You're going about your day. You might be preparing some pastries, drinking tea and smoking with your friends while exchanging gossip. Maybe you are out on a walk with children or your husband. It's a normal day, but you see something a little off in the corner of your eye. You look up. Taller figure but with jet black hair. You go back to your business. But wait, something was different, so you look back. Those eyes! That hair is like yours, but that face is unmistakably Caucasian. You get excited. Lowai! You say to your friends. You point at the funny foreigner who is on her bike. She seems just as curious about you as you do her. Soon you and all your friends are staring. Meiguo you say excitedly, as this funny girl couldn't be anything but American. But what is she doing here in Wenjiang? Maybe someone snaps a picture, but soon she has ridden on and you go back to your business.
I go through that little ritual everyday when I bike past remote parts in Wenjiang. I don't know if that's exactly what they are thinking, but I have picked up on two words so far when I am around locals and I know they are referencing me. Lowai, means foreigner, and Meiguo is America, or American. I am pretty proud of myself for picking up on that, actually.
The best part of biking in Wenjiang is getting my 25 cent breakfast. I loooooooove street food. I don't even get off my bike I just hand my 2 yuan over to the lady and she hands me the goods. She knows what I want and she hooks me up. That's what I love so much. The people here remember who I am because I am one of the few white people that they have ever seen. I even have started to pick up on words when I am ordering. Like I can now successfully say that I would like some green tea, to the women at the tea shop. Nothing too useful, but hey it's a start! I am sure that after this summer I will be practically fluent!
This weekend was quite stressful, and I definitely needed to catch up on some much needed sleep. So I opted to stay behind and not go on the trip we had planned and instead hang out with Dan, Scott, Sam, and Eamon around Chengdu. While everyone got up at the crack of dawn to go on some freezing cold nature hike I slept till 2 pm and slowly got out of bed. Wow it was great. We decided that it would be a good idea to see some new clubs and hit the town. We got dressed to the nines, grabbed some road mons and took the bumpy ride into Chengdu. Eamon took us to the old SWUFE campus, where we should actually be staying. Man did we get screwed. The rooms at the foreigners dorm are like hotels. Beds on the ground, western toilets, heat...right in the center of Chengdu. And there are actually foreigners there! Like from Europe, and America and stuff. Lots of them! As much as I wish I was in the city and not out in Wenjiang, if I was never here I would have never made such good friends like Lisa and Eamon so I guess I am slightly thankful. But western toilets? Come on...
We trudged on towards the clubs and decided to grab some street food cause our stomachs were getting a little rumbly. I discovered that they could grill me up some Chicken feet so I decided to go for it. I'll upload the pictures later on facebook..it was pretty entertaining. You may say that I have completely lost it but I actually took a bit of the chicken talon and it was pretty tasty. yes the toenails were slightly off putting but really, it tasted just like chicken :) The boys were not having it so I chased them down a few streets of Chengdu with the chicken talon. Methinks the Chinese may have taken offence to this.
We hit the first pub, Shamrock. We were excited because we thought it would hold white people and we were right. In fact, that's all it held. We had found all the white people in Chengdu. All the old, creepy expats. It was amazing, there were literally maybe four Chinese people in the whole joint. We ordered a couple of drinks and I got a greek salad. Oh it was amazing! I mean the one I make and that Matt makes are way better, but beggars really cannot be choosers our here in the far rural west of China! It wasn't quite a dancing club and Eamon was trying to get his Caribbean on so we headed to Muse for the rest of the night.
It was better than last time, as we had a smaller group and were able to maneuver around way easier. We were the only white people there that night so we all set off to make some friends. And friends we made, about ten feet in to the club some old guy saw me and insisted I take about six watered down shots with him. I tried to say no in Chinese (and english) but he was too excited about the meiguo and insisted. He was a lot worse off than me, and eventually he pushed me down in the couch and gave me some sort of lap dance while the rest of his group took pics and cheered. Keep in mind this guy had to be about sixty. Hilarious. What I really like about the clubs is that no one there really speaks any English, and my Chinese is limited to compliments and ordering food so I'm kind of useless as well. But they don't care! They just get so excited that a lowai is there! I find it almost awkward cause we can't talk but they love it. I need to charge for getting my pic taken at clubs cause I could start making quite a few yuan off of it. I guess the sincere compliments are enough "you rrrrrrrr beautifurrrrr grrr!!! varrrrrlyyyy beutifurrrr!!!! I likkkeeyyy youU!)
