Food Poisoning, The Night Market, and Beijing Opera

While jogging through the streets of Beijing the other day, I noticed what I looked like an interesting restaurant. On my first trip to China, I had eaten at a hot pot restaurant, which is, for you idiots out there where they bring out some boiling water to your table, along with a bunch of raw meat that you cook in the water. I had very fond memories of this restaurant and was excited by my discovery, which was similar, except that each table had a little grill instead of boiling water. When a group of us were trying to decide where to eat dinner tonight, it came instantly to mind.

Now suggesting a restaurant to a large group is always risky business. Anyone who disagrees with that has never been on a MUN trip with Mr. Parker. "Affordable and delicious?" I can remember him asking many a student post-meal. The sarcastic nod that followed cut deeper than any unclean steak knife at that restaurant could have. But, I took the plunge, and off we went.

The menu handed to us offered a myriad of exoctic meats alongside the more commonplace. Dog meat, which is surprisingly rare in China (usually medium rare actually, ba dum chhh) was available, and I joked that we should try the ram testis. The waiter who was presiding over all this tom foolery began to scrible in her notepad, at which point I frantically explained that we didn't actually want that, and I was only joking. She motioned to erase the writing, but the rest of us were a little wary of what we were eating from this point on.

We settled on a massive platter of beef, potatoes, and some nice slabs of bacon, which were quickly brought to our table. This is where the food poisoning bit comes in. Because all told we had five pairs of chopsticks and a grill space no larger than a sheet of notebook paper, there was massive cross contamination. At one point a young man was heard to utter:

"This potato tastes like beef"
"McDonald's French Fry" came the reply.

Personally, I found the whole experience to be rather enjoyable, although there was some muffled complaining amongst the group. In one clear incident, I berated a companion for not eating a large majority of the bacon on his plate, to which he replied "it's all fat". You see, this poor misled soul had never learned that bacon fat is the best part of bacon. The look of horror on his face when I ate all his fat, matched the look of horror on my face when I learned that the "artichoke" I thought I had been eating was actually cow's tongue.

Earlier today, I went to the store to buy some index cards and ended up walking out with a Chinese Chess board and a ping-pong paddle. The storekeepers really looked like they thought they were getting away with something, but the joke was on them, because everything combined cost about 13 american dollars.

Speaking of ridiculously cheap things, I went to the night market with my roommate last night to peruse various and sundry junk that I might want to buy. We went to a place right outside of Tianamen square, that was everything you expect from a Chinese market: dirty, cramped and items that would be overpriced if they were free. But I found some hilarious glasses that I bought, and plan to wear to class everyday, claiming that I was diagnosed with cataracts by the nearby Chinese eye clinic. Hopefully I will get some pictures up shortly of these bad boys, because they are hilarious. I also continue to buy dvd's which cost all of 1 dollar here. If anyone has any requests, I can probably bring you back some dvd's. Did I say one dollar? I meant five.

Speaking of dvd's I spent a large part of this weeking finishing up "Lost" which I am now convinced is one of the greatest TV shows of all time (better than 24?) The only thing that upset me is how they answered almost none of the big questions and are making us wait until the next season. And just now I realized that Chris and Joey are the only ones who even care about this.

On Friday was the Beijing opera, which has about as much in common with real opera as something that has nothing in common with it's name (I tried to think of a joke here, I really did). I was really skeptical at first, as it seems that every theatrical venture in China has the production values of a fifth grade Christmas pagent. Surprisingly the night proved somewhat enjoyable, as we were provided with snacks during the performance.

The actual production went something like this. A weird guy wearing make-up would prance out onto the stage, and every time he took a step or moved, the "orchestra" would make a calamitous sound, which the program identified as "music". To get a better understanding of what this sounded like you should know that the orchestra consisted entirely of percussion and string instruments with one string. In fact this one string instrument is quite prevalent in China, which might explain why the West has produced Mozart and the Beatles, and the East has produced Mandopop.

Though the story lines for the two plays were uncomfortably similar (scrappy underdog fights massive army and triumps), the provided english translations laughably poor (the second play was entitled "stealing the filthy pelf"), and the dramatic arcs of the two acts left much to be desired (at the end of the first act, the two main foes who have been viciously "battling" for the better part of 45 minutes suddenly decide to stop and [and I quote] "have a chat besides the old barn"), I found myself not despising the whole experience, which was much more than I could have hoped for coming into it.

