The first week of October is a national holiday in China. It's the "National Founding Day" national holiday, or 国庆节 in Chinese. In order to celebrate the founding of the PRC, everyone in mainland China gets a week of vacation. Ironically, that "everyone" doesn't include the true proletariat. Workers and service industry people in cities, rather than getting a break, have to work all the harder as the white collar Chinese pour in for their vacations. Oh, and then there's also the matter of the "week" of vacation not really being a week for most companies.
But back to the point. It's kind of hard to decide where to travel for this holiday, because most of China's tourist destinations are just overflowing with Chinese tourists. Add to that the fact that my job takes me to a lot of tourist destinations for free and during non-peak season, and I start to look outside of China for a vacation destination.
I've pretty much decided on India. It's nearby, it's cheap, and I even know someone there. I know I can't see much of India in only a week, but to be honest I'm not sure I'd want a real long stay either. But it's certainly a country I'd like to see a bit of. I'd appreciate any recommendations anyone might have; I'm still in the planning stages and I'm not going to buy the stupid Lonely Planet.
Note: The guy I had lined up to do my job along with me fell through. I'm still looking, and it's urgent! See the original entry as well as the Sinosplice Jobs description.
Why the long silence? I've been in Tianjin for the past 11 days running a kids' summer camp for my company. It had been my intention to update from the road, but I decided not to.
For one thing, the internet cafes weren't the most cooperative. Most of us know that China blocks a lot of websites, like anything on Geocities or any Typepad blogs. Trying to access those pages directly from China yields the browser's "page not found" error. However, some of Tianjin's internet cafes have a kind of proprietary software installed that closes all open browser windows if there is any attempt to access a page on the blocked list. Let me tell you, that is really annoying! Sometimes you don't even know that the link you clicked on is blocked, and then suddenly your e-mail, news stories, etc. that you had open are all closed. Grrrr... Maybe this is becoming more common in internet cafes in China -- I haven't needed to use an internet cafe in a while -- but it's the first time that I've seen it.
But anyway... about Tianjin. I'm not going to go into the camp now; there's a lot to say and I'm going to save that for a separate post. There's plenty to say about Tianjin itself, so I'll take a stab at it.
I had hoped that with 10 whole days in Tianjin I would have ample opportunity to meet Adam of Brainysmurf.org in person, but it was not meant to be. (I think he's avoiding me. He beat a hasty retreat to the USA with some kind of "I'm getting married" excuse. Hehe.) He did, however, leave me some sightseeing tips, which I forwarded to another e-mail account for easy access on the road. Unfortunately, all the Chinese in it went to crap and it ended up being useless. Oh well. Thanks anyway, Adam.
One of my first impressions of Tianjin is that it's very Chinese. I think to understand what I mean by this ridiculous statement that it's useful to compare Tianjin to Beijing and Shanghai. Shanghai is very international. Snooty expats in other parts of China like to go so far as to say that it's "not China." I disagree with that, but Shanghai is certainly singular in its modern atmosphere. Beijing on the other hand, feels very political and cultural to me. (Like the nation's capital, even!) The city is steeped in politics, and it tries hard to be the nation's cultural center. It succeeds.
Sure, Tianjin has its own peculiarities... it's got plenty of leftover Western architecture from that period of its history, and it's got its own local dialect and cuisine, etc. But to me, these don't detract from the overall Chineseness of Tianjin. It would be impossible to thoroughly explain or delineate, as it's really just a big mass of tiny details. But I'll share some of my observations.
When the student of Chinese begins studying Mandarin outside of China, northern Mandarin in general (and often Beijing Mandarin in particular) is stressed as the standard. Cultural images of China presented in class are usually of Beijing. The influence is a subtle but lasting one. Even now, after four years of living in China, I immediately recognize Tianjin as meshing well with the "proto-China" images still lodged stubbornly in the recesses of my mind.
Yet the Mandarin of the people of Tianjin doesn't sound nearly as harsh as that of the Beijingers. I actually liked it quite a bit. The "R" sound (er-hua) wasn't nearly as pervasive as I remember it being in Beijing. They add in their own little Tianjin words too, and the overall effect is just sort of... homey. (A few quick dialect examples: in Tianjin you can say (not write) 耐 for 爱 and 卧 for 饿, although perhaps the feeling changes slightly. I was also amused by their local word for ice cream on a stick: 冰棍儿.)
This all amounted to the Mandarin of Tianjin sounding unquestionably northern to me, but less assaulted by Beijing's ego. That seemed to fit more with my "proto-China" impression of Mandarin.
The taxi meters in Tianjin start at 5 rmb. I found that charming. In Shanghai taxis start at 10 (13 at night), and even Hangzhou starts at 10. I'm not sure if Beijing still starts at 5, but there's something that seems right about a 5 rmb Chinese taxi ride, even in a big city. (Meanwhile in Shanghai we can get a short ride in a Mercedes Benz with a built-in TV for 10 rmb.)
Tianjin is a very large city and thus has its traffic problems, but it's nowhere near the proportions of Shanghai's traffic problem. There are still tons of taxis on the road, and taking a taxi at rush hour didn't result in any notable delays for me. Lots of people bike (and yes, they wear solar visors too). The street scene is just so China.
But enough of this "Tianjin is so China" nonsense. I think you get the point. How is Tianjin different from the proto-China image?
