to get my ticket to Shanghai from Steve while I'm away, but that shouldn't be too bad. So, ten days and I'm on my way to Guangzhou and a change of pace!

PLANS FOR THE UPCOMING 10 DAYS

I'd planned a photo scavenger hunt with Malcolm, so we'll probably get going with that next week. It's mostly to beat boredom and get me out and about while I'm still in Xi'an. I've seen a lot of things already and I'm comfortable with a lot of places, but I guess this is like a last-ditch effort to push me out of my comfort zone in a city I feel quite safe in already. We've got challenged for ourselves including: crazy fashion, street food vendors, leftover Christmas decorations, and bridal photo groups. None of these things are difficult to find, of course, but we're going to make sure we don't go to the same old places to find these things. So that should be fun, and it doesn't really matter if we actually get everything on our lists, but at least we'll have gone out and done something.

It's not really my going away, though, because Niki and I will probably have a joint going-away (she is moving to Beijing, hopefully, by March) in the time between my getting back from Guangzhou and leaving for Shanghai, and while Sarah and Luca will be away during that time, they're going to come and potter around Shanghai with me for a day or two. I might do some preparation for leaving, like packing some things I won't need to use, but I'm pretty sure my time wasters will take care of the little free time I will have, and anyway I'll have nearly a week back in Xi'an for last minute things so it's not really important I get all those things done.

And I've just forgotten that I had laundry going, so it's probably done and I should pull it out before I go to dinner!

To bring everyone up to speed, this is basically a quick summary of all the important parts of January, now that we are in our final week of the month. I have less than six weeks left in China, so it is probably a pertinent sort of time to update about the last six weeks.

So I present to you: JANUARY. In no particular order!

EXAM WEEK AT JIAOTONG UNIVERSITY

There is the strangest phenomenon here at Jiaotong University Chinese Language Program, and that is that a large portion of students seem to attend the classes up until the time of the HSK (Chinese Proficiency Test), and then they start dropping off like flies. Personally, I had suffered a mid-semester/December lull period in my attendance, but it seems that everyone else managed to keep steady through that time because they weren't going to stay through January.

Which meant that I, having made a personal promise to myself to attend each and every class in January (which I kept!), was the only student in class at times. Especially for the first classes of the day, I was the only one there for the first hour, or two hours. Usually someone would turn up for the last two hour period of classes, but often I was there alone for an extended period of time, and it sort of ruined class for me because teaching to one student? Boring for both myself and the teacher, so we more often than not just ended up talking about random things. I found I'm best at talking about myself, which I suppose isn't surprising, but it's easier to talk about what I know rather than prescribed topics, which is what trips me up so much in class.

I learned lots of interesting vocabulary (science fiction, androgynous, political party - not all from the same conversation!), and had lots of interesting conversations (well, the vocab tells you the stories!), but it was all sort of useless for the exams. The exams weren't terribly pressing. I took two of them the week before the official Exam Week - for my Reading Comprehension class and my Writing class. I got an 80 and 88, respectively, but I haven't received my grades back from my other exams.

The thing about exams was that there was only one I could really study for, because Listening and Speaking weren't the sort of exams you could study for. Speaking we didn't even get our topic until that day, so we couldn't prepare, which was unfortunate because it was a topic I had no idea how to answer and found myself flailing and incredibly under the seven minutes we were supposed to discuss gender equality in our countries. Honestly, even if I were speaking in English I couldn't fill seven minutes on that topic! I have no experience with it, no examples to make, and it was sort of disappointing, but at least my teacher knew that I could actually talk about things. My listening exam went well enough - though it got harder and harder as the exam went on, which was unfortunate. There was also one part that talked about robots and I think the word for robot (which is particularly alliterative) will be stuck in my memory forever.

The other exam that I could study for went well, too. I didn't get everything, but there was a lot of material to study and it was difficult to shove it all back into my brain. It helped that we had been tested on each of the sections, though, because at least I had the experience of studying and preparing the lessons before, so it was more just refreshing my memory. Of course, it didn't work entirely well and I still forgot things (even things I knew I had studied - very frustrating!) but that's what happens in exams. Also, I had gotten a slight case of food poisoning the evening before and literally lost my lunch, so I lay some blame off onto that.

But otherwise, classes and exams were worthwhile and not too stressful, and now my semester is officially over! SCHOOL'S OUT, WOO!

CBA BASKETBALL GAME: SHAANXI VS. BEIJING

Ardan had always expressed a desire to go to a basketball game, but it was the other German on the fourth floor that finally propelled us to go. Sarah, Luca, Andreas and I went to dinner at the noodle place (of sheep-gutting fame) for dinner, and he suggested we catch a game. None of us could think of any reason not to, so we found out where the tickets were being sold and, for Y30 (AUD$5) we got a pretty good seat to watch the game!

The game started with standing for the national anthem. No hands over hearts or anything, and there were only a couple of people in the whole crowd mouthing or singing along, but I have to say it was very difficult for me not to join in. I learned the words to the Chinese national anthem last time I was in China, and the words and tune have stuck with me, so hearing it I just wanted to sing out loud, but I thought that might attract a bit of attention (not like nobody noticed the four white kids in the audience, but they weren't particularly bothered as long as we cheered for the home team), so I staved off the desire.

The match was Shaanxi vs. Beijing, and our team was not particularly proficient and lost by about ten points, but the experience was still lots of fun. The sponsors of the game (Hans beer and a Chinese sports clothes brand that is only defined by a Nike-like swoosh) handed out these inflatable sticks that everyone used to clap and make noise with, which helped with the clapping and whooping throughout the game. I didn't realize how fast a basketball game moves, because they have 24 seconds to get the ball in, which makes sure that everything moves really quickly and it was definitely action-packed! Or at least, felt like it was action-packed.

