救火 is save fire
our prc friends brought us out to 玩玩 yesterday (i love that they call outings 出去玩玩 chu1 qu4 wan2 wan2, there's something very nice and innocent about it), and we started the day by going to the lama temple where i hung around outside the buildings where the statues were housed, in the foggy after-rain morning, choking on the smoke from burning incense, observing the various temple-goers with much amusement.

and i was rewarded shortly when two bundles of incense which a short fat man was trying to light caught fire.

it looked like he was holding torches fit to light the way in the dark of night, and he also looked as if he was afraid that he would burn himself. in fact, i was afraid he would.

he hurriedly raised them up and down three times and threw them into the incense trough.

maybe it was a bundle of dried sticks, not incense.

i also saw people burning yellow and gold paper folded into the shape of ingots, which i didn't understand, because why do the gods need money? i asked one of our prc friends about it, and i think he said that it was to curry favour with the gods on behalf of dead family members. in fact, i think he even said something which can be translated to mean bribery.

but my chinese is still rather half past-six, so don't take my word for it.

if only
yesterday our professor for law of international sales, finance and carriage didn't come again. with a name like john shijian mo, you just know he's too busy trying to advance his career outside of being a professor to really care about teaching.

anyway, over breakfast jinni said let's visit the great wall, just like we would have said let's go catch a movie back in singapore, if class was cancelled. a clear blue sky, barely any wind - the day was perfect.

we even made it back in time for jinni's modern chinese history class, which i attended with her. since most of my modules are of the mind-numbingly boring kind, being 双语课 - taught in english and chinese, not much more than exercises in translation - i have decided that i will go on doing this, because classes taught in chinese are infinitely more interesting and fulfilling.

for instance, yesterday, i slept for half of jinni's class, and she woke me up in the second half to watch a video on 圆明园, which made me feel extremely angry at westerners for being power-hungry imperialists and stealing china's national treasures and refusing to return them, even now.

this is what it's like to trace one's roots i guess. haha.

sardines

all of beijing is busy getting ready for the olympics, and one day i think i'm going to stand in front of the huge electronic billboard at the end of the expressway on the way to school, and take down all the slogans which flash past. my favourite one so far is 我奉献、我参与、我快乐 (wo3 feng4 xian3, wo3 can1 yu2, wo3 kuai4 le4) - i'm contributing, i'm participating, i'm happy. there's just something very communistically (is that a word) optimistic about it.

and you wonder where the singapore government's penchant for slogans came from.

there's also 迎奥运、讲文明、树新风 (yin2 ao4 yun4, jiang3 wen2 ming2, shu4 xin1 feng1) - as we welcome the olympics, let us be gracious and put aside past habits.

at the bus stops during the morning and evening rush hours, there are about four or five senior citizens, usually fat, red-cheeked old women- 阿姨 - dressed in the bright blue and yellow uniforms of the beijing transport services. yesterday i noticed that they wore tags on long cords around their necks which said that they were 文明员 (wen2 ming2 yuan2). their titles might have been slightly more descriptive, but i was running to the bus when i noticed the tags and couldn't see them properly. anyhow, from those three words one can gather that they're, quite literally, gracious people helpers - i.e. they're there to help create a more gracious beijing.

which they do by waving little red flags and telling people to line up in orderly queues to get on the bus.

it doesn't work.

and these 阿姨 usually end up helping people to get onto an already full-to-bursting bus (if buses could burst), by shoving and pushing and cramming them against those already on the bus, holding them there until the bus door folds closed and they can't fall out.

i sacrificed a loaf of bread that way the other day, because it costs eight singapore cents to take the bus and at least two singapore dollars to take a cab on your own.

once you're on the bus, the bus driver and conductor will holler for passengers who've just boarded to move towards the back, which one can endeavour to but will usually fail to do. i spend my time on buses wedged tightly between people, praying very hard that i'll be able to move towards the exit and be right in front of it when the bus door opens at my stop.

the bus conductor yesterday morning couldn't see his side-view mirror due to the sheer mass of people blocking it. after hollering very irritably for people to move aside, he swerved and someone shouted from behind 你会驾车吗 do you know how to drive?

i say, these people have never died before.

in other news, the central heating has been centrally turned off, heralding the arrival of spring! which, unfortunately, appears merely to be stirring slightly from her hibernation. we thought it was just the wind making it cold in our apartment, but i realised yesterday that the heaters, which used to give out a faint but sufficiently cosy heat, are now Stone Cold.

here is a very interesting picture:

i never saw a chinese emporer so dark, even though we were at the summer palace
don't think they went tanning in those days

i really think i look like a right old prat, but maybe not, because you can tell i was trying Very Hard not to laugh. jinni said i couldn't show my teeth, whether when smiling or otherwise, because then i wouldn't look like a proper ge ge (daughter of emperor). shangren couldn't get his costumes right, he captioned a picture of xiaoyun (as a manchurian princess), him and me on facebook Me and my 2 concubines.

anyway, you can see the dustbins in the background.

this is a 煎饼 （jian1 bing3)
right, i don't quite know what 煎饼 translates into, so for now you can just think of it as a "pancake- thing". it's another cheap local delight sold on the streets, and is made on the spot with batter spooned onto a hot griddle. an egg is then cracked onto the batter, followed by chopped spring onions, and lastly a large piece of fried beancurd skin is crushed on top of everything and the entire thing is folded together and placed, steaming, in a plastic bag for you to burn your tongue on. well, for me to burn my tongue on anyway.

but there are no photos of it, because this post isn't actually about them. the title of this post actually refers to a joke jinni, xiaoyun and i made during our weekend trip to 承德 （cheng2 de2), where emperor kang xi (康熙皇帝) built a summer palace (避暑山庄 bi4 shu3 shan1 zhuang1). unfortunately, the details of the joke cannot be divulged here because they are potentially libellous.

