this is why i will miss being a student

I woke up at noon today. It is 6 pm now and I'm still in bed. It is just the begining of my four day weekend. There is a cleaning lady mopping up the nuclear mess left over from our housewarming last night. Said cleaning lady charges 10 yuan an hour (approx 1.5$). I have eaten nothing but pop and candy all day. And I don't feel at all ashamed of the waste of space that I am!

Here's something I wrote last week when we didn't have internet yet, so here you go a blast from the past

Moving to a new city, even if merely for 5 months, is hard work. And now that most of it is done, I finally stop to breathe. I look around me, sniff my glorious new mood candle from Ikea, and look out at the city that is still alive and beating.
It is 1:30am on Thursday and I should be sleeping. I also don't know when this post will go up as internet is still a distant dream for our new apartment.
The last few days have been consumed with househunting, moving, contract signing, household shopping, cleaning, school, permits and student visas. We got this beautiful place on the top floor of a building that looks out onto Tsinghua. It is big and expensive to Chinese standards, but barely half of what I paid for living in Canada, and definitely a better deal than the double dormitory rooms I was sharing last week.

Today was the first day of class for me. I have four classes, bringing me to a grand total of two and a half days in school a week. Bummer, I wish I was on campus more often. I'll have to make do within my alternate habitat, the library. Mmmm learning, gimme gimme.
Things I miss: being able to use the washroom when I need to. Things I learn to deal with: the PA playing classical music to signify breaks, during which every girl with a bladder mauls eachother for the washroom.
So far the organization level of Tsinghua's international exchange admin has been questionable. They left us to our own devices during course selection, which was online and in CHINESE, providing a handful of english taught couses that all seem to coincide with eachother, and not bothering to resolve conflicts although our graduation hinges upon the completion of these courses. But hey, no biggie to them. Then in a few of the classes, the professor doesn't even speak English and the exchange students are forced to learn the language or bust. Since we were getting no love from the admin, we decided to take matters in our own hands and offer to write the professor an english case in exchange for not coming to class. He loved the idea. Success!

Otherwise life has been life, and I'm still searching for that aha moment here.


So last night was our housewarming party. It was an epic success, everyone loved our apartment and had mindexploding fun. We had probably 100 people, half of whom we had never met, in our apartment. There were Germans, Chinese, Frenchmen, Swedes, Colombians, Spaniards, Aussies, you name it we had em. Makes for the most eclectic and dynamic predrink EVER. This morning when we woke up there were 12309234987 empty beer bottles and the remnants of awesome memories all around.

Words are cheap, so I present you with some eye candy.

My new bedroom

Colours of my dreams

Room with a view

All cleaned up for partay

Setting up the table

Some healthy finger food!

The start of the night

Blondes have more fun

The hostess with the mostess!

Nothing wraps up a good night like MickeyD's at 5 am.

The aftermath.


Now let's do it again next week!

exhausted

and throwing in the towel

30 second update

We have moved into a new apartment. It is a 3 bedroom, on the right side of the sun, and with a beautiful view on the 20th floor in a central location. Perfect right? Except the internet still doesn't work and we are forced to hijack internet from a friend in the building who is stealing internet from someone else. Great. We are hosting a house warming party on Friday wheeeeeee.
Will post more updates tomorrow including first day of school failure and treks extraordinaire.

how can i have you in my life?

its all about flylo

we make great success!

Clearly it didn't take very long to get back into college mode. It is 1 o clock and Cat and I just woke up. It's also been a while since I shared a double room with someone else. Everything's been great except for the fact that our washroom is down the hall, and that there's only hot water between 7 and 9 and 3 to 5 every day. We've met some pretty rad people here so far. There's been no organized meet and greets by the university so we've sort of taken it upon ourselves to socialize, creating facebook groups and knocking on people's doors guerilla style. One of our first friends was a Costa Rican who has a midwest twang picked up from university in the States. He insisted on calling Cat, Lucia because she's from Colombia, so we now call him Yoyo.
On one of our first days we tackled the biggest tourist traps in Beijing; Tiananmen Gate, and the Forbidden Kingdom. I felt like one of those yelling tour guides marching ahead, paving the way for my tourists. All I needed was a big staff with a red flag. As noone else in our group spoke Mandarin, I was their glimmering light of hope in an otherwise hopelessly vast city. Tiananmen Gate was flooded with people even though it was a biting minus 10 degrees out on the coldest day of the year.






We shuffled through the gate with the herd and proceeded past a few more gates until we got to the Forbidden Palace, the place 20 or so emperors have called home. It is called 'forbidden' because noone was allowed to enter and noone was allowed to leave, save for the emperor himself perhaps.




The number of tourists thinned out beyond the palace gates because you had to pay an entrance fee to get in. The palace itself is magnificent, massive courtyards upon massive gates. Beyond getting a feel for the size of the place, probably in direct correlation with the emperor's egos, there was nothing much else on display except for their embellished thrones and chairs. We concluded that they liked to sit a lot.



spot the frozen fish!



parents should probably not let their kids this close to me, especially if their fat and meaty







Then we went to Wangfujing, the most famous shopping area in Beijing, to get our window shopping on. The kids were captivated and engrossed by all that was on display at the food stalls down Snack Street.


yumm-o!

