The past few weeks have been pretty hectic. On weekdays I've been getting up at 8am and not getting home until 9pm or 10pm. This has caused the days to fly by, it's crazy to think that October is almost over. I have also been coaching on the weekends. All in all, a lot of basketball.
I am just realizing that I never finished writing about Chengdu, which is really too bad because it was a fun trip. In a non-sequitur that will fill up the rest of this blog post, I've been getting more responsibilities around the office. This afternoon, I am going to start my search for more basketball coaches with my boss. I'm not sure how to recruit in Beijing. There are some expat websites and hangouts, but I'm going to have to sit down and brainstorm how to lure prospective basketball coaches into my snare. At the moment, the company I'm working for (Show1) is expanding like crazy.
Aside from weekend camps, one of the new ideas the company is trying out is getting into high schools to coach. I've been coaching at a boys and girls high school where the players are actually pretty good and so far it's been a lot more fun than trying to coach 10 year olds the fundamentals of basketball because their parents want them to learn skills rather than have fun even though that is one of the few ways to kill any kid's passion for basketball at an early age. But I digress. Apparently, Show 1 doesn't get money for coaching at the high schools, the idea is for the high schools (and middle schools that are connected with the high schools) to promote and encourage the kids in the schools to pay for and go to the weekend camps that Show1 puts on.
They are also opening up more camps around Beijing. They are hiring more people who will be in charge of organizing and facilitating the basketball camps in specific districts in Beijing. Part of what I've been doing over the past couple of weeks is putting on Demo camps in the new areas that we are expanding to. The idea is to show kids how great our camps are so they decide to pay for them. Show 1 has been advertising the free demo camps in newspapers and online, so I have been running around to coach all of those camps. However, in the future there are going to be what Sun Qiang calls "a lot" of demo camps, so I have to find some more coaches to help out.
Lastly, Show 1 is expanding outside of Beijing as well. We are trying to move into other provinces, with the overall goal to saturate all of China in a sea of little Chinese kids who will become the next generation of all star ballers and in time will dominate the NBA and in time turn it into merely an extension of the CBA (China Basketball Association). Although that is just me surmising. I think we just want more money. That's mostly likely why we're moving into other provinces.
So that's what I've been doing lately. I think that in the near future I'm going to start coming into the office less, which will be nice. The next couple of months should be interesting as to where the company is going. We have about 20 employees, and I think over half of them are marketing people.
Well, time for lunch!
Sometimes I have experiences here that always raise the same question - is there some sort of cultural gap between myself and Chinese that make some of their suggestions/ideas seem ridiculous and illogical, or is there just a lack of common sense?
Yesterday I coached my boy's high school team. Like all basketball teams in Beijing, they practice outside. This makes rain a very formidable enemy. Although it was sunny and there were blue skies overhead, the day before it rained quite hard. Because of this, the good outdoor court that we usually play on had some large puddles that would make practice unsafe. I was with Sun Qiang and the athletics director of the school at the time and they said we were going to practice on the court spotted with puddles anyway. I asked about the issue of copious amounts of water on the court, and they said that a couple of kids were going to get rid of them. I was skeptical but decided to see what was to come of this. A couple minutes later, the kids came with large brooms. They walked over to the largest puddle and started sweeping the water around, making the formerly dry area around the puddles wet as well, and covered more and more of the court in water. After about 20 seconds of this, they stopped and declared that this wasn't going to work.
I had to fight back my laughter. I have no idea what they were thinking. I imagined it in America:
"Hey Jim, there seems to be puddles of water all over the court and the kids' practice starts in five minutes. What should we do?"
"Oh don't worry about that Bob, we'll get some brooms and just sweep that shit all over the place. Piece of cake."
"Alrighty."
20 seconds later
"Well shit Jim, it looks like sweeping water just makes the rest of the court wet as well."
"At least we tried!"
This is an example of the endless sources of comedy that goes along with living in China. As absurd as it is, it makes me love this place that much more. China is a wonderland of the absurd, preposterous, grotesque, fantastic, astonishing, breath-taking, of smells, of mice (or in this case, rats) and men, of chopsticks, of loud speaking natives, and of dumplings (among some other things). The longer I live here, the more I think to myself: there's something happening here. And what it is, it just ain't clear.