Oh! The most exciting part of the night was when I got straight up molested by a ninety pound Chinese girl that spoke broken English. At first I thought she was trying to grab my neclace, but nope she was going for booby. She straight up grabbed my boob, tried to kiss me then screamed "GIRLS GONE WILD"! Umm, no sweetheart. I know you may have seen it on TV but just because some girls in America like to do that doesn't mean we all enjoy getting molested by female strangers. Namely, me. I ran away from her and tried to seek refuge in the girls bathroom but unfortunately it was occupied. A girl and a guy walked out ten minutes later and I was completely shocked. Let me take a break from my riveting story to talk a little about Chinese (namely sichuan) culture. The Chinese, though integrating and picking up more onto our western world, still very much hold on to their old ideals and beliefs. From my understanding with talking to my peers here at SWUFE there is absolutely NO SEX before marriage. None. Most would not even think about it for a second because that is lowly and that is how it's always been. Maybe this is more with just the educated class, but it seems to be a pretty strict rule. Girls probably wouldn't get good husbands. Also, when talking to Winnie and my other female Chinese classmates there is a zero drinking rule. It's not like it's completely enforced, but I guess it is still looked down upon when females drink. Winnie told me that she would not be able to get a good husband at all if people knew she drank at all, and if she did get a good husband and he found out she drank before he might leave her. I was thinking about what a difference between here and America (namely Pullman) this was. I mean, no girl in Pullman would ever get married if these rules applied! I'm not so sure still about these rules because there seems to be quite a few girls at the clubs dancing and drinking...maybe just college students?
But yadda yadda yadda, I got drunk, everyone got drunk, we climbed into a taxi and babbled some nonsense about food to the driver. The next morning when I woke up I wanted to die, but more than that I wanted some salty food. Oh what I would have killed for some fries! I knew I wasn't going to get that so I stumbled to the market and tried to find some chips. Just some normal, regular, potato chips.
And here is my rant about potato chips to China. I love China. I think it's great. I am going to stay here all summer. Yeah, the spitting, pushing, grabbing, and such are a little hard to handle at times but I deal. The buildings are cold and the beds are hard but I have adjusted. But really, blueberry, cucumber, Italian red meat sauce, american turkey, steak and god knows what else are NOT adequate potato chip flavors! All I ask is for some normal, some salt and vinegar, maybe jalapeno, something! Come on China, throw me a friggen bone here!
I didn't get the chips but what I did get was better. Significantly better. I got a two hour long Thai massage for a mere fifteen bucks. Oh it was awesome. These women are half the size of me but I swear they could beat up a man twice my size. The massage parlor was a bit different than what I am used to though, as you get massaged with at least one to four other people in the room. You didn't get naked of course, but it was different. Also, typical of them they didn't have the heat on, but I guess I was warm enough since I was getting beat up by this 80 pound woman. After the massage we headed to this delicious tex mex restaurant that tasted just like home! Everytime I go to an American restaurant I always order way more than I can eat just cause I get so excited when I see all the choices! Seriously, you people back home don't know how good you have it. America has such diversity when it comes to food. You can get american, italian, chinese, japanese, thai, spanish, french whatever! China, at least in the western provinces you can mainly get Chinese food and more Chinese food and then maybe some stuff you can't even call food but they still eat it. Yum.
We headed back to the SWUFE campus to meet up with europeans to head to the clubs that night, but instead of meeting up with them I ran into seven new Europeans. One from Holland, one from Amsterdam, one London, oh and Americans. One from Pennsylvania and one from Delaware. I decided they would take me somewhere good so I followed them and was not dissapointed. One guy, Kent from Pennsylvania got into the cab and started spitting the dirtiest sichuan hua at the cab driver. I was impressed. He knew bot Sichuan and Mandarin and was impeccable at both. This is no easy task. You see, the Chinese have lots of dialects. It's not like America with our accents, because we can still for the most part always understand each other. Here it's like a completely different language. I mean I know this place has 1.3 billion people but come on China, unify, damn it! Make it easy for me to just learn one language and one type of tones.
The bar they took us too was cool. It was rasta themed and they had a stage with a guitar, drums, etc that anyone could just play at random. I sat outside chatting with my new friends for a while and we joked about China and life. It was nice to meet some new people that weren't Chinese and knew what I was coming from, and they also gave me some good advice. They think I should stay in Chengdu instead of Shanghai for the summer so that's definitely something to think about! Eventually they all started free styling and I must say they were pretty damn good. It made me think of Cyril and his band and how he better visit me in China this summer!
Nothing too good happened at the next series of clubs, except for when we all started throwing cake at each other. That was pretty exciting, and I think we kind of just solidified the fact more that Americans are crazy to the Chinese. Lisa spent the night with me in my dorm last night, as the dorms here kind of have curfews. Since it was past eleven she wouldn't be able to get into her dorm as they close the gate and they are pretty strict about it. They try to do it to the foreigners but we just play the whole "what? We are white we don't understand.." card so they begrudgingly let us in. Every time.
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