Beijing and Hainan

Last week was a complete blur of finals and packing. I am shocked at how fast the past eight weeks went, but I was really excited to go on our final week long trip together! Our final trip will consist of three nights in Beijing and then two nights in the tropical Hainan. As per usual we woke up at the crack of dawn to make our flight. Also as usual Ana and I sat next to each other and clutched her crucifix and prayed the whole time we were on the flight. Seriously! I swear these are not real pilots. There is just absolutely no way. I am pretty sure I could fly a plane better than these Chinese drivers. I understand turbulence, turbulence happens. But the whole swooping up and down at random and swerving side to side thing just should not happen.

We were so happy to be off that plane and were completely shocked when we looked around and there were....white people. Everywhere. Herds and herds of lowai. Just milling around the airport. And there were normal toilets. No one was staring at us. We weren't exciting. We were just a dime a dozen. We got on our bus to head to the hotel. And then there was the ride there..no one was honking! No crazy drivers, nothing. Oh and the sky was almost blue. What was this place? Surely we were not in China anymore.

We got to the hotel and did the usual waiting game. In China everything takes forever, hotels especially. We milled around. Outside looked clean. We finally got situated and then it was time to head out to Tienanmen and The Forbidden City! It was hot. When I got to China it was absolutely miserably freezing cold out. But the second April rolls around more smog rolls in as does the heat. We were hungry and tried desperately to look for food. For some odd reason there were literally two restaurants around this area. We turned down Bernie's idea of heading to McDonalds. (For some reason Bernie always assumed that we wanted to eat breakfast lunch and dinner at Mcdonalds. I mean, I love my fries and my McChickens, but not that much). We regretted turning him down when all we found was a KFC to eat. We all just stared at each other and picked at our "food" and then ventured on.

Being at Tiennamen was...uneventful I guess? I don't know what I was expecting. It's not like there were going to be a reenactment of the events of 1989 (which the Chinese students don't know about by they way). It was a bunch of Chinese taking pictures of a giant square. People selling Mao memorabilia. "Hello!" they would call out. "Hello! You buy!". Like yeah, I would love a giant stone bust of Mao? It would look great in my apartment next year or better yet my Dad's office. I mean he did so many great things for America? They were also selling these red books that I found out everyone had to carry around as little as 20 years ago. They were all quotations of Mao and his beliefs and what not. I also found out that the Chinese people weren't allowed to see their groceries until a few years ago. Weird? Definitely. We took turn posing in front of Mao and staring at each other until we decided it was time. Time to enter the Forbidden City. Ooooooohhhhhh...

The Forbidden City was cool, I guess. Me, Audra, Colette and Ana decided to buy those giant rice paddy hats to wear around. Instead of actually trying to learn about the history of the City we decided to amuse ourselves by jumping into random Chinese people's pictures. Ha. Give them a taste of their own medicine. Too bad they actually enjoyed it and got really excited when we posed with them. Hurmph.

I am sure that years ago the Forbidden City was amazing. Especially when it was actually, you know, Forbidden. But Mao, in his fit of genius decided it would be best to destroy any part of ancient Chinese culture so we were looking at replicas that were built probably around thirty years ago when they opened up the boundaries for tourism. It's sad. It really is.

The next day we ventured toward the Great Wall of China. Ahhhhhh one of the wonders of the ancient world. To tell the truth, I was not that excited about it. You see, I never really get excited about seeing things like that. I prefer endlessly walking around and finding unique little places among cities that will remind me of them. But I was pleasantly surprised at how awesomely epic the great wall was. We were driven two hours out of the city to a non touristy place that few people come to. At times we were literally scaling the wall because it hadn't been refurbished. It was so cool. The view was absolutely amazing..I can't believe all those little Chinese people built all that! I couldn't see the end of it. For a while we walked alone, and then we ran into some interestingly dressed women. We were all in shorts and tank tops as it was pretty hot and these ladies were covered head to toe, and wearing hats. Bright colors. We later found out that they were Mongolians. That made me laugh.