***
so, i spent most of holy saturday crammed into a seat, knees almost to my chest, in a Very Dodgy bus with Very Furry, dirt encrusted seats, praying that the oncoming cars and massive trucks laden with things like donkeys and swivel chairs would be able to swerve in time, because our bus driver cut corners at high speeds and sometimes undertook to overtake other vehicles at road bends. there was an old man next to me who started smoking, and i pointedly opened the window about half-way but he didn't seem to get the point. his cigarette butt ended up on the floor of the bus along with hundreds of melon seed shells and eventually his water bottle, but that wasn't before my cheeks were almost frozen from the wind-rush coming in through the half-opened window. because the bus was, of course, going at a speed above the speed limit. even with its rickety suspension and the going-to-fall-apart sounds it was making, which the driver seemed totally oblivious to.

imagine me, then, in three layers, bundled up in my dad's blue goose down windbreaker which is 5 sizes too big for me, crammed into aforementioned seat, sticking my head ever so slightly out the window to the godforsaken country road.

i spent the time before dinner on holy saturday looking at huge representations of gods which i thought looked like fat old men who'd had too much to drink and decided to dress up for a lark, then became angry when others laughed at how ridiculous they looked, faces set in a permanent scowl. or maybe they were scowling because a number of joss sticks being offered to them were stuck in little paper cups of ashes bearing the words 超市发 (chao1 shi4 fa1), china's answer to giant, on them.

and i ushered in resurrection sunday with a scaldingly hot shower - the tap at the hotel didn't seem to be able to register an in-between temperature, so you had to choose between scaldingly hot and icy cold - and that was followed by a walk, during which i blew out smokey breath to my hearts' content, to breakfast at the local sunday morning market; chalky white soya bean milk, poured from huge thermos flasks into bowls, eaten at tables set up by the road next to a shop where a man was sawing window parts. it was bland but had a sweet, burnt aftertaste and a grittiness when your tongue met undissolved bits of sugar. that was accompanied by the lightest, crispest 油条 (you2 tiao2) i've ever eaten, fresh from a pot of hot, bubbling oil seated on the back of a wheelbarrow, cooked by a man with cheeks chapped and red from the cold.

and, as i had a spoonful of beancurd with soya sauce and bits of spring onion, i turned to jinni and xiaoyun and told them that i was happy.

***
it was probably the happiest resurrection sunday i've ever had in my entire life, and i mean that. the time during the service in 2007 when we sang because He lives was probably the only other time in all my 21 years that i even came close to feeling that perfectly happy.

because it dawned on me, along with the cold morning in an industrial town a few hundred kilometres off beijing, that this was what Jesus died on the cross for. these moments of the Everyday kind of happiness, only made possible by His perfect peace in our hearts.

later in the day, we went to a temple and i wandered off on my own feeling a little sad because our tour guide had gotten a little Too Insistent about offering incense to kuanyin, as a mark of respect, regardless of your religion and beliefs, she kept saying. a lot of westerners do.

i wanted to cry.

imagine, then, me standing on the steps leading to the temple, looking out at the glorious hills and rock formations in the distance, singing because He lives softly to myself, holding my water bottle tightly in my hands and feeling less alone.

but greater still, the calm assurance
this child can face uncertain days because He lives

paul said he thought the fat old men gods had to look fierce to chase away evil spirits. i think they were scowling because they knew, deep in their hearts, that there was a God far greater than them all, that they were ultimately worth nothing and would fade into obscurity once people forgot about them and moved on to other gods.

***
on the way home i saw snow for the first time: sad, thinning patches of it on a brown barren land as yet untouched by spring. whose appearance, it must be said, would have been greatly improved by several layers of snow. there's something very clean about cold air and newly fallen snow as it's described in storybooks that would have gone a long way towards hiding the poverty, the dilapidated industrial buildings and houses, the rubbish scattered all about the fields and trees. and it would have made the fact that there were children bundled up in brightly coloured clothes running around seem less sad. we also stopped at a functioning petrol station for a toilet break, and the toilet was little more than three drains set about a foot apart in concrete behind an unfinished brick wall. all three drains were choked with tissue paper, soiled sanitary pads and faeces.

i decided i could wait.

we took a bus which was Definitely Very Much Less Dodgy back to beijing, and by the end of the journey we wished we'd taken the Very Dodgy bus of the journey to 承德. the windows couldn't open, so whenever someone smoked we'd feel like we were slowly suffocating as the smoke diffused towards us. and to top it all off, during the last third of the journey one of the bus staff decided to put on a chinese techno ktv dvd, complete with girls dressed like Complete Skanks singing nonsense in chinese on the tiny tv screen at the front of the bus.

we got off the bus with Awful Headaches.

but a taxi ride, washing machine cycle and shower later, i thankfully made a cup of 3 in 1 milo - which is one of the most comforting things in the world, late at night. the wind shrieked and howled outside (like it's doing now) but inside my apartment i was draining the last of my milo, the pounding techno beats leaving my head, a brown sludge remaining at the bottom of my mug which would harden by the next morning because i'm too lazy to wash things immediately here.

oh, and there's now a tagboard on the left; actually i can't see comments here because anonymouse.org doesn't allow access to secured sites unless you pay a premium. this was a recent development, the lousy buggers. but everyone's gotta make money some way. so in case anybody actually wants to communicate with me here, do tag. unless of course the comments that have been appearing have been from random web-based spammers.

corruption

i think our internet guy hates, and would dearly love to strangle us, one by one, slowly. last night our internet refused to work, and jinni only found his number at around 2330 so this morning i rang him at 0850 and tried to explain that we'd paid the bill for this month, but something was wrong again.

poor man, i wonder how many calls he gets a day from clueless foreign students who can't express themselves in mandarin very well.

he told me to unplug the router and plug it back in again, assuring me that there was nothing wrong. which act of troubleshooting worked, because i am back online and listening to a Very Nice cantonese song called 扶手电梯 by sherman chung 钟舒漫 (who looks like a Bleddy Skank on her album cover) on repeat and chuckling to myself. because i don't understand a single word of it, save for the bits i'm able to pick out because it sounds like chinese, but i'm feeling Absolutely Delighted listening to it anyway. of course. :) and what a lot of capitals there are in this last paragraph.

***

in other news, i almost bought a box of cigarettes on tuesday

... because i was feeling absolutely bored and restless with my life, and anyway my juvenile delinquency professor had actually walked into class with a half-finished one, how ironic.

all that Somebody With the Same Surname As Me had strived so hard to make sure the singapore education system instilled in me about the ill-effects of smoking went right out the window with the smoke from the professor's cigarette. i had been ready to take the plunge, but you know what they say, 进朱者赤，进墨者黑, interact with good people and become gooder, interact with bad people and become badder. so thanks to the wonderful, inspiring influence of the people on exchange with me, i eventually decided not to.







KIDDING!

