Pita and the PSB

Let's continue to talk about food. It's been quite busy here, so I haven't had a lot of time or motivation to undertake any major touristy or sight-seeing type of activity. What I have had time and inclination to do is check out a variety of recommended restaurants. Truly, one of the best parts of city living is the wide variety of food available. In my neighborhood alone, for foreign cuisine there is a delicious Turkish restaurant, an Indonesian place, and a new Indian restaurant, and those are just the ones I've tried. For Chinese food, there's a good Xinjiang place, a yummy baozi stand, and a little counter that makes a baked, filled pastry called a bing. It's kind of like a little meat pie. Or peanut pie, or spicy vegetables, or bean, or a half dozen more varieties whose names I do not recognize. My favorite is the beef and onion for savory, and the peanut for sweet. There's a place directly next to it that makes a killer mango smoothie, too. A mango smoothie and two beef and onion bing runs me 14 kuai. At the baozi stand, I can get red-bean stuffed steamed buns, or the unstuffed variety flavored with scallions. I can also get a flat bread that has a scrambled egg fried to it, or a half kg of scallion pancake. All of these range from 1 - 4 kuai. The Xinjiang place [that would be Chinese Muslim cuisine, fyi] has the advantage of delivering to work at lunch time. They make the flat shaved noodles that I first ever tried in Xi'an, and also delightfully garlicky dumplings. The dumplings are 25 for 8 kuai. The noodles are 12.

Foreign restaurants tend to be a heck of a lot pricier, but sometimes, you just really want some variety. I would say, sometimes you just want something familiar, but I haven't quite found a Maine diner on the corner of Dong Feng street yet. I have found these, though, and I can happily report they taste exactly the same as they do in the USA:

Ikea Swedish Meatballs: 15 kuai. Eating Swedish Meatballs in Guangzhou: Priceless

Today was my day off, so my flatmate and I went to a Mexican restaurant about which coworkers had raved. I have to say, the raving was deserved. I had a chicken quesadilla with sour cream and homemade salsa. The chicken was smoky with chipotle and the gooey cheese was something like Monteray Jack. Oh, so good. My flatmate had a vegan bean burrito with roasted veggies and was wicked happy with it. It made me cringe to pay 60 kuai for lunch, but really, that's only about 9 USD, so I truly can't complain too much. As we left, I overhead a party just sitting down conversing in Spanish. Mexican so good, even the Spanish-speakers of GZ eat there.

Now, you may be wondering about the title of this post, so let me finish off with a story. Now, Saturday and Sunday are the busiest days of our work week, when we are at work from 8:30-6:30, and teach three 2-hour classes each day. Sunday night, we got off work and decided we really didn't have it in us to make dinner. I had told my flatmate about the middle eastern Shawarma place I'd been to the week before, and we decided to go out for some falafel [because falafel makes everything feel better]. It was about 7pm and dark when we arrived in the neighborhood. The restaurant is two subway stops away, in Taojin. Now, Taojin has a higher concentration of foreigners than anywhere else I've been in Guangzhou, though I don't have the foggiest idea why. Anyway, it's also where we ran into the PSB version of a speed trap. Two things you might like to know: the PSB is the Public Safety Bureau, and in China, not carrying your passport gets you a 50 kuai fine.
So, here we are, on a quest for delicious falafel, and we get stopped by a gaggle of cops about a block away from our goal. They ask us for our passports [in Mandarin Chinese, which, by the way, my flatmate speaks not at all]. I produce mine, but my flatmate only has a photocopy. This earns us a trip around the corner to the local PSB station. As we arrive, I see a group of foreigners leaving. In the station, there are about 6 or 7 foreigners waiting around. We follow our officer in, and he asks us [and by us, I mean me, because this is all still in Chinese] if there is anyone who can bring us my flatmate's passport. Well, no, there isn't, since we're both here and we hadn't gotten around to giving anyone a spare key to our apartment [in our defense, we just had the lock replaced on Saturday]. Our officer seems surprised, but settles for asking if she knows her passport number. She does, since she has a photocopy to reference, and they go to look her up in the computer system [thank goodness we are law-abiding foreigners and are registered with the police in our district]. They confirm her identity, write her out a pass, and collect the 50 kuai fine. It all takes about 10 minutes, and we're free to go. As we leave, there are more foreigners being escorted in. Honestly, I think they accost every foreigner they see. Maybe they've got a quota to fulfill?