Alright, during class, I've made a bunch of notes about other things that I should write about. For example, every day, EVERY DAY, the electricity in our classrooms short circuits and we lose lighting and air conditioning for about 15 minutes. They then turn on the power, go around and turn all the air conditioners and lights, and then act surprised when the power shorts again. This cycle repeats intself about 4 times each day. One day, they came by to turn on the air conditioning and the lights again, though in an act of pure strategical genius left one of the lights off. The worst part is, this actually solved the crisis! For about three days there were no power shortages. For some reason they abandoned this strategy though, and we now get to enjoy warm, dark classrooms again.

Two things completely unrelated to China, but that have been on my mind. First is the saddest radio call-in I've ever heard, which is saying a lot, because I listen to a lot of talk radio. Anyway, at the turn of the century, Einstein was named man of the century, and they were discussing it on KFI. They went to the phones and the first guy said that he thought the Einstein's importance lay in the theory of relativity. The host seemed thrilled that someone had called to discuss this and probed further.

"Yeah, for example," the caller continued "I'm sitting out here on my fishing boat, drinking a beer, and all of life's problem's seem to go away. It's all relative."

The caller was dead serious, and the host was speechless.

The other thing is that in 7th grade, I had to take this class which was kind of like shop with you computers. We used AUTOCAD software to run a lathe for example, which sounds cool, until you learn that our biggest accomplishment of the year was taking a large block of plastic and making it slighty smaller. Anyway, my lab partner for one of these projects was an absolutely ugly girl, probably the most disgusting girl I've ever met. I introduced myself as Tom, and then she told that I should call her "boys over books, because her sisters think that she spent all her time talking with boys on the phone instead of studying". My time with boys over books will haunt me for the rest of my life.

And the blog just keeps on going. Three last things. First of all if I had a time machine (speaking of the theory of relativity), I finally decided what I would use it for. I would go back to the creation of the Chinese language, and I would teach them the joys of phonetic spelling. "You mean we don't have to create a unique combination of little tiny pictures for every single item on the planet?" they would ask.

"No, you idiots, no."

And while we're talking about Chinese characters, I must say that I am a little miffed that my college Chinese teachers decided to teach me a type of characters that hasn't been used since 1947. They claimed that it was so we could read "ancient texts" which on my list of why I'm taking Chinese ranks about 1043rd, right below "Being able to negotiate for cheaper soap at various Chinatowns across the United States", but right above "being able to watch Chinese Soap operas". So, now I've had to relearn a whole bunch of characters, completely ruining a number of pnemonic devices that I had crafted for the old characters. Thankfully though, I've been able to salvage a few. You see, to help myself memorize the characters, I create little stories for each one. For example for the word "dean", I imagined that the character was Howard Dean in front of audience with a microphone to his left. Now, appropriately, in the simplified version, the microphone has been taken away.

Ok, something I was thinking about was that if I was teaching English to a bunch of bratty Chinese kids, I think I might intentionally slip in a few "mistakes" into their vocabulary. This is why I'm always a little afraid to speak Chinese. That, and I'm terrible at it.

As time wears on, I've been attempting to craft the perfect metaphor to describe what Chinese Class here is like. Right now I'm stuck on baseball, with the teacher as all time pitcher, and the students as somewhat unwilling batters. What happens is that the teacher will throw a random pitch to a student, and the student will attempt a respond, doing so well (homerun) or terribly (strike out). The difficulty of the questions often varies, allowing for the fastball/curveball/etc... metaphor. The one problem with this metaphor is that it fails to capture the truly devistating nature of an all out student wipe-out. Whereas a strike-out in baseball is commmonplace, and hardly shameful, I've seen many students be reduced to stammering idiots on questions they probably knew the answer to. But once you get going down the wrong road, things can get ugly. I tend to call these the "Train Wrecks".

Why is it that when you have the most to do, you have the most to blog about? This is a great mystery of the 21st century, that some great thinker must tackle. Though not me, the night is young and much homework awaits me. Farewell brave readers, if you've made it this far. And if not continue reading, because there's alot of hilarious jokes in this one.