The best part of the game was, however, the cheerleaders. There were the typical pretty little girls in few clothing (the venue wasn't heated though so after half time they took to wearing big yellow coats, taking them off for the dancing bits), but there were also these fat dudes who also danced with the cheerleaders. It was definitely a funny sight, I guess the fat guys were the comic relief, the shout out to the common man in the audience, but it was hilarious, and we got plenty of photos which are up on Flickr now (after things finally decided they could be uploaded).

KARIM'S BIRTHDAY PARTY

Karim is one of the French guys in the large tapestry of foreigners here at Jiaotong University, and he's been at both of Niki's parties so we sort of used her invite to get into a party at Building 7 for his birthday. We brought plenty of alcohol and snacks, and he seemed to be very welcoming so it wasn't so much stealing her invite as just adding merriment to the party. (I say we used Niki's invite because she didn't turn up until about an hour later, but I usually have no way of gauging whether people will be welcoming or think we're crashing.)

It was a regular sort of party, though of course there was an interlude nearing midnight for present-giving and many renditions of Happy Birthday in different languages (English first, French, Chinese, I think someone tried for Spanish too...), which was more than amusing. Karim got a pair of Beijing masks from another French friend of his who had recently moved to Beijing from Xi'an, and he had lots of fun trying to scare people with the masks (I think he succeeded with a few people).

We adjourned after a while to a club in the city, which of course was yet another disaster of logistics, but we all made it there in the end, about twenty people or more, I'd say. We all put our coats in the same coat check, which was just about the most hilarious thing ever, both for the moment we handed them over and had to retrieve them. Handing them over just had the coat check window as a big pile of coats and bags, and retrieving them involved leaning through the window and directing the poor woman to the coats and bags we could see were ours.

The club was lots of fun, they played a good mix of Chinese and Western music, and at one point we made a foreigner's congo line around the bar. There were lots of people by that point (I figure we picked more up at the club), and we almost had it entirely circling the bar, but it dissolved after two rounds. Otherwise, it was just lots of fun dancing with everyone to great music! There was a little platform and everyone (except for me, of course) had a try up there, which was really funny, but after a while we all got sort of tired and just wandered out. The trouble with clubs is it's hard to say goodbye.

After retrieving our coats we found Felix and Basil outside eating soup and steamed buns, so we chatted to them for a bit before deciding that it was a good idea to get some soup and steamed buns for ourselves, so we did that, sat outside in the freezing cold and ate our late night food and drank bottles of water. Much better than kebabs, any day!

DINNER WITH TEACHERS

The teachers at the English school I teach at have been so friendly to me over the time I've been there, as they're all about the same age as me, and I have been out with one of the teachers twice in the last week. Her English name is Marbrain, and I have no clue where she got that name, but it's easier for her to use her English name at work because there is another teacher with almost her exact name (the second character is different but even the tones on that are the same).

So on the Friday of exam week, I went with her to one of her student's house to make dumplings and have dinner. The kids (Sunny, Sunny 2, and Fei - the latter of which is not an English name, obviously) were very enthusiastic, using all the English they knew to make me feel welcome and ask me all the questions they could think of - my favorite food, animal, sport, etc. I was shown around the house, made comment on the fact I had been watching kids' TV for the last week (and the TV stayed on the kids' channel all night), and managed to use my well-reviewed polite words to give a gift of fruit and nuts to the mother. I'm not sure where the father was, but he was not there for the evening.

It was really fun! Marbrain and I put together the dumplings and then the mother cooked them while we talked to the kids about the cartoons on the television (and of course, the one I don't really quite get came on and I had to admit I had no clue what it was about). Dinner was good, the kids ran off after a few dumplings and I talked with Marbrain and the mother in Chinese and English, alternating with what I wanted to say and how drunk I was getting.

See, the mother offered me some "alcohol", right? And I was like, yes of course I can drink alcohol! Not knowing that I was getting myself in for Baijiu, which is just about the most foul alcohol ever. The particular sample I got was 56% alcohol and we each drank a little shot glass of it (well, Marbrain gave me some of hers because she had to teach in the next hour), and of course I had to drink it, cheers and all, because it was the polite thing to do, but Biajiu is definitely not the sort of thing I'd choose to drink. Ever.

Then this week on Monday I went to Marbrain's house and we made hot pot together. We went for a walk around the city first - she wanted to show me somewhere I hadn't been before, which was nice but I just don't know the names of any of the places I have ever been! So it came to pass that I had been there before, a few times, but that was all right. We walked and talked and it was lots of fun. For the curious, I talk with her half in Chinese and half in English. Sometimes it's easier to say thing in one language as opposed to the other, so it can change easily, but it's good because she mostly speaks to me in Chinese but she knows how to translate if I don't quite get it.

Then we caught the bus to the supermarket near her house, took nearly an hour to buy all the ingredients for hot pot (lots of vegetables and thinly-sliced meat, basically) and some fruit and yoghurt for snacks. Making hot pot was lots of fun; mostly consisted of cleaning and chopping up all the vegetables, and of course the hot pot itself is really easy to make - just boil up some water and put whatever you want into it! I'll have to do it when I get back to Australia, because it's piss-easy! Just need some way to keep a pot of water boiling on the table....

