China: Part 3

Ladies and gentlemen, the third and final act is about to begin. If you would be so kind as to return to your assigned spots, we may commence. Thank you for your cooperation.

Please be warned that this is the longest of the three acts. If you require a bathroom break or a drink, please take care of that now. One the act begins, there will be no stopping.

And here we go in 3...

2...

1...

*



Let's fast forward now to my final full day in China. It was a Monday, a fairly normal Monday. A curtain of smog hung over the city, though its threat level hovered only at a mild "unhealthy" rating. Certainly manageable. Nonetheless, I had no plans to bother managing it.

I had booked a ticket to the Great Wall.

It's said that when a person goes to Beijing, there are two things he must do: eat Peking Duck and see the Great Wall. I'd managed the Peking Duck the previous night and it was time to his the second item on the list. The question was, where to start?

Lucky for me, my hostel had a Great Wall tour on offer. In fact, they had two. Seeing as how I was feeling a little tight - 900 yuan in cell phone rental fees will do that to you - I opted for the cheaper one. Nonetheless, it looked pretty cool. I'd been told to avoid the tourist trap otherwise known as Badaling and this tour quite clearly went somewhere else. Good enough for me.

(For the curious, my destination to-be was Jinshanling.)

The girl behind the front desk informed me of the price and the pick-up time. 6:20 AM. My first thought: "Damn, that's early." But it was a full day at the Great Wall that I'd wanted and it was a full day that I got. This information was followed up by a reminder that it took three to four hours to drive to the Great Wall, thus the early pick-up time. We wouldn't be back until five or six in the evening.

I happily told the girl that would fine and wandered up to my room to read my book and get some early shut eye.

6:20 rolled around and with it a knock on my door.

"Coming!" I replied. The lack of response suggested I was not dealing with an English speaker. Opening the door confirmed that yes, the man outside was Chinese and spoke no English.

I raised two fingers. Two minutes and I'll be ready, I was trying to say. Sign-language was never a strong suit of mine, but he nodded and headed downstairs. I hurriedly slipped on my jacket and hat, swung my bag around my shoulder, and headed out the door. No time to shave, but that was okay; I could think of no particular need to make myself presentable.

When I arrived downstairs, I noted a distinct lack of people. There was only myself, the desk girl, and the Chinese man who was, I presumed, my guide. Perhaps everyone else was already on the bus, I thought.

Following the man outside, however, showed me that there in fact was no bus. We walked to a black car parked along the curb. It was in relatively decent condition. Corrosion from rust was limited to the edges of the car's frame and nothing too serious. I climbed into the back seat.

Well, I guess it's just me, I thought to myself.

My driver opened his door and sat down. He fiddled with the radio for a moment before selecting a Mandarin talk-radio station. At the same time, I searched for a seat belt, which I quickly realized was a futile search.

Then we were off, driving through the center of the city, around the Drum Tower, down the street, then onto the second ring road. For those who don't know, Beijing's walls were knocked down in the cultural revolution to be replaced by the second ring road. While a convenient road for transportation, it is also a reminder of what the city has lost.

After driving for about half an hour, we stopped at a light. Crossing the road in front of us was a group of nearly thirty tourists (exactly 28, I later learned). Oh, I thought. Maybe they're going to the Great Wall, too. Clearly they were headed for one of the buses parked just to the side.

As it turns out, my guess was dead on.

The man driving the car executed a U-turn as the light turned green and drove to a stop in front of the bus. I was, I suddenly realized, not alone. And this man was certainly not my tour guide. He'd simply been asked by the hostel to take me to the tour.

The light bulbs, they flicker in my head.

I gathered up my bag and rushed onto the bus. Just in time, as it turned out. They were ready to leave.

Three hours later, the duration of which time I had been crammed into a tiny space between my arm rest and a large German man, we arrived. Only one stop had been required on the way, a bathroom break.

I note this because the tourists coming back on the bus made several incredulous noises relating to the dirt-hole nature of the bathroom. I barely suppressed my own incredulous noise; what exactly had they been expecting, I wondered? Just how romanticized were their views of rural China?

