Commentary about the Middle Kingdom
My friend Trevor is featured in the latest issue of Canadian Business magazine. There’s a full-page picture of him looking sharp in the print edition, but unfortunately it’s not shown in the online edition. Trevor works for Calgary-based Zi Corp., here in Beijing, and he’s a regular dancer with us at Swing Beijing! Way to go, Trevor!
I started feeling something Monday night. It didn’t take me long to figure out that a cold was coming on. I get about four major colds / flus every year. They usually last about a week. So, I’m resting at home today, like yesterday, surfing the Internet, eating, sleeping, and keeping warm.
Keeping warm is important. Fall has come full force in Beijing, with colder temperatures outside, and waiting for the heat to be turned on inside. I think the heat got turned on yesterday in my building. For now, it’s only on for a few hours in the morning (before work) and in the evening (after work). So my apartment has gone from 13°C to 15°C. And believe me, this is a very noticeable difference. It’s very welcome, too.
While I was feeling industrious today, I cleaned the filters from my air conditioner (which acts in reverse as a heat pump, to give my bedroom sufficient heat) so it will work better. Better means warmer. And better means more efficient. I also put plastic over my bedroom window to seal off the airflow from outside. I had to open the windows in the apartment for a while to get rid of the condensation on the window frame so the tape would stick. But this dehumidification stage didn’t last too long, plus the sun was shining on the window frame at that point. I reused the plastic from last winter, so it was already cut to fit. Last year, while hunting for a plastic solution, I came upon the idea of using a clear plastic shower curtain from IKEA. It cost me $3 CDN. Easy to cut and very durable. By sealing the window, I will gain a few more degrees in the apartment’s ambient temperature. When the heat comes on full-time (will it?) later on in the winter, I’ll be in good shape.
So much has happened in the last few days, or even hours. It’s 4h12 in the morning, Saturday morning, and I just finished a very cool Friday night. Since being in the taxi on the way home, I’ve wanted to sit down and write a blog entry. I haven’t done that in a while.
I started the evening in the afternoon. After researching what needs to be done to get me a new passport, I headed over to Qiao Ying’s tea house. I spent the afternoon drinking tea and speaking Chinese with her and my friend Zhang Hua. Sometimes Qiao Ying gets in these moods where she refuses to speak English. So I played along and I didn’t speak English either. It’s really good for me, actually. It really helps. I went through three kinds of teas during my stay there, met a new friend of Qiao Ying’s, and then left to join Mandi for her farewell dinner. I didn’t have far to go, and traffic wasn’t bad, but there were no empty taxis. I waited, changed locations, and then waited some more. So I eventually took a bus.
It was a direct route that I needed to follow, just 2 or 3 km up the street. And the trusty Route 120 took me there. I met my friends at Ya Show market near San Li Tun Bar Street. Most everyone was late (like I was—even I was the second person there!) cause traffic was really bad. It ended up being a party of 18 and then some, and miraculously we managed to find a restaurant to house us. Even to pick a restaurant. I was impressed. It was a Xin Jiang Muslim restaurant. Very good food, roasted lamb and such. I had my first Budweiser beer that night. The restaurant ran out of the local beers, so that was all that was left. Damn expensive and not very good. (Sorry, he says to his friend Karen who works for Anheuser Busch.)
On the way to dinner, Joanne pointed out to me that my backpack was open. Did I leave it open from the tea house, all the way on the bus ride? Or did someone open it while I was walking or talking to Paul in front of Ya Show? Yikes! I didn’t find anything missing until later. My minidisc was still there as well as my USB sound card and Palm Wireless Keyboard. (Yes, my backpack is an arsenal of geek electronics. Go Darren!) It was only after dinner that I realized that my $300 Etymotic ER-4P earphones were missing. I’ll never see them again. The disappointing thing is that the new owner will have no idea the true value of their new prize. Damn. Back to el-cheapo $10 earbuds for a while. At least the Etymotics are well coated with a couple month’s worth of my ear wax. Hope the new owner doesn’t actually use them.