(did you EVER think i was for real?)

what happened was, some dude rang me up telling me he'd found my wallet! jolie thinks the people at the pharmacy took it because they were very evasive when she went back to look for it; sure enough, this dude owned a shop which turned out to be a couple of doors away from the pharmacy.

we asked our local friend what i should get to thank him, and he said, you should buy wine or cigarettes. that's standard protocol here for gifts, because they're considered valuable items. and even if the person you're giving the cigarettes and wine to doesn't smoke or drink, they'll keep these items for guests, etc. or reuse them as gifts, i suppose. that's a world-wide practice for things you don't use yourself.

the co-op at our school sells cigarettes, and i was prepared to get either jolie or our local friend to purchase them for me because the whole idea of actually buying cigarettes felt really strange. i tried to point out to them also that i didn't want to encourage smoking, and that if anyone wanted to thank me they could get me fresh fruits and vegetables, but this idea was met with exasperated smiles.

but there's even a fruit shop outside the co-op can!

however, after lunch, we stood outside the co-op and i rang the dude back, but he didn't pick up the phone so we decided not to buy the cigarettes yet. we went across the road to the bakery - 金凤成祥, china's version of breadtalk, but there are TWO outlets within walking distance of my apartment, i don't think even breadtalk has expanded so fast - to buy some eats when he called me back.

much to my delight, i ended up buying him six portugese egg tarts.

when i got it back my wallet didn't have any money in it anyway.

***
it's good friday today, and i've just finished reading good omens by neil gaiman and terry pratchett. which was a really good book - british humour, a good ending, and enough fantasy and magic interspersed with the real world.

unfortunately, it also showed its authors up as humanists/materialists. in the middle of the book i'd begun harbouring (a rather faint) hope that they might very well have been christians. especially since i'd read neil gaiman's american gods before this, and i thought he'd described the concept and idea of god-worship pretty well, just that it hadn't been directed to Jesus in the book, of course.

by the end of good omens i had no doubt as to what position they took, and went to sleep feeling rather sad.

but there are some things in life you know you can never give up believing in, no matter how well-crafted the arguments against it are, and Jesus' death and resurrection is one of them.

***
it's raining properly for the first time since i came to beijing and it's a proper grey sky morning.

from what i've been able to identify of the lyrics so far, i'm pretty sure if i understood 扶手电梯 in its entirety, it's actually rather sappy and perfect for this emo-i-miss-jon-boohoohoo mood - the tune says it all too, despite the rather dodgy could-be-midi drum track.

you could baidu.com it, but in a while, because it hasn't been uploaded yet. better still, why don't you buy the CD - it's called castle - you'll be contributing to my getting better bak chor mee when i'm out with jon.

since discovering the wonders of baidu's mp3 search, i've been in love with faye wong's songs. a bit slow, i know. maybe i should buy her cd soon.

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today when i woke up the sky was a funny colour, because the sandstorm which was supposed to happen when we first arrived, and the week before this, finally happened. there were strong winds, i could hear them whistling through the trees in the classroom, and when i was outside i couldn't walk properly.

however, before my class started today i walked across the road to buy 珍珠奶茶 (zhen1 zhu1 nai3 cha2), undeterred by the fact that the air was rather a golden colour.

jinni thinks i should be hired as the brand's spokesperson.

on the ground floor, once you come out of the lift, there is a board. on this board are lots and lots of numbers, and once you're running low on electricity your unit number gets posted there. we buy electricity in blocks, and before we remembered that we were finishing up the previous tenant's electricity before starting on the block we purchased, we were not amused to see 1109 written there for all the world to see.

maybe the pub should think of doing something like that, it saves a lot of paper and manpower.

the first time we went for ktv in china i was introduced to s.h.e.'s superstar. since kuek foo sent me a link with the lyrics and mp3 i've been singing it, much to the annoyance of my housemates and jolie.

part of the chorus goes:
只能爱你
you are my superstar

jon thinks courts should adapt the song for their purposes:
只能爱你
you are my superstore

i can only love you, you are my superstore.

a rant

it's late, and i'm online waiting for jon to finish talking to his mother so in the meantime:

'The report from Human Rights without Frontiers International urged the IOC and Western governments to press China on the issue as well as on its human rights record. “China’s toxic air reflects its equally foul human rights record,” said Reggie Littlejohn, a US lawyer advising the Brussels-based group.

“It appears doubtful that Beijing will take the robust and decisive measures required to ensure safe air for the Olympics.” ' - from the timesonline.

there have been many comments of this ilk going around, and it is Extremely Annoying.

right, i don't know much about politics but i think people of the west (though not all of them are that Annoying) should stop talking about a life they've never lived, only read and heard about, and stop making generalisations based on the past and not life as it's being lived in china NOW. and we should all encourage and support the up and coming generation of chinese who truly desire to make a difference and shape china's future for the better.

(see, Somebody with the same surname as me has taught me well. that sounded like a line from a social studies textbook.)

but it's true. they do believe in a better tomorrow, and they acknowledge, humbly, that there's a lot to learn, and change.

which is a lot more than i can say for the citizens of Certain Other Countries.

un-gay entry

just now, after i posted that gay entry, i was on my way to the starbucks (新巴克 xin1 ba1 ke4) opposite our apartment when i thought about it some more and decided that i managed to fall asleep last night because i got out of bed and opened the window just a sliver to let in some air. it was rather stuffy in my room before, and very cold but not stuffy after.

so that's alright.

and now, as promised:

the sunset in changping, near where we go to school

what xiaoyun is holding is a banana on a stick, and what i'm holding are hawthorn berries on a stick. remember those haw flakes, little red-brown discs wrapped in pink yellow and green paper, which we ate when we were kids? this is what they're partly made of.

both the banana and the hawthorn berries are coated with soft malt sugar which hardens instantly in the cold winter air, and rank second on my list of nice things to eat in beijing so far. number one being ma la steamboat on sticks.

i seem to like food on sticks alot.

judging by this picture, so does xiaoyun.

it's called 冰糖葫芦 bing1 tang2 hu2 lu2. i think the guys selling it were very amused, because i asked if i could take a picture with it first, and then could they wrap it up for me to take away? when you do a take away they wrap it in rice paper first, which i really like.

whenever i eat the rabbit sweet i always try and peel off the rice paper first. although that doesn't usually work except for a short strip of it, the rest is usually stuck too tightly to the sweet.

gay entry

maybe it's a bit too early in the morning for this nonsense, but anyhow; last night i couldn't fall asleep and i wasn't quite sure why. my tummy felt funny (lactose intolerance, among other things, it's the time of the month) and every way i turned i could feel my rib-cage - yes, my mattress is that hard. but just before i finally dropped off to sleep, i decided that i hadn't been able to before because i was just feeling very happy loving jon. seeing as he's far away over the himalayas and we haven't had a proper conversation for some time i thought that was worth mentioning.