At any rate, we arrived at Jinshanling with no further incidents.

We got off the bus and had our first real glimpse of the Wall. The road we were on winded up the hills on the Northern side. On the highest hills in the distance, rising above the rest, was a lone tower. It was brownish in color and squat-looking, but clearly formidable. Off its sides ran two long, jagged lines, like the flattened wings of a ragged bird. Somehow, it was smaller than I had expected. But I also knew it was still quite far away and would seem much bigger soon enough.

What was exactly as expected was the crowd of local villagers trying to foist their assorted coke bottles and snickers bars onto us. Thanks to my unshaven face and dark sunglasses, they didn't seem to bother much with me. Still, a few people did approach me with offers. I simply shook my head in response and turned my face in another direction.

We continued on the road to the wall and discovered another group waiting for us. I took this group in stride, too. The same routine followed.

"Snicker? Snickers?" A chorus of 'no' erupts in response. "Water? Coca cola?" This time a few low chuckles are mixed in with the 'no.'

The group gets through, more or less unscathed.

After this second assault, we regroup in front of a map of the Jinshanling section of the Great Wall. Our tour guide informs us that we are to be back at that sign by 1:30 for lunch. Our bus will depart at 2. He drives this point home a few more times, then sends us on our way.

The way to the Great Wall consists of three parts. First is the bus to the entrance. Second is the road from the entrance to the trail. This bit has to be walked. Third, and finally, is a slim, ice-covered trail up the hillside from the road and onto the wall itself. Each part has its own group of vendors attempting to sell you various snacks and drinks. Mostly snickers bars, water, and coca cola. A few also offered beer, but whether anyone has ever actually bought that, I have no idea.

As we came up to the final third of the approach to the wall, the expectant group of vendors was waiting. They chatted among each other and seemed generally more jovial than the previous two groups. They were also all women.

When the trail, it was impossible to not also approach them. They had positioned themselves directly between us and the trail head. Frustrating though it was, I put my head down and tromped on through.

Something interesting was happening this time, though. Unlike the previous two groups, these women were following us up the trail. It sounded like they were propositioning us with goods, but I didn't hear any of the previous goods mentioned at all. No snickers, no water, no coca cola. In fact, the more I listened, the more I realized that the chatter I had been tuning out was actually chatter between the women. They weren't even talking to us.

I began to wonder what was going on. Was this another, domestic tour group? Their friendliness seemed to push this proposition forward. For instance, I slipped on a patch of black ice at one point and heard an accented voice behind me say "Be careful!" A light chuckle followed. These did not seem like the attitudes of saleswomen.

And yet they were sticking awfully close to us and some of them did not appear to be very well off. I couldn't decide what was going on for the first few minutes of walking on the trail. Who were these women?

Finally, once we were actually on top of the Great Wall itself, surrounded by a ring of these women, who were seemingly just waiting for us to move, I realized what was happening. Our tour guide, who had essentially disappeared, was not our real guide. These women were. And they were going to expect some sort of reward at the end.

I didn't like this very much. I had paid for a guide and I wanted the guide I had paid for. Either that, or I was going to be on my own. So, determined, I set off. It wasn't long before I was clearly in the lead, outpacing most of my fellow tourists.

It was also clear that I had a acquired a guide. She managed to stay a few steps ahead of me the entire time. At first, she offered to show me a route through some of the more difficult terrain, but those offers soon disappeared as she realized I didn't actually need that sort of guidance. Instead, she started explaining little features about the wall. Things like how you can tell which side is North, which are the newer sections, and which sections are 500 years old. Before long, I started to find I actually liked the woman.

We talked a little bit about where I was from and where she was from. Turns out she had been doing this every day for the past 10 years, that she was actually a farmer from over the hills, that she had two sons. Most shockingly to me, she said she was 37 ("old" by her reckoning). When I first saw her, I had estimated her age to be at least ten years older. Whether she was telling me the truth about her life of not, she clearly had had a difficult time.

The hike took me about an hour and a half each way. My guide and I were both sweating and panting by the time we reached the end. I had pushed her hard. Even though she had essentially forced herself onto me, I decided in the end that she had earned her souvenir. The prices were steep, but I didn't bother to haggle. I bought a book and a shirt and said farewell.

Lunch was an interesting affair, mostly because the food was not that interesting. Nearly all my other meals in China were delicious and very noteworthy, but this one was not. There was a lot of it, though, so I filled up and climbed on the bus.

On the way back, I discussed my hatred of Twilight with a French woman who was also part of the trip. And, as promised, I was back at the hostel by six that evening.

The next day, I woke up bright and early, climbed on a plane, and made my way back to Japan. And here I am, once again, Jeffles in Japan.

~Jeffles

China: Part 2

Welcome back. Please, take off your shoes, grab a cup of tea, and relax for a little while. Take any seat you like; they're all there for you, baby.

*

When I got off the plane, I had to suppress a wave of disgust threatening to rise from deep inside me. Apparently, the Chinese had taken a 'throw them in the deep end' position on tourists. Rather than connect the plane directly to the inside of the airport via walkway, we new arrivals exited from the plane into the smog-filled landscape that is Beijing. Our goal: a grey bus lined extensively on either side with windows.

Awareness of a previously unknown stench crept in like a family of cockroaches climbing through the kitchen pipes. Even when I reached the bus, I couldn't escape it; the doors had been thrown open to the world. It was all I could to to stand, gloved hand gripping a pole to steady myself, and wonder what sort of place I had brought myself to.

The smog never lifted. As I waited for a taxi to take me to my hostel, it was there. As we drove down the third ring road, winding our way through desiccated forests and looming high-rise buildings, it was there. When, a couple hours later, I found myself wandering through one of Beijing's aged hutong districts, still it was there.

In fact, it only got worse.

After a deliciously massive lunch of unknown meat, noodles of equally unknown size, and various tiny, red hot peppers, after walking the grey streets of Beijing for two hours in an attempt to gain some sort of rudimentary understanding of this incredible city, I returned, exhausted, to my hostel. It was approximately four in the afternoon. Maybe four thirty.

Sixteen hours later, I woke up. Usually, when traveling alone, I stay in a hostel's dorm style rooms. This is for a very simple reason: it's a damn good way to meet people. To this day, I've only had one item go missing and that was because I left it out in a communal area as if anyone could use it. My guess? Someone thought it belonged to the hostel and, you know, used it.

This time I decided to spring the cash for a personal room. And thank god I did, because I never would have rested so well in a dorm-style room.

The room itself was on the second floor, yet most of the surrounding buildings were only one story, so its two south-facing windows presented a view of the entire city. Or it should have.

When I woke the next morning, even the building next door, a place all of five feet from my window, was obscured by smog. Just the idea that I would be able to view the entire city from my window was so ridiculous at that moment that I wondered if I shouldn't have my head examined. After all, who was I to expect to be able to see the city I had come to sight-see in? Obviously I was going about this all wrong.

The smog stayed all day. Around noon I called an acquaintance of mine in the city to meet up for lunch. During the call, he quietly informed me that the air quality monitor on the US embassy in Beijing was reporting Beijing to currently be "very unhealthy."

You know what that is? That's one step below "hazardous." And children were playing in the streets. They may as well have been playing in a smoker's lounge. Hell, they may as well have been smokers.

"There should be a ban on anyone under the age of 18 entering the city," I thought. My eye fell on five children in their school uniforms, each child no more than ten years old, kicking around a soccer ball. I wanted to shake them, tell them to go home as quick as they can and stay indoors. Instead I averted my eyes and tried to think happy thoughts.

Nonetheless, I was determined to see Beijing.

I'll continue in my next blog post.

An Excusable Absence

Sorry! I haven't been around in a while, I know. I actually have legit reasons this time, though.

Last week, I was in China! Yeah, that's right. That country with the billions of people and one-child policy and communist crazies. And as China has a firewall that blocks blogger, I couldn't blog.