ANDREAS' FAREWELL

Andreas' farewell proceeded much as Ardan's did, actually. We started out at the Korean restaurant (mainly because nobody had any better ideas and it was the only solid suggestion we had), our party comprised of myself, Andreas, Malcolm, Sarah, Luca, and a Japanese guy whose name I've forgotten but who used to be Malcolm's roommate and is a very sweet guy and remembers all of our names even if we can't remember his (Andreas was calling him Kyoto). After Korean food we walked to the bowling place (after the taxi fiasco last time, we figured it was better to go the way we knew), drinking large hot bubble milk teas and talking about random things (an amusing point: Malcolm, Andreas and I argued for a moment about the time difference between China and Japan before we realized... there was a Japanese guy with us; also we talked about aliens finding Earth).

Bowling was fun as usual, I had a spectacular second game with 127 points! I took a photo of the scorecard, just so that nobody would think I was just making it up. Then we proceeded to KTV, karaoke, where I started looking at the English music choices from the other direction so we had plenty of new music. I'm not really sure, of course, what we're going to do next time, because we may have used up all the good English songs, but I guess we'll see. I am really enthusiastic about karaoke, which is more than slightly embarrassing, and there are some videos that Luca took with my own camera to prove it: there are stirring duets of me with Sarah and Andreas singing NSync and Michael Jackson, respectively. But you are never seeing them.

From KTV we adjourned after getting really confused about how much we needed to pay (I think the dude was trying to tell us we needed to buy the room for the rest of the night, but if Malcolm couldn't tell and he was sober, I had no chance of knowing), went back into the cool night and caught taxis to the Jazz Club. I may not have mentioned the Jazz Club, but I went there once before with Niki, Ardan, Sarah, and Luca after going to the Indian place and we met up with lots of kids from the Languages University, including another Belgian and and Australian from Cronulla (which upped my ocker accent by about ten notches).

This time, we got there after any hope of a live band, and there were only a couple of groups left in the bar. We played darts for a while, which is always fun with really drunk people because their scores are only ever as good as their eyesight, but thankfully there were no injuries. We moved onto pool quickly, though, after I had determined that it was, indeed, pool and not billiards (there was some confusion), and my team (Andreas, Malcolm and I) got absolutely trounced, though somehow I managed to get two balls in the pockets, so I was very happy with that, given my alcohol levels. Throw in some popcorn and very bored looking staff after everyone had left but us, and you have our stint at the Jazz Club.

Then we went to our favorite late-night city drunk food place, 烤肉 (meat sticks) in the Muslim quarter. We walked there, taking our time and I took some random pictures, we got a timed-camera snap of us all with the Bell Tower lit up in the background, and it was definitely time for food by the time we got there. I don't know how many meat sticks there were, but we got bread and rice too.

I was up till 5AM digesting it all (and the Tim Tam Slam that Andreas made me teach him how to do once we got back to the dormitory).

OTHER STUFF

During this time frame:

1) Participated in teachers' meetings which included: introducing Australian money, talking about my childhood and where I live in Australia now, taking part in some Chinese word games and answering lots of difficult grammar questions (as per usual).

2) Discovered my favorite Chinese TV show, which is called "Home With Kids" (家有儿女), and it's really great! I mean, it's just a silly television show about a family and their kids, but I find it interesting on a societal level as well. The thing is that it is touted as "an ideal family", in the ads for it, but the family has three kids. Obviously, to have an interesting show you need more than just a typical one-child family, so this one is comprised of a perfectly legitimate three-child family. How is this possible, with the one-child policy? Both parents were married before and brought in one child, and then bore their own. One of the children gets to see his other father, but in my time of watching I haven't seen the other mother.
It's also interesting because the father seems to sometimes work at home, taking care of the kids while the mother is at work as a nurse. The other parts are just obvious Chinese customs making themselves known: the kids are left alone if nobody is at home, the grandparents are very involved in their lives, two of the children are boys with an older sister. But for the most part it's just a regular show, of course: the kids fight, try and get back at each other, the parents have trouble controlling them and knowing how to punish them, the grandparents think they know best of all.... I really like it and wish I could find it on DVD but they're only on episode 17, so I don't think I'll be successful.

3) Played a lot of Katamari on PS2, which Luca has set up in Sarah's room. So much fun!

And so that's up to today! A very condensed version, of course, there are way more details than I have put here, but I'm sure this is enough to digest for now.

That's all for now; I promise not to leave it so long next time!

So I have been putting off updating for a while because for about a week or so just after Christmas the internet went down due to an earthquake off the southern tip of Taiwan that just cut off China to most of the world. National websites and some other Asian websites were still accessible, but for the period between Christmas and New Years, I could only access Google, which handily has a station in China now. Thank god!

Anyway, then I got lazy and now it's nearly February, but here's my entry about Christmas and New Years, as summed up from my paper diary. Still to come: a basketball game, exam week, dinners with teachers from the English school, and another farewell to a German friend!

CHRISTMAS 2006!

We had a Christmas eve party at Niki's house, which was awesome loads of fun. I had been sick in bed the day before with food poisoning (my verdict on the culprit: dumplings from the night before, even though nobody else I ate with got sick), so it was a slow start for me, but I was feeling fine and the food was great and the company was even better, so it was all good! Twenty people turned up and I had orgnized some international Christmas music while Niki and Malcolm ordered a cake from Holliland cake shop (with the most massive dragon on it!) so it was all in all a great atmosphere.

