A tender message from a father to an over-stressed daughter entering the real world. It made my day.

Listen [1:15].

Remember: Even if you can't sing it, you can still hum it.

[via Metafilter]

Robot vs. Tweaker Methods

At some point this week I decided that it was easier being robot than a foriegn English teacher. I was getting too serious and too frustrated with a group of third graders who wouldn't stop talking while I was teaching. Honestly, I don't rightfully have the skills to teach kids that young. It's too early for all-English classes. It's hard listening to a teacher who speaks half gibberish no matter how much you want to learn. This biomechanical transformation was one of two methods that worked this week.

The first method was acting like tweaky Jim Carry on meth. As soon as the Chinese teacher left I'd say my standard, "Good morning, class!" They'd respond plenty loud, but then I'd stand on a chair and yell it. I'd yell it again trying to scream louder than they could. I had their undivided attention. I'd then hop off, write a category on the board like "food" or "animals." I'd then run around picking students whose hands were shot a mile high. "Cat," they'd say. "CAT!!!!!!!" I'd yell back while giving an enthusiastic and exaggerated high-five crouched down to their little seats. If I was really into it I'd give a psychedelic meow or two.

"Hot Dog!"

"HOT DOG!!!!!!!!"

High-fiving and fake vomiting follows.

The Tweaker Method works perfectly with the little tykes excerpt for two issues that emerge after class. I lost my voice and energy. Out-screaming and out-crazying 9 year olds saps a 25 year old pretty quickly. I'd go into my next class with all the enthusiasm of Ben Stein.

I was going around the room asking them easy questions and I could barely hear the answers under the dull roar of laughter and talking of other students. I couldn't speak over them because my voice was gone. I couldn't dance about acting out "MONKEY!!!" because I didn't have any energy. Getting angry wasn't working. That's just loud and mean gibberish. So I decided to be a robot.

I walked to the other side of the room. I stared at the class. They shut up and stared back. I extended my arm forward making the high-pitch mechanical grind similar to an electric drill. Every move was slow, deliberate, and accompanied by it's own whirring.

They were transfixed. I pointed my finger and asked, "What. Is. Your. Name." in the best monotone android voice I could muster. "My name is...!!!" followed by a squeal of laughter.

When a kid in some distant corner would start talking I'd gun him down with my robo-pencil machine gun and he'd fall over dead on his desk and shut up for a bit. The other kids would giggle and quietly make their own robo-sounds. I was even able to shut the whole class with one swipe of my robo-pencil gun.

It works. I highly recommend the Robot Method to other TEFL teachers with classes to young to know what's going on.

Tags: Treyopia stories China Shenzhen TEFL teaching EFL ESL TESL methods English Chinese children elementry school

Arrgghhh

Shenzhen is the "bastard child" of my company. I was told that when I first got here. The branch has been open for years, but it seems like it just opened yesterday. I like all my supervisors, but I think it's something about the collective whole that's flawed.

Next week every teacher is off for National Day. A few of us were planning to hit up Guilin, the city famous for the gumdrop mountains and beautiful misty lakes. I was gung ho. I've been working 28 classes weekly [part of why my posting has slowed - I'm tired], which is 13 more than the average Chinese teacher does. I've been racking in the overtime covering for the girls who quit. That's, at minimum, 840 students.

On top of just discovering yesterday I'm supposed to do 32 classes this week, I just found out I need to go to Hong Kong on Tuesday. My visa expires on the third and they've waited - as always - until the very last minute to do anything. I wasn't even working my first two weeks in Shenzhen. I pestered them constantly about doing it then so they wouldn't wait to do during National Day week. There's no one person to blame, of curse, it was a collective failure.

This isn't some barometer of my overall feelings of teaching here, but this particular incident really, really makes me angry. I don't mind putting in the hours, I do mind of being deprived my travel plans because of incompetence.



I leave you with a photo from the side of a preschool in the alleyways around my neighborhood. I think it says something about my mindset teaching those little devils tomorrow and now Saturday too.

I had to hide a bit to grab this photo of a man waiting for the evening rush of customers to his kabab stand

Old man selling fruit in my new neighborhood



Tags: Treyopia Shenzhen photos street life vendors photography

Xinjiang Food

It's a little known fact in Islamic history that when the Archangel Gabrielle gave Mohammad the words to the Koran he also gave him some killer recipes. It was pretty lonely up on that desert mountain and Mo was always, always hungry. During breaks between holy scripture sessions Gabrielle would light a cigarette, the mood would relax, and he'd start passing off recipes to his Arabian friend.