One of the responsibilities of my job is to write comic dialogue aimed at the kids. The comics are supposed to be anywhere from 3 to 6 frames each. The big boss man wants the comics to be funny, and he hopes that the kids who read them will learn some English, think it's funny, and ostensibly be grounds for them to want to come to the camps. However, of his true reasons for the comics I am still unsure. Those hopes of big boss man were all supposition on my part. I have asked Sun Qiang why we are writing comics. He told me so that the kids will read them.
There is someone whose job it is to take the dialogue I write and create the artwork from it. Let me say that again, there is someone whose job it is, to take the dialogue THAT I WRITE and create artwork from it. Let me tell you something about comics I write. They are not very funny. I have no idea what I'm doing (which I have told Sun Qiang before). There is no plot line or character building. The comics are, in a word, uninteresting.
Sun Qiang just came by my desk to clarify what I meant in a couple of the comics that I wrote so that the guy who creates the comics can better understand what it is that he's actually trying to create. I listened to Sun Qiang repeat the a few of the comic strips back to me so that he could make sure he understood correctly what it was I was trying to say. All I could think was, 'wow, that's really not funny.'
This happened a few moments ago. This whole situation is quite hilarious when I take a step back and look at from a distanced perspective. It's also incredibly frustrating. I can see myself working towards tears of frustration as I struggle to create unfunny content, then laughing so hard at the ridiculousness of my job that the tears begin to flow.
Don't get me wrong though, writing the comics isn't all that bad, just... unexpected. I wonder if they think that because I can coach basketball that I can also write comics about basketball. I can now see where Mitch Hedburg was coming from when he said:
"When you’re in Hollywood and you’re a comedian, everybody wants you to do things besides comedy. They say, ‘OK, you’re a stand-up comedian – can you act? Can you write? Write us a script?’ … It’s as though if I were a cook and I worked my ass off to become a good cook, they said, ‘All right, you’re a cook – can you farm?’"
This music festival was the catalyst for bringing me to Chengdu. I wanted to go to Chengdu at some point while I'm back in China, and this was a great excuse. I got about 2 weeks notice for my week of vacation so I couldn't have planned anything really big anyway.
It was a 3 day music festival with DJs from all over the world. The first night I can't remember what the theme was, but the second night was hip-hop/electronic and the third night was house/techno. It was being headlined by DJ Shadow. I was also scoring free tickets to all 3 nights (which was around 400 kuai altogether). On the website Reddit there is a subreddit for China. I was perusing it a couple weeks prior to leaving for Chengdu, when I saw that the festival was going on and someone on the thread whose name I would later learn was Charlie was offering to give away a few tickets. I told him I was taking a hard seater from Beijing to Chengdu and he said that there was no way he couldn't help me out. He said if I made it in one peice I would have 3 tickets waiting for me.
The festival was located in a brand new remodeled area just outside the Third Ring Road on the Eastern side of the city (outside of the third ring road is where you begin to get outside Chengdu's city center). The venue used to be a big industrial area of the city back in Mao's day. Apparently, in the 1950s, the Soviet Union had come to Chengdu when it was one of China's leading industrial cities, and pumped millions of dollars into it. Over time they built up a gigantic manufacturing infrastructure that has long sinced moved further outside of the city as population growth has caused the city to expand.
However, that area has not gone to waste. They took a part of the old industrial zone and turned it into 2 or 3 square blocks of swanky new nightlife. The Panda Festival was taking place in only one part of the newly renovated industrial compound. There were also art exhibits, night clubs with DJs and night clubs with live music, restuarants, and even a hotel or two. I talked to a few foreigners who have lived in Chengdu for at least 6 or 7 years and they both were really hoping that the area makes it. Apparently Chengdu has been in need of a new nightlife scene, but not for lack of trying. For some reason no one's really been able to break through, there's been a ton of failed attempts at starting getting new nightlife going in Chengdu over the years, but nothing has stuck. The industrial area is quite aesthetically pleasing and all the nightclubs and restuarants I peaked inside of seemed really nice. I hope it makes it, I guess only time will tell.