The best part of the party was, however, the Secret Santa we put together! The way we organized it was that everyone would buy something random and non-gendered and at the party we brought them all together and then pulled names out of a hat. The name you pulled out was the person whose present you received and then that person got to pull a name out of the hat. It worked out really well, too! I'm sure most people thought about their presents like I did mine: that it was just something random and off-handed they didn't think too much about, but in the end it turns out that most people are really sweet and thoughtful and buy awesome presents even when they didn't know who it was going to!

There were some great gifts: Chinese "Monopoly" (in quotations because it was unofficial), cookies, chocolate, DVDs, incense, slippers and earmuffs, and metal puzzles. The metal puzzles were a big hit with everyone, and soon everyone was walking around trying to get metal puzzles apart and put them back together. Malcolm has some really funny photos I have yet to get from him (and his camera is broken for now so it'll be a while yet) of just about everyone at the party trying their hand at the puzzle. Somewhere after 10pm, once everyone had finally turned up and had some beer, we headed back out again to a club for some evening festivities.

It was a minor hassle getting 20+ people into taxis that would all end up at the same place, but we managed it, with a bit of a walk, and it was fun to see all the Chinese people celebrating as well. The city was absolutely buzzing with people, families and twenty-something partygoers alike, wearing Santa hats (some flashing, some with braids), waving neon things and noisemakers, firing off firecrackers, carrying sparklers. It was really interesting to note the difference between the way the Chinese celebrate and Westerners. I mean, we have out big parties with noise, but Christmas is... perhaps not a somber sort of holiday, but the idea is that you stay inside with your family and sing carols and keep to yourselves for the celebration. Chinese people get out there, walk around, and make lots of noise!

The club was your general nightclub fare, but it had a really amusing countdown to Christmas, sort of like at New Years. Nearing midnight, they had a singer up on a main platform near the dance floor, so Andreas dragged me down from our spot to watch his performance. Straight afterwards, the strangest thing happened. "Edelweiss" started playing over the loudspeakers, and about ten Chinese girls wearing long red dresses and carrying candles on their palms moved up onto the platform. They did a sort of slow dance to the song, waving the candles about, and then promptly stopped and a countdown from ten started. Firecrackers and sparklers went off at the end of the countdown, along with a loud techno version of Chinese "Jingle Bells" (which goes 'ding ding dang! ding ding dang!...' instead of jingle bells). It felt so much like New Years that Andreas decided a hug and a prompt "Happy Christmas" was in order.

Christmas day was great, I spent most of it on the phone with my parents, lounging around on the floor of my room (which I made more comfortable by spreading out my bed cover) and looking at my presents. One of them was the first season of the Jeeves and Wooster television series, which I promptly watched three of that evening. Other than a milk package unfortunately spilling all over my jeans, nothing else eventful happened on that day - definitely a nice, relaxing day after the Christmas eve party!

NEW YEARS

For New Years, we all gathered at Niki's place after coming from various things of our own for the evening. Niki had been stolen by her work for a mandatory celebration dinner (sounds like fun, no?), and Sarah and Luca were off doing their own thing, Andreas was spending the time in Xianyang county at a wedding party, and Malcolm and I went to the Indian restaurant near the Big Goose Pagoda (and ate way too much). With the exception of Andreas, of course, we all came together at Niki's house at around 10pm, along with a Kiwi friend of Niki's from work and her Chinese friend, and some beer, vodka, and a couple of hours later we rang in the New Year!

No resolutions, which was good, but at midnight we made New Years wishes. Mine were fairly tame: I wished to graduate, to travel around Australia more, and to continue with my Chinese studies even while I'm not at an institution studying it. Wishes sounded like a better idea than resolutions anyway, because there is always the chance that you'll break your resolutions, but it doesn't seem so bad if you just sort of don't get your wish, right? Maybe that's the wrong way of thinking about it, but resolutions always sounded so final to me, irreversible and sort of scary! Plus, whoever really keeps them? It's just upsetting in the end.

Niki headed out with her Kiwi friend after that, went to a club and the rest of our night at Niki's place was spent drinking and talking. Nothing in particular, of course, just random things and when there is enough alcohol you tend to forget things anyway; on New Years Day I tried to tell the a story about a cooking show I had watched earlier on New Years' Eve, but they stopped me halfway through and had to tell me I'd already told the story. This, of course, was the day after I had fallen asleep in the bathroom while the other were watching Queen of the Damned, after Niki had gotten back.

It was a fun evening though, despite being made fun of for falling asleep in the bathroom, and we all woke up after noon the next day as Malcolm cleaned up our mess (he is somewhat known for it, as he doesn't drink and always seems to be the one cleaning up drunk people's messes) and ate lunch at around three in the afternoon at the local North East cuisine restaurant - yum!

OTHER THINGS

During this time frame:

1) The first snow of the season came! I was attending class, and it lasted for about an hour in the morning. Nothing too spectacular, but it was the first (and only) snow I have seen in Xi'an, which is cause for happiness! I tried to take a video of it, but it was really so pathetic a snowfall that there doesn't seem to be anything on the screen!

2) We had a big party for all the foreigners at Jiaotong University, which really amounts for quite a few. We took up almost an entire hot pot restaurant, which was spectacular, and it was loads of fun! Not only were there the Chinese language students, but there is a big portion of foreigners studying regular undergraduate courses at the university - lots of courses are taught using English textbooks - so it was really an amazing turnout. Plus, who doesn't like to turn up for free hot pot and alcohol?