Then, last night, my computer pretty much exploded. At first it started smoking, then the power plug started shooting sparks into my hand as I tried to unplug the cord. So I shut it down and today ordered a new computer. It should arrive in two weeks.

Each one of these things constitutes several blogs in themselves, but I only have about half an hour left in the work day before I have to return home. Where I have no computer. For the weekend.

So I just wanted to let you know what was up.

There will be multiple blog posts next week to cover these topics. This is because I have no classes right now and am basically just sitting around at my desk with nothing to do. Hooray spring break! Maybe I'll talk about that a little bit, too.

For now, a little anecdote about China.

It was Friday morning and my plane was arriving in Beijing. The flight had only been a short three hours, a mere hop and a skip from Osaka. As the plane descended and I thought about how it seemed to be landing altogether too soon, I thought back to Japan.

"To tell the truth, I've never been to a foreign country," admitted one teacher of mine. She's in her late 40s and exactly like a depressingly large number of her fellow countrymen and women.

But it's not just foreign countries. Japanese adults seem to rarely take any vacation time at all. Not because they don't have vacation time; they do have vacation time, though from what I understand it may only be as little as 6 days. No, it's because they'd feel bad if they left work. Vacation is, from a Japanese perspective, selfish.

This is one thing I'll never understand. Vacation is enlightening. It makes us more well rounded people. And most importantly for a business, it refreshes an reinvigorates us.

I thought about all of this as the wheels dislodged themselves from the body of the airplane. They were accompanied with a clunking sound like boiling water crashing through an old radiator. Nothing to worry about, though. This was hardly my first time on a plane and sounds like that are pretty well par for the course. If anything, it's a sign that all is well and working. Next to me, a Japanese man bobs his head in his sleep, his mouth making a funny little pout.

We had been enveloped in clouds for about five or ten minutes when the ground appeared beneath us, rising toward us like the back of a gargantuan whale. Then, with a jolt, we were down. The wheels of the plane raced across the asphalt, great gusts of air pushing on the wing flaps, trying to force them back down.

As the aircraft, now little more than an over-sized bus, finally slowed down, I took a look outside.

Beijing looked grey. The sky was invisible. Nothing was up there except static, like a tv at two in the morning on mute. Off in the distance, I thought I could make out the outlines of tall buildings. They were pretty obscured, though. Well, Beijing is a pretty polluted city, I thought. Everyone's heard the stories.

"Welcome to Beijing," chimed a flight attendant's voice over the intercom. "You may notice that the air quality is a little different from Osaka."

I took another look outside the window. Damn. Talk about an understatement. "A little different?"

Those weren't buildings I had seen in the distance. Those were trees. And they weren't so distant, more like sitting on the edge of the runway. Somehow, they had been so obscured, I thought they were far off buildings.

I was no longer in Japan.

~Jeffles

[Ramble]

So I lied. French is not the answer. Spanish is the answer!

Haha, yeah. I keep changing it. But this time is for reals! Seriously! It would be super useful (the US is full of Spanish speakers), I have tons of resources (both my parents are fluent), I definitely have motivation (half my family speaks Spanish and some of them don't speak English), and there's much Spanish literature to discover. Truthfully, my initial dip into the world of Spanish literature didn't go very well. Got just over halfway through One Hundred Years of Solitude and couldn't go any further. This was after about two years of effort.

I've got it! The book is mean to TAKE a hundred years to read, and then only if you're placed in solitude the entire time! Man, I am a genius.

Har har. No, I know, I have to give the book another chance. And there's gotta be lots of good books by Spanish-speaking authors out there. Actually, if you're reading this now and know of some such books, let me know!

In the meantime, I've been trying to figure out how I want to spend the rest of my time here in Japan. I want to travel, that much is clear. But I need to travel cheap, because I've sorta been hit by a bunch of unexpected costs recently. So how can I do that? I may have discovered the answer.

I remembered last night that I have a ton of Aeroplan points, which work for any airlines in Star Alliance. That's a lot of airlines! Best part, I have enough points to swing a free round-trip flight to pretty much anywhere in Asia. Huzzah. The question now is where?