"When you get back to Mecca, try taking about a three pound big chunk of dough, chip it and then steam it for five minutes, then...."

Mo, though extremely tired from writing out the Qur'an almost every waking hour, would hurriedly jot down the recipes. He knew there was a wisdom and beauty in them that would pacify men's hearts for generations to come.

More would come everyday, "k... now get some mutton and put it on a sharp wooden stick and grill it with some of that pepper sauce I told you about on Wednesday."

After many cold nights and wretched hot days up on that sacred mountain, it was time to go back and spread the message. Gabe said, "got everything, man?"

"Yeah, yeah... blanket, clothes, rice, and food that will make the world smile," Mo shot back with a grin and a rucksack slung over his back.

"What? Where's the Qur'an?"

"That manifesto you've been having me write? Ohhhh, that... it's good stuff, Gabe, but I just don't see a market for it... and I think these dishes will civilize the hearts of men. It is the seventh century, and ya know... not a lot of my fellow Arabs can, you know, read."

The Archangel Gabrielle unleashed his fury. Mohamed understood. The recipes were great, but the book was more important.

Mo did a good job. He founded the religion Gabe wanted him too and he spread the recipes to new converts while taking hookah breaks from battle, "... now take the beef - and remember, NO PORK! - and marinate it in some..."

Millenia later, thousands of miles away from the holy lands, Muslims found themselves in China. They set up small resteraunts with the charm of a hometown diner in Kansas and serve noodles that could unite all men under the green banner of Islam if only the Archangel had allowed him to push those noodles and kababs instead of the book.

The point of this little thing is that I moved apartments today. I'm back in Sino-Heaven. Though the Tianjin-style kababs are still ellusive, there are Pakistani men selling sheep kababs and little noodle shops dotting the streets. I spent an hour getting lost walking transfixed through all the markets yesterday. I love it.

And thank you, Angel Gabe, for those killer recipes you gave Mo outside Mecca so many years ago.



I made sure Betsy had some Muslim noodles before she goes home Monday. The soup on the right is incredible [as you can tell by the empty dish closest to the camera operator], as is the little pickled salad dish.



Tags: Treyopia Shenzhen China Islam food culture Muslim

First Day

I puffed my chest, swallowed my smile, and looked angry. Ten of the cutest kids you could possibly imagine were swarming my podium on a raised wooden platform in the front of the classroom. Other kids were sweeping, cleaning, and wiping off the chalkboard. All of them, at the same time, we're asking my age, my name, where I was from, if I was married. All of them had ear-to-ear smiles. I beckoned them coldly to sit down. I had to play the role of disciplinarian foreign teacher, as mean and cold as any Chinese teacher.

The bell rang. Well, not really a bell. It's actually some hideously cutesy take on classical piano that plays for maybe ten seconds. It's not nearly as creepy as the eye exercise music and instructions. It is exactly them same kind of brain-washing hypnotic repetition via distant PA that you'd expect to hear at some North Korean school.

I wrote my name on the board and had them practice saying it. A million hands went up to ask me questions. I ignored them.

I wrote "rules" on the board underlined and asked if anyone knew what they were. No one knew. I explained and had them write down my four rules and repeat them endlessly. Still no smiles. I drilled them until they had the rules memorized verbatim. I had them practice locations ("I am from Jacksonville. Jacksonville is a city in Florida. Florida is a state in America," and then flipping it to be relevant to them) With much less success I tried to explain my [divorced] family to a few classes. "Your father have two wives?!?"


It worked. The kids were extremely well behaved. I broke down the wall of seriousness mid-way through class and let them ask me questions. I did this seven times my first day. I can still hear the same questions ringing in my ear, over and over, "what's your favorite animal?", "what do you eat?", "do you have a baby?", "do you like China food?", "do you like KFC", ad infinitum.

My only bad class was after lunch where I had a fluent and very talkative student. I assumed all the other kids were on her level and shot over everyone's head. They hated me because I kept turning the jerk up a notch. The fluent girl eventually stopped me mid-sentence to tell me no-one understood a word I said. There were no crowds swarming me at the end of class.

Ahh, lunch. They made me eat out of styrophone containers because they don't have my medical records. Laowai-itus is infectious, perhaps?