:)

do indulge me. i promise to go back to more un-gay things by the next post, with pictures - taken myself, but with jolie's camera. and xiaoyun's.

supermarket shenanigans

because we've been hit by the spring chill at home - it wasn't my germs, honest! - we've all been cooking porridge for dinner (and me, lunch) the past week. i used up the last of the rice for my chicken porridge, so friday after dinner xiaoyun and i went to the supermarket to get some.

the supermarket's got a really pretty name: 易初莲花 (yi4 chu4 lian2 hua1), lotus blossoms.

anyway, we'd set out for dinner pretty late so by the time we were done it was about twenty minutes to closing time.

we were at the check-out counter, me hugging a bag of rice, and both of us feeling very pleased because we'd managed to successfully communicate to the supermarket staff that we wanted to buy ikan bilis (鱼干 yu2 gan1). i set the packet of ikan bilis on the counter along with the packet of wolfberries i'd also picked up and was about to do the same with the bag of rice when it slipped out of my arms, fell to the floor, and burst open.

rice grains scattered everywhere.

(of course they scattered everywhere. where else would they have gone?)

the rice was packed in those bags that you usually get for putting fruits in, so i don't think it's my fault that it burst.

xiaoyun and i stared at each other, horrified, and then we started laughing uncontrollably, not knowing what to do.

xiaoyun recovered her senses first.

hurry chloe let's run away! i'll wait for you here hurry hurry run upstairs and get a new bag and let's go!

i ran like anything to get a new packet of rice, but after we paid i felt so bad that i decided to wait to tell the cashier that i didn't mind paying for the burst bag of rice.

but either she didn't understand me, or she just wanted to close the register and go home, because she peered over the counter and coolly handed me a plastic bag and told me to pick up the rice.

as xiaoyun pointed out, i think she wouldn't have minded me taking the spilt rice. in fact, due to my half-past-six chinese, we think she thought i'd already paid for the rice.

i scooped up as much of it as i could into the plastic bag (it scattered everywhere, remember?), set it down on the counter, and then we scurried away, me clutching the second bag of rice to my chest for dear life.

***
tuesday, after i'd picked out the chicken which ended up in my chicken porridge, i asked the guy at the supermarket to chop it into pieces for me.

he picked up the chicken (dead already, of course), put it on his chopping board, and began hacking away at it with large, lazy, careless strokes.

just before he brought down the chopper to chop off the chicken's head, i said that i didn't want it. and as he brought down the chopper, with a large, lazy, careless and heavy stroke, the head of the poor chicken flew right off the chopping board and landed a good 5 metres away.

so much for not wanting the chicken's head.

heartbeats and himalayas

i decided to stay at home today, because i went to school yesterday and came home with a splitting headache, the skin rubbed raw around my nose, after using up about 2 and-a-half packets of tissue paper, thermos nonewithstanding.

i cleaned the floor in the morning, using the imitation magiclean floor wiper, and decided that when i get married it's better to stay in a flat because there's less floor space which needs cleaning. and i decided that my flat will be prettily furnished, but with as little furniture as possible.

i'd planned to do some reading today but was hit by a massive sleep wave after lunch - chicken porridge - and woke up feeling incredibly alone.

so i stuffed a packet of tissue paper into my jeans pocket along with my house key, wallet and phone, and went for a walk.

i saw school children on their way home, and i saw a man selling ducklings outside the school, 3 yuan for 2. i heard some of the kids say that that was quite cheap, they usually went for 5 yuan for one and died easily. i saw a small boy sitting on the handle bar of a bicyle, the back of which was absolutely crammed with mineral water bottles tied up in plastic bags, waiting for his father to finish loading the rest of his rummagings.

and i thought about home, and how whatever i cook here reminds me of it. not that my cooking's as good as my mother's or grandmother's (yet, haha), but i've been cooking everything in water with a minimal amount of salt, and with lots of garlic, onions and ginger. i thought my chicken porridge turned out pretty well. if we had an oven i'd be considering baking my mother's chicken wings too.

thinking about ovens made me think about abi, and how i wanted to be in a kitchen with her somewhere, maybe with kathleen too, bickering about how much sugar and butter to cut from whatever we decided to make. the kind of bickering that's done just for the sake of it, because we all know abi will grudgingly let us cut the amount of sugar, and i'll grudgingly add just a bit more butter to make up for things.

then, because abi starts with an a, i thought of adele in freezing cold exeter and how much she'd have enjoyed shopping here because there are enough cheap, good quality, kooky clothes for her to experiment with. and thinking of adele made me think of ian and how he told me the other day that quents wanted him to tell me that they all still loved me very much. i do think the guys have been making an effort - quents and ian and jon wrong and shannon - which is quite sweet, really.

sometimes it feels surreal thinking about the fact that i have a boyfriend. maybe i've been thinking too much, i'm definitely the only one of us beijing people who properly stays at home. and people who are alone too much begin to go slightly crazy, you think? especially when they're alone away from home.

just now i realised that i'd like to be doing something worthwhile with my time when my life properly starts again, back in singapore. not to be up to my eyes in activity, of course, but to live well - whatever that will entail, time will speak for itself. and i don't know why but ever since jon went on exchange it felt a little like a part of my life went on hold. it's been good, as i've said, being apart - especially since it allowed adele to happen, and i think that's something i will cherish my whole life long.

it's been weird, is all. weird in a good way, but still weird.

and when last semester ended, i really started feeling like my life was on hold. maybe i shouldn't have felt that way, or maybe i felt that way because it was the first time since jc ended that i actually had nothing to do for an extended period of time. not that i ever had nothing to do for an extended period of time in jc, for that matter.

that's just the way things are, and feeling incredibly alone or not, i never quite felt lonely. aloneness and loneliness are different, you think? it's been nice, and surprising, when i'm alone, to find that i actually enjoy my own company very much. there's only God i can thank for that.

being away from home is finally starting to sink in properly, i suppose - as is the fact that i'm far away from jon, time and distance wise. however, it's also started to sink in that we're really only a heartbeat away from each other, no matter where we are, and i'm thankful.