The only time I really have to do such a trip is going to be in August. I reeeeeeally want to go to Southeast Asia, but there's a problem: August is monsoon season. Practically the WORST time of year to travel there. It looks like Malaysia is relatively dry during that time, though. So maybe I'll go to Singapore, then travel around to Malaysia and Indonesia, then back to Singapore to catch my return flight to Japan. I dunno. Could work. Might be fun. I hear that's a relatively cheap part of the world, too, so maybe it wouldn't be too expensive.

Sigh.

In case you didn't figure it out, I have nothing to do these days. I just sit around at the office and wait to go home. Much thinking and plotting (dreaming) is involved.

Well, okay, I guess I've done a few things. I finally made it back to Judo after three months. That was two days ago. I'm still sore. (Reminder to self: don't skip Judo for that long again!) I've also managed to learn about 100 words in Spanish in the last three days. So that's something. And I wouldn't exactly call myself bored. It's hard to be bored in a place like this, where there's always something happening somewhere. I'm just... not stretched enough. Yeah. Need more stretching!

[/ramble]

~Jeffles

Ze Future

Oh my god it's March!

Yeah, I don't really have anything to say. I think it's gonna be another short one... You see, one of my schools is basically out of session until sometime in April. That means that I get to sit around at my office desk for half the week. Soon, when my other schools get out of session, I'll be sitting around at my office desk for ALL the week!

It sounds like I'm complaining. The truth is that I have no desire to complain; I like having nothing to do. It's relaxing. I can concentrate on the other things I have a desire to do. And these days, I'm full of thoughts that need to be sorted out. Mostly about (DUN DUN DUNNNNNN) my future!

That's right, Jeffles is angsting out about his future. Sigh.

It seemed like I had it all figured out. Once JET ends, go to Thailand and volunteer in an orphanage for a month. Then, hop on over to Beijing and become a master of Mandarin in six months. Then, go back to the US and become a citizen. Get my driver's license, a cushy internship and a sweet new pad. Then ALL the moneys will be mine.

Except it isn't working out that way. Mostly because I realized that the Thailand and Beijing parts of that are logistical nightmares to figure out. I might be able to do it, but I'd be flat broke by the time I went home and probably wouldn't be able to maximize the experience because I'd be so cautious about my money. Moreover, I can't spend that much time outside of the US or else the authorities will take away my residency and that would put a serious damper on my become-a-citizen plans.

But even more importantly, I forgot a lesson I learned early on in university: I am not the kind of person that can simply do what is useful or convenient. There has to be more to it. I have to have some sort of personal investment in the activity. That means that, for me, studying Mandarin would probably be a bad idea.

Why? China's a big, powerful, rich country, after all. I would have my future SET if I could go there. Except that money has never really been a big motivator for me and, frankly, I just don't care that much about China. So why learn Mandarin? I firmly believe that a language cannot be learned "just because." You need a deeper motivation, a reason to care. I don't think I have that with China.

With Japan, I definitely had/have it. I lurve Japanese literature and dream of the day that I can read a Japanese novel in its original form. So I asked myself, what other language is like that for me? The answer seems to be French. There's a great deal of French literature that I have read (in translation) and loved. So maybe I should give that a try, eh?

Hopefully this gives you a bit of an insight into what goes on in a JET's mind as the second half of the contract year progresses. Everyone I know is going through a similar mental struggle at the moment.

"What do I doooooo!"

"I can't just go back to nothing, so what am I gonna go back to?"

"Japan's been awesome, how can I possibly do something as awesome when I go back?"

"I have no skills and I don't want to keep being a teacher. I'm screwed!"

That sort of thing. Even people who had a clear-cut plan before coming to Japan seem to second guess themselves a bit. A bit. It depends on the person.

I don't know if I could offer any advice to people about to enter JET. The only thing I could think of it "Keep your eyes open to any and all options." But honestly, that doesn't always work. I think you just have to be prepared to figure out what you want out of this point in your life and go for whatever that is.

Me? I'm gonna be polylingual.

~Jeff