At 8:30 I met Charlie and the 5 or 6 other lucky kids with golden tickets (hah) and headed inside for the Panda Festival. The industrial compound was packed with people, lots of seniors and young kids come as well because the architecture of the place itself is enough to draw visitors. It's hard to describe the area, and when I can finally upload my pictures I will be sure to add them here for anyone who cares to see. We wound our way through the compound until we finally made it to a big building with a large Xiong Mao festival banner flapping in the breeze next to it. There was a large line, rather, since it's China, a large routy mob waiting to get in. Charlie tells us to follow him and we push our way to the front, elbowing and mushing people along the way. When we got to the front it was extremely loud due to all the people and music blasting from speakers not too far away and Charlie waved at the people in charge at the entrance who had passes strung around their necks. They waved back and signaled him forward since trying to communicate via yelling wasn't going to work in the chaos. He pointed to us, the great white faces in a sea of Chinese indicating that we were with him and the people in charge nodded us in as well. When we got through the entrance, we got our hands stamped, a sticker put on our shoulder and someone handed each of us an empty cup. Apparently the entire show is open bar. As we head inside I am blinded by red light. The floors, walls, and celing were all a bright, glossy, relentless red. The red hallway then opens up into a red lounge area with 2 extremely large glass tables with long cushy black benches around them. When we get into the lounge area and turn right, I saw a venue much, much smaller than I had imagined. The room couldn't have been more than 50 feet wide by 30 feet deep, with a bar in the back. The main room was also completely white, with nothing on the walls except projections of trippy videos to accompany the music. We drank and talked amongst ourselves while Chinese people started to filter in. Before we knew it, we almost couldn't move from all the people. Luckily, being 6-3 and in China, I didn't have any issues of not being able to see the DJ or the psychedelic projections that accompanied them.
The first night was a lot of fun. Shows in China are similar to ones in the U.S. The dancing is a little different, and definitely more hilarious. There seemed to be no reason or rhyme to the wild flailing of limbs all around me as the show really started to get going. Their dancing reminded me somewhat of those big inflatable thin balloon people you see at used car dealerships that shimmy, bow, raise, and snap in the wind. At one point, and this is during heavy electronic music mind you, a large number of Chinese kids locked wrists, and began to jump around and around in a circle while yelling incoherent babble in what I can only describe as a techno-possibly-drug-induced-Chinese-ring-around-the-rosie. I tried to get a video of it, but by the time I got my phone out they had already dispersed. The hipster trend has also caught fire in China. The trendy, alternative, rebel Chinese youth came out of the woodwork that night in full force. The extremely skinny jeans, crazy button up shirts, wild hair, platform shoes, HUGE black rimmed glasses. It was a sight to see. One guy had headphones on (yes, headphones at a concert) an all black flat rimmed hat, a hoodie that was pulled tight around his head, a pink shirt, white jeans, and platform shoes. As much as I may have mixed feelings for those I label as 'hipster' I couldn't help but smile at the restless, super-hip Chinese people all around me. I highly doubt a current U.S. clothing/lifestyle trend would be capable of catching on in China even ten years ago. I know five years ago I didn't see any traces of the 2006 America I knew in Chengdu, but then again, my eyes weren't exactly all the way open.
I found Charlie later in the show and thanked him again for the ticket, and asked him how he liked the show. The conversation went something like this:
Me: How do you like the show so far?
Him: It's great, I was worried about the turnout, but it's packed.
Me: Yeah you could spin the DJ's turntables if you got to the very front.
Him: I hope no one does that to me.
Me: Yeah... what?
Him: When I DJ tomorrow, I hope no one fucks with me.
Me: You're DJing tomorrow?
Him: Yeah, didn't I tell you?
Me: No.
Him: Yeah, I'm playing before DJ Shadow comes on.
Me: You're opening for DJ Shadow?
Him: Yeah I guess so.
Me: Oh.
It turns out Charlie DJs all around Chengdu and he was asked to open for Shadow. I guess that's how he got all those extra tickets and we got special entrance to the show before it started. This may sound strange, but none of that really shocked me at the time. In all honesty, I figured it was because we were white and/or foreign. It's amazing what seems normal would have seemed extraordinary just a month earlier. Anyway, I left the show at around 1:30 and seemed to have a curious case of the clumsies as I was oddly having trouble walking. I found a cab and before I knew it I was at my hostel. I was also very hungry so I walked a block away and got some street food.
Let me tell you something about Chengdu street food: it is god damn delicious. Even though I've only been back in Beijing for a few days, I am already craving more of that street food. I call the street food in Chengdu shao kao, although I'm not sure if that is the correct term for it or just what I've always called it in Chengdu, I think the translation for shao kao is simply barbeque. Anyway, how it works is this: displayed in front of you is an assortment of skewered foods of all types of vegetables, meats, fish, and even eggs. You grab a fish-and-chips-esque plate and load it up with whatever you want. You hand them to the cook and he places them on a coal grill attached to his bicycle. He then adds all of his spices and sauces and uses voodoo incantations to summon tastes and smells otherwise impossible to bring into this world. While he is doing this all you can do is sit down on a toddler sized plastic stool at your mini 3 foot table and count down the seconds until your food is ready. When my food finally arrived I went into an odd dreamlike haze and suddenly all of my food was gone. I paid something like 15 kuai for about 10 sticks of food and went back to my hotel and passed out.
If I can't make it in China, I'm going to go back to Seattle or somewhere in the U.S., buy a rickety-ass bike, attatch a mini-wagon to the back and and sell the delicious roasted vegetables and meat. I will request/steal/buy the recipes that makes the meat so good, learn the voodoo magic, and I will then tour the U.S. on the bike, serving shao kao out of the back. It will be the dawn of a new Johnny Appleseed era, and it will be called Adam Meatwagon.
I woke up at around 10 and got out of the hostel at noon. It being my first day of three in Chengdu I decided to walk around and see the city and how much it's changed.
To be honest, Chengdu is a lot smaller than I remember it being. I think that has a lot to do with how insular I had been when I was there before. It makes me feel all grown up to have that type of perspective. It was a lot like when you were a kid and you would go to the same park to play all the time, then when you revisit that park later when you're all grown up, you almost can't believe how small at is, at how big you used to think it was. Compounded on that, having been in Beijing for the prior three weeks, I had warped expectations of what I was returning to. Beijing is an enormous city that dwarfs pretty much every other city that I've ever been to. Geographically, Beijing is the 4th largest city in the world with only Washington DC, Ottowa, and Moscow being ahead (but much of what is counted as 'Beijing' geography is very rural, areas where I probably will never go). Nevertheless, it is physically almost 3 times larger than NYC and in terms of population, it is has almost 3 times the number of people. In the area of Beijing where I actually live and explore, the city center, there are upwards of 13 or 14 million people.
Anyway, the first day back in Chengdu I was really excited to see a bunch of the spots I used to frequent when I lived in there in 2005-06. I walked down the main road just looking around and taking in all the small shops and street vendors. I soon found myself back at Tian Fu square with Big Mao, and even though it wasn't the same as it was the night prior (no light shows and not as many people), it was still very pretty. Sometimes when I'm in China and I see some remodeled square like Tian Fu, or a new building, or maybe a la-di-da plaza, I feel like I could be anywhere in the Western world. I was thinking just this thought as I was admiring a huge abstract sculpture made out of marble, considering the master craftsmanship that it must have taken to construct it, and how the square it was in was just as impressive and would never have existed anywhere in China even 10 years ago, when suddenly an old man on a beat up bicycle pedalling just faster than I was walking, leans over and hocks a huge loogie that misses the sculpture by an inch and lounds with a loud splat. He didn't give it a second glance. Good old China. I looked at the whitish, grayish flem on the ground next to the sculpture and couldn't help but think of the line: sticking feathers up your butt and clucking does not make you a chicken.