I learned that it's a universal trait that kids get rowdier after lunch. Another class played games on me in a cutesy 10-year old kid way. They started by repeating everything I said and then all crowded around me and the chalkboard because 15 of them "couldn't see" my massive writing on the board. It was funnier than it was annoying.

I dig the school. I've had none of the problems the other teachers have had. It's a university-affiliated boarding school where English is taken very seriously and the foreign teachers are respected. I was given an office key, a desk, and keys to another room to take a nap in during the "noon break." I used to get the evil eye from my principal in Jacksonville for dozing during my planning period - this after 7 straight hours of teaching and watching kids while trying to eat lunch at my desk. These guys expected me to string together 4 chairs in a conference room and make a bed. They also gave me a bag of paper, pens, and the kids English books so I could plan around it.

I'll be ready for the weekend though. I have 27 classes this week, as opposed to our normal load of 20 and the Chinese teachers load of 15. We all have to cover for the girls who quit. It's nice though. I've been idle for almost two weeks now. I like how drastically things change day-to-day in China.

Buy the Ticket, Take the Ride

A minor drama storm has been weathering our small outpost in Shenzhen over the past few days. Two girls who came together to China decided to go back home. While I have lucked out on almost everything related to my job, they were running into bad luck every step of the way and blamed it all on the company.

An echo chamber of bad vibes and griping erupted. Previously frustrated teachers became incensed as they trades stories back and forth and complained. I pitched in a few of my annoyances [which I had corrected today], I also offered wisdom from the good doctor: "buy the ticket, take the ride." Were here. We signed up for a year, ride out the year and make things work.

I remembered reading it in a Thompson book and being reminded of it when Steve Sykes explained why he plucked a fishing hook out of a sharks mouth instead of just cutting the line. It's something I've reminded myself every time things get a bit too Chinese for me. This is what I signed up for, this is what I get.

I had to eat those words today. Buy the ticket, take the ride, right? Here I literally had a ticket in my hand and there, right there in front of me, were very real and very literal rides - metaphor be damned.

The teachers were originally scheduled to have a tour of the city, but somehow that got turned into a tour of an amusement park. Four teachers show up along with a former teachers girlfriend and two of her friends. Two teachers bolt when they see the price of admission, but I go...

Happy Valley - gotta love the subtly in that name - is a small Busch Gardens. I hate amusement parks. Hate, hate, hate. I hate the lines, I had the crowdedness, and I hate the rides. Yes, your fearless writer who plunges into the eye of hurricanes for a good story and some photos hates roller coasters and machinations of that ilk.

USA Trey would have gone home even though I spent the money. American Trey would have called it a day and opted out. China Trey did no such thing. I got in line with everyone else and we spun around on one of those weird 180 degree under-arch spinner things and you know what?

It was fun!

I also did a miniature tower-of-terror thing where the shoot a line of seats up and then drop it straight down and all those shenanigans. I did it. I enjoyed it. I even got to play high speed Chinese laser bumper cars and got my driving fix in [I miss my Miata and driving more than I miss any food right now]. I also met some really cool new Chinese friends. I'll write up about some of our conversations on national identity and religion a bit later... I really needed to get a post out.

Photos from Happy Valley amusement park.


Happy Valley with Shenzhen and hills in the background.




Meet Diamond Geezer [geezer is cockney slang for a street-type guy] and his friend Boozy Baby. Have I told you there's a toothpaste brand who's logo is a black guy with a top hat and pearly whites? Politically correct what? I should mention our Chinese friends saw nothing offensive in this at all and picked them up to giggle at their bobbling heads.



On that note, here is the line of tourist waiting to have their photo taken with Adrian. He's black! Get a picture! You think I'm kidding...




Lisa, Ting [1], me, and Ting [2]



E.v.i.l.

[insert excuse]

i'll be posting daily again soon.

First Glimpse Inside a Chinese Classroom

R. is a soft-spoken, educated, vertically impressive, late-20's, former intel officer with the Army national guard. R. has absolutely no control over his 2nd grade classroom beyond a few curious onlookers in the front two rows. It's not that R. doesn't have innate teaching skills, and it's not that he's unorganized. He came in prepared. He has a naturally effusive personality. The kids just don't care.

They speak about 50 words of English and he speaks about 20 words of Mandarin. Parents demand native English speakers, so the school provides "Conversational English" teachers for 6 year olds who can barely write in Chinese. That's where the contracts are, so that's where we go.