I skipped out on Mandi and drinks on San Li Tun at 22h30 after dinner cause I wasn’t in the mood. It’s really not my scene. Adam and the gang were going to be at The Big Easy a few kilometres away, so I decided to join them. I wasn’t feeling so hot, actually. Mostly just tired from being sick all week with the flu. But I found myself telling the taxi driver to go there, so I just went with the idea. The Big Easy was alright, but nothing too great. The band was swinging a bit so Adam and River danced, and I got one dance in with River. I would have liked to spend time chatting with Adam and River, but an impromptu business meeting between them and the owner cut our time short. The belly dancer gave a couple of performances, but I wasn’t impressed. I just couldn’t get into it. Besides, her hair was dirty and her costume (what little costume she was wearing) had big food stains all up the front. Pretty yucky.
But, during one of the belly dances, I looked up at the balcony and, to my surprise, saw my friend Cheng Lei there. So I immediately left my friends and went and said hello. This is the second time that she and I have met “by luck” in this area. The other time happened at Latinos, next door to The Big Easy, about a month and a half ago, just before I left Beijing. (And I never go to Latinos.) So we were quite happy and surprised to meet like this again. It made the whole evening worth it. Plus she smiles so nicely at me. We chatted for a while until Adam phoned me looking to see where I was. I literally had disappeared on the group without a trace, so they wanted to know where I was. I felt loved. So we came down and said hello to Adam, River, and John for a few minutes. Cheng Lei had friends over at Latinos, a Brazilian dance performance group that was in Beijing for the week, so she invited me to join her over there. I hesitated, but finally agreed. I have never felt comfortable at Latinos, especially since Latin dancing/music isn’t my thing.
But I’m so glad I went with her. Although Cheng Lei likes dancing (she’s a salsa teacher, even) she just wanted to watch the others dance. But when I told her that I wanted to dance with her, she invited me to dance Swing to the Latin music. I was surprised that it even worked, but I guess it can be done cause we did it. And it was fun. She made me feel so comfortable there that I had no problems being there, dancing my own way, and enjoying myself. We met up with her friend Julia, and after the Brazilians left, the two of them decided the music at Salsa Caribi would be better. So, back to San Li Tun, and I got to try out a new club. Since I never dance Salsa in Beijing, they’re all new to me.
Salsa Caribi seemed not too bad. An acquaintance, Mustafa, was there outside the club, so already I had a friendly face to welcome me. The two girls, Cheng Lei and Julia, took to the dance floor immediately, so I just waited at a table. I saw my friend Irene dancing there too, and eventually discovered that all of my friends of Irene were there: Karen, Maple, and Christine. Seeing them was a treat, especially Karen since I haven’t seen her in so long. She’s been busy with work-related travel for many months now.
I had the best time with Cheng Lei and Julia at Salsa Caribi. They were dancing pretty hard, and when I joined them, I started dancing hard too. We danced and danced and danced. Some of it was Swing (but not to Swing music). Some just disco, and lots of Latin. I started to figure out the arm thing, twisting you and your partner’s arms in and out of pretzel contortions. Lots of fun. We played with it a lot, sometimes doing the pretzel thing with all three of us holding hands.
A very sweet night. I’m really feeling blessed by the whole thing, how it all turned out. I’ve been dealing with a lot of internal struggles and realizations lately, stemming from events in and related to returning from Canada. (I can only post weblog stuff when I’m being outgoing and external, which is why my posts are as infrequent as they are.) So I think tonight’s events have corrected my thinking in various ways, helping me to keep on the correct path that I need to follow. It’s what I needed.
After a long flight on Sunday, the I-arrived-before-I-left flight from Beijing to Vancouver, I arrived pretty tired back in Canada. I tried sleeping on the plane but it was quite futile. When I want to sleep, they serve me food, and when they want me to sleep, I’m awake and looking around. Oh well. The long flight, its cost, and the jet lag are the reasons I don’t do this more than once a year.