Probably the most notable difference is Tianjin's huge Korean population. It's really stunning. I had dinner one night in a sort of "little Korea" area, and virtually every store had Korean hangul lettering in the window. I didn't know that there were places like that in the hearts of China's cities. I really wonder what other Chinese cities have such sizeable foreign immigrant populations.
Tianjin also has weird traffic lights. They can't just have the normal "three circle" kind. All traffic lights seem to be in the shape of arrows or colored bars that shrink to indicate when it will change.
The people of Tianjin are friendly, and old people walk the streets at all hours of the day. I didn't get the typical Beijing impression of there being only old people on the streets, though. There were lots of young people everywhere I went. I was surprised by the number of attractive girls I saw. They didn't look terribly different from southern girls to me, although I think they tend to be fuller figured (which is a good thing!) than their southern (sometimes anorexic) counterparts.
I attribue fuller figures of the women to the overall northern tendency to eat more. The people of Tinjin adhere strictly to this policy. Sometimes the 10-year-old kids at the camp would out-eat me! I heard an amusing explanation from one person: In the south they eat soup with their meal. It helps fill them up, so they feel full sooner. We eat our soup at the end of the meal, so we end up eating more. I really had to laugh at this, because it's just like the kind of thing you might hear from Americans rationalizing American obesity. I wanted to tell that girl: No, actually you all just eat a hell of a lot!
I didn't take many pictures in Tianjin, and certainly nothing notable. I didn't feel it was necessary. In many ways, Tianjin just fits images of China I've already mentally collected. Now I can attach a place to those images. It is Tianjin.
China is currently in the midst of a new headwear craze. It's like a typical sun visor with a swivel down piece of dark transparent plastic which shades the face from the summer sun's harsh glare. The protective plastic can serve as an extended visor (up), or sort of a whole-face "sunglass mask" (down). See the pictures below, modeled by yours truly. I'm not entirely sure what to call the new hat-like apparel.
The Chinese just call them 太阳帽, which could be literally translated as "sun hat" and my (normally awesome) good dictionary lists as "sun-helmet." The thing is, I've been in China nearly four years, and I can assure you that this is an entirely new product, so the dictionary term can't possibly apply in more than a very general way. Anyway, I can't call these new "sun-helmet" things "sun visors" because that name is already taken by the traditional sun visors without the crazy swivel-down tinted plastic piece. So I'm calling them "solar visors."
The whole point of this post is that China is going nuts over these solar visors. Like I said, as far as I know, they weren't even around before this summer, and now I see them everywhere. They're particularly popular among the bicycling crowd. Russell just got back from trips to Beijing and Sichuan, and he said they were all over there too. These solar visors are taking the country by storm. And they're just so tacky. But practical. The Chinese go for practical.
Here are a few shots I took last Saturday of the Solar Visor Madness coursing through the streets of Shanghai these days, and, indeed, possibly all of China:
I hope you're thinking, "wow, those look really ridiculous." Because that's the idea. It's madness! But it's kinda fun.
Why do the solar visors look so ridiculous on people in the street? Perhaps they remind you of something? Here are two possibilities:
Of course, it's not the entire country that has gone mad. A lot of people stick to more traditional (and sometimes quite creative) methods of protecting themselves from the sun:
I just stick to sunglasses, myself. After taking my pictures I gave my own solar visor away to someone who would use it for more than a blog entry. It cost me 7 rmb (less than $1 US).
Have you seen these things before? If not, you probably will soon.
When I first started getting comment spam, I thought I could delete it manually. I didn't realize how much I already had. When hours of manual deletions weren't enough, I googled "comment spam" and found MT Blacklist. It's a brilliant plug-in that allows MovableType users to deny comments from known spammers as well as easily delete from the database existing comments posted by spammers.
This is all well and good, but it depends on the blogger regularly updating his spammer definitions and then running MT Blacklist to remove newly posted spam. It's certainly way better than deleting it all manually, but it's far from automatic at this point, and it's still a big pain.
I was quite pleased then, to discover another, simpler solution, which when used in conjunction with MT Blacklist should keep your Movable Type blog pretty much spamless:
...Spammers have automated scripts that look for Moveable Type blog sites and they then post to our comments using a direct call to the "mt-comments.cgi" script. If you installed Moveable Type into the default directory (/mt) then they know exactly where the script is and how to call it.
The solution is simple: rename the script to some odd name (ex. qwerty.cgi) and edit your mt.cfg to point to the renamed CGI script. Look for the line that is commented out and reads "# CommentScript mt-comments.cgi". Uncomment the line and change the name of the script to the new name. You need to rebuild the site before it takes effect. Users will not be able to post comments while you are doing this but the entire process only takes a few minutes.
I made this modification about three weeks ago and have not had a single comment spam since then. [source]
Don't forget to rebuild! Your comments won't work until you do.
Granted, this is not a permanent solution, but it has drastically reduced my own comment spam, and I'll take the break from comment spam as long as I can have it!
"Rainbow," one of my former students and fellow bloggers, has recently finished a poll (survey?) of Chinese students. With the help of an American friend, she was able to provide cultural contrast, with the results nicely graphically displayed. Although the sample size was not large, the questions were well-chosen and the results are interesting. Some of my favorite questions were Can you cook, Do you have an idea now about what kind of job to do after graduation, Have you ever had an IV, and How many relationships have you been in so far. There are 20 questions in all. Have a look.
