HANGZHOU

Where do I begin, my internet hasn’t worked in about a week, so this is my first chance to do anything on it.

Let me start making up for lost time with this….China is amazing. Not like a really fun night out amazing, more of a life morphing amazing.

So the first full week of classes was last week, and its going to be hard, but I can already see improvements in my Chinese that I never saw at Union. Conversationally that is. I can survive at restaurants, order drinks at bars, and talk with great difficulty to women…(the last but most important piece of the puzzle)

On Friday afternoon, we went to the American consulate in Shanghai to meet a Union alumnus Jonathan Heimer. He is a large part of the reason that I’m absolutely positive I will be coming back here. The talk we had on the roof of one of the multitude of skyscrapers was extremely motivating. I’ve decided that Chinese is going to play a bigger part in my academic life than it ever has before. I’m determined to learn as much Chinese as physically possible over the next 10 weeks or so, and continue to retain it while I go through 2 terms of less efficient teaching. I plan to come back here on my own and live here for a while teaching English. I’m not sure when, but we’ll see.

On Saturday morning, we left for the Shanghai train station where we would depart for Hanghou. Hangzhou is another big city, with about 4 million people in it, but less actual space, so it seems just as or more crowded than shanghai. The train ride was boring and fairly uncomfortable as Jeff and Pye display here.

We went to this 900 year old pagoda, there’s not really much I can say about it, because that’s all it was. There was nothing inside besides stairs to the top. There were some pretty nice views from there, but nothing to scream about.

We then went further up the mountain, and into this hillside village. Here we washed our hands in a “lucky” 1000 year old well, and got to pull up our own buckets. This well was discovered by this guy with the same first name as me “long” which means dragon. So it is known as the dragon well. They claimed it gave their tea a special touch. The tea in this area is known as the best in all of china. The tea is shipped directly from this village to all government locations, because they refuse to drink anything else. Put that in your pipe and smoke it. We all got to drink several small cups of it, and I bought some to take home.

We then took a little boat trip on the west lake, and went out for the best Chinese meal we’ve had since we arrived. I took the chopsticks with me as a souvenir; I believe they are made of bamboo. We also got to see a water fountain show that was choreographed to music. Sweet. We went back to the hotel (we were only propositioned for massages with happy endings twice), and go to bed.

This is where the trip took a turn for the surreal. Most of us went to bed that night, however Jeff and Pye had actually slept the night before, and decided they would have a look around. I was asleep by 11, but at 11:30, there is a banging on my door. At first I tried to ignore it, but it wouldn’t stop. I made Sam get up and open it and Pye sprints into the room and leaps on the bed with me. He’s bouncing up and down, declaring that we need to come with him right now, because we would never believe it if he told us. Always up for an adventure we put on our clothes as fast as we could and headed down to the lobby. When we got there I asked Pye where we were going, and he said “back up!” confused I continued to follow. We got in another elevator and he pushed the button for the top floor. Pye began to explain what they had found as the elevator kicked into gear. On the 40^th floor, there was a club. At this club, there were dancers (not strippers), and they were the prettiest women Pye had seen in his life. Not only that, but the bar was full of women of which none were below an 8.

We waited anxiously in the elevator like it was Christmas morning. The doors open and we all but run inside. My first image is Jeff, sitting at the bar, with this look of a combination happiness, intoxication and disbelief on his face. We sat down next to him and ordered a round of drinks. 4 dollars a beer maybe less for a 2 ingredient drink.

The dancers were indeed inhumanly beautiful, and much to our double happiness (Chinese expression) so were the bartenders. Jeff admitted to me that he had never been attracted to a single Asian before but now he was attracted to 11 of them. So we order maybe 2 or 3 drinks, chatting up the bartenders in our best chinglish that we can manage, and we notice this other guy at the bar who has put about 500 American dollars worth of bills in a cup in front of him. We decided to make friends. He Buys us a round, and then another. We made friends with the guy on the other side of us too, and he bought us a round as well.

All of us are in prime form now, and the best parts are yet to come. We ask if we can get up on stage, and they say that we can. The next thing we know, is all 4 of us (Sam went to bed and I don’t know where John went) are on stage, and demanding that they play the Numa Numa song.

If anyone has seen the family guy episode where Peter and his friends play journey at a karaoke night, you’ll understand what happened here. Everyone in the world knows this song, not just college age Americans and Europeans. As we were Rocking out on stage (we each had our own microphone) everyone in the club sang along with us and people outside began coming in to join the ridiculousness. We were rock stars. We exited the stage and were greeted by another 10 beers that a few people had chipped in to buy for us. We did not however decide to start our own band.

Things settled down as we continued to enjoy the night. One bartender who was absolutely breathtaking, was having a little too much fun, and drank a little too much and became belligerent. Mike ordered 2 drinks and she took his 100 kuai note and pocketed it right in front of him and wouldn’t give him his drinks. This snowballed and began to involve 3 of us and more bartenders all fighting with this first bartender. The inebriated bartender finally put the 100 kuai note back on the bar, and told the barback to get the drinks. Mike had had enough and just snatched the note for himself and told her he didn’t want the drinks. “BU YAO BU YAO”. Now of course, the bartender wouldn’t just let this stand, oh no, she was going to put up a fight even if she didn’t know what it was for. She started accusing him of stealing the money, and in her rage took one of my unopened beers and smashed it on the ground. Then she took a swing at one of the other bartenders. (She’s 5 feet tall tops) Eventually she ended up stomping off in a huff. I don’t think they planned on letting her back in the next night but who knows, I was going to be in shanghai again at that point.

As the night wound down and we continued to drink, we managed to get up on stage one last time to dance along to Gunther. The highlight of this was picking up confetti off the ground and blowing it out of our hands all over the bar. We were greeted by more drinks when we returned to our seats. Some other crazy stuff happened but I don’t feel like writing it all down so you’ll have to ask me in person about it.

Eventually we decided we should leave (we needed to wake up in 4 hours) and we went to bed and were asleep by the time our heads hit the pillow.

The rest of the trip involved a Chinese breakfast (our first), a short lecture on the site of a palace that doesn’t exist anymore. (Hangzhou used to be the capital of china before Beijing was. At that time Shanghai was nothing more than a small fishing town.) Following the lecture which was really interesting that all of us fought viciously to keep our eyes open for, we went on a hike to the town/ forest where the temple/palace used to be located.

Taking the cab out of Hangzhou and walking through a poor town then into the woods, was a very strange transition. It’s easy to believe when you live in a city like Shanghai, that there are no more forests anywhere. The hike wasn’t too hard, but it was scenic and full of stairs. Felt the burn. We got to see a 20 foot tall Buddha that was carved into a rock face, and climbed up him and sat on his lap. We finished the hike, and threw caution to the wind. Enough with China! We are going to Pizza hut! Pizza hut is called Bi Sun Ke or something along those lines. The characters that make up the name literally translate to Succeed above expectations. Many parents of Fudan students take their children out to Bi Sun Ke before exams in hopes of boosting their scores. However I guess that 200 other people decided the felt like pizza hut at the same time, so the wait was over an hour. We settled for McDonalds and dumplings.

We got back on the train at 4ish and headed home, we played Rummy 500 the whole way, but with 4 people, it took forever. I ended up winning with a score of 365. We dropped our stuff off in our rooms, and went out for Italian food. After we returned it was around 930, we were all exhausted and still needed to do our work. That grindstone will be dust when I’m through with it.

I've got close to 70 new dvds now. Someone stop me.