I bought a Mao hat and am here posing with said hat.

it's always a good idea to pose with mascots



That night we had an impromptu night out after meeting some of our new facebook friends in person. We gathered at a grad student's apartment outside campus and played Korean drinking games with Soju. None of us were Korean. They are the best ice breakers ever. Imagine sitting in a circle and screaming Bing!!! Bang!!!! Bong!!!! WAAAHHHH!!!!!!!!! while flaying your arms wildly in the air. We're all BFFs now.




Yesterday was our official Exchange Students Welcome Meeting and they brought in the head of police to brief us on the legalities of living in China for an hour. With every law, there was an accompanying anecdote that made examples of past foreign exchange students. For example, do not drink excessively, especially if you are male and have a lot of testosterone. "Last December, a foreign student from Germany drank too much, and got in a fight with a taxi driver, and later when the police came he beat up a police officer as well. He ended up in jail for 10 days." Do not engage in acts of prostitution, especially if you are foreign and female. "Last December, two foreign girls from Mongolia were found to be engaged in acts of prostitution at a bar. They were deported and black listed from border control for the next 5 years." Do not engage in gun fights. "Last December..."

Lesson learned, do not come to Tsinghua in December. I don't know if it was the worst use of two hours or the greatest two hours of my life. Me and Cat would look at eachother after each law and go Damn, you mean I CAN'T start a cult here? Shit son what am I gonna do with the guns I packed?

Oh China.

Lol, and apparently I shouldn't have taken that "Black Cab" to the health clinic the other day, since "last December" two Korean students got in one of those and got their organs removed and thrown into a ditch. Selling organs on the black market is apparantly all the rage these days. My mom called me terrified I was going to get my drink roofied for this express purpose and warned me to stay far far away from all nightlife establishments. Oh, mom.

Last night we met some more people at a dinner and went to a tiny bar that featured live music from Chinese emo punk rock bands! Totally rad. There was this Chinese guy in the bar with an AFRO, and we decided it was a good idea to ask him for a picture. Turns out he is part of a band called the Fire Balloons and Cat gave him her Ivey business card so he can tell us where their next show is.

We are going househunting today because there's only so much you can take with dictated shower times. Our dorm is also a 30 minute walk from the closest subway station as well as our classes, and we have to cab everywhere because there's no busses. It is also about the same price as renting off campus, so hopefully we can get out of here asap. Eventually we'll also have to get bicycles and then we can be true locals foreals.

Until then, zai jian!



Live update. Fire Balloon Afroman has emailed our girl Cat. We make great success!

sort of like a dream...no, better

I'm beautiful, I wasn't born to follow. I live just for today. What i've got in my head, you can't buy, steal or borrow. I believe in live and let live. I believe you get what you give.

Via Air France on Myspace



The windmills are for you Hea-v D.

Women only. Men stop here now.

After a couple of loooong days, I can finally let out a huge sigh of pent up tension, wiggle my toes free of fatigue and announce with semi-certainty that I'm settled in Beijing. After I last wrote, which I forgot to mention was pre-boarding at the airport, I was relieved to observe that the plane was not missing any discernible parts. I didn't know what to make of the stewardess outfits of day-glow yellow tshirts and black courdroys though... I also had an 8 hour overnight layover in Shenzhen, where to my dismay they do not have a transit lounge with open bar and internet, and woe is me I had to lie on a hard metal bench in this dingy hallway with a fellow budget traveller and someone I'm pretty sure was homeless. To add insult to injury there was a glass enclosed VIP area with inviting leather couches directly in front of us but that was locked up for the night for our viewing pleasure. And I've heard so many horror stories of luggage being stolen as the victim dozed off that I kept one eye open the entire night. But I survived with the spirit of a bona fide hustler and is that ca-ching I hear in my pockets?

Tsinghua University is like a township in itself. It is massive. I walked from the north side to the south today and it took about fourty minutes, I live on the east side and have yet to see the west. The foreign students administration thought it necessary for each step of the registration to take place in a different building, so that was really a treat. I had to pay for the dorm, which I would like to announce is 6 times the amount a domestic student pays, purchase an internet package that counts down my hours- I'm so not used to limited cyber time gahh, pay an unexplained registration fee, open a bank account, get a cell phone, pay for a meal card, and begin the process for my visa conversion from a tourist to a student. To get a student visa I had to go to some health clinic and get an inspection done so I walked into the frigid snowfall this morning to try to locate this place. Met another exchange student from Pakistan who was also headed there and together tried to flag down a taxi. Apparently this place is like in the country and so obscure that NO taxi out of the five we stopped would take us there. Just when all options seemed to go to hell this sketchbag guy in a rundown car shows up out of nowhere and offers to drive us there and back for 100RMB. I look at my new friend, he looks at me, and we jump in with the desperation of two students perilously close to deportation. There were a million other foreign students at the centre and most of them paid double what we did for similar "private taxis", so lesson learned is that good things come from trusting shady dudes promising to absolve your problems. Read up, kids!