3) I saw a sheep being gutted on the side of the road one of the days as well, just after I'd eaten lunch with a Korean classmate of mine. It was lying on the ground, split open, and someone was just pulling bits out with his bare hands. Rather impressive! We stood around and watched for a while, and I have to admit to finding it quite fascinating, but it hasn't put me off my mutton so I'm thankful for that. It was being done just out front of our local noodle shop, and all I have to say is... well, at least we know the ingredients are fresh?

In the interest of not making each post too long, I will leave this one here and just continue on with the stories mentioned at the fore of this entry in another!

All right, I'm going to do this before it all falls out of my head (as these things are wont to do), AND I'm even being smart and writing it out in Text Edit before I put onto Travellerspoint - somehow, every single time I manage to write out a big long involved post about something, TP stops saving it after I've been at it for maybe twenty minutes, and then it stalls my computer an hour after that. Last time it took me two hours to talk down Firefox from its ledge and salvage my entry, and that isn't even an overstatement!

So, let's start with the beginning, shall we?

THE BELL & DRUM TOWER TOUR

One of my good friends here, Ardan (who features in many party photos and was known to me, before I knew his name, as "the German looking for a party"), recently left Xi'an, and so this tour of the Bell and Drum Towers was to officially complete his sight-seeing tour of Xi'an, and clamber around the most prominent image of the city of Xi'an (the Bell Tower) and it's lesser-known cousin (the Drum Tower). To tell the truth, this wasn't anything very interesting. I have been to both before (I wonder if there's anywhere in Xi'an I won't go for the second time), and they are really both excuses to charge Y20 entrance fee and have a look around at the city from a different (and, admittedly, better) vantage point. They're nice buildings, old dynasty-style stuff, and they have moved some interesting artifacts into the buildings from the museum; when I went there five years ago they were just empty halls, as they must have once been, but they now house performance areas and are jam-packed with your average Chinese artifacts and relics.

The great part about this trip was, of course, the company. I went with Ardan, and the other German I know who isn't studying Chinese, Andreas. We had a good lunch before we left, at the street across from the South gate of the university, some delicious noodle soup, and we discussed Germany for a while. I had no idea, before talking to them, that Andreas was born in East Germany and Ardan in West Germany, so when I innocently asked the question about the Berlin Wall coming down, I didn't really expect a rather balanced debate. It didn't get nasty, of course, they're both level-headed guys and took the whole thing philosophically, but it was interesting to hear all about the different perceptions of the unification. We then, later, discussed 9/11 and the aftermath of all that, and it was interesting that we talked about the stories of Where We Were When... for the World Trade Center bombings, but not for the demolition of the Berlin Wall (which they both must remember; Ardan was 10, and Andreas was 9 at the time).

We also saw lots of the Christmas decorations and promotions that were going on around the city. There are two major shopping centers in the middle of the city - Ginwa (expensive), and Kaiyuan (still expensive by Chinese standards, but not as high-profile/designer as Ginwa) - and they both had huge Christmas trees on display at their centers. Most places here in Xi'an also have decorated up their windows, and put their staff in Santa hats, but it all still feels different. Not as serious, I suppose. Which is strange, because for the most part I don't really enjoy the earnestness that some people seem to have about Christmas - the seriousness of the religious holiday or the activist mentality railing against consumerism, or even the increased charity awareness - I just like my Christmas to be fun, silly, and full of happiness. But Christmas here in China seems to be just about decorating things for the sake of it. Another cultural cross-dressing that... you know, it looks okay from the outside, but when you look closer, there's something not quite right about it.

ARDAN'S FAREWELL PARTY

About a month ago, I introduced Ardan to a Korean restaurant just outside of the university's South-east gate. Before then, he had mainly been eating at the university cafeteria which, while it isn't terrible food, isn't the best around, either. After taking him there for the first time, he said he dreamed about it and often waxed poetic about the food, especially the sushi, even when we weren't there. So it was fitting that we started off our farewell celebrations at the Korean place. Attending dinner was Ardan, Niki, Sarah, Luca, Andreas, Malcolm, and myself, and we were probably the largest party to go to the Korean place since we took Sam there. It was loads of fun, Andreas and I kept a whole plate of pork chop to ourselves, we teased each other, and took photos on Ardan's camera with his little tripod. Mum also texted during the meal, once or twice and finally to say goodnight and she hoped that Ardan had a safe flight home. Andreas pointed out that it was possibly the most international message you could ever get: here he was, in a Korean restaurant in China, getting a text message from Australia wishing him a good flight home to Germany.

From the Korean restaurant we lost Niki (she was tired and needed to sleep after her weekend of teaching), but she pointed us in the direction of a bowling hall. The VERY general direction of a bowling hall, and the taxis we took had no clue, we had no clue, and the whole escapade resulted in us walking around very confused, Andreas asking random people where the bowling hall was (once he asked a girl our age, but her boyfriend snatched her away before she could answer, looking very angry. Andreas isn't that scary!), and we had almost given up hope and gone to a karaoke bar when the guard downstairs at the KTV told us where to go. We finally found the place, put our bowling shoes on, and played two games! We were split up into two teams on two lanes: me, Malcolm, and Andreas; and Ardan, Sarah, and Luca. On the second round we gave ourselves funny names - I was Miss Marple, Malcolm was Hercules Poirot, and Andreas was Sherlock Holmes. The lanes were a bit screwy though, and kept stealing balls or knocking over pins or turning off altogether, and at the end of our second set, the lane I was playing on didn't wait for play, but just kept resetting as though the player hadn't scored at all. By the end of it, we were fed up with the lanes, and everyone seemed to be gone (it was about 10:30 or so by this point, I guess), so we headed out back to the karaoke bar.

