Olympics!

I return from the capital and hustle and bustle. I had forgotten just how big Beijing is. It is big. Comparable to LA in terms of population, but size, I dont know. Using public transport it is enormous. Consider riding public transport for multiple hours every day and always ending up somewhere different. You could ride to subway for a hour in any direction and not reach the end. One day I started from the center of the city, rode the subway for a hour, then transfered to a bus for half hour before finally reaching my destination on the third ring road. There are six ring roads. The diameter of the 4,5,6 and ring roads must be immense.

Beijing was much the same, except there was noticeable crowding. It was hard to differentiate the normal summer tourism crowding and Olympic crowding. There were people everywhere. Since I was there last three new subway lines have opened, and they are all packed. It didnt help that half of the private cars were prevented from driving to reduce beijing's air pollution. Beijing Air,
Harmful Air

It was pretty and relaxing to take a break from Ha'erbin and chinese class. Attending track and field was exciting. The crowd was mostly chinese and there were a surprising number of Empty Seats. In the stands I was asked to pose with some little chinese boy for a picture. The same little boy a little latter was instructed by his mother to retrieve a coke bottle from under my seat and then urinate in it. I guess she wasnt willing to take him to the restroom.

The olympic park is enormous. It took a good half hour to walk from the front gate to the rear gate and the beginning of the forest park. When I go back to beijing in a week I will explore the forest park. I cant help but wonder, what will become of the olympic park when the olympics are done. Right now it is just very wide two mile paved swath of land with a few buildings here and there. I assume there is a massive underground complex of offices and facilities, as I saw many barricaded staircases. We will see later this year on another trip. By the way have Beijing and the Friendlies welcomed you yet? Beijing Welcomes You

So I am not alone in being disappointed with CCTV's coverage of the olympics. Here is a piece that explains some of vexations in prettier language. NBC vs CCTV

In other news, I have a week of classes left. Just enough time for midterms, and then a 10day vacation to the south. On the 29th I leave for Changsha via beijing and eventual end up in Chengdu. Back in harbin on the 8th. Going to explore and check out possible locations for next semester.

http://picasaweb.google.com/xisphias/olympic

Olympics TV

I want to know what the Olympic coverage is like in the states, or other countries. Are most of the events broadcast, are the highlights and stats? Do the broadcasts focus on the US teams? What is the commentary like?

Olympic coverage here is interesting. All coverage is provided by the state run CCTV (Chinese Central TV station). There are about 4 separate CCTV channels broadcasting Olympic coverage of some sort and several others not. One channel was even renamed from CCTV 5 to CCTV Olympics.

Chinese events, especially potential Chinese gold medal events are the main focus. What else would you expect. Gold medal replays are frequent, repetitive, and glorious. I bet you havent seen the three women's weightlifting gold medalists lifting their final weight over 30 times. I have. I have seen more slow motion jumping and running replays of the young Chinese gymnastic team than I want. I keep going down the list of the 17+ gold medals china has already won. There is great pride in the athletes, and there should be. The Chinese athletes have done
very well thus far.

The sporting commentary is not what I remember from watching in the states. The Chinese commentators are very critical of the foreign athletes. They might me critical of the Chinese athletes as well, but the only events I have seen broadcast have all resulted Chinese gold
medals and nothing but praise for the outstanding performance of the Chinese athletes. Is it like this in the US as well? I dont remember as much critical commentary. There lots of comments on form, style, execution, balance, strength, coordination....and on and on. The commentary for last night's China vs. Austria pingpong was particularly critical of the Austrian's form and style. The Austrian lost.

I am off in a few hours for the heart of china. I expect to find it beautiful, clean, full of foreigners, and helpful Chinese youth dressed in blue.

olympics

I am going. This friday night we board the train for beijing. Got three big days in the city and one precious ticket to see the 110m hurdles first round including the chinese Liu Xiang and American Terrence Trammell. An extremely kind former coworker gifted me the tickets he was unable to use.

Its pretty excited, not only to escape the drear of chinese class and harbin, but also to go back to beijing. i want to see first hand what has changed over the past two years and what all this talk about beijing putting on a false face is all about. There have been several reports in the western news about beijing walling off areas of the city, erecting fences, tearing down neighborhoods, building false tourist attractions, etc. Now we get to see what is true.

When I was last in beijing in 2006, they had begun work on the olympic facilities but there weren't many noticeable changes. Full report to come next week.

Things Ｉ dont yet understand

Plastic bottle collecting.

There are numerous people scouring the campus daily in search of plastic bottles. They collect them and sell them. Reports of how much they are worth vary between $0.01 and $0.07 per bottle. I have no idea how many bottles one might collect in a day, but it is apparently worth it and the competition with other collectors is fierce. It is not uncommon if you are carrying a half full bottle to be approached or chased by a bottle collector requesting you finish it and give them the empty bottle.

High heels everywhere.

I know most of the chinese women are short, and apparently taller is better. I still dont understand walking around this campus in high heels daily. I have heard it is hard to walk in high heels. The natural difficulty combined with the array of uneven awkward surfaces around campus seems to make the daily life for the high heeled precarious if not dangerous. I have yet to see anyone fall, but have seen some impressive blisters.