After six hours of wandering around campus and the surrounding perimeter today I've concluded that Beijing is daunting and massive and that the campus is nowhere in walking distance of anything significant save for a sprawling mobile phone and electronics supercenter. I'm now alone in my room safely guarded by a sign on the floor saying "Women only. Men stop here now." My lovely roommate and fellow Ivey col to the league arrives tomorrow, and I'm relieved to finally have someone to practice Canadian english with again. My english has been getting progressively worse with each new Asian country I'm inhabiting. And it's not like my Chinese is improving exponentially or that I've learned any Nepali at all. I almost couldn't recognize my voice when I spoke today, spitting out some mutant crossover of fob and Singlish (truly amusing for anyone who's ever heard it). Be glad there's no audio accompaniment to this blog.

Now its off to rest for me, as I'm missing a tube of blood from my 2 hour examination this morning. I was surprised to find drawing blood no biggie, since I've built up this unnerving fear of it ever since I tried giving blood a few times in the past and was denied each time. Evidently since I have lived in England once upon a time, I undoubtably possess mad cow disease, and oh think of the unsuspecting recipients who I have potential to mentally destabilize. Don't worry though, I have other ways to go about that. The Canadian Blood Foundation ain't got nothin on me.

cause for concern

...when you realize the the obscure airline your parents booked your ticket on does not leave from Changi Airport's regular Terminals 1 and 2, but from a completely separate building named "Budget Terminal".

The boarding pass is printed from a roll of grocery receipt paper.

And the half-expectation for the aircraft to have a refurbished sign printed on the side in red.

Fingers crossed guys. Hey at least I saved 60%...

raise the red lantern

What is this life, if full of care, we have no time to stand and stare

As my recent posts reveal, I have been consumed lately with my forays into discovering the authenticity of a locale. This obsession has extended into the everyday, my life, as well as my observing other lives of distant communities. Right now and for the definite period of the next seven months, my life will be somewhere in a limbo between those two. The minute I drift too far into the realm of possibilities of when I "begin my life" back at home, I have to snap myself back to reality, which is in the now. Left to the whims of my impatient mind, I easily forget that this is no limbo, that tomorrow rests on what I do today. Instead of a numb bystander, I need to be there, learn something new, and "look alive" literally and otherwise.

There's too many ways to do this, take 30 minutes of Me time for example, jot down a thought, but more important than having a great idea in your head, act on it. Buckminster Fuller, the extraordinary thinker and inventor probably put it best that "merely talking about ideas does not support their advancement or the development of individuals and humanity...the majority of people do nothing about their good ideas except engage in seemingly endless discussions." So instead of envisioning scenes for that screenplay in your Moleskin, get a camera and film a prototype. Walk up to that gallery curator and show her your samples instead of waiting to be discovered. Sign up for that triathalon, even if none of your friends are willing to sacrifice that weekend with you. Take that intro to improv class, even if you run the risk of shitting your pants in a classroom of strangers. All of it will ultimately lead you down the path of acting rather than waiting, which we all need more of. In my case I'm learning to come out of hiding behind the peripheral vision of my D70, speak to and touch, in a completely noncreepy way, my subjects.

Uncovering someplace's authenticity requires a keen eye for not just the exceptionally novel but also the unexceptionally mundane, sharp ears for the drones, buzzes, and trickles, a mind open to the impossible and continuously questioning the acceptable. I don't need to tell you how hard of an exercise this is in our times. It's too easy to travel Asia with the precise scheduling of a guide, or even to trace the same route to work every day without raising your head from the concrete. The idea is to be alert, but in our daily grind, scheduled down to the second, we barely have time for ourselves, let alone notice our surroundings.

I was deeply touched by Gene Weingarten's article for the Washington Post, in which he conducted a fascinating experiment testing people's perceptiveness of beauty displaced in an extraordinary context. He placed Joshua Bell, arguably the world's greatest living violinist, in a busy DC metro station during the morning commute with a $3 million dollar violin and a repertoire of Bach's most revered work. Every one of the 1000 passerbys in the next hour had a choice to make, "Do you stop and listen? Do you hurry past with a blend of guilt and irritation, aware of your cupidity but annoyed by the unbidden demand on your time and your wallet? Do you throw in a buck, just to be polite? Do you have time for beauty? Shouldn't you? What's the moral mathematics of the moment?" In the 45 minutes that he played, only seven people stopped and took notice of the music, 27 people gave money for a total of $32.17, while thousands rushed past oblivious to having been in the presence of a musician who had just played for the President the night before. Watch the video below.



If even Joshua Bell gets lost in the shuffle, what about all the smaller beautiful things that can enrich us if we only let them? Rhetoric is great but what's important is application when it actually counts. For having read this article, we are the lucky ones, because we are still on that commute. In time my goal is to not just experience the authenticity of exotic travels, but of the raw life breathing around me every day.

I leave for Beijing tomorrow afternoon. The start of another chapter and goodbye to Singapore!

why what is this my sweet heart?

child's play