First Date

Today I held a lesson on first dates.

This kind of topic is bound to result in some kind of awkwardness among Chinese students. The minimum age for marriage here is 22 for men and 20 for women, and I'd estimate that around 80% to 90% of my first- and second- year university students are virgins. Half of the younger generation still holds traditional values of no sex before marriage; the other half is adamant that it does not!

Even middle schools have rules such as "don't fall in love" (as well as "don't hold birthday parties" and "don't form a clique"). Making kissy noises is still a fantastic way of cracking the class up and embarrassing any poor victims (aka students) who happen to be showing affection toward members of the opposite sex. Making the students sit boy-girl-boy-girl works wonders for making them concentrate on the class; they're too embarrassed to do anything else! I try to break down this gender barrier as much as possible - after all, Mao Zedong stated women should be treated as equal to men, so I'm not worried about repercussions - it's annoying how it's even noticeable!

Anyway, back to this morning. When brainstorming for words and phrases about "A first date", interesting suggestions came back. As well as the usual stuff that you'd expect - "romantic, shy, exciting, nervous" and so on - there were things like "worried about money" (fair), "expecting to receive a gift" (fair, although only girls thought this mattered) "expecting a kiss" (this just from the boys) which were a little off the beaten track.

Then we had the good ones. "Morose" was listed, and apparently means, "when the girl is not satisfied after the date"; also, with an utterly serious and deadpan face, a small academic-looking girl ventured the idea that a first date may be "sweaty".

Dirty!

Carp pool at Heilongtan, Kunming

We went to Heilongtan, a beautifully calm Daoist temple in the outskirts of Kunming. One thing they had was a carp pool. This in itself is barely worth mention - every tourist site in China worth its salt has a large pool of carp, and a sleeping person who will sell you a modestly sized bag of special fish food for a kuai or two. Anyway, there were loads here, and they were all very greedy fish. We decided to empty a whole bag into the pool, far away from where everyone else was feeding the fish, and film the results! Like chickens, fish are attracted to others who are eating, and seem to be able to detect it from quite far away - just look at the video!

Military training

All Chinese university students have the first 4-6 weeks of their tuition off from lessons. Instead, they are trained by the Chinese army, using university ground and facilities. Uniforms are provided, as well as weapons. Training begins at around 7.00-7.30am, and finished at 5pm, with an hour or two for funch. Training activities include, in no particular order: marching on the spot, sitting in a grid on the ground for two hours, sweating, rifle usage, marching backwards, and my favourite, breaking from marching in formation into a disorderly rabble of 18 year old students.

My first impression was that this was really unusual - education and "defence" are usually considered fairly separate activities in the cultures I've previously seen. Indeed, often there at odds with each other - you can either get educated, or failing that, maybe go into the military! Here, you may miss military training if you don't get into university (which is incredibly hard here). Even first-year Finance students have military theory lessons. However, China manages to allocate a lot less than some countries to defence - officially 1.35% of GDP, and unofficial guesses say no higher than 3%.

The whole process (compulsory for both men and women) is conducted under a roasting early September sun, and fainting girls are not uncommon. As with every school, it usually takes about 4 other girls to accompany a fainting one to water, and for boy, at least 2 extra are required. Students don't really state much of an opinion on military training. The whole process culminates in a weekend parade in front of higher-ranking officers.

Without further ado - pictures and videos!

Repurposed playing field:


Getting into formation - there must be hundreds of students on this small field:


Military is in green, watch out for jeans and adidas trainers:


Rifle practice:


Very pointy toes:


Walking backwards, and girls in a separate group:


Turn into a rabble:

Building

China is under construction. Every street corner that you visit has a new building underway, with older houses being ripped down to make room for another enormous skyscraper. Nanjing used to be home to China's tallest building, the Jinling hotel, in 1990, with around 18 floors. Now, that honour falls to the Jin Mao tower in Pu Dong (Shanghai), which is also the fourth tallest building in the world; they're building what will be the world's tallest building just around the corner, too, due in late 2007.


More than eighteen stories..

The Chinese are no slowcoaches when it comes to building, either. A pair of 20-storey apartment blocks were erected and occupied within 10 weeks of moving here. My university (NUAA) created an exhibition building and a modern arts centre inside one month when news of an inspection came. Over the road from the uni, there's an enormous development that didn't exist when we arrived, and is almost finished, which could house tens of thousands of people. It's simply phenomenal!