We continued on our way, got our delicious falafel in homemade pita bread [yummy yummy yummy], and returned to our apartment without further incident. My flatmate seemed very surprised by the whole incident, and while I can understand why, part of me is really not surprised at all. China, despite all it's cosmopolitanism, all it's private ownership and rampant, gleeful consumerism, is still a communist country. Why shouldn't the authorities stop us and demand to see our papers?

But, that is too dark a note on which to end, so I shall leave you with this picture from my walk today. This is a little garden along the canal that runs behind the hospital outside my window. The garden immediately lifted my spirits, as the swiftly flowing current carried the scent of warm, wet mud. Ah, but the thing I miss most about rural living is the smell of nature. But I suppose, for a year, I can settle for the smell of fresh baked pita and steaming hot dumplings.

Whatever Shall I Eat?

Ah, China. Home to some of the most delicious food on earth. In my five weeks weeks here, I have had delicious noodles, buns, dumplings, vegetables, fresh fruit, fish, soup, scallion pancakes et cetera, et cetera, ditto, ditto, and so on and so forth. There are several nice restaurants and hole-in-the-wall places within a ten minute walk of my apartment. Now, when I was in Beijing, I didn't have the ability to do much cooking, as my room didn't have any kitchen equipment. I ate a lot of instant soup noodles and oatmeal. Here, in my apartment in Guangzhou, I have a kitchen, and I feel rather obligated by both frugality and my general nature to cook for myself.

My Apartment Building

This presents two problems. Problem one: I do not have an oven in my kitchen, and I'm suddenly realizing that some 75% of what I know how to cook involves the oven. Problem two: grocery shopping is a whole new ball game in China. In walking distance, I have a little grocery, a Circle K convenience store, and a fresh market. The Circle K is great for a cold beverage or a quick snack. The little grocery is, at first, comfortingly familiar to a foreigner, although perhaps oddly organized. You enter through a small section of toiletries and household goods. In the back, there is a dairy and frozen goods section, then a small fruit, vegetable, and meat section, then two large bins of bulk rice. There's an aisle of noodles and instant soup, an aisle of vinegar, soy sauce, seasonings, corn starch, etc, and aisle of cookies, crackers, and other nibbles, an aisle of cooking oil, rice, and canned and preserved goods, an aisle of shelf-stable soy milk, and an aisle of bottled water and other bottled beverages. Up front by the registers are displays of specialty goods, candy and gum. Beyond the registers is a little Tupperware vendor and a vendor by the front door sells nuts and dried fruit. All in all, it sells most everything you need to cook Chinese food. If, on the other hand, you are trying to cook Western food, you are SOL. Flour? No. Tomato-based products? No. Cheese? No. Any of the lovely meal-in-a-box, hamburger-helper-type products which take up aisles and aisles of space in an American grocery store? No. Alas, I am sadly uninspired by the selection. Beyond stir-fried veggies over rice, I don't know what to make. I am painfully aware that I need to (re)learn how to cook.

Now, if I go further afield to the larger malls, I can find larger grocery stores with "international" sections. There, I can pay a relatively obscene amount of money for a can of Hunts spaghetti sauce, a can of (Italian) chickpeas, Swiss Miss hot chocolate powder, or Land o Lake's Monteray Jack cheese (oh, what I wouldn't pay for some Sharp Cheddar). But still, the part of me which yearns for a sack of potatoes and a pound of hamburger remains unsatisfied.

Perhaps the most fun way to shop is to go to the fresh market. The fresh market is a tightly packed space of vendors selling piles of fresh vegetables of every variety: onions, celery, bok choy, cucumbers, eggplant, scallions, mushrooms, carrots, peas, beans, and a heck of a lot of things I don't recognize. There's fresh ginger and garlic, and eggs (you buy them by weight), fresh and preserved. Along the right hand wall are the fish vendors. They have fresh, frozen, and still living offerings [including a tank of frogs. Hmm]. Towards the front, near the exit, you have the meat vendors. These make the squeamish American in me want to run for the hills. Now, visualize the meat section of an American store. Everything brightly light and gleaming, no smell unless it's one of disinfectant,  all the meat wrapped in plastic and neatly separated in refrigerated cases. Even at something like a farmer's market, or a butcher shop, the meat will be refrigerated or somehow kept cold.
 Here, the vendors have their offerings piled before them, same as the vegetable dealers. Some cuts are hanging along hooks. Shoppers peruse the selection, picking up cuts, examining them, putting them back down. Vendors hold things out to entice. When people are paying, they sometimes throw the money onto the pile of meat. Nothing is refrigerated (including the whole market, which means the temperature of the space is likely somewhere in the eighties, or high seventies at best). Honestly? My reaction is probably irrational. Clearly, the Chinese shoppers are not being stricken en mass by salmonella and e coli. But I can't know the handling history of the meat. I don't know how long it's been there. I don't know how long ago it was slaughtered. I don't know how many people have touched it, or what other contaminates might have contacted it. In short: there are days I'm happy I live with a vegan and can use that as an excuse for being a chicken.
 