The karaoke bar wasn't actually a bar, it was a KTV, which is like the MTV I described back in the Taiwan entries. You get a room, a TV, and a machine for your karaoke purposes, and you belt it out in the privacy of your own friends and acquaintances, which means no nasty public embarrassment. Just semi-private embarrassment. It was great, although the room was ridiculously hot and we couldn't seem to get the thermostat to turn down, so all the photos of me are awful, I look like a tomato (it doesn't help we had been drinking beer since the bowling - this probably explained my 39/44 score, but I doubt it); but it was still loads of fun. I managed to figure out the machine and worked it the whole time, picking out some good songs and some not-so good ones, but most of them were so popular I was safe: some ABBA, The Beatles, Michael Jackson, Simon & Garfunkel... it was good. But I don't think we can go back, because I think I picked out all the good ones, haha.

After that, it was about midnight, and we weren't really tired and couldn't really call it a night, so we made our way to 1+1 and recreated the end of Jon's farewell party. We hung out at 1+1 for a few hours (the first of which was practically taken up by trying to figure out the drinks orders), dancing and having fun and talking over the speakers we were sitting under, and there was an ice fight, and drinking with some Chinese men (not too much - they were pretty crazy and moved on from us when we showed ourselves to be wimps), and fun was had by, I believe, all of us. Conversation is difficult at a club, and I didn't dance much, but it was fun just to watch and hang out - I like to people watch at 1+1 as much as I like to dance; probably more.

From there, we made our way outside, to be harassed by flower vendors, get our photos taken by the security outside the club, and walked all the way from 1+1 to the Muslim quarter, which we knew had places open 24-hours. It was about 4AM and we ordered 100 sticks of 烤肉, which are meat sticks (we got lamb but you can also get cow's stomach and other such delicacies), three spicy fried rices, and two large fried bread rounds. If you can think of a more awesome after-drinking meal than that (and yes, the six of us did finish all 100 sticks of meat), I will be surprised!

It was strange, though, because Ardan didn't really leave the dorm until Tuesday evening, when we (me, Andreas, and Malcolm) hung around in his room looking at his photos, talking about leaving and other interesting things, and eating pfeffernüssen. Then we walked him to a taxi, officially said goodbye, and that was it. Though... he had to hang around the airport overnight, because his plane didn't leave until 6AM. So a little more than 24 hours after we got home from the going-away party, Ardan was finally gone.

(Yes, he returned safely, though he had to relocate to a hotel because the Xi'an airport closes overnight.)

乾县 QIANXIAN COUNTY VISIT

Qianxian is a county two hours northwest of Xi'an, and my visit there was two-fold. First of all, the school that I work for invited me out to visit the tomb of Wu Zetian, the first empress of China. Secondly, they had organized a Christmas party which would be like a larger version of the Christmas event I did at the regular school here.

The first point was easy enough. Touring is something I do well and, like everything else in Xi'an, I had been to the tomb of Wu Zetian as well. Unfortunately with Chinese tombs, they don't seem to be open. You hear about the opened tombs in Egypt, all the artifacts they got and the history they gleaned from the pyramids and all, but the Chinese have been very hesitant to open their great emperors' tombs, and I have to say that's the way I like it. I'm sure I've said it before, about the First Emperor Qin's tomb, but I continue to believe that it's a smart decision on the Chinese government's part to keep these tombs closed until science has a way of preserving everything within it as it is excavated. Of course, that might just leave everything closed for years and years, people being scared of ruining things, but I still think it's best to leave things were they are. I only say that it's unfortunate they haven't opened it because when you visit, it's not really that interesting. You go to this site, see a mountain, see some statues all around them, and that's about it. Wu Zetian had some foreign envoys guarding her, a path over 2km long leading up to the mountain, two rows of guards - one representing military and the other culture - horses and their groomsmen, and two other hills about a kilometer away representing her breasts. There was a wordless epitaph stone, lions guarding the gates, and big stone constructs leading up to the tomb itself. So, it was interesting, and a spectacular view in the bright, blue skies and sunny day in the countryside, but there wasn't really much to see.

The second part of the visit was much more amusing. Basically what we were doing was helping to promote the Qianxian county branch of the school that I work for. There was another foreigner, a man of nearly seventy from Texas who is in Xi'an pursuing a relationship with a 45 year-old Chinese woman (I would make some awfully stereotypical comments, but Bill doesn't really seem that bad, or lonely, or anything you think of in the case of the older man/younger woman dynamic, and neither does she seem like a gold-digger or visa-hunter. But I digress), and we were both there to help give an air of authenticity, I think, to the organization. The Wednesday before, we had all put together a party, playing games and singing songs, teaching words and being silly having fun, and then this Wednesday, we put it on as a party for the children who attended.

Now, in reality, the party went well, though my performance was about as good as during the last Christmas event; it was more structured and was more interesting, involved the kids better and taught them the words in a fun and engaging way. It was better that they had a translation after we talked about Christmas, and that was fantastic. There was only one problem.

In a room less than the size of a basketball court, we had crammed 300 children, their parents, and we still had to make room for ten teachers and the activities we had planned. It worked out all right, though it was definitely more than a fire hazard as everyone welled up near the only entrance/exit to the building. The kids were deafeningly loud (they were having fun, I guess, and it would have been worse to get silence from a room of 300 kids), I couldn't scream over the top of them to save my life, and at the end of the party when we wound down into a game of London Bridge, everyone started to surge forward and the space in the middle was dangerously pinched. Once the festivities were over, the children sprayed two of the Chinese teachers with fake snow and silly string, mobbing them in the middle of the room and, once all the freon had been released into the room (with closed windows because it was too cold), they surged on Bill and me, trying to shake our hands and say Merry Christmas. That was all well and good, until Bill mistook one of the teachers' motions for the children to move as a sign to bring out the plastic bag of candy. All I have to say is I'm glad I have a little sister, because I would never have been able to wrestle away and hide the big plastic bag from the ravenous crowd otherwise.