It was fun being in Vancouver for two hours. I wasn’t looking forward to the customs and immigration experience, but it went by without any problem. I even got to see the cute little customs beagle at work.
It was pretty easy to tell that I had arrived back in Canada. It wasn’t very long before I noticed people were apologizing and being extra polite. One lady in the customs line stepped backward and hit my foot slightly, so she apologized. A man stopped suddenly in front of me while we were walking and he apologized too. I held a door for a third person and he thanked me. Kinda fun.
I guess I paid enough attention to the people on the Beijing flight that I recognized a few of them later at the gate to board the flight to Edmonton. So I sat down and introduced myself to a young girl there. She’s currently a Chemistry PhD student at the University of Alberta. She had been visiting her family in Nanchang, Jiangxi Province for her two-week summer vacation. We compared notes about our opposite overseas experiences. I told her about my plans for the coming month and invited her to check out the Edmonton Fringe Theatre Festival that will take place this August. The Fringe is one of my favourite things about summer in Edmonton.
But the excitement that I’m really looking forward to on this trip is the Swing Dancing in Edmonton and Calgary. Here in Edmonton, there are Lindy Hop classes every Wednesday night for the summer. They’ll have a social event—a charity dance—on August 7. Then I hope to catch a dance in Calgary on August 14. There’s even a dance workshop taking place in Vancouver around August 27 that I heard about. Maybe I’ll have to push back my return trip to Beijing far enough to go. Why not? I’m young, and dancing is my life these days.
My friend Eydie sent me this clever little short message to my phone the other day. Welcome to the strange world of old men in China.
As I walked to work just now, I saw a man open a bag of dirt and pour it in a fat stream along the sidewalk. He was adding dirt to the street. Adding it! Like the roads and walkways of Beijing aren’t dusty enough. Then I got to thinking, maybe this is the secret behind the city’s grime-enrobed thoroughfares. That in fact there are many men who stealthily coat the highways and byways for reasons unknown but no doubt nefarious. Makes me almost want to be an investigative reporter again. Though I’d probably be thrown in jail and sentenced to work on a road gang—spreading the dirt!
I’ve just spent two days in Hefei, doing some collaboration work with a research group at Anhui University. They’ll be building a temperature and precipitation dataset like I did for my masters degree over two years ago.
Here’s a picture of the fire exit in the hall outside of the hotel room where I stayed on campus. The double door is situated at the end of the long hallway.
![[Fire Escape]](/darren105/1982_fire_escape.jpg)
Yep, that’s right. That’s a bicycle lock threaded through the two door handles. So, when I first checked in, I thought I’d entertain myself and ask the staff to unlock the door for my safety. For one thing, the Chinese characters on the sign above the door translate into “Safety Exit”. I didn’t expect them to honour my request, but I wanted to see what would happen if I insisted. I had a good laugh when they responded by saying: “It will be less safe for you if we unlock the door.” I told my translator to tell them, “No, you’re wrong.” I should get an honourary degree in cross-cultural diplomatic relations for coming up with that one. I stood my ground for a few more minutes, but I didn’t bother getting angry. I mean, I really didn’t have to because I wasn’t taking it personally, nor did I expect them to do anything anyway. But one of the staff members involved in the conversation with the “crazy foreign devil” was smart enough to realize that a person could fit through the open doors when the lock stretched to full length. So they took me back upstairs from the front desk and we opened the two doors so that I could see that a person of my stature could fit his head, and hence his body, through the space between the two restricted doors. I told them that was good enough and that I was satisfied. Of course, I then wondered how having this more-or-less useless lock there in the first place made me “more safe”? I guess it would keep someone from sneaking a lion into my room while I was sleeping. But what about a smaller animal that was just as hungry?
