Chinalbeit

Inspired by this great blog post at Sinosplice “10 Vegetables China Taught Me to Love“, I thought I would take the opportunity to reflect on some the daily activities I do here that I never would have considered doing back home in America, or that I had to do but hated.  To start off, I couldn’t agree more with the above blog post.  I wasn’t completely anti-vegetable in my old days.  I’d often order the “garden salad” instead of the french fries with my burger, but I rarely ventured away from the safe pastures of iceberg lettuce, romaine, carrots, or broccoli.  My daily diet now consists of all sorts of crazy vegetables I pick up at the wet market near my house (a soon to be blog post about this wet market) and fry them up or grill them on my new barbecue.  The lifestyle changes haven’t stopped there, oh no.  So, without further ado…

1. Riding a Bicycle

I was actually quite an avid bike rider back home, but it was strictly a leisure activity.  The thought of trying to navigate a bicycle around the mayhem otherwise known as the Northwest Suburbs of Chicago sends more shivers down my spine than taking a bath in a tub full of Chinese loogies.  Well, okay…perhaps it’s  not that bad.  During the summer of my 17th year, I actually spent a month or so trying to ride a bike around those streets (due to an unfortuante accident I incurred just months after receiving my driver’s license).  It wasn’t quite so bad, but then again, it was summer and I was seventeen.  I didn’t really have anywhere to be, and I wasn’t in any hurry to get there.  If I had to rely on a bicycle as my main method of transportation to get to and from work, I’m quite sure I’d end up in the unemployment line pretty quickly, and not because of the current economic troubles.

I’ve relied on my bicycle for years as my main method of transportation in China, however, and I wouldn’t give it up even if someone offered me a free Audi.  The bicycle has a number of distinct advantages here.  First of all, the traffic in China’s major cities is absolutely horrendous.  Not that the suburbs of Chicago are a dreamland or anything, but it is still faster to drive a car around there than it is here.  Most roads here have bicycle-only lanes, making travel relatively safe and easy (you’re never truly safe anywhere within 10 feet of a Chinese road).  As I ride my bike to work in the morning, I can’t help but laugh at the fools stuck in a traffic jam caused by some tricyclist hauling chickens who refuses to yield to the government official in the Mercedes.  I can squeeze through just about any situation and continue on my merry way.  I have not once been late to work due strictly to riding my bicycle.  While taking the subway can technically allow me to sleep 10 extra minutes in the morning, there is always the fear that something is going to break down, as happened yesterday morning, stranding me in a jam packed car with 150 other people for over an hour.

All in all, my bicycle is one of my most cherished possessions here.  It gives me some daily exercise, it allows me to blow off some steam by cutting off idiotic drivers (ok, I’ll admit, perhaps my style of riding is not the safest), it’s fast, it’s cheap, and it’s oh-so-China.  Besides, my bike is called a “BATTLE SCHOLAR” – how faux badass is that?

Battle Scholar

2. Riding public transportation

As I worked downtown but lived in the suburbs in my past life, I was reliant on Chicago’s wonderful public transportation system to get me to and fro.  Unfortunately, reliable and “Chicago public transporation” are two words that should never go together in an affirmative sentence.  I was forced to take the train 30 minutes early everyday, because at least once a week it would arrive late.  My work didn’t really care about what excuse I had, so I ended up arriving 30 minutes early most of the time just to avoid the inevitable late arrivals.  Public transportation just doesn’t go to enough places either.  I lived in a suburb called Schaumburg, a rather faceless burg about 30 miles Northwest of Downtown.  Despite being a major hub of economic activity and housing almost 100,000 residents, there is no direct train line to Chicago (the station is way out in the farthest corner where nothing actually is).  Thus, in order to take the train every morning, I had to drive to the train station.  It seemed to defeat the purpose of taking public transportation in the first place.  It’s expensive to ride the train as well.  A monthly pass cost nearly $100, and that didn’t include the parking fees at the station.  Still cheaper than paying for parking downtown, but frustrating nonetheless.  To top it all off, public transporation is just plain dirty in Chicago, and I say this after having lived in China for 4 years.

Having said all that, public transportation here seems like a dream.  At least in Shanghai, the subway goes everywhere I need, it’s cheap, and delays are rare (though extremely frustrating when they do happen: see #1).  I try to avoid using it during rush hour – on weekends and off-peak times, it’s great.  Most of the lines are brand new and state-of-the-art and don’t smell like urine like Chicago’s red line does 24/7.  There is one thing that really pisses me off about public transportation here though, and that is that it closes so early.  Chicago’s transport sucks, but it at least turns all hours of the night.  However, taxis are cheap and plentiful here, which mitigates the problem somewhat (more on this soon).  I haven’t yet ridden too many buses in Shanghai, but I truly learned to love buses in Beijing.  There are hundreds and hundreds of different lines going basically everywhere, and it only cost 4毛(mao) to get there (the equivalent of about 6 US cents or so).  Best of all, bus drivers are all completely insane – this is good because most drivers stay the hell away from them, and thus buses speed around and arrive at their destinations quite quickly.  Bus stops are quite far away, which can be annoying at times when you need to walk 8 minutes from the stop to your destination, but it also means the bus doesn’t stop at every little side street like it does in Chicago, causing the bus to move at a snail’s pace.