I came to observe some classes before mine start next week. I've heard the horror stories and want to see them first hand. After getting lost on the bus system I walk into his classroom right as the bell rings and take a seat in the back. Three kids rush to shake my hand and say, "Hello! How are you?!"

As I take my seat against the wall a kid sitting to my left is staring. I look over. I was being stared down with the most earnest face a six year old can muster. Still staring, he put his finger to his nose and pushed the cartiledge up. No smiles, this kid means business. I know Chinese have some stereotype that Westerners have big noses... was this some statement concerning my own nose? He pushed it back down almost to his lips and broke into maniacal laughter. I popped back into teacher mode and snapped while moving my hand to point at R. who was trying to get the kids to talk about birthdays.

I left after 20 minutes to visit another teacher at the same school. His class was better. A. was fluent in Chinese and had older kids plus the show-stopper: a bag of candy for kids who got right answers. As I walked in he was handing out small scraps of paper. He had to supply it himself. When he asked for paper in the front office, a lady responded by moving her fingers up and down the same way you'd make a hand-puppet talk. In extra slow-motion, she enunciated her meaning: "Talk." It was conversational English, there were no books and no supplies. Get up there and talk.

Impressed with his effectiveness, I bought a big bag of candy on the way home. I've made a visit to my school and hope it's a smoother run than what everyone else is experiencing in the public schools. I'm hoping my own experience will help with little kids, but we'll see. I melt around kids but I'm going to have to play the role of mean non-smiling jerk for at least a few weeks.


Tags: Treyopia teaching public schools education Shenzhen China stories ESL EFL TEFL TESL forieng English Conversation Colloquial

Off the Rails

There's a freedom living abroad that's difficult to describe. One is not judged the same as you are back home. Locals tend to attribute almost all our behavior - better or worse - as just being something foreigners do. The minor guilts that haunt everyday life are absent and true personalities shine. You begin acting on your own conscious without second thoughts instead of having to consider what other people think. That freedom is exponential in somewhere like Cambodia, an impoverished nation putting itself back together after wholesale slaughter during decades of civil war. There's an allure to the anarchy that draws many colorful characters.

It's also the subject of Amita Gilbao's Off the Rails in Phnom Penh: Into the Dark Heart of Guns, Girls, and Ganja. Unfortunately, it was horrific in every imaginable way. To begin with the writing was sloppy. There was no narrative arch, no story to unfold, and he simply doesn't have a writers hand at description. Three times in one paragraph he described Cambodian music as somber. He invents words - something I'm not opposed to - but sticks with the duds throughout the book. One of the words in his last sentence was "tragicomic." No one says this. Your last sentence is supposed to be poignant, reflective... tragicomic is what you come up with? It's almost as bad as him stopping to add "shopping arcade" in parenthesis to let us know that's his clever term for strip malls.

So we've got down that he's a bad writer... so what does he pick as the subject of his book? Whoring druggie pedophile expats. He delivers almost 200 pages about men running around in Southeast Asia snorting heroin before their English classes and renting teenaged peasant girls sold into sexual bondage.

He throws out his cards early by having someone describe his work as a being " Like a Gonzo rant from Hunter S. Thompson" on the cover but then falls on his face emulating the unedited stream of consciousness style that only a select few can pull off. There's also little tension between the writer and over-the-deep-end friends like Thompson had with Oscar Acosta. Thompson uses his lawyer almost as a proving point of his own sanity and keeps Acosta at a safe distance when he's is at his worse, you really get a feeling that Gilbao deeply admires the men he writes about. He wishes he could be brave enough to sleep with a $2 illiterate 14 year old prostitute too.

It's so disappointing because the subject matter is so rich. Gilbao brings up the Josef Conrad link early saying that there's a reason Kurtz goes crazy in Cambodia in Apocalypse Now, Francis Ford Copalla's re-imagining of Conrad's Heart of Darkness. Heart of Darkness is about a good man gone mad without any of the routine social factors keeping us sane. Deep in the jungle, far removed from civilization, morals and ethics bend beyond recognition. Gilbao makes the connection in the first chapter, but then does nothing more with it.

This would have been an excellent approach to the book instead of the self-important diary entries. Gilbao touches on it briefly, when he visits a brothel and leaves before anything happens, afraid that there was no turning back afterwards. It is precisely that moment, when heavy moral questions about actions disappear after trial, that is worth writing an entire book on. The depravity in and of itself is not interesting. It's the mental slide into an entirely different world where the values and norms you grow up with vanish without notice that holds literary weight.