New apartments - 2 months from flat ground to inhabitation.


New university buildings - 1 month from flat ground.



New apartments opposite university - now complete; took 6 months to build residences for 30,000 people. If you visit this area on Google maps, you can see that the upside-down-L shaped area they occupy is nothing but brown dirt with a few shacks.



This rapid rate of development is courtesy of the millions of workers who migrate from the poorer countryside into the cities, to earn money for their families. They often save money by living inside the incomplete building sites, sleeping inside makeshit tents of hammocks. It's really impressive and practical.

Traditional Chinese scaffolding is still used on most sites less than six or seven stories high; instead of bolting together tubes of cast iron, a much less expensive, lighter, and equally durable material is used - bamboo! This used to be used for buildings of all different sizes, but now larger constructions tend to go for metal scaffolds. A very shiny and tall hotel building in Hong Kong was built using solely bamboo supports in during the 1990s.



Side effects of a booming construction trade can also been seen everywhere - the pavements are often occluded by building supports, or even huge piles of raw building materials, and there's a plethora of different kinds of construction vehicles on the roads.



Cement mixers are common, as are huge 20-tonne overladen 12-wheel trucks full of dirt zooming in an out of town. The city's streets are coated in construction dust, which gets everywhere, especially when the city's dry! This doesn't appear to affect the locals much, though the Chinese culturally consider the floor to be an extremely dirty thing, that you wouldn't rest your bag on even for a second.

Infrastructure

China's enormous. All the cities are massive. People refer to a town of one or two million as "small". This kind of population requires a fantastic transport system, and the powers hat be are well aware; massive areas to the north, south and east of Nanjing (there's a river to the west) are mainly incomplete, but already have a complex and advanced system of wide roads ready to take all the traffic produced when these areas are complete.

But that's not enough. The city centre is also under constant developement, and needs an infrastructure to match. As a result, new highways and high speed roads have been built to provide direct links for popular journeys. Where this isn't possible, tunnels are dug to connect highways and busy traffic centres. Since we've been here, a new 8-lane road has opened cutting north/south through the south east part of the city, which connects up to the end of Longpanzhonglu (lu, 路, being Chinese for "road"), a link to a major flyover just south of the city walls. And as if this wasn't enough, a tunnel is being dug underneath this new road, to be finished in February 2007. Hopefully this should relieve traffic flow in the south-east of the city!

It's interesting to see that the municipal authorities have no problems issuing orders for major roads to be built in already busy urban areas, despite the disruption it will cause. The sooner it's started, the sooner it should be finished, and people are expected to work around any problems - there's certainly enough alternative routes for most journeys, though they can become very convoluted. In December 2006, I took a taxi round the outskirts of the city, for about 20km, as the two main conventional ways of getting back into the city were blocked as a result of accidents in heavy fog at two already overladen junctions. Incidentally, one of these junctions has already been 'fixed' (as of mid-January) and is now a working twelve lane highway/tunnel intersection - they've built a 6-lane tunnel by the yellow square and following the yellow line to help transport traffic straight through the city centre.



Here are some shots of a nearby junction. I go along this route every morning (at about 7.30am, uurgh) as part of a commute to the remote campus of my uni, which is in Jiangning the new region of town to the South.





Also an aerial view. The photos document approaching from the left, looking south. The raised road going that looks horizontal is about 40m-60m above the ground (pretty high). - it's never very busy, but the area it leads to is still developing. It's much better to build the road before there's a traffic problem!



Click to see the relevant area on Google maps.

Cute tricks with chicks

The chicks are growing! They love to sit by anything warm, as they're used to keeping hot beneath their mother. We've called them Soup and Curry. Chickens - even newly hatched baby chickens - peck at the ground constantly; as soon as one of them find something, the other runs over. So, if you tap on the floor lightly, like a beak pecking, they'll hear and run. (Press the play button in the bottom-left of the video to get it going quickly)




Once you've got their attention they won't let go!

Chinese lunch break

The Chinese also have a saying about the importance of lunch as the main source of energy in a day: "早餐吃得好，中餐吃得饱，晚餐吃得少" (at breakfast eat well, at lunch eat until full, [and] at dinner eat just a little).

The strangest thing happened when I first arrived here (and still does, every day): everybody in the office stopped doing everything at around 11.45, and ate (not too strange..), but when I looked around at 1.30pm, everyone was alseep! There's even a sofa-bed next to the desks, for napping on. Often three of the girls cram onto it at once and snooze their way to the afternoon lessons; if they have no lessons, having completed any marking or preparation, my colleagues simply sleep their way through the day at their desks.

It's said that the 2-hour lunch break originates from an Emperor who simply didn't have enough time to eat food and sleep during his day. Thinking that most of the rest of China had a similar problem, a 2-hour lunch break was decreed for the whole of China, and is still well observed to this day! More practical reasons can be found for this long break, though, which is reminiscent of southern Europe's siesta. This article about workers at a metal factory says:
They, themselves, start at 8 a.m. and work until noon, when there is a lunch break - 3 hours during the summer and 2 hours during the winter. They don't always go home for the lunch break. Often they stay at the plant, where they can heat the lunch they have brought with them. Work finishes at 5 p.m. in the winter and at 6 p.m. in the summer. The long lunch break is there for a good reason during the summer, when the moist heat does not further productivity - especially not in the middle of the day.


Of course, this elongated gap changes the amount of time you spend at work. While in Europe it's fairly common to start work around 9am, have what works out as 25-40 minutes of completely free time at lunch, and wind down as the clock approaches 5pm, here people are up very early and at their desks by 8am sharp, then work for four hours until 12pm, when they have a long lunch; relaxed afternoons take up the rest of the day until 5pm, when it's time to start going home. I think I prefer going in and getting the job done all in one go, then getting back to "real life" - being at the office (and its contingent of sleeping people) is not what you'd term quality time!

It's not just lunchtime that's good for a doze, though. Anywhere out of downtown, shopkeepers will open up early and simply nap (possibly in front of the TV, or maybe in the sun, open-mouthed and dangling off a chair) until a customer gets close enough to warrant a grunt or some kind of rousal. They do work very long hours - but they're mainly spent sleeping!

Chicks

Yesterday, in Fuzi Miao, there was a lady with a polystyrene box filled up with baby chicks. We bought two (and got bulk discount!). They're barely bigger than eggs and need to be kept warm, and are only a few days old. And cute!

Bizarre fruit

Bizarre fruit

This cheery lady offered us some very strange fruit on Ruijinlu (the main road just round the corner). I've no idea what they are! Any ideas?

FIRE FIGHTING JURY EXCITER LAMP

FIRE FIGHTING JURY EXCITER LAMP

A whatnow?!

Burma

China, from Burma

We're in Burma! Kids were playing in the border control station behind, and the crossing point is a hole in a barbed wire fence about 4 metres to the right of this photo. Sophisticated, eh? The guy who took us here wanted 150RMB for the service, which consisted of a 5 minute walk through a park and then a quick foot tour around some good Burmese monuments, such as the Museum Celebrating Opium Free in Special Region Number 5. He didn't get it.
On the Chinese side of the border hole, there's a set of concrete steps leading down to the tear in the fence. Now, why on earth would anyone build these?

Horse and cart

Horse and cart

There were a lot of horse-powered carts around Kunming, especially on the motorway. This one clattered by down a minor road from the airport, with another two carts in front. It's obviously owned by a rich-ish (or lazy-ish) guy - the plastic pipes look light enough to be bundled and carried between two people without any kind of vehicle at all. Nice to see!

Good steering

Good steering

Where is he going? Nobody knows! Leaving Xuzhou, there was an enourmous tailback down a 5-lane road. This truck was the culprit. You can see the feet of the driver and his mate on the other side of the truck. Oncoming traffic moved onto our side of the road and starting squeezing round the back of this truck, leaving us no way to go. Of course, everybody starting on their horns - obviously to let the people at the front know that they should move a bit quicker, because someone was in a rush, and of course beeping would definitely fix the problem, right? ;)