The first place I went to was my old school the Southwest School for Nationalities (Xi Nan Min Zu Da Xue). I think they changed a lot of the campus, but it was hard to tell. They added a section of basketball hoops and redid the flooring of the sports courts to a shocking blue grid type of pattern. The ping pong tables got new nets (still made out of metal, obviously), and the cafeteria was still jumpin. I went in and got a lot of food for something like 7 or 8 kuai. After, I exited out of the west gate and I found myself in the Tibetan quarter of the city. Suddenly nostalgia hit me like a slap in the face. I would come here all the time after my classes with my friends and get dumplings. The best dumplings in the world in fact. I had to see if the dumpling spot was still there. I heard about lots of restuarants closing in the 5 years since I was last there, which wasn't surprising, but I was hoping a spot that served the best dumplings in the world could survive. If they couldn't make it, I don't know who could. I couldn't quite remember what the outside of the restuarant looked like, my legs were pretty tired from all of the walking, and I was starting to get worried I wasn't going to find it when all of the sudden, BAM, there it was. Inside, 3 or 4 people ranging from about 12 - 40 years old were making the dumplings at a table right next to the entrance, a metal bucket between them full of some sort of seasoned, delicious meat. All of the tables inside were covered in clear, thick plastic, and on the ends of them were all of the garnishes for your make-your-own sauce. I was stuffed, tired, and relieved all at the same time. Even though I was stuffed, I could not look this resturant in the sign and not have some dumplings. I went inside and ordered 2 liang (I forget what liang stands for, I think it's a measurement of grams, maybe 50?) of pork dumplings. Even though I was stuffed, I easily finished off the delicious dumplings and was thinking about getting more. I decided that I should probably restrain myself because I didn't have any toilet paper with me and I wasn't confident I'd be able to find a public toilent regardless in the case of a catastrophic meltdown in my large intestine.
When I left the dumpling spot, it was almost 4 o clock and I felt oddly rejuvinated. My legs weren't sore, and I had a bounce in my step like Peter in Family Guy when he walks down the street with his own theme music playing. I looked at the English map of Chengdu that I gotten from my hostel and saw there was an English bookstore not far from where I was. I thought this would be a good opportunity to grab a book so I would have something to read once I finished Murakami. The bookstore was quite splendid. Inside there were large comfy chairs all along the large windows that looked into the street. The bookstore was made of 2 large rooms, on the far end of one room there was a bar and menus for food and drinks with chairs and tables for eating. It also had a large piano on the side wall with a saxaphone and guitar resting next to it so I could only assume that they would have live music from time to time. Next to the bar, there was a big sign that adverstised trivia night every Wednesday. I could tell I would be here a lot if I lived in Chengdu. In the other room, the walls were stacked high with shelves of books, most of them used. The rest of the floor space was filled with my huge comfy chairs and comfy leg rests.
After looking around for a while for a book, my eyes stopped on one and I immediately knew I was going to buy it- it was a paperback copy of A Game of Thrones. It was a thick book, easy to read, and I had been meaning to get around to that series for a while. I paid 100 kuai for it, which is rather expensive at roughly 16 dollars. Nevertheless I decided I needed it for the train ride back. I also ordered a cup of 'American Coffee' because god damn it I was on vacation and I hadn't had a real cup of coffee since arriving in China. I sat down with my coffee and read the first 30 pages of the book. I would read all 800 pages in the next 3 days. I was surpisingly happy with the coffee, it was legit and powerful. I found myself squatting over a hole in the ground only 3 or 4 sips in.
I took the subway home. Chengdu has only one line going north-south that is located on their biggest street. I am told that they are currently building a second line that goes east-west on their biggest east-west street. The subway was really clean, which isn't a surprise as it is only a few years old. After I paid for my ticket, I found 25 kuai on the ground. When I got back to the hostel I rested for a little while before heading out to the Xiong Mao (Panda) music festival, which I will get to later.
I knew the train ride to Chengdu was going to be long, 30 hours long to be exact. I had been on trains that took longer, like the train from Shanghai to Chengdu which was 36 or 40 hours. However, there was one little ticket difference which made all of the big difference. To give some background, on Chinese trains, there are 4 types of tickets you can buy:
1. Soft Sleeper: the soft sleeper ticket buys you a bed in a private compartment that has 2 regular sized bunkbeds. This is the most expensive ticket and "luxurious" way to travel via train.
2. Hard Sleeper: triple decker bunk beds where you have about 3 to 3.5 feet from your bed to the bed above you. You can't sit up. However, the bottom bunk has a normal amount of space, and therefore it costs more. The middle bunk costs the 2nd most, and the 3rd bunk costs the least. This is because you are about 3 or 4 feet away from the ceiling, where the blinding lights are located, so when they turn them on in the mornings, your eyes are assaulted by vicious white light.
3. Soft Seater: I have never ridden via soft seater, but I imagine it's like an airline seat that can recline, but I am not really sure.
4. Hard Seater: The hard seater is the most inexpensive mode of train transportation. Rather than having all of the seats facing the same direction, there are groups of two seats facing another two seats with a miniature table in the middle. The seats look deceivingly comfortable. I say this because they are not in the least bit comfortable. In fact I would go as far to say they are extremely uncomfortable. Uncomfortable to the point where if you are relatively tall like me, by the 4th or 5th hours you begin to lose feeling in your legs.
On my Chengdu-Shanghai trip I traveled via soft sleeper. This time, on my Beijing-Chengdu trip, I was going via hard seater. I traveled with my coworker Sun Qiang, who is in his early 30s and has not ever traveled very far outside of Beijing in his life. He had many interesting questions about hostels in his research of Chengdu. Are there man with woman in one room? Do man and woman shower together because I think this is strange maybe. If I have to go to the bathroom, where should I go? What should I wear in the hostel?
We arrived at our train departing Beijing at 11AM, and pushed our way through the swarms of Chinese travelers to our specified train car. When we found our seats, there was a problem. The problem was that a short little Chinese man who seemed to have red hair and copper skin was passed out with his head on the table and his hand clutching a half empty bottle of bai jiu (chinese liquor). Sun Qiang tried to wake him with words. When that did not work, he tried tapping him, then shaking him, then finally with one of Sun Qiang's hands slapping his back and the other one shaking his shoulder and yelling "WAKE UP" "WAKE UP" the guy finally sat partially up and looked at us - me to Sun Qiang, then Sun-Qiang back to me, and proceeded to go back to sleep. That's when one of the train stewardesses, a short middle aged Chinese woman, started screaming at him and finally came to and started yelling at her, and then yelling at us, and then yelling at no one in particular, and then vanished to another car, presumably to appropriate another seat.
The two seats facing us were occupied by a couple that Sun Qiang and I would later learn was very fond of PDA. The man looked like a big hairless baby who liked to lift his shirt above his big hairless belly whenever he got hot (also known as The Chinese Air Conditioner). The girl was super skinny and literally acted like she was 5. Hitting her boyfriend and pouting, being really restless and ordering her boyfriend to switch places with her, it was pretty jarring after 30 hours. To make matters worse, apparently there is a fifth kind of ticket that I did not mention in the above ticket order because I did not know about it until I got on the train. Since we were traveling during national day (1 of 2 yearly Chinese vacations that lasts at least a week), all 1.3 odd billion people in China travel. Naturally, there isn't room enough on the trains to seat everyone, so people who can't buy or afford a hard seater seat ticket will buy a hard seater standing ticket. What this means is that the aisles and the connector portions of the train cars were literally packed with people standing and leaning on the seats. Many of these people were going all the way Chengdu, and I suddenly felt fortunate for my extremely uncomfortable hard seat.
The trip itself was more or less uneventful. The drunk man came back and wanted his instant noodles from his suitcase, which was stashed above my seat, so I obliged. He said thank you and I told him not to use thanks. Later, I played cards with Sun Qiang and the couple sitting across from us. Naturally, half of the train came over to watch this white guy get his ass kicked in cards, and I soon had 3 of the standing passengers leaning over my shoulder and debating amongst themselves what I should do. That turned into them literally taking the cards out of my hand and placing them on the table for me when it was my turn. After, whenever I won they would pat me on the shoulder and say 'good job.'