Dazed and shaken, everyone took about an hour to wind down from the activities, drank some tea, cooled off (it was freezing before the children came in, but the activity and 300 little mouths breathing helped that), and packed up. We had dinner in the city, I was driven home with two of the teachers (Zhang Jing and Miss Hu) by the very abiding bus driver, and by the time I got back to my room, I had been out for a grand total of 13 hours. What a day!

I won't link pictures (I don't have any from the Christmas party yet, though I hope to get some from the headmaster next week), but they're all up over at Flickr, so take a look!

Next up on the social calendar: Christmas Eve party at Niki's! Which, I must say, promises to be eventful.

JON'S FAREWELL PARTY: Sunday 10 December 2006

I'm not sure how much I've mentioned Jon. In this blog, probably not very much, and I believe I've been calling him John with an h, because I didn't know until he gave me his email address that it lacked an h, so I suppose he needs a bit of an introduction before we say goodbye to him.

Jon's an American guy from Brooklyn, a philosophy major at American University. He's studied Chinese for two years at college and before he left he had been here for coming up on a year. He is a phenomenal Chinese speaker. He's just one of those people that's really outgoing, has no fears about saying the wrong thing, and I don't know how but he has an amazing vocabulary recall and seems to learn even the most obscure vocabulary words. He's in my class at school and, obviously, he's a pretty popular kid; he's just got one of those laid-back personalities and even a laid-back sense of humor, a sort of "whatever goes" attitude but not in that annoying "I don't know what I want" sort of way.

So, when we'd gathered together everyone he knew from the dorms and a few Chinese kids he's really good friends with, there were nearly thirty people in attendance. It was incredible, and lots of all sorts of people. I knew most of them, being in my class or having been at Niki's Halloween party, or having gone on the school trip to Henan.

It did, however, create problems when it came time to find somewhere to eat. The place we originally wanted to go to couldn't find room for us, so we wandered to South Street and went to a buffet. That was okay, I hadn't eaten all day (and had frozen my toes solid watching a football/soccer match the French guys are in) and I managed to scarf down a whole lot, but the food wasn't really that great and we all got split up between tables, so it was less of a Jon-oriented meal than one where we just sort of divided into our little cliques and ate some food.

Then we went to the world-renowned 1 + 1 club on East Street. (I only say it's world-renowned because kids in my Chinese class in Australia who had visited Xi'an knew about it, and I'd always heard about it.) I had yet to go to 1 + 1, either this time or the last, and it's a really nice place. I've only been to one nightclub before, and a jazz bar, in Xi'an, so it's not like I'm versed in nightlife, but it was definitely a really nice atmosphere. People there are used to foreigners being there, they probably expect it (though, I didn't see any other foreigners while we were there), and it's got good music and it's really clean. It feels a little bit like a maze to walk through, which is not really that fun when you're drunk, but I definitely liked the clean feel to it, mostly because it's so different to everything else you experience in Xi'an.

It was really much like your average night at a nightclub: drinking, dancing, and general frivolity. There are some highlights, though, and for brevity's sake I'll list them (but you all know how my lists go):
1. The drinks: Budweiser beer, which were Y25 each! This is absolutely exorbitant given you can get a 500ml bottle of Chinese beer right outside for Y3. We also got some Chivas whisky (which I think sponsors the club, given the amount of advertising), which they mixed with 冰红茶, which is just about the most common iced (red) tea drink you can get here. And before you start thinking that sounds gross, it's actually great. The iced tea is really sweet and somehow goes really nicely with the whisky. First of all we ordered a big combo deal, a beer each and a big bottle of whisky with mixers, and some small food (fruit, lollipops, chicken feet, you know...) which was Y50 each and, I think, an awesome deal.
2. However, as I mentioned the prices after you finish all that are ridiculous, and it drives most people outside the club and to a little stall for a Y3 beer so that you can get a cheap drunk and come back in. There's no cover charge at the place, so you just walk straight back in no worries. I hung out with the Western boys for most of the night, Ian a Canadian, Felix a German, and Jim a Briton, and of course boys being boys they went out at some point in the night. Which I followed along with, and it was actually quite fun. Not only was it fun to see Jim talking loudly in Chinese to the shop owner, we also stumbled across a Korean hairdressers that was quite interesting. We got there and they seemed to be practicing dance moves, supposedly for use as they cut hair. We thought this was hilarious, so we went inside and watched for a while. They sort of danced around à la Backstreet Boys to loud pop music and would swing scissors around their fingers and then do haircutting motions and... it was very strange indeed.
3. They played two Australian songs while we were there: one Rogue Traders song, and the really quite bad remix of Evermore's really popular song. I got really psyched for both of these, danced like a crazy woman, and had loads of fun telling people in shouted Chinese that these were Australian songs so I was very, very happy about it!
4. Briefly: chatted to Jim about Australia, as he's British and stayed for a while in New Zealand. One of those drunk conversations about politics and the state of the media, those sorts of things. Later: another German, David, drank too much too fast and passed out, then when we woke him as we were leaving, he threw up on the steps to the bathrooms, which I managed to step in without realizing (but realized before I slipped).