I will save the story of my restaurant adventures for another post. Just to tease you: I've already found a wonderful vegetarian Buddhist place, to-die-for Indonesian, decent Turkish, mouth-watering Middle Eastern (falafel! hummus! lamb shawarma! pita!), my favorite hot and sour potato dish that I discovered in Beijing, delicious Xinjiang style noodles, and a baozi vendor who makes a ridiculously cheap and delicious scallion pancake. Now, if I could only find some baked beans and a blueberry pie, I'd be in culinary heaven.

A Walk to Work, or, The Theory of Polite Relativity

Walk with me a moment. We’re on the way to work, and we’ve just exited the gate from our apartment compound. It is a hot day, 98 degrees by the thermometer, but it feels like 106 or so. The sky is high and blue above the skyscrapers. We’re walking down the brick tile sidewalk on Mei Dong Road, toward the pedestrian overpass. The sidewalk is probably 15 or 18 feet across here. To our right there is a bus stop, where one can catch the 545 to the malls at Ti Yu Road, or another half dozen buses to various points. To our left is part of the wall which circles our apartment compound. It is about knee high, with some shrubs and a metal fence atop it.In front of it, there are a few vans and carts pulled up onto the sidewalk. Today, various vendors are hawking sweet potatoes and garlic, peaches, some sort of limp leafy green, grapes and cherries. The cherries tempt us, but we don’t have any way to wash them at work, so we walk passed without stopping. Closer to the overpass, some people have spread out little items on blankets: one sells credit-card sized stickers (we look closely for a Maobama, but alas, there is none), another, glittery hair accessories. There is a man handing out flyers for an apartment agency as we head up the overpass (on this side of the street it is a ramp, on the other side it is stairs. The ramp is better, especially on rainy days, when the uneven stairs fill with water and climbing them becomes like climbing a waterfall). There is also a beggar. He is missing one arm below the elbow, and holds out a small aluminum bowl in the other. On the ground next to him, he has laid out a large poster full of carefully written characters. We cannot read it. We make it to the far side of the street and skip-trip down the stairs. At the bottom, we dodge other pedestrians and the cars trying to park on the sidewalk in front of the corner bank. We make it into the building and from there it is just three sets of stairs up to the school.

            My morning commute takes about 8 minutes, only half of which is really on the public street. At first glance, you wouldn’t think there was much opportunity to encounter cultural differences. And yet, and yet. Let’s look back at our walk and break it down.

            The gate from out of our compound is one person-width wide. Thus, if two people wish to go through in opposite directions at the same time, one must yield to the other. Or so one would think. While people sometimes yield, it is equally likely that a person will turn slightly like a schoolchild about to make an attempt to break the line in a game of Red Rover and shove his or her way through.

            One you are through the gate, you are on a busy sidewalk. On the right, people are gathering in clusters for the bus, and others are trying to read the bus stop sign, which rather inconveniently requires one to stand directly in the flow of passing pedestrian traffic. On the left, the street vendors are taking up half the sidewalk, and their customers further impede the flow of people. Now, there is still plenty of room for people to walk. Alas, there is no sense of “keep to your right” when walking, so traffic in both directions is completely mish-mashed. No one is willing to slow down behind a slower walker, and so you have people darting in and out and all around. Actually, if you look over to the street, the situation on the sidewalk is not so different from the roadway, where cars seem to completely disregard all known traffic laws. This leads us to a philosophical question for the ages: Do the Chinese walk like they drive, or drive like they walk?