"so neither he who plants nor he who waters is anything, but only God who gives the growth."
- 1 corinthians 3:7.

***
pomelos are readily available here, all peeled. i've been eating quite a lot of it, i love how the sacs separate.

today when i went downstairs to the fresh produce shop to buy carrots for my porridge i had to ask where they were. turns out i'd missed them because they were freshly plucked from the ground and covered in dirt so they looked like skinny sweet potatoes.

who's ya daddy?

the secret to crossing roads in china, so says lonely planet, is to wait at a junction until a large group of pedestrians gather, enough for them to be considered a force to be reckoned with.

which advice works, but i sometimes think it's all in your attitude. you've gotta hurry across the road, of course, but at the same time one should look nonchalant and unflustered as one walks in front of the cars raring to go even though the lights are in one's favour. and the best way to achieve this, i think, is to think to yourself: this is my grandfather's road.

这是我爷爷的路。

shangren thinks that that doesn't have any effect, because if it really was your grandfather's road cars would actually be lining up to drive you across, or drivers would come out of their cars and sprinkle rose petals at your feet, offering the coats off their backs for you to walk on. that sort of customary nonsense.

there are some lectures in school which are so popular that students go the night before to the classroom to reserve seats. they write 占座 on a piece of paper and stick it to the desks. or, on the morning of the class itself, they hurry to a counter where they can exchange their student IDs for a stool, and then they sit in the aisles or at the front or back of the classroom.

if you're left without a seat you can stand, of course.

today we woke up to wondrously clear, blue skies. for the first time, when we looked out of our apartment windows into the dawn, the colour of the buildings gradually became clearer in the grey-blue light, and beijing from our side of town looked absolutely beautiful.

but that, of course, just meant that there was a horrific wind chill to deal with when we stepped out of the house.

if not, you tell me how all that sand from the gobi desert got blown away (hopefully back to where it came from)?

jinni said, it's as though our eyes have been cleansed!

i said no, more like our windows.

it's finally beginning to look like spring, and the brilliant sunshine and blue skies i saw after class meant that the temperature was having a good time being erratic. the locals have said that it's easy to fall sick in spring, and i think this is the reason.

at least it's pretty. there are cherry blossoms, and as soon as jolie takes more spring-ish photos i might consider palming them off her.

the day before yesterday i bought a 1.1 litre thermos flask, and today in class i unzipped my bag and produced it, much to jinni's amazement.

wah chloe isn't that a bit too 夸张 (kua1 zhang1 too much)? she said.

anything for hot water and a bit of respite from the cold.

little drops of water, little grains of sand
i am sitting on my designated piece of sofa in the living room, feet up, listening to the water dispenser humming lightly as it disinfects itself. xiaoyun and i decided to carry out a 消毒 (xiao1 du2), just in case.

today we finally called the apartment management office regarding our water dispenser, and they sent someone to fix it up for us. however, our landlord provided us with a necessary, but odd fitting part. i think it's kinda like when you can't find the cap of your pen so you use the cap from another pen of a different brand instead. and it fits but not as perfectly as the original pen cap.

thus, the very heavy barrel of water is perched rather precariously on top of the odd fitting part. we've decided not to move it unnecessarily because the weight from the water's keeping it down. and it's working fine (for now at least), for which i'm glad because mineral water costs a lot more even when you buy it in 4 litre quantities, and it's no fun to have to keep buying it because you're sick and you need water and you're on a budget.

when the water dispenser man left there were bits of grit on the floor where he'd stood. i'm not very sure where they came from. xiaoyun thinks they came from the old water filter which we had to dismantle.

just now xiaoyun and i threw out some week-old breadtalk bread, because it was mouldy. i was very puzzled (and sad, because i hate wasting food) as it's dry here, and in singapore no mould forms no matter how humid it is.

this isn't gardenia hor! she said. it's freshly baked!

yeee to yeast, and aren't you now feeling just the teensiest bit horrifed to think of what they must put in off-the-shelf bread to keep it "fresh" and prevent mould from forming?

***
last night a fellow exchange student (whom i don't know very well) asked me about the food and night life in beijing. to which i replied, i'm very boring, i don't club or eat around lah.

to which he replied (and i quote):

eee haha so ure like ani other chinaman la! =p

i responded with a series of dots.

........

eight, to be exact. which means that in the msn window two sets of 7 dots in the seven colours of the rainbow appeared.

too long jogging can impair your lungs
the above is a sentence from a level six english word book which one of our prc friends uses, and there are many more strange sentences in the book but i cannot remember what they were because jolie was smsing them to me during class (she was in another class), and i was actually being asked questions by a professor, and the vice-dean at that!

which just means, very unfortunately, that i cannot skip this class at any cost.

i'm taking a module called study of international cases, and it's more or less geared towards improving translation skills. so, whenever there was a particularly difficult english word, the vice-dean would go 李惟明, polished accent all, so it sounded like leaaherrr weiiirr minggerrr. say it quickly and listen to the words roll off your tongue!

the vice-dean - who, although a nice man and good teacher, has, i'm sorry to say, a voice exactly like one of those eunuchs in period chinese soaps. i don't think he's gay or physically impaired in any way - he was just unfortunate. and his notes, which we are using, are more or less grammatically accurate but he has very long convoluted sentences with many commas, just like these.

to top it all off, some of the english words he uses are used out of their well-known contexts, used for little-known meanings. thankfully my chinese isn't that horrible (well, i voluntarily chose beijing for exchange) so i can usually guess what the english translates into.

it's quite fun, really.

***
i took down that particular sentence from the english word book because i'm sick. not from running, because i've been skipping - and the last time i skipped i skipped indoors at our lift landing on the eleventh storey (yes, you read correctly), because the air quality got quite bad in the past few days.

i can accept and understand forest fires, but here, some ill-wind blew sand from the gobi desert over the city and didn't blow it away again. furthermore the temperature throughout the day is erratic, which isn't very good for the body.

so, i'm sick.