Then we headed out to get 烤肉 (kaorou), which are basically meat skewers. We took a fleet of taxis (we had to catch TEN on the way in but we were now about 23 people instead of 30) to the Islamic quarter, headed into one of the open restaurants, and ordered way more kaorou than we ever could have wanted. It was all spicy meat, liver and stomach and stuff and it was delicious but it was so spicy and seemed to upset my already beer-bubbly stomach, but it was all right in the end. I ate as much as I could fit in, tempered the spice with some bread, and drank some more beer. Talked to Felix a whole lot and I cannot for the life of me remember what we talked about (why he's in China, I think, but I can't really remember except that he's in the same, I study languages and what do I do with that? sort of boat), had to float Felix and Jim the money for the kaorou because they only had Y5 leftover from the club, and by the time we made our way out of the restaurant it was nearly 5AM.

The Koreans made fun of me for my accent and really, just tried to get a rise out of me because I'm such a quiet mouse in class and they want me to talk to them more. Then we took another fleet of taxis back to the university, collectively woke up the gateman (who wasn't the usual nasty-faced one, it was one of the women), and said a rather loud goodbye to Jon in the lobby. I guess from my perspective it sounds like I didn't have anything to do with Jon at all during the evening, but that's not true. We talked, told bad jokes at dinner, danced at 1 + 1, he taught me a Chinese kids' game that uses Rock Paper Scissors, and we talked about other random things during the night. So it was sad to see him go, but I'm the one who has to provide him with everyone's email address (Niki is collecting them for Secret Santa purposes), so I'm sure I'll talk to him again, and we're looking to be in China at the same time again anyway, so who knows. The world is small.

THE ADVENT CREPE PARTY: Monday 11 December 2006

Niki had been sent a few packets of crêpe mix in the mail a few weeks ago, so she'd been dying to have some sort of soiree where we'd all make crêpes together. She'd put it off, though, and so today it coincided with her desire to get a Christmas tree, and so (today being the second-to-last advent of the year) we turned it into an advent crêpe party. On the invite list: Niki, me, Malcolm, Ardan, and Andreas (another German).

This afternoon (after having slept off a hangover and had lunch with other hungover Koreans), we headed out to Metro, the big supermarket in the middle of nowhere, where you can find lots of Western food (real cheese and bread and wine and imported chocolates and biscuits and just wow), and also proper Christmas trees and decorations and things. Niki found her Christmas tree, and Andreas and I purchased little ones for Y20 to have in our room. I bought baubles, bells, tinsel, and lights for my tree, and so all up I spent about Y80/AU$13 on my Christmas stuff. Which sounds cheap, but then I also blew Y70/AU$11 on Twining's English Breakfast tea (100-bag pack). Those dollar values might sound like a lot, but consider I spent Y150, which is three weeks' worth of phone money.

We had to wait a ridiculously long time for a taxi, because at 4:30 taxis all change drivers (I have no idea why they don't stagger the change-over, but they don't), which means that from 4-5pm, it's virtually impossible to find a taxi that'll take you where you want to go. It took half an hour of us trying to find a taxi that would take us to the university (they all stopped to see if they could pick up a fare on the way to where they were going), , and of course we were still five people so Niki and Malcolm (who went to Niki's place first to get the crêpe mix) had to stay behind even longer.

Just after 6pm we started getting ready for the crêpe party! We held the party at the dorms, in the kitchen/laundry room on thr fourth floor (where all of us but Niki live). It took us an age to find the utensils we needed: we borrowed a bowl and frying pan from a classmate, a spatula and spoon from the kitchen that makes us lunch, and we just used the hotplate that's in our kitchen. We all also brought every piece of cutlery and crockery we have just so we could have something to eat off of, we used Malcolm's water bottle as a measuring cup for milk, and it was all very makeshift, but it worked out well anyway. Andreas and I put together his little Christmas tree, which we put on the fridge to be festive, I brought my computer as a musical aid, and we got cooking!

It was a nice sort of get-together, we chatted and cooked and wore our Santa hats and everything. The crêpes were really good, slathered in butter and brown sugar, or strawberry jam, or Nutella. At one point there broke out a war between Niki and Andreas as to which was the better chocolate spread: Nutella or Nussplimma, the latter of which is the German equivalent. You can guess who was rooting for what. We put this to the test, however: Niki took a blindfolded taste test, vodka in between to cleanse her palate, and she picked the Nutella. Of course, Andreas just told her she had picked the Nussplimma but I don't think she bought it in the end.

I ended up the evening getting photos from Ardan and taking some of my own Christmas tree, which I had put together as soon as we got back from Metro, and now I'm here writing about it all! Photos of the Advent Crêpe Party can be found at my Flickr account page, but there are no photos of Jon's farewell party because my camera is bad at taking night photos and anyway they wouldn't let you take photos at the club (I don't really know why).

Hopefully that's all for this week! Crazy start to it, hey? Ardan is leaving next week, so I think next Monday is also going to be a crazy night out, probably back to 1 + 1, and then the Sunday following that is our Christmas Eve party at Niki's house, complete with Secret Santas and loads of people! Then there's New Years, which I haven't heard of any plans for, but it all seems to wind up so quickly, I don't know how it all happens.

For now, it's 2AM and I need to be awake in far too few hours for class (one person turned up to our class this morning, apparently, and then another for the second hour, but neither of them had gone out the night before), so I think I'll call it a night and crash out.

Remind me to track down my Y20 from Felix and Jim...