            Now, a busy sidewalk can be found in any country. Let’s add some details about the people. It’s a sunny day in Guangzhou, which means every woman is carrying an umbrella. Yes, when you buy an umbrella here, you can find one with UV ratings. You can also find one that actually is a parasol and will not keep you dry in the rain. Those are usually identifiable by the glittery bits or lace edges. So, here we are on the walk to work, and we’re getting whacked in the head every six or eight steps by the edge of a passing woman’s umbrella.

            As for the beggar on the overpass, I will admit that I don’t know what to do with beggars. Every time I see one, my heart clenches at the injustice of our world, that we so fail to support those weakest members of our society.  I know it is a complex social issue that we have been struggling with for thousands of years. And yet I find it significant that we cannot so much as make eye contact as we walk passed. To do so would be to acknowledge that we stand by and do nothing. Sometimes I feel like the passengers in the lifeboats who listened and watched the others drown after the Titanic sank. I don’t know what to do.

            But these are heavy topics, so let us continue on a little lighter path. Down off the overpass, we’re dodging cars trying to park on the sidewalk – because cars park on the sidewalk in China. If we were going to continue down Mei Dong Road toward the subway station instead of going in to work, we would have to cross Shui Yin Street. It is the responsibility of the pedestrian to dodge turning cars, bicycles, and other pedestrians. No one is going to stop for you. If you happen to be crossing a lane, cars may swerve around and in front of you, if they have space and you are in the way.

            If you stop in any of the little restaurants on the way to the subway station, you will have a waitress hover over you until you order. She’ll bring your order and then disappear. When you want the check, you’re going to have to find her and ask for it. Don’t tip: they won’t take it. They may chase you out into the street to give you back your “change.” If you’re in a fast food restaurant, like McDonald’s or KFC, you don’t need to bus your own tray. In fact, if you do try to bus your own tray, be prepared to hunt around for a place to put it.

            Subway etiquette is actually improving. People actually will kinda sorta line up while they wait, and people trying to get off the train will get a moment or two to disembark before the crowd starts pushing its way on. If it’s rush hour, though, forget about personal space.

            So, if you haven’t cottoned on yet, the general topic of this post is what it means to be polite. Many of the things people do in Guangzhou would be considered very rude in Maine (clearly, I cannot speak to any other part of the US. For all I know, someone in Los Angeles would read this and think ‘but that’s just life in the city’ and maybe it is.). In Maine, if I bumped you with my umbrella, I would say sorry. If I cut you in line at the 7-11, it would have been truly an accident. If the cashier didn’t say anything, but I noticed, I would apologize. If I left my tray on the table at KFC, I would totally deserve the looks of scorn from the counter staff. If I didn’t tip at a restaurant where I had received decent service, I would completely deserve all the things the waiter said about my mother, my associations with swine, and the probable intelligence of any future children. If you failed to stop for me while I was crossing the road in a crosswalk, you would deserve any and all hand gestures I might make. Here, though, that’s just how things work. If I apologize for bumping people with my purse while trying to find a line to stand in the subway, they give me weird looks (admittedly, it could be because I’m foreign, because I’m speaking Chinese, because I’m speaking Chinese badly, because I’m speaking Mandarin, or a list of other reasons). It makes me wonder what horrible etiquette faux-pas I am making, without even realizing I’m making them.

Needles, Kidney Punches, and Free-Form Philosophy

I've been in Guangzhou for less than a week, now, yet so much has happened. Since arriving last Saturday evening (local time), I have gone through preliminary orientation, completed my medical check, searched for an apartment, observed classes at my school, and reacquainted myself with the wonderful deliciousness that is Chinese yogurt. The drinkable yogurt I'd been enjoying for the past month in Maine was good, but it just doesn't compare to the yogurt here. I don't know what it is, but here is it creamy and rich and hits that perfect balance between tangy and sweet.

But enough about yogurt. The real highlight of the past few days was the mandatory medical check required for foreigners desiring to get a residence permit to work in China. So you know, I am one of seven new teachers newly arrived in Guangzhou, and we are all going through orientation together before being split up to our different Centers. We arrived at the hospital at 8:15am, and spent a good 45 minutes queuing first for one person to check our forms and then for another person to check our passports and collect the fee. Then, we took our forms across the street to the hospital proper, where we began our round of tests. This was, potentially, the most thorough medical exam I have ever had, and when you consider how many tests we underwent, the 3.5 hours we were there doesn't seem so bad. We had an abdominal ultrasound, a resting ECG, and a chest x-ray, they examined our eyesight, looked in our ears, noses, and mouths, weighed us, measured our height, temperature, and blood pressure, took 2 vials of blood and a urine sample, and listened to our lungs, whacked us in the kidneys, and asked us about four times if we were pregnant or had any communicable diseases. And throughout the whole process, you had to be vigilant about when it was your turn, because the Chinese doctors and nurses weren't  even going to attempt to read your name. Instead, they would hold up the form to the waiting area, and you had to squint to see if it was your 1 inch square photo taped to the top. Nonetheless, I survived and I don't think they'll have found any medical reason to deny my residency application.

GZ Metro (http://fakeisthenewreal.org/subway/)

Now, I'm still in the process of getting an apartment, so I will save that whole story for later. One last thing, though, about my first day of observation. I sat in on a class of primary-school aged kids and one of 15-16 year-olds. The older kids were doing a speaking game where you have to talk as long as possible without stopping (even to say "um"). The girl who managed to go the longest offered us this piece of philosophy: women are like pizzas; there's a lot of different things about them all on the surface, but men are like (Chinese) buns (steamed and stuffed with filling), where they hide everything inside. Oh, and life is like a bowl of porridge: blank and bland, you have to strive to fill it in with your own actions to give it some color and flavor.

Well, the porridge that is my life is certainly getting some color and flavor here in Guangzhou. What exactly that does to the mix of my life as a whole, well, that remains to be seen.

This, the Moment Before the First Step

You must know that old phrase, a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step? Well, this is the moment before that step. The moment when everything is in place and all you can do is wait, and contemplate the vast distance you are about to cross. And I do mean metaphorical, emotional, and personal distance as well as physical. I find myself wondering how Miss Rumphius felt, 38 hours before setting off to travel the world.

If you do not know who Miss Rumphius is, then you must find your way to the nearest library or bookstore and head down into the children's section. Miss Rumphius, or the Lupine Lady, is a 1982 story by Barbara Cooney. In it, our eponymous character grows up listening to her grandfather tell her stories of his world travels. She vows that she, too, will travel to faraway places when she grows up and then she will return home and live by the sea, and he makes her promise to do one more thing: she must do something to make the world more beautiful. So, up she grows, and she travels the world, and eventually she slips a disk getting off a camel, and she decides to retire to the sea. She achieves Crazy Old Lady status and spends her time sowing lupine seeds, which, come Spring, do in fact make the fields more beautiful.

As a child, I wanted to be Miss Rumphius. Her life seemed exciting and full and glorious. Now I am older, and about to set forth on my own world travels. Now, I have a few more questions for Miss Rumphius. Was she ever lonely? Did she leave anyone behind when she set off for tropical climes? Did she ever wish for more in her life? At the story's end, she is a Great-Aunt, but she, herself, seems to be alone. In many ways, I think I do not want to be Miss Rumphius. But perhaps I can have my cake and eat it, too.

Miss Rumphius seems to live in the days before air travel: certainly in the days before internet. But I can email and phone and video chat with home instantaneously. Even the post can make the 8,000 mile trip in just two weeks. In an emergency, 19 hours of flight time could get me home. Even this blog is a way to stay connected: one long, rambling letter to my friends and family and the world at large. And I am only going for a year, which though it seems a bit like forever, is really not so long at all.

So I take will take Miss Rumphius with me, in my heart (and in my suitcase: along with Blueberries for Sal and One Morning in Maine). As I wait, and finish packing, and try to envision what my life will be like next week (to travel to Mars could not be less alien), I will try to remember the second thing Miss Rumphius did: she came home and told stories. Travel is a form of personal growth, a way to enrich the soul and help us better understand the world we live in. This world we live in is already beautiful in so many ways, but hopefully, if we can better understand the people with whom we share it, we can make it even more beautiful.

This will not be an easy journey. I have already had doubts, and second thoughts, and emotional crises that have left me awake in the dark, paralyzed with uncertainty. I have doubted my reasons for going, my own desire to go, my motivations, my own confidence in my ability to endure the hardships. Rene Descartes said, 'If you would be a real seeker after truth, it is necessary that at least once in your life you doubt, as far as possible, all things." I have faith in my decision to go. To me, faith is not belief without question, but belief because there are questions. This is going to be hard, but it is also going to be amazing. There's a lot I don't know, and a lot I am going to learn. And, you'll be with me the entire time, so really, there's no reason to be afraid.