Anyway, this is just a typical example of the state of fire safety in buildings in China. The lock wasn’t even a problem, really. I inspected the doors before making my request and realized that even a ten-year old could kick the doors open if necessary. All over China actually, and here in my hotel room, any windows on the first and second floors are covered by bars that are bolted to the concrete door frames. The only way to bust them open is with a moving car and a strong cable. That, or a half-stick of dynamite. (I keep a half-stick in my backpack just for this purpose!) Sometimes they even bar the windows on the third floor. Most fire exits are treated as potential entry points and are thus locked. Typically, they are used as storage closets too. In the case of the hotel, I suspect they are trying to prevent television sets and furniture from walking off. But anyway, when I hear that dozens of people die in a building fire in China, I am never surprised. Death traps are endemic despite being 100% preventable.
Yet through my little stunt in challenging the hotel staff, I didn’t actually get any closer to understanding how the Chinese think about fire safety. Well, okay, I can infer a lot from the fact that everyone who joined in the conversation burst into laughter—laughing directly at me, in fact. There was a hotel fire in my neighbourhood last month and about nine people died. So my office decided we needed to replace all the powerbars in the room (the supposed cause of the hotel fire) with brand new ones. But we still keep the doors on most floors propped open to the stairwells. (This is hazardous because smoke will spread from the floor that is on fire and prevent people on all floors from using the stairs—the only way of escape.) So I don’t have much faith in their reactionary way of doing things. It’s not going to make a lasting difference. It never does. So to the people laughing at me over the fire exit request, “See you in hell” should have been my response. It’s a literal possibility from my point of view.
Boy, I’ve been having fun dancing. Two guests from the States, Amanda and Eric, came to Beijing to join our Swing Beijing! group. Eric is leaving to go home tomorrow. Amanda will be around for another week and then move on to Shanghai. It’s been great having them. Adam, our teacher, also came back from a week-long furlough at his home in San Francisco. So all three of them brought some new styles and new moves that they were able to show us this week.
We had a Saturday night party, an emergency session of sorts, at our Thursday location at the Move! studio. It seemed like reunion night. Don came back to join us after being gone all winter / spring. I got to see and dance with Linda whom I haven’t seen for so long. She’s one of the people who joined our group for about two months way back when we started last July. Eric and Amanda were there. Adam came back that night, too, bearing gifts. It felt like Christmas! I had ordered some earphones and had them shipped to Adam’s house, so he brought them that night. He also brought me a 4-CD box set of traditional bluegrass music. A total surprise. Thanks, Adam! Other people got their new swing shoes that Adam brought back to Beijing with him. But beyond all the gift giving and excitement, there was lots of dancing. And lots of follows for me to dance with. At one point, I turned to a friend and said, “So many follows, and so few Darrens.” Sigh. I was in Swing heaven. Same thing tonight at our Monday class. I danced and danced and danced. We ended the night with real New York cheesecake in celebration of Eric’s birthday. Mmmmm. Cheesecake.
Update: You can read Amanda’s report of her trip here.
I’ve had a wide variety of experiences over the last few days, so today’s entry will just be a random walk through where I’ve been and what I’ve been doing.
Casting my vote
I voted today. Prime Minister of Canada, Paul Martin, announced an election last month scheduled for June 28. Since I’m in China at the moment, I get to vote by mail. So I faxed in a photocopy of my passport picture and signature pages, plus an application form. The ballot came in the mail last week. It’s an interesting system, really.
The ballot itself is just a piece of special paper with the following sentence (in English and French): “I vote for…” and then you fill in the candidate’s name. It was up to me to find out who is running in my riding and to fill in the full name of my choice. Once the name is filled in, the ballot goes inside an “inner envelope” which has no markings on it. Then the inner envelope goes inside an “outer envelope” which has my name, my riding, a bar code, and my signature. The signature must be there and must match the one I used to apply for the ballot.
The system insures that I don’t vote twice, that someone doesn’t use my ballot instead of me, and it preserves my anonymity. It works like this. When the mail-in votes are counted, the outer envelope information is checked against the registry. Then it is put with the other ballots from my riding. The outer envelopes are opened and the inner envelopes are all mixed together. This way, the ballot is no longer traceable to me. Then, the inner envelopes are opened and the ballots removed and counted.