Meats on a stick

Meats on a stick

Eating various meats on a stick is a great way to pass time. Lamb on a stick (yang rou chuan, 羊肉串) was the first meal I ordered on my own! Meat on a stick sellers can be found everywhere! The style of cooking often comes from the Xinjiang province in the west, which is very Muslim (relatively speaking). This is a picture of an outdoor meat on a stick restaurant; you pick what you want, and then it's barbecued over hot embers, a nice fragrant spicy thing added, and (optionally) spice (la, 辣) is burned in too.
I have no idea what most of this stuff is, you can definitely see pig trotters and tails, duck hearts, fish chunks, various whole fish, eggs, jellyfish (on the right next to the larger eggs), and chicken feet. Now there's a sexy meal to get your girl to chew on..
Just before we saw this, we had a big meal, with plenty of beef on a stick, lamb on a stick, and my current favourite duck-heart-on-a-stick (it's really something!). Our restaurant had a small 3-wall tent made out of plastic sheeting and a couple of fold out bences and tables, with a narrow portable grate for cooking on, outside in the cold (it was much warmer indoors!). As I was finishing, a young couple of about 20 sat down, and the guy brought out a 500ml bottle of baijiu (Chinese rice wine - always over 50%) then proceeded to pour his petite bashful girlfriend a paper cupful to the brim, and another for himself! Insane.

FIAE EVACUATION CHART

FIAE EVACUATION CHART

A huge amount of broken English looks like someone's glanced at what should be written, and then tried to copy the shapes of the letters, with no real knowledge of English. Sadly, Beijing seems intent on stamping out all the hilarious Chinglish in advance of the 2008 Olympics - I read in China Daily that the Chinese think foreigners are insulted and can't understand the bad English. On the contrary, it's comprehensible and a constant source of amusement! In this case, it's pretty easy to see what's going on:
YOU ARE: (person)
IN CASE OF FIRE
PROCEED TO NEAREST

Proceed to the nearest what, though - the nearest fire?

Busy Fuzi Miao

Busy Fuzi Miao

Fuzi Miao gets busy! This is just a Tuesday afternoon. The population here is immense, so much so that almost every business seems to succeed, no matter how much or little it's advertised - there are simply so many people going past that sooner or later, enough of them will provide some income. The Chinese seem to have a much reduced sense of personal space - probably as a direct result of the huge numbers of people trying to do anything. You can either stand back and miss an opportunity but retain free space around yourself, or sacrifice it and stand a chance in the rat race. I love it!

Caramel Strawberries

Caramel Strawberries

Around most towns in China, there are vendors selling hawthorn fruit stacked on a stick and coated with crunchy and sticky caramel (you can see one just outside Smart Noshery Makes You Slobber - the vertical red sticks toward the bottom left). Well, over Christmas, we found a delicious variation on the theme; as strawberries were in season (£2 would buy you about 5kg), you could pick up a set up very plump and juicy strawberries on a stick, coated in the same crispy caramel, with a hawfruit at the bottom to secure the whole thing. Delicious!

Smart Noshery Makes You Slobber

Smart Noshery, originally uploaded by leondznanjing.

Some minor things like leaflet footers here come up with fantastic Chinglish, some just annoying; usually, things as important as shop signs have the odd missing letter or spelling mistake. But this neon-lit restaurant sign's excellent - almost looks like it's been crafted by a native speaker with a sense of humour, right?

Li Fu Jie

Geoff and Sara have put up an excellent post about the little (it's 1km long, but very narrow!) street we live on - Li Fu Jie. Laetitia's also put up a Lifu Jie photo album.

Deep fried scorpion

It's said by some that the Chinese will eat anything. They'll certainly serve it up for idiot foreigners and boyishly proud men to devour! A market stall (at the same market where sugar dragons were found) was serving various deep fried insects. Having heard that starfish was not the nicest of dishes, I tried scorpions - one stick of little ones, and one stick with a big black one on.





The stings look horrendous! I was quite worried that there would be some venom left in there, or that it would gouge your tongue while chewing on it. There's only one way to find out! The chefs courteously deep fried the shiny-carapaced creatures (which were of course already dead) and after waiting for them to cool, I carefully bit one of the small ones. It tasted slightly bitter, slightly burnt, and was very crunchy. There's nothing to it!

The big black one was slightly chewier, and the meat in the pincers isn't so hot. The best thing about this food is the looks you get from locals while grinning and commenting "Hao chi!"



- delicious!