Tao explained that they wanted to sell us souveneirs. We told them we didn't want any but they insisted and followed us around the Great Wall. Each lady grabbed onto one of us, and tried to speak to us in their Broken Chinese. I was borderline annoyed because I didn't need anyone telling me to be careful and that there were sharp rocks around. And that the great wall was really old. Cool woman, thanks. Actually she told me that the Japanese paid to restore part of the wall so that actually was interesting. Anyway, they helped us down the mountain. She held my hand the hold time but it's not like I actually needed the help. I humored her and Tao explained once again that we didn't want to buy anything from them. When we got to the bottom they literally attacked. They were trying to sell us the most worthless stuff - all for 100 yuan each. Everyone in the group caved but me. No way in hell was I going to spend 15 bucks on some decorative chopsticks! Maybe a dollar fifty, but no more than that. She didn't budge so I told her politely that I really didn't have any money. She asked Bernie if he would front the money. I handed her 20 yuan to thank me for helping her down the mountain but she was PISSED. I was having Tao translate for me and what I got from him was that he was going on about how she was cursing my family or some shit. Oops...

The hotel was pretty nice and even had a pool. That night we decided that we wanted to take a nice refreshing dip to ease our muscles. We were floating around having a good time when an employee came up and asked us if we had swim caps. We stared at him. Then we stared at each other. He repeated the question and told us that we needed to have swim caps to swim in the pool. Did it look like we had swim caps? No. I mean we weren't doing it for exercise, we were just floating. He said we could purchase them for 33 yuan or we could get out. We got out. Weirdest thing, wouldn't the Chinese be happy to have western hair be stuck in drains of their pool? This country is a mystery, I swear. We dried off and decided to see what the Tuesday night club scene in Beijing had to offer us.

Turned out it offered nothing. We went to a Muse type place and found it completely empty. And a cover charge. Puhhhhleeease like we were going to pay that! In Chengdu people begged us to come into their clubs. We left and made our way down to another strip of seedy bars and clubs. There were people hustling for us to come in but they all wanted more money than we were willing to pay so we settled for a restaurant where we could smoke some Hookah. We met some Turkish people smoking at the next table (weird...Turkish people and Hookah) and chatted them up for a bit. It made me think of the burrow and how Ty keeps his Hookah set in a cat litter box. So that reminded me of cats. I like cats, and I like Ty and the burrow so it was an all around good feeling. We hung out for a couple hours, and naturally had some drama when it was time to pay the bill. See, the Chinese still haven't quite got the concept of separate checks, or any sort of organized system that would make the process go a lot smoother.

I guess this is because in China you eat family style and you pay family style. In any case, they really need to figure it out. They don't bring the bill to the table. You have to go up, point at what you ordered, and pay separately. This is okay, but the problem is the Chinese don't seem to want to cross off the items after you pay. This is always the cause of some drama. We have theories that they do this to get more money out of us because they will claim that we didn't pay for something. This was one of those times. We argued back and forth in Chinglish that the girl who just left paid for the rum and coke and everything is good. I think the Chinese assume that since we are foreigners we have lots of money we would like to throw at them. Well we are in college, so we don't, oh and we are kind of assholes when it comes to that kind of stuff. It's probably from living in Chengdu.

The next day we saw some more boring temple type things. I won't go into detail because it wasn't that amazing. Just a bunch of tourists looking at new buildings that represented old buildings that used to be there. It's really sad actually, but I will go more into depth and detail about that in a different post. The thing that was most eventful that happened was me going into major mommy mode. See, I tell people that I don't like kids and that I would never, ever, ever want to produce a snot-nosed child. But the truth is I am pretty good quite kids and have quite a large maternal bone in my body. So when I saw a little three year old boy crying, next to his overturned bike with no parents around I started freaking out. Where were his parents? Was he hurt? Ana and I rushed over. I picked up the little boy and tried to calm him down. Chinese people came over and took pictures of me holding the screaming child and none seemed to be his parents. I wanted to scream like the little boy. Where were these irresponsible parents?!? Tao came rushing over demanding why I was carrying this random child. I told him. He went around asking, and no one came forth. Eventually we figured out his mother was a random woman who was trying to push useless Chinese stuff on tourists. Tao finally coerced me into putting him down and explained that in China you learn to take care of yourself from a very young age. That's the Communist spirit!