Sleep was probably the worst part of the ride down. On hard seaters, the lights stay on all the time, glaringly bright. My seat was rigid and stuck straight up with no way to lean back, the other couple facing me made me disgusted as they clung onto each other but also reminded me of my own bitter solitude, I couldn't put my feet far enough out to get my legs to reach a 90 degree angle, so I would try to weave them through the legs of the couple in an effort to stick them out further. This would often lead to blood coming back to my legs, as well as severe cramps. I tried sticking my legs in the aisle, but they kept getting kicked by random people walking up down the aisles during all hours of the night. Sometimes I would jerk my head up in a sweat, completely disoriented, forgetting where I was and how I got there. I would look all around, blinded by the omniscient white light with my eyes all but closed, while the sheer power of the lights made my eyes water, although that also might have been tears of frustration and helplessness. I also read a lot. I started Haurki Murakami's Hard Boiled Wonderland and The End of the World and had to pace myself so I wouldn't finish it all on the ride over. By the time we arrived, I had only 50 pages left. When we got off the train, I noticed my legs felt weird. I looked down and saw that my ankles were swollen. In fact, I no longer had any ankles. My legs literally went from calf to heel. If you know how large my ankles are to begin with, I leave the rest to your imagination. The first thing we did when we arrived in Beijing was walk to the ticket building and waiting in line for 30 minutes to buy our return tickets. Weeks earlier, when Sun Qiang and I were buying our hard seater tickets (those were the only tickets available from Beijing to Chengdu), I asked if we could buy our return tickets as well. He told me that we could not. When I asked why, he simply replied: because we will buy them when we arrive in Chengdu. And that pretty much settled it. So, when we finally made it to the front of the line in Beijing, we asked if they had any return tickets on October 5th. The woman at the desk said they did, but the only tickets available were hard seaters. I felt dread creep up my spine and work its way into every extremity. My fingers tingled, my legs quivered, and my testicles started their slow ascent into my stomach. I might have well been sitting on the floor hugging my legs, rocking back and forth and whispering "no, no, no." Seeing my obvious ambivalence of taking a hard seater back to Beijing, she said she also had a hard sleeper the night before our intended departure date. Sun Qiang and I gave each other one quick look and both said yes.
We bussed from the train station to our first hostel, which was only 5 stops away, and which I was very thankful for. The Mix Backpackers Hostel was only a block from the bus stop and we staggered in looking like many of the other travelers, the only difference being that the other travelers looked disheveled from their week long mountain backpacking trip and not a 30 hour train ride. Sun Qiang wanted to walk around the city, and I was being led by the hostel reception into a dumpling making party in the lobby, but I did not want to sit down. I realized with an especially strong movement in my bowels that I had not gone to the bathroom in nearly 48 hours. I rushed off and by the time I got back the dumpling making party was underway and it looked like all the seats were taken so I walked around outside as well.
I found a little hole in the way restaurant that was bustling with people. They all stopped what they were doing and looked at me. One of the guys had a mouthful full of food that was agape when he saw me. It looked like noodles. I quickly ordered pork fried rice. When you look back on things, like the taste of food, sometimes we have the tendency to romanticize or idealize the taste, look, or feel of whatever we are thinking about. I was worried about this when the plate of steaming deliciousness was set down in front of me. But after the first bite, it was just as delicious as I remembered. Even better, actually. It made me think of a little restaurant close to where I used to live in Chengdu called Little Rain, but I will get to that place later. After I finished eating, some random Chinese lady came into the restaurant and gave both the restaurant and myself a bottle of pepsi. She said something about me being American (not sure how she knew), and the restaurant being Chinese and something something something, but she was speaking in Sichuan Hua so I didn't understand and my Chinese probably isn't good enough yet to catch what she was saying anyway. I got up with my free bottle of pepsi and went on my way.
When I lived in Chengdu in 2005-06, I lived in the south-western area of the city. Our hostel was located very far north in the very middle of it. I also realized, for having lived in Chengdu for 8 months, I really didn't know it all. I knew a few street names that came back to me as I looked at a map, but I sometimes wonder how I survived there for so long while being so ignorant. I think much of the credit goes to Dan, Tim, and Jordan. Anyway, the city was very similar to how I remember, except that now there is a subway line that goes down the main street from Ren Min Bei Lu to Ren Min Nan Lou. I walked to Tian Fu square smack dab in the middle of the city, where there is a very large statue of mao, and saw an incredibly large square with huge fountains and water works, beautiful cropped gardens and well over a thousand people. I remember thinking, this is new, when I remembered that this whole area was under construction the entire time I was in Chengdu before. I randomly ran into Sun Qiang, he told me he was going to walk around some more and then I left him again because I walked back to the hostel and went to sleep. So I did.
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