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#