Clarification

I dont actually eat bugs all the time.
Only sometimes and entirely by choice. Uncooked insects are rather abundant. Culinary cooked bugs are actually rare in harbin, although, I have heard they are more popular in the south. That will have to wait.

Food is not that interesting, as most of my meals on the the cafeteria. I eat out at local restaurants for most dinners. Restaurants are very prevalent, as regular chinese people eat out frequently.

Breakfast can be anything from steamed dumplings with fennel stalk or pork filling, plain steamed buns, fried buns with pork cabbage filling, corn pancakes fried in oil, donut like things dripping with oil (you tiao，油条), milk, soy milk, rice porridge, hard boiled eggs, fried eggs, and pickled vegetables.

Lunch and dinner blend together. Mostly assortments of stir fried vegetables and meats. Standard vegies plus lots of chinese cabbage and eggplant. Meats are either stir fried with some veggies or fried with their own sauce and maybe a light breading. There are also boiled dumplings, fried rice, noodle soups and fried noodles. And Rice, lots of white fluffy rice.

There is alot of oil involved with most food.

Currently it is watermelon season, so most dinners are followed with a trip to the watermelon pile to buy a half watermelon. About 5lbs for $0.75. Did i mention food is cheap? If I eat 3 meals at the cafeteria, probably spend $2 a day. If i go for the plain stuff and gorge on rice, $1.50.

What is china? What is america?

Rather relative and not any one thing. Today's topic for class was what best represented China and the US. We came up with a quite an impressive list.

China:

• Panda
• Jackie Chan
• Kung Fu
• Manufacturing ('Factory of the World')
• China Shipping containers
• Tea
• Calligraphy
• Great Wall
• Silk
• Chinese Opera

US

• Efficient
• Democratic
• Equality
• Self Importance
• Arrogance
• Freedom
• Money
• Modernity
• Hollywood
• McDonalds, KFC, Nike, Coke

I cant say I agree with either list. Actually the whole activity of making lists to represent countries is rather disagreeable. I just want to argue with each item, argue that a list couldnt ever hope to even come close to accurately representing a country, let alone a city. But I have to play along in class.

Friday I get to give an oral report on what represents chinese culture. I give oral reports daily, and dislike them. I dislike them because I feel limited by the rather simple and often binary prompts. Like "is a large national population a good thing or a bad thing?" I begin most of my reports with, its not a question of good or bad. There are advantages and disadvantages to both sizes and there are sizes in the middle. Then go on to give some examples. In the population report, I talked about per capita natural resources, carrying capacity, and agricultural output's dependency on oil(or rather, how oil has allowed us to exceed the natural carrying capacity). I think pomona might have influenced my responses.


I went for a walk the other day and here are the results.
http://picasaweb.google.com/xisphias/archy

I have been adding photos to existing albums rather than creating new albums. So expect the archy, strange things, chongzi, and soon to be 'sheng huo' albums to get new photos regularly.

Olympics in the news

The olympics is in the news here everyday. On TV and in the papers its all 'ow un whey'

Most of the stuff on tv and in the news is pretty rosy.

Finally some real american investigative reporting.

http://tw.youtube.com/watch?v=aqNaAU2vXlI#

Dinner and another day exploring

I went out exploring again yesterday. This time to one of the shopping districts for a more thorough investigation. What I had before thought was a mediocre pedestrian underpass lined with clothing vendors/stores turns out to be a vast underground city jammed packed with women's clothing, women, and the occasional mens clothing or leather jacket stall. I spent about an hour wandering around in search of a t-shirt vendor in hopes of purchasing some chinglish keepers to no avail. When I emerged it was still daylight and I was very far from where I started. After finding my bearings, I reentered the labyrinth the the intent of underpassing a large intersection. I emerged a few minutes later further away from the intersection, but on a different wrong side. I normally dont have trouble with directions or navigating, but the womens clothing underground city is packed and very confusing, as every hallway looks the same, and there are many turns, twists and strange stairs. After a second attempt I made my way under the intersection.

On my way home I found a "tasty dog" restaurant and a dumpling restaurant which will be explored in the coming week.

Last night was the final dinner for the students on the summer program. They one week of exams left, then they return to the states leaving tony and I here until the new crop arrives in September. Dinner was an all you can eat hotel buffet, not that interesting, nor that tasty. I did get to eat something labeled as 'quail' and some silk worms. The 'quail' was a small bird no bigger than a baseball cooked whole. After the dinner we(3 americans and 3 chinese) went exploring harbin we found some super fun exercise machines and some more insects to eat. Conversations were varied, but topics included remote sensing, public displays of affection, long distance relationships, the 2005 benzine spill (nytimes,iht, bbc, wikipedia) racial discrimination in the US, obama, and homosexuality in the US. Overall it was really interesting talking the the chinese students and getting insights into chinese perceptions.

For example, one student mentioned that in the interview process to be a roommate with one of the american students he was asked whether he minded living with a a gay american. He didnt mention his response, but he did say, before that interview he had never thought about the possibility of sharing a room with a gay man. Homosexuality isnt visible in china. This student said he had never met a gay man and asked if we americans had. Thats sort of a strange question. My college had a queer resource center, complete with a director, student staff, and numorous 'mentors' to assist incoming students integrate with the queer community and explore their queer identity. Of course I had met some gay guys, they are a large contingent of metropolitan american cities. There are even tv shows based on not much more than being gay and living in a city.

I should probably mention that the program here has a language pledge. It wasnt a big deal, i just scratched my name at the bottom of a page with some rules one it. Either way, all of my interactions are in chinese, whether they be with the other american students or the chinese students. The chinese students signed a similar pledge promising not to speak english with us. My chinese is improving. Remote sensing is a pretty advanced topic to be talking about in chinese, at least i think so.

http://picasaweb.google.com/xisphias/Food

Bank Confusions

I have been trying to get a wire transfer setup from the US to my chinese bank account for the last two weeks. I started by strolling into the bank of china and setting up a bank account. It was an easy painless process, although strange. I had to create a 6 digit pin and enter it about 40 times throughout the account opening process. After the account was open I asked for the wire transfer numbers. I was supplied with one number, an address, and my acc number.
Before I left the states, I had called the US bank and asked what I needed to do to wire money. I needed my acc number, a routing number, and the wire transfer code. I was a bit suspicious when I got an address instead of a routing number. Bear in mind all conversations concerning my account are in chinese. So when I got the transfer info with an address instead of a routing number, I questioned the teller and was assured that the address was sufficient. I thanked the teller and left.

The next morning at 6am I called up the US bank to catch them before closing and setup the wire transfer. I was politely informed that the wire transfer desk closed at 130pm and it was now 3pm. That night at midnight I called up the US bank and attempted to setup the wire transfer. I provided the bank with the information from the bank of china, acc number, wire code, and address. I was told I needed a routing number. I said they dont have a routing number, they use their address instead. No good. I called up bank of china customer service and asked to speak with an english speaking rep. The english rep didnt really 'speak' english. She said some things in english and then waited for a select list of memorized responses or questions. My query was not on her list and she was utterly confused. The conversation resembled one you might have had with a computer.

Please say your name
me
I am sorry I couldnt understand you. did you say justin?
no
please say your name
me
I am sorry I couldnt hear you.
me
did you say johnson?
no
Please speak your selection 1 for acc summary, 2 for ....
customer service
Transferring you to loans and credit
no!
If you would like a car loan say car loan, if you would like a rate quote...
No, Customer service....

After about 10 minutes of trying to explain what a routing number was, I hung up and called again, this time speaking to a chinese rep. Still failing to both explain what a routing number or obtain one. The chinese rep, just as the teller had done, assured me that only the address was needed and that she had no idea what a routing number was.

The next day I returned to the bank of china branch and again failed at obtaining a routing number. At midnight I called the US bank and again tried to explain that routing numbers were unavailable and wire transfers in china only use addresses. Still unable to wire money, the rep said they would have a manager call me back with info on how to transfer money without a routing number. Progress! I got a message two days later telling me to provide the bank with my account number, wire code, and routing number. Failure!

That night I called the bank of china, ny branch office and talked to someone who not only spoke and understood english, but also knew what a routing number was and gave me one. Finally real progress. I called the US bank and gave them all the info. Wire transfer on the way.

A couple days later the bank of china calls my cell phone and tells me (in chinese) they have received a wire transfer with my account number, but the name on the wire transfer does not match the name on my account. The wire transfer is for a me cxxxx. not a me axxxx cxxxx like my account. I explain that in the us, middle names are not important, and that my us bank doesnt even know my middle name. She doesnt buy it, and says the bank of china cannot accept the transfer. I guess this is some sort of international anti-money laundering/illegal transfer protection.

That night I call up the US bank and relay my conversation with the bank of china. The rep says they used whatever name was on my account and that i would need to come in to add my middle name, or fill out some paper work and mail it back to them. I elect for the paperwork option, and resign myself to not getting a wire transfer anytime in the next month. After I hang up, out of curiosity i check my account online. Magically it has my middle name listed. I immediately call back and get the same rep. I tell her my middle name is on the account and ask why it wasnt included on the wire transfer. She says middle names are not used, unless the customer specifically requests it. How was I to know? After speaking with a manager, the bank agrees to send out a new wire transfer with my full name at no additional charge as soon as the old one comes back. So now I wait for the new transfer to come through. Maybe next week, the bank of china said it might take 2 weeks to clear once they receive it. Banks are fun.

Other options for setting up a chinese bank account include things like going to the atm every day drawing the max, then carrying the wad across the street to the bank office and depositing it. I could also use travelers checks or western union and go downtown to the main office, trade the paper for US dollars, then goto another bank and convert the money to RMB, then go and wait in an enormous line to deposit it, or come back across town with the wad and deposit it my local bank after waiting in a much smaller line.