Shanghai Metro Plan

Finally, learning to use the bus is a great way to learn some basic, commonly used Chinese characters as well.  Most locations tend to reuse lots of the same characters like 村(cun) which means village, or 屯 (tun), which also means village (don’t ask).  It’s a good way to learn your way around the city as well, since the subway is all underground, and you don’t actually get to see the locations that you pass by.

3. Taking a Taxi

I only took one taxi in my life before coming to China, and that was from Chicago’s Union Station to the Symphony Theater.  The ride took five minutes, and including tip it cost me $12.  Needless to say, I decided it was best to just walk back to the train station after the show was over.  I didn’t take another taxi again until arriving in China.  Back then, in 2005, taxis were mindblowingly cheap.  Most of them drove around in “Xiali” cars, a poorly constructed, rickety, rattling Chinese made car that was popular with taxi companies.  The ride started at 10RMB for the first 4km (about $1.25 at the time), and was 1.2RMB (15 cents) for each additional km.  Needless to say, I could ride from one end of the city to another for the same price it cost me to travel a short distance back home.  Like most expats, I began taking taxis everywhere almost indiscriminately.  They’re a bit more expensive now (2.1RMB per km now), but still quite cheap for getting around at any time of the day or night.  These days, I prefer public transport (or my trusty bike) to taxis, but on a particularly hot or lazy day, I will hail down one of Shanghai’s 50,000 taxis for a roller coaster ride through the nightmare traffic of this metropolis.  Beijing taxi drivers have also been some of my best Chinese teachers throughout the years.  Now if I can just figure out what the hell the Shanghai drivers are saying, I’ll be set.

That is not the best part of taxis here though.  For a modest sum of about 400-500RMB (depending on where you’re going), you can hire one of these taxi drivers for a full day to take you anywhere you want to go.  In Beijing, we would often rent a taxi for the day to go to some out of the way location not served by normal public transportation for a hike through the hills.  Given the easy availability of taxis for quick trips or even day-long excursions, I fail to see the need for actually owning an automobile here.  Though I would describe the average Chinese taxi driver as “sociopathically insane”, I would still trust his ability to navigate the death traps otherwise called Chinese roads over my “defensive driver” training anyday.

Xiali Taxi - Always Reliable

4. Eating Out

This example is perhaps a bit of a stretch, but the term “eating out” has taken on an entirely new meaning for me since I’ve come here (if this sentence made you feel excited in your loins, you should perhaps be visiting this site instead of mine).  Going out to a restaurant was always a rather special occassion back home.  It was certainly not something I did on a regular basis.  Perhaps twice a week at most I would go to a restaurant, usually of the fast variety.  There are a number of reasons for that, I suppose.  The first one was obviously price.  It was expensive to go out to eat, even at supposedly “cheap places”.  Cooking at home was pretty much a necessity.  I’ve also been a bit of a health-conscious kind of guy as well, and restaurant food in America, for the most part, is of the greasy, fatty, heart-destroying variety.  Even the salads at McDonald’s have more fat than a hamburger and fries combined.  The fact is, supermarkets in America have an amazing selection of healthy, delicious foods at pretty reasonable prices.  Fresh-baked, whole wheat breads; lean chicken breasts; vitamin-packed cereals; tons of fresh fruits, etc.

I have found that the situation in China is often the reverse, however.  I really hate going to the supermarket here: even the supposed “foreigner-friendly” ones like Carrefour or Tesco.  The selection is terrible.  Good luck finding whole-wheat bread (that hasn’t already expired) or lean chicken breasts.  Obviously, there is basically no cereal, except in the expensive “import” aisle, and even if I decide to splurge and buy some cereal, I can never find any skim milk!  The meat is often unmarked in terms of quality.  Chinese restaurants, however, are cheap, plentiful, and often have a massive selection of good, nutritious stuff.  Hell, most restaurants have an entire page dedicated just to vegetables.  Choose your veggie (see the link at the top of the post), how you want it cooked, and you’re good to go.  Of course, I still often eat at home, and I buy most of my stuff fresh from the local wet market.  I do still pine for the days where cottage cheese was available in every store though.

水煮鱼 - Spicy Water Boiled Fish - A personal favorite

I’m a big fan of the Chinese custom of having a big party at a restaurant for special occassions.  Choose your favorite restaurant, invite ten friends, order 15 different dishes, share them amongst each other, drink plenty of beer, and all for just a bit more per person than you might spend at KFC.  The thought of spending 2 or 3 hours in a restaurant just eating and talking was a thought that had never occurred to me prior to coming here, but it’s an activity I often enjoy these days.  My last trip back to Chicago, I invited a large group of friends to an authentic Chongqing style restaurant in Chinatown, and in the words of my friend Kevin, “it’s like a 2 hour explosion of tastes”.  Luckily, I get to enjoy it on an almost weekly basis.