Tags:Off the Rails Phnom Penh Cambodia Amit Gilboa Gonzo Thompson Hunter S. travel writing expat lifestyle Asia Treyopia

My Neighborhood

This is the view from the porches at my temporary porches. Doesn't look like China, does it? Click the pictures for super-high resolution. Each is a composite show with like 6 8-megapixel photos stitched together quickly in Photoshop.


Front porch


Back porch


Tags: Treyopia Shenzhen China photography photos

Chinese Air Conditioning

This is the window I was holding my laptop out of for a WiFi signal.




Tags: Treyopia Shenzhen China photos photography

Breakfast

The best way I can contrast Shenzhen with Tianjin is breakfast. It's 7:30am right now. I'm hungry. If I were in Tianjin I'd take a five minute walk towards Anshan Xi Dao and would find at least two people in the street selling Chinese omelets, someone else selling fried eggs, and at least one strange variable. In the food alley off to the side I'd be able to get something akin to a chicken McMuffin and several creative concoctions of hot sauce, meat, dry biscuit, and egg. I would grab an orange juice from one of several drink vendors.

Street vendors are illegal here. My clearest option at this very moment is to walk into the kitchen and pour a bowl of fake Mueslix cereal that I bought at Super Wal-Mart yesterday. I could walk across the street to the 7-11 and grab a slurpee [I'm very clearly addicted] and a fried egg if I wanted to. They also have the standard convenience store pre-packaged mini-meals that one throws in the microwave. A few restaurants sell some sort of small meat dumpling with hot soy milk out front in the morning. K. found a few my first day here, but I can't find said restaurants on this side of town.

I really feel like I'm in some hybrid Hong Kong/Los Angeles/Miami right now. The language barrier is more difficult here, no pinyin on signs and different accents, but it just doesn't feel very "Chinese." I think I'd come to accept the lack of aesthetics and grittiness - if not outright dirtiness - juxtaposed with overflowing curiosity and humility as "Chinese." The streets here are cleaner than many European streets, the sidewalks run snake patterns against the road to better show off the beautiful trees hanging overhead. Looking at a map, entire swath's of town are colored green to show off parks. There are several "public gardens" surrounding the office.

That said, all the American teachers are spread out here. I'd have to take a bus to visit half of them. Three others are a 15 minute walk away. I don't feel the same sense of community we had back in Tianjin. I haven't met any Chinese but our small staff of four. I've traveled the length of the city two or three times, but I still don't recognize any landmarks. This place is huge. My first impressions of Shenzhen is a summation of all the reasons I've always feared moving to a big city. Sometimes a place is just too big to become familiar with.

By the time I left, I knew most of the faces in my neighborhood. I knew where to eat, I knew the best dishes, I knew when people set up and closed shop. I'm sure I'll learn the routine here soon, but in the meantime I miss dirty ole Tianjin.

I've been sick the past two days. I'll start posting more regularly very soon.



Tags: Treyopia Shenzhen stories Tianjin comparison food China

Shenzhen

It will take about a week to get posting on a regular basis again. I wish I were kidding when I tell you that at the moment I'm typing this, I'm holding my laptop outside a 16-story window stealing a WiFi connection.

The Train

The aisle went down the right side of the train. Fold-down seats with a strong recoil back into an upright position line the wall against windows. Small tables, perhaps 10 inches deep, are offered for every two seats. The left 2/3's of the train are bunks 3 high, 6 to a cabin. They are perhaps 18 inches deep and spaced maybe three feet apart from each other in height. It is impossible to sit upright in the top two bunks. The bottom bunks provide headroom but are used as couches by random strangers. Spidery passengers use other bunks as ladders up and down instead of the micro-ladders.

I got to the train late-ish. Sometimes you get a spirited cabbie, sometimes you don't. When I got onboard the luggage racks about the fold-up seats. I had to pile my backpackers bag and my laptop bag on the bed while tucking my book satchel underneath the bottom seat. Needless to say this took an already cramped situation and cut my sleeping space in half.

* * *
I managed to make the sleeping space bearable. I threw a comforter over my bags and propped my feet on them. For the first time in awhile it was relatively easy to pass out when night came. I didn't sleep the night before and got only a few hours as we passed through Hebei province at the begining of the trek. I think it's easier for me to sleep in slightly situations than in comfortable beds.

I woke up at 2am though. