Classes are Over, but the Lessons Keep Coming

Tuesday we had our last class, and immediately afterward I cracked open a 13 cent beer (not really, but they are cheaper than dirt--or at least cheaper than Coke). Now we're into finals. These last few days I have felt my Chinese language abilities come to a pinnacle. While I have everyday conversations with my classmates, it's not the same as talking with a real Chinese person--when talking to another student you have to lower your vocabulary, because maybe the other person doesn't know a word that you know, or you don't know a word they do. The end result is a dumbed-down conversation.

But yesterday starting with the conversation with the taxi driver about all kinds of stuff, including China's and the U.S.'s pollution; continuing through my 15 minute oral report/Q&A on China's non-public economy; and finishing up with my 20 minute oral interview/test with my Chinese Spoken Language teacher today, I can finally see the full effects of two months of not speaking English. I think the real topper was when Ren Laoshi, the director of this CET program in Harbin, personally sat in on my oral report, and in the end commented on how much I had improved (My teacher at Vandy also has an advisory position with CET, and a relationship with Ren Laoshi and other teachers at the program, so many teachers knew me before I even got here). She has been so helpful through this program, and I hear from others who had her as a teacher here last year that she was an extremely good one. I'm really not surprised.

Anyway, so the continuing lessons I was referring to in my title actually concerns the aforementioned taxi driver--I was with him on my way to Bank of China--the main bank of China and the only place you can exchange money. To simplify China's banking system, it has 4 banks: Agricultural Bank of China, Industrial and Commercial Bank of China, China Construction Bank, and Bank of China (BOC). From what my teacher tells me, there really is no difference, except that Bank of China is the main one (the names have nothing to do with the customers' occupations).

So I'm at BOC at about 12 noon, and the first thing I notice is the mass chaos of probably more than 50 customers banking/waiting to be served. I'd been there before, but not when it was this busy, so I only knew that you had to take a number when I saw other people holding them. But where to get them? After looking around for a good few minutes I figured out that the BOC "manager on duty" was handing them out next to the printing machine. After waiting behind 3 or 4 other people waiting to talk with him, I finally told him what I wanted to do--exchange travelers checks--and which window I needed to go to. He gave me my number--only 7 people in front of me--but failed to give me the form to fill out while I wait.

Well no problem, I'll just go to the Form Table and find it. After digging through the unorganized forms, I realized that it wasn't there. I went back over to the "manager" and waited another few minutes behind people, then asked where the form was. He dug around a bit, and finally found it. I sit down and fill it out in all of 3 minutes, and then notice that there are still 7 people in front of me. But this is because they only have 1 worker behind the Foreign Currency Exchange windows. After waiting 20 minutes only to have 1 person in front of me finish, I go over to the "manager" and ask him if it is always this slow. He said because it is between 12:00 and 1:00, it is "rest time." I've also noticed this practice at the hospital I went to for my leg x-ray: between 12:00 and 1:30 there, things just shut down.

This is one huge difference between China's economy (banks especially) and the U.S.'s economy: in the States, when you have a room that full of customers, your private banks are going to alternate workers in and out, or tell them to take their lunch break during the slow times; in China, when all the banks are owned by the government, who cares? What are your customers going to do, go to one of the other 3 banks you own?

So after waiting another 10 or so minutes while one more person is served, it's my turn: the other people in front of me have given up. I get the window and tell the lady that I'd like to exchange travelers checks. At this point, as expected, she tells me that from 12-1:00 you can't exchange travelers checks--for what reason I didn't understand, but I don't think there's an international law about exchanging travelers checks during lunch time. I tell her that the "manager on duty" said that I could exchange them now, and she said "he doesn't know." (Now you know why I've been putting "manager" in quotations) So now I've got 15 minutes to kill until 1:00, and I didn't bring anything (material for my oral presentation later that day) to do, so I walk outside and just kind of stare into space.

Nearly 15 minutes later I'm back in the bank and sure enough, 20 or so workers march into the room and take their positions--the staff has just doubled. I go to the first open window I see (the lady said since I already waited an hour, I didn't need a waiting number). It takes me all of 5 minutes and I'm out of that god-forbidden place.

As you can tell, my experience with Chinese state-owned-enterprises wasn't exactly a positive one. While I have been saying that China just has 4 banks, this isn't completely true. China entered the WTO in 2002, and their 5 year grace period for implementing economic reforms, such as opening up their banking industry to foreign and private competition, has just expired. Citibank already has branches in Beijing and Shanghai, and is the first-ever bank in China to launch a drive-through ATM.

This is what opening up their banking system and economy will do--increase the quality of service. And as you can tell, I definitely think it needs it.

Sorry for the lack of pictures...nothing that interesting happen lately, except getting little sleep and studying until my head hurts.

Kareoke--Chinese Style (kind of like everything else I do in China)

Wow, it's been a long time. This last week of schoolwork was pretty tough--I actually felt like I was back at Vandy. A large part of the reason it was so tough was because I went to see a doctor to get my leg X-rayed for bone damage (if you didn't know I've been fighting a calf strain for some 2+ weeks now). Turns out there is no bone problem, and I have thus started swimming religiously. Taking a taxi to and from the swimming center, swimming, and showering all together might be about 3 hours. Hence my delinquency.

But I want to fill you in on a pretty bizarre and surprisingly good time we had singing karaoke last weekend. A bunch of us decided to go out to the main strip, and then after walking around for long enough, a couple people suggested we go sing karaoke. I was pretty reluctant to go at first, as it was already 10:30...far past my bedtime. But obviously I went--it was a place called KTV--which stands for "Karaoke Television" and is a reference to MTV. You might be able to tell from the pictures that the facilities are pretty plush.

When you first walk into the building, you notice that everything's a good bit cleaner and newer than the facilities of any other building you've been into lately. There are many rooms, and you can rent one out for about $6 an hour (if you think that's cheap, try dividing it between 6 people--it's like splitting hairs). From what I hear it's a popular place to make business deals--yea, not over round of golf, but an hour or two of karaoke. From what I've read online there is supposedly something called a "Special KTV" where men can choose a hostess for the night--basically an escort service--but these are mostly in Taiwan. So while my friends were taking care of registration and such, I kind of just checked the place out.

Like I said, the facilities were comparable to anything you'd see in the States, and they even had these cool looking water dishes all around with marbles in the bottom (see pic). In some childish reflex, what did I do? Oh yea, I stuck my finger in the water. As soon as I did it I realized what that pretty dish's purpose was: it was a spit dish. While spitting has greatly been reduced by changing attitudes toward it here in China, it's still living strong. In the locker room at the swimming pool I go to there's spit buckets next to every group of lockers, and at every end of the lanes of the swimming pool.

So anyway, that was stupid, but it was on to the karaoke. Starting out we sang some Chinese songs, which were ridiculously fast for our Chinese language abilities. Then our machine had some problems coordinating the words with the music, so after getting that figured out, we sung Britney Spears' "Drive Me Crazy", Backstreet Boys' (personal favorite for karaoke) "Tell Me Why", Van Halen's "Jump", Aerosmith's "Dream On", that song from Grease (don't remember, the girls picked that one), a plethora of Disney songs: "Can You Feel the Love Tonight?", "Under the Sea", "A Whole New World" and more. That's me in the 3rd picture getting way too into "A Whole New World" (thanks Cody and Jeff).

Probably the funniest point came when we were singing "Beauty and the Beast."

When the karaoke machine doesn't have a music video for the song (most didn't) it would play this stock footage to stand in as the background movie. This background movie, which looked liked it was shot by one person about 30 years ago, just got weirder and weirder. At one point, the movie was just this Chinese farmer in the middle of nowhere hoeing away. At another point it was at a public swimming pool in the United States, focusing on one person for about a minute and then another person for a minute.

Needless to say, the background movie didn't

lend to the vibe of the music, but this was especially true during "Beauty and the Beast." Of course, this is a pretty romantic song--it is about love at least. However, when the song came on, the background movie instantly switched to some mid-1900s black and white war movie. If you look at the picture you can see the solider with the rifle slung over his back. There's nothing better than singing "Tale as old as time, song as old as rhyme..." while watching a solider brutally assault the opposition.

We left at 1:00am, a whopping $2 poorer, and happy we all decided to do it. There was also a feeling of awkwardness, because we're not allowed to SPEAK English, but we had just SUNG a lot of English. Maybe we were bending the rules a bit, but how often do you get to stick your hand in a spit dish?

Lost in Translation

In the past 6 weeks my friends and I have discovered a new past time: finding the craziest 翻译 (fanyi), which means "translations." I'm sure if you're a Spanish speaker, you see some pretty funny translations in the States. However, because Chinese and English are so far apart linguistically, you often get some pretty laughable translations.

There's an obvious divide on where the best translations are: you're private companies, especially foreign ones such as Wal-Mart and Carrefour are going to have the best translations--they're paying translators a good sum of money not to screw it up, and it's in their best interest to look like a competent company. Your little local Chinese restaurants are okay, although you don't see much translations there in the first place. They often get some translations wrong, but many Chinese have command of the English language, so it's not a problem for them. The worst is certainly your public parks and attractions. There's really nothing hinging on whether or not they get these translations right or not--people are still going to come to their parks for their beauty, or in my case, the hilarious translations.

So below throughout this post there are some signs and other funny stuff either I or my friends have seen, some more laughable the others.

In the 2nd picture of the rock, if you look to the left of it you can see the "firm" rock in the background. They weren't joking around, that thing wasn't going anywhere.

On the picture of the red material, you're guess is as good as mine--I'm still trying to figure it out.

The picture of the disco club with the Indian prominently mounted on the entrance--we didn't actually go in--is pretty interesting. My classmate Robbie, when he first saw it, aptly put it, "A disco with Cowboys, Indians, and neon lights--it looks like someone watched way too many American movies and mashed them all together."

I think my favorite has to be the last picture. It's on the same type of sign as the first one and a few others--these were all found at Sun Island the first weekend here. Of course, Sun Island is a a big attraction here in Harbin, and of course it's government owned and run.

Other than wasting my time looking for ridiculous translations, I have been studying, even if my blogs don't exactly portray it. This last was pretty cool because things are finally starting to click. I'm actually retaining vocab and grammar, and I can watch a Chinese TV program or read simple newspaper articles with minimal difficulty. I've also switched several websites over to Chinese language, and also portions of my computer's operating system. It's kind of slow at first working with all that Chinese, and kind of scary when a pop up box comes up in Chinese and you're not sure whether you're deleting important things (or course, you kind of have to consult the dictionary). But all this helps, and now I don't even think twice about speaking Chinese. Kind of a shame I have to go back in two weeks.

This weekend we go bowling, so I'm gonna put some people to shame. I'll let you know how the slaughtering goes.