I say I voted today because I went to the Embassy here in Beijing and turned in my set of nested envelopes. They will ship mine and everyone else’s ballots to Ottawa tomorrow. I doubt that my candidate will win, but that is not necessarily how I choose my candidate. In fact, all votes, even those for candidates that lose, are important because the number of votes that a given political party gets in this election will determine their status and funding from the government for the next election. Most people don’t realize that, figuring that their one vote doesn’t count for much. They are wrong.
Okay, enough preaching. But it was fun to vote from abroad.
No sleep
I didn’t sleep last night. Except for maybe 20 minutes of sleep when I first crawled into bed after midnight, I stayed awake the whole night. I eventually turned on the light at 03h30 or so and started to watch South Park on my computer. One of the problems with my insomnia here in Beijing is that sunrise right now is at 04h46 and it starts to get light at 04h13. (Hey! I just realized that it’s the Solstice today. I can’t believe I wasn’t paying attention.) Once it starts to get light, I find it almost impossible to initiate sleep. If I’ve already been sleeping, it’s no problem, but if I haven’t fallen asleep before 04h00, I’m screwed. I did laundry at 07h30, and then I started to fade waiting for it to finish the spin cycle. I made it to the end, hung up my shirts, and then went to bed at 08h00. I had no trouble sleeping then. I woke up four hours later in time for lunch. I’ll probably be tired again by supper time, but I should be able to readjust and fall asleep normally tonight. At least I hope so. As for the cause of this insomnia, I don’t really know. My suffering from Restless Legs Syndrome has a lot to do with it. I need to write about this topic sometime later cause I won’t attempt to fit it in here.
The latest Swing news
The weekend was pretty good. I got to go out with my Swing Dance friends (pretty much my primary social group now) on Friday and Saturday night. Since Zuma mysteriously disintegrated, we have no place to have our Swing parties on Saturday nights. This is a huge disappointment. Zuma wasn’t perfect, but it was a venue that we were quite happy with. The only thing really missing was a live band, but that takes more than just having a venue. Now we have neither.
This is a problem for this week especially. We have a guest dancer from California joining us tonight (don’t know how long he’ll be here) and another guest dancer, Amanda, from Texas coming this week as well. Amanda is working on her Masters research in cultural studies, and Swing Dancing in China is her topic. At least this is what I understand it to be. I’ll learn more when I meet her on Thursday. She’ll spend over a week with us and then move on to join our fellow “hats and cats” in Shanghai.
Update: You can read Amanda’s report of her trip here.
A private honour
I visited Qiao Ying in her teahouse yesterday. Aside from some guests, we were the only ones there, so we got to spend some quiet time together. It was good to feel her spirit again and leave behind the world of negative thought that I inhabit so much. As we were saying goodbye, Qiao Ying told me that her teahouse was “my place”. She wasn’t just saying, “make yourself at home”, but she really meant that I belonged in her teahouse and that it belonged in me. I could welcome no greater honour than this.
A needed vacation
I guess I could announce it here. I’m going back to Edmonton for a one-month vacation next month. I’ll leave for home on July 18. In fact, Michael, my German best friend, is also going home for his family visit at this time. Some projected highlights for my trip:
Well, it’s not quite Rolling Stone magazine, and certainly not the cover, but it’s still pretty cool. My swing dance group, Swing Beijing! and I are featured in a one-page article in Cosmopolitan magazine here in China. Page 130 of the June 2004 issue. I wonder if it’s available in Canada, perhaps in Vancouver or Toronto.
Follow this link or click on the cover to see a scan of the article. I’ll be bringing a copy home to Canada when I visit to show my friends and family.