AND. i got pickpocketed today, sometime before i reached home from school. i realised my wallet was missing when the bus was on the expressway so getting off to go back and search for it wasn't an option. i only had about 20-30 yuan in it, which is about SGD$4-6. my meal card and china ez-link card were also in my jeans pocket, so i wasn't too fussed about the entire thing.

anyway, i'd cut my juvenile delinquency module to come home and rest - and all i wanted to do was come home and brew some tea with the dried lemons and chrysanthemums i'd purchased. which i did, and i added fresh ginger and honey and it tasted really good.

jolie did go back to the pharmacy to check whether i'd left it there by accident, but she didn't find it.

all's well, just that it's rather inconvenient for me to get a new atm card. inconvenient in the sense that it'll take a while. but thank God i have enough spare cash, and i'll just have to budget until i have a ready source of cash again. which might not be such a bad thing.

smokin'
it was supposed to go up to about 24 degrees this weekend. since weather forecasts are never reliable, i didn't think much of the news.

sure enough, this morning on the way to church i breathed smokey air. it's one of the nicest things about cold countries for me, and i get a big kick from doing it. but my breath wasn't as smokey as when i first arrived in beijing, and by the time i came out from church it was actually warm and my breath wasn't smokey anymore, there weren't even little wisps of white. it wasn't 24 degrees, perhaps, but close enough.

the temperature's fallen again though, it's about 15 degrees now.

i cooked porridge yesterday, with carrots and french beans and garlic and ginger and minced meat seasoned with taucheo, seasame oil, pepper and cornflour. the flame was too big (chinese gas is powerful, really - not my fault (excuses!)) so the bottom layer of porridge burnt itself to the pot and it looked like many little black worms. however, the rest of it tasted pretty good - it had that smokey flavour you get when you cook things in claypots over a charcoal flame. which is a good thing, because jon is cantonese and they adore cooking things over a charcoal flame for that smokey flavour.

even if he doesn't like my porridge in the future, he hasn't got much choice, has he?

i searched online for quick and effective ways to remove the burnt porridge because filling the pot with water and bringing it to a boil didn't loosen any of it, and when we went grocery shopping later that evening i bought a bottle of white vinegar and tried to find baking powder, but to no avail.

probably because i had no idea what it was called, and when i finally found out, the supermarket had closed. for future reference, in case you need to get some in china or in a chinese provision shop in singapore, it's called 烘培粉 (hong1 pei4 fen3), which is a quite a cute name, translating literally into nurture baking powder.

i did find 自发粉 (zi4 fa1 fen3), which i'd thought was baking powder, but no, it's self-raising flour.

i didn't think it would have been very effective so i didn't buy it, although i did contemplate doing so. after all, self-raising flour's just flour mixed with baking powder.

when we got home i poured about 250ml of white vinegar into the pot and brought it to a boil, and after adding cold water i scrubbed the pot with steel wool and most of the burnt porridge came off. xiaoyun managed to get off the littler bits later on with some soap.

baking powder and vinegar might have been more effective overall, but the white vinegar worked just as well i think. don't put your head over the pot while it's boiling though, your eyes will water and your nose will smart like anything.

made in china

last night, jon said during a phone call which cost me a Ridiculous Amount of Money, wah your room not bad ah - got parquet floor!

(considering that most electronic products come from india and china, you'd expect their telecommunication networks and therefore rates not to be so expensive, but maybe it's because the himalayas are in the way. and he'd spent another Ridiculous Amount of Money calling me the past two days so it was alright, give and take.)

i rolled my eyes to myself and said, then you should see the floor just where it connects to the door frame of the bathroom door. if we're not careful when we shower, water seeps out under the bathroom door, and the floor peels.

one concludes that it's plywood or some synthetic material (which is more likely) manufactured to look like parquet, because it doesn't lie flat anymore, at the part where it connects to the door frame of the bathroom door.

thankfully, we haven't been able to look beneath the floor yet. i'll let you know if it ever gets to that state. and, like me, i don't think you're looking forward to what it looks like down there.

probably just concrete lah, and it's too dry for mold to form from the wet.

but you never know.

cockroach eggs, perhaps. they love it here, we've already killed too many to ever be able to look another one in the eye.

***
today marks the second week of my stay in beijing, and i still haven't decided which i dislike more: the smell of cigarette smoke, or the smell of urine and bleach.

i think everybody here either smokes reds or some unknown to singapore, but extremely potent, local brand. some professors even smoke in their offices, i almost suffocated to death the first day we reported to school because no windows were open in the office of the professor we were talking to, and he was smoking like a chimney, extinguishing the butts in a close-to-overflowing ashtray.

moreover, the smell of stale cigarette smoke clings to clothes like you can't imagine; in winter i don't think anybody does washing on a regular basis, much less bothers to wear fresh clothes, and the smell lingers, until it becomes a part of you, proclaiming to all you meet that you're a smoker. and when you speak your breath is sour, horrid, evil. the smell gives me a headache and makes me want to cover my nose but it's everywhere, as are cigarette butts. taxi drivers, door-to-door salesmen, professors, students, bus drivers, passengers on the bus - there's something about whatever they're smoking.

toilets here are clean, but the smell is a whole new story altogether. there is nothing like it. what's more, when we went to the forbidden palace last sunday, we paid one yuan (twenty cents) to use what still ranks number one on our list of horriblest toilet encounters. putrid, now that's an appropriate word for the smell. signs on the doors of the port-a-loos proclaimed that the toilets would flush with some 'special water,' meant to disinfect or some such nonsense, which turned out to be brown in colour and the exact same colour as excrement.

you really don't have to read on if you're feeling queasy.

but every cloud has a silver lining, and i'm glad that the toilets have doors, that they're squatting toilets and the flush is one which you step on; that they can usually be found easily whenever you need one, and, lastly, even though it makes the smell infinitely worse, that some poor soul (who ought to be blessed) cleans the toilets with bleach.

except for the port-a-loos at the forbidden palace, perhaps. and i don't blame them. the toilets within the palace itself are okay, though.

and if these smells already assail my nose now, in winter, one can only imagine what it'll be like in summer. stay tuned.

***
i didn't think our forbidden palace experience was worth it at all. some of the main attractions were under rennovation, and to top it all off, it was bitterly cold. thermometers here (and the world over, i'm sure) never seem to register the wind chill.

we had lunch at the only place where we could get lunch. i actually watched them prepare it - they cooked some noodles in a vast pot of some stock or other, drained them, put them in a bowl and dumped a very dodgy looking brown sauce on top, which turned out to be black bean paste mixed with i don't want to know what.

it didn't help that the place where we had to eat made me feel uncomfortable. maybe it was just the cold, or the fact that it gave off the air of a derelict hawker centre, with food cooked by people who knew that you had no other choice but to eat whatever they gave you or starve.

needless to say, i didn't finish my lunch that day.