Later that night we went to a large market where you bargain for designer knock offs It was more fun than anything - I didn't actually want to buy any of the cheap shit that they were selling. The whole thing was really dramatic. They would show us a ridiculous sum of money that they wanted for the stuff on their calculator than show us the special discount price they would offer only for us. We would show them a ridiculously low price, they would get angry, and roll their eyes, and we would do the same. We would go back and forth saying how poor we both were and that we couldn't afford this - then usually we would walk away and get the price we wanted. Which of course was probably too high to begin with when you factor in production costs. I mean come on, you know they pay them like thirty cents an hour and the raw materials cost like seventy cents each. Also, did you know that in the workshops (sweatshops) the Chinese roll around on rollerblades to increase productivity? Human Rights?

We took another early flight out of Beijing to head down south to the beautiful island of Hainan. I don't need to go into depth on how the flight was because I am sure my regular readers know exactly how it went. A couple of Hail Marys and tears later we were on the ground. On a scale of One to China, the airport was definitely more China. A lot of pushing, staring, and cutting in lines in the bathrooms. So great, really gonna miss that about this place. Anyway, once we got there we had to take a two hour train ride to the south of the Island. The train was pretty sweet. It was air conditioned, and we saw some pretty cool Chinese countryside. The best part of the trip was seeing THE PACIFIC OCEAN. OMG IT WAS SO BEAUTIFUL. You have no idea. I love the pacific, since I grew up near it. I wanted to cry. I think we all wanted to cry. We hadn't seen water like this in over two months. It was glorious! I wanted to praise Buddha. Instead I just made a noise similar to that of a goose and jumped up and down a bit.

We got to the hotel. It was beautiful. Amazing, an actual five star hotel. We all joked that WSU set us up with this nice hotel to make us forget about how shitty our dorms were. It pretty much worked. We hopped into our suits and ran into the ocean. Oh It was majestic. Water, lovely, wonderful, tropical salt water. We laughed and splashed around. Eventually I actually looked around at my surroundings and noticed something. The signs were in Chinese, English,, and some other language. What was that? Greek? No it was...Russian. I looked around. There were a lot of white people and I soon realized that they were all Russian. What were all these Russians doing in China?

I realized that Hainan was the closest tropical place for those living in Eastern Russia. For the next two days I studied these people. They all have the same facial expression on their face. Not very happy looking, with furrowed eyebrows. They all also seem to have a nice hefty weight about them. And they don't seem to mind. Women that frequent Lane Bryant were wearing bikinis, bearing it all out on the beach. The men (of course..they are European) were wearing speedos. I was also certain that there were quite a few members of the Russian Mafia there. They were the men with the big guts and gold chains hanging around their necks. And gold teeth. Then there were the ungodly skinny ones who definitely shared the same pant size as my nine year old sister. Because of these Russians, the Chinese had to learn to speak some. Have you ever heard a Chinese person speak in Russian? Hilarious.

As you all know, in America we love the idea of being tan. A little bronzed is beautiful, and pasty white is disgusting. So the tanning industry makes quiiiiiiiiite a bit of money. In China it is the opposite. I'm sure I have already mentioned the whitening cream they sell in stores. But you know what they don't sell in stores? SUNBLOCK. Yeah, so being in cloudy, smoggy Wenjiang we had gotten quite pale over the past two months. Being in sunny Hainan we got burnt to a crisp. All of us. Even Colette, and she is black. We were completely miserable and wanted to cry. Tao just laughed because he turned a nice bronze color. But he was afraid that Fan-Fan would leave him because he looked like a Farmer. Oh the Chinese.

And that concludes the last week of our china adventure together. Everyone was to go their separate places. We said a tearful goodbye to Dayton in the Hainan airport as he was leaving for Beijing. When we got back to our beautiful (ish) city of Wenjiang we split up once again. Most of the group went to Vineyards with Winnie, Helen, and Joanna. Vineyards is Korean owned restaurant that makes American food. We found this place two weeks before we left. Typical. Me, Colette, Ana, and Eamon went to hit the clubs in Chengdu one last time. We of course started off with Shamrock and had a blast with all the rugby boys. I did my best to avoid master Tom and had a blast. We went to Jellyfish next and reminisced with all the good times we had out at these clubs. We avoided the Eurotrash like the plague and danced until three in morning. Unfortunately we never made it to Muse. I am really going to miss my two partners in crime this Summer.