Swing is a relatively new thing here in China. The media is getting a little tired of Salsa and other Latin dances, which are now quite popular after about four years of hard promotion by the original Salsa dancers. So Swing is appealing as a new thing, and we are quite glad of the publicity. We hope to grow the popularity of Swing so that there are more people to dance with and more events to dance at.
Swing Beijing! has been going well now that spring has arrived. We had a really good turnout at our Saturday night Swing party at Zuma. Perhaps 25–30 people, and many of our missing regulars decided to return. So we all had a great time dancing our hearts out to the great music. As heat and humidity continue to climb, we’re getting more of a workout, oftentimes with our faces drenched in sweat after a fast song. I love it!
We are considering holding a live-music event at the end of June, and an even larger event with a guest band from America sometime in the Fall. Things are looking good for Swing in Beijing.
Party On
Well, I’m having too much fun. I’ve been really busy these days. A little bit of work, a bit of play, and a whole hell of a lot of socializing. I was at a birthday party/get-together for my friend Allena last night. There must be live music at The Big Easy (a Cajun-style restaurant/bar in Beijing) every night because there was a live band there last night and we got up and danced Lindy Hop to a few numbers. They were playing blues, of course, but it worked well.
Right before that party, I was hosting two fellow Canadians who had just arrived in Beijing. Last week, at the Annual Canadian Charity Ball, I met and talked with the guest speaker, Canadian Astronaut Bjarni Tryggvason. We talked about the possibilities of space science research collaboration between Canada and China and getting Canadian payloads on Chinese recoverable satellites and manned missions. So he passed my name on to two of his colleagues (the two I met last night, Marcus and Catherine) so that they could hook up with me on their visit to Beijing. So this week, they’re visiting various institutes belonging to the Chinese Academy of Sciences (my employer). We had a great time last night, as they were very excited about being in China and experiencing everything they could in their week-long visit. I took them to a Guizhou-style restaurant, introduced them to whatever I could about the food, the beer, the culture. And I filled them in on things to do, things to avoid, and how to tell the difference between a 1.6 RMB and a 1.2 RMB taxi. Just so you know, the cheaper of the two taxis is smaller, especially the back seat, they don’t always have suspension, and they quite often carry a strong smell of gasoline in the interior. But hey, they’re cheaper, right? You will run the risk of a driver with bad B.O. and completely unbearable halitosis in either type of taxi. Welcome to China.
Why I haven’t written lately
I also have been avoiding computing tasks, including writing this blog. You see, I developed some extreme pain in the joints in my hand recently, and it seems to be related to typing at the computer. It was mostly aggravated by a recent assignment which involved editing on the computer for an entire week. I normally do my editing work on paper with a red and a black pen. That, and the weather changed extremely recently, with lots of low pressure and humidity. So I’ve been trying to rest my hands.
But that’s just a small excuse. I’ve also had lots of ideas of things to write about but I haven’t explored any of them, so none of them fully developed. My friend Jodi, a professional writer, suggested that I write out these ideas anyway so that I don’t lose them. Cause, yeah, she’s right. I’ve already lost them. My nighttime dreams overwhelm my daytime thoughts so much, and that’s another blockage to being able to think (and write) clearly.
SomaFM revisited
SomaFM kicks ass. I’m still listening. You’ll remember that I wrote about SomaFM in a previous entry. I’ve been listening a few times a week (for about an hour at a time) so I decided that I should send them a donation. So last month, I sent them $25 USD via PayPal. I think it’s well worth it. You should too. Or at least start listening first.
I’ve explored some of their other channels only a little bit, but by far I listen to “Boot Liquor” the most. American Roots music, lots of songs about drinking, some really funny shit sometimes, and a few token bluegrass songs. Keeps me happy. When I first started listening, Boot Liquor was offered as a 96-kbit MP3 feed, but now it’s 128-kbit MP3 and that’s pretty much CD quality. Sometimes the feed is choppy, so I switch to the 32-kbit mono feed, and it works well. Plus my sound card came with some DSP software that can enhance the mono to a pseudo-stereo image, and that makes it better.