***
dodgy is a very useful word, and it sits nicely in the mouth when you say it. dod-gy. we've been using it at every available opportunity, to describe badly shot mtvs, the kind where the wind always seems to be blowing in the right direction so the too-fair heroine's hair blows away from her face (whenever i try to get my hair blowing in the wind it gets tangled), to the meatballs in school - definitely dodgy. but i've tried them, and they're not half-bad.

we went to sing ktv with our university classmates yesterday (where jolie pointed out the dodginess of certain mtvs), and we chose 我愿意. guess what, it looks like quents was right after all.

***
the picture at the bottom left is of a santa claus soft toy i saw lodged between the cupboard and the wall when i stood on the chair to try and get the entire room in one shot. the picture at the bottom right is of the view from my room at night. quite lovely, really. and it also overlooks the main road, so i wake up and am kept awake by the honking of car horns as early as 0630.

swing swing

i'd intended the first (and last) exchange picture on my blog to be one of my room in its lived in state, but neither jolie nor jinni have taken a picture of it yet. and, since jinni and xiaoyun are out and cammie is not with me - yes, i didn't bring a camera - i can't take a picture of it now. so that will have to wait.

the above picture is of me on a swing in the school courtyard, snagged from jolie's flickr site. i was supposed to have a distant dreamy look on my face so i wouldn't ruin jolie's collection of artistic shots, but i couldn't bring myself to look like a right old prat. i would've, you know, if i'd actually held the pose long enough. just before i saw her finger press the button i grinned widely.

i went running with shangren this morning, one big round along the surrounding roads, even though they're thinking of cancelling the marathon at this year's olympics because they don't want the athlethes to breathe in all the polluted air.

giving up your name

at the china university of politcal science and law (中国政法大学）, where we're on exchange, every year is divided into different "classes", each with its own class committee. it's not a "class" in the sense that they have all their lessons together, but it's more to facilitate planning of recreational and co-curricular activities. every university student in china has to stay on campus and participate in student life, which isn't as bad as it sounds, seeing as many of them come from all over china to beijing to study. it helps you feel less lonely, i suppose.

the class president (who's called a 班长 ban1 zhang3, just like in primary and secondary school!) of the class we were assigned to has been extremely nice to us - jolie and i agree that he thinks we're very amusing because our spoken mandarin is terrible, so we're like pets which amuse him, hamsters or guinea pigs or something of that sort of small furry animal you can keep in a cage and observe.

so when he told us that there was going to be a class "meeting," because some students in the class had done something wrong and the level guidance counselor said they had to have a soul-searching and repenting session together (自我检讨), we agreed to go, if only to lend him some support.

remember how, in jc, we used to make the class or subject representative mark us 'present' in the register even though we were in the void deck talking nonsense, drinking ribena and eating chocolate hello panda (well i was, anyway, and i was assistant class rep. ****** was responsible enough i suppose, and he spent half his time in lectures with his head supported by his right hand, falling asleep)? three of the girls in the class had done something like that, arriving back in school after the lunar new year holidays later than they were supposed to but getting the class president to sign them in anyway. and although many students do it, unluckily enough, the teachers decided to do a spot-check on their class attendance.

you can imagine the sort of things the three students and the class president had to say. but it was sincere, and they were all rather eloquent, and we didn't go away feeling slightly embarrassed for them. thankfully no teacher sat in, as the class president had said might happen. or it might have been a lot longer. the class president kept his sorry speech short, and ended by saying that since it was a new semester they wouldn't talk about such sad things anymore.

not that such a thing would have happened in jc when we flouted the rules that way, but somehow i can't imagine something like that happening in a secondary school or junior college in singapore without everyone present going away with a bitter taste in their mouths and the feeling that the session was an utter waste of time.

i'm sure that sort of thing will carry on. but as jolie and jinni and i agreed when we were out in the cold waiting for the bus home, there is something very sincere about the chinese university students we've met. i don't know if it's true for all of them, but they're not afraid to be themselves, and they actually have an opinion about things, and different and worthy ideals. it's quite different from university students in singapore, or maybe it's the education system and the culture. and our smallness. stand out from the crowd, and you'll be noticed instantly. and we're afraid of being noticed.

***
as i was saying, we were waiting for the bus back home - we commute to school everyday, and usually we catch the shuttle bus back from the main campus to the research institute, which is very near our house. the main campus is some 30 plus km away, if we measured the distance correctly on the street directory. there are two drivers covering the route, and the 7 p.m. bus was driven by the very mean one and he didn't allow us on. well, it was very crowded and the shuttle bus is mainly for professors, anyway.

so we trudged out to the bus stop, where jolie and jinni insisted that the express 919 bus service hadn't stopped because it was still too early, but after two of the 919s which plied the normal route passed by, we decided to stop the third and ask. whereupon we found out that the express 919 stopped pretty early, and so we hopped onto that one.

it was already dark at 1930, and because it was 1930, the roads were pretty clear and the journey passed quickly. maybe because we sang chinese songs all the way back on the bus (to prepare ourselves for a karaoke session with our university mates) in the dark, as, for some reason the bus driver turned off the lights. for people to sleep i suppose, but i thought it was a rather strange thing to do. especially since at times the bus took us down roads which came straight from a horror movie - no streetlights, leafless trees, only the headlights of the bus providing some direction.

two chinese nationals sitting in front of us were very amazed at the vast amount of chinese songs we knew.

anyhow, we were just talking about how much we liked faye wong and 我愿意, and i said yah so nice hor she's singing about how she's willing to give up her name for the man she loves. jolie and jinni stared at me, and i said it's wo3 yuan4 yi4 wei4 ni3 fang4 qi4 wo3 xing4 ming2, 我愿意为你放弃我姓名 right? which makes sense, because women give up their maiden names when they get married.

and then it dawned on me that xing4 ming2 in this context was more likely to be 性命, or life.

i'd actually thought she was singing about giving up her life, at first, but then quentin told me that she was singing about giving up her name.

i suppose googling it would solve the mystery, but at this point, would you rather belive girls who came from chinese-ed schools at one point or another in the course of their education or an acs barker boy?

i heard you say, what can make me feel this way?

well, jon's in india and his sim card is out of credit so in the meantime i shall continue having a crush on the very dishy lee dong wook as he was in my girl. china's channel seven shows it every night at 2230, and tonight they're broadcasting the last episode. however, last night, i couldn't stand waiting twelve hours so i watched it on mysoju. predictable ending, but happy and satisfying nonetheless, especially since lee dong wook was so charming and lee dong hae so lovable that you were just rooting for them all the way.

it was the first korean show since autumn in my heart which made me cry, and the second ever korean show which i watched. well, semi-watched. i only caught the last five or so episodes, and i have no patience to go back and sit through the first eleven.

now is he just too charming for words, or what?

xiaoyun, and my very own mother, think so too.

may this be a warning to you not to let your girlfriend go on exchange and then find that you have no means of contacting her properly because you're on exchange yourself and doing slum work.

okay, you're very good lah jon :) but i'm sorry, for now your position as the best-looking boy in the universe is being threatened. you'd better try and secure it soon.

now you know that this is what exchange students really go on exchange to do. watch korean dramas or anything else which helps them pass the time because it's too cold to go out or they're too lazy to do so.

and because my girl's temporarily turned me into one of those korean drama nutters:

"Lee Dong Wook and Lee Da Hae... acted as lovers whose families oppose their union in 'My Girl.' When they finally got through all their difficulties at the end of the opera, the audience loved them together so much that 770 people in the poll hoped the could fall in love with each other in the real world." - chinadaily.com.cn

see, i'm not the only one okay.

of eats

for the past two days, xiaoyun and i have been frantically trying to log on to the internet. we tried everything - from removing our firewalls (not recommended) to trying to manually dial our broadband connection. we finally threw in the towel and rang the 富润家园 tech support. we were reluctant to do so because his coming would have meant having to pay him 100 yuan in consultation fees, and i'd even told xiaoyun that maybe he even arranged for our internet to fail so he could come again.

(although she did find him more trustworthy than the guy who cheated us and sold us our router for five times its worth, as he was the one who told us that we had been cheated.)

and the first thing he told me when i told him, in a rather dismayed tone, that our internet wasn't working was 你们应该是还没还这个月的用费吧。已经是三月了。which means, it's likely that you girls haven't paid this month's internet bill。 it's already march.

well we've paid it, and now you can be the proud possessor of the knowledge that on saturday night i ate a scorpion and a grasshopper, and just now jinni and i stopped by a street food stall near our place and ate 14 or so sticks of miscellaneous things between us, which had been cooked in ma la soup. and we also shared a bottle of tsingtao beer between us.

it was very safe, everything was piping hot and cooked on the spot in a huge metal tray. kinda like steamboat on sticks. and we had pretty healthy stuff, vegetables and tofu and things.

you have no idea how good ma la and tsingtao is together, particularly on a cold, windy beijing night. it really warms you up - so your hands freeze from the wind and the cold beer bottle, but you're all toasty warm inside.

the ma la and tsingtao was in honour of jon, really. if only he'd been there, those are two of his favourite things and i know he'd have enjoyed it.

anyhow, on saturday after the three of us - paul, me and shangren - had eaten one grasshopper each - they were sold in threes, on a stick, fried and coated in chili powder - we were walking along looking for jinni and xiaoyun when paul suddenly said shangren! there's a grasshopper leg at the side of your mouth!.

oh and in case you were wondering, the scorpions tasted like fried prawn shells.

yesterday

yesterday morning i went skipping in the courtyard. it was cold, but a lot of fun. i received funny stares from the locals, and when i met shangren on his way to school he said i think you're the only girl skipping in 富润家园. i also got displaced from my original position by a group of old ladies doing tai ji quan. shangren and i have been debating about asking them whether we can join them, but i believe he doesn't fit both requirements: you have to be female, and old. at least i fit the former.

yesterday afternoon, after going with my landlord to a nearby police station to register myself as an alien, i went shopping for some basic groceries all by myself - soy sauce, seasame oil, salt, pepper, garlic, onions etc. there were certain brands of soy sauce which cost less than half of the other brands, for the same volume, which i avoided. the locals appeared to have avoided it too, judging by the number of bottles left on the shelf. and there were these very dodgy-looking eco eggs which i didn't buy either. i figured that they actually weren't real eggs at all, in the sense of having being laid by chickens.

i bought some tuna which the locals also seemed to trust, seeing as there weren't many cans of it left. i also purchased some minced meat. i stood at the counter waiting to be served, when suddenly i realised that you were supposed to scoop up the amount you desired on your own, and bring it to the counter to be weighed.

garlic and ginger is very cheap here too. the garlic was about 0.88 yuan, which comes up to about 17 singapore cents.

yesterday evening, i decided to walk home from the supermarket. it was opposite the police station, and i'd taken a cab to the police station because i was late and it seemed very near my flat. the walk would have been pleasant enough, if only i hadn't been carrying so many groceries. still, it was good fun, and i think i'm going to do it again with less groceries.

yesterday night i finally started to feel some semblance of excitement about being in beijing, a place with (supposedly) good shopping (i wouldn't know, haven't gone to shop properly) and at the same time much history to see and experience. at twenty-one i doubt anyone'll ever feel the same sort of excitement as they did when they were children, particularly about travelling. or maybe that's because i've been to quite a few places. it's more of a pleasant, nice sort of feeling - finally having the knowledge that i wouldn't mind staying here for the next four or so months.

i remember being enthralled by mao's posters, reproduced in my history textbook. brightly coloured smiling people, and such idealistic slogans. not very different from singapore now, really. tell me what great difference there is between 同一个世界，同一个梦想 (one world, one dream - beijing olympics 2008), or together we can make this suburb a clean suburb and one people, one nation, one singapore?

it's interesting, experiencing the effects of those reforms and seeing how they've shaped and affected the chinese way of thinking, particularly with such rapid globalisation.

alright, this is starting to sound like a very boring gp essay.

coming home from dinner, i was looking out of the cab window at the surroundings - which, unfortunately, look the same at night, which resulted in us getting slightly lost - and i knew i'd miss it when it was time to go. but i told shangren also that a part of me's just counting down the days till i get back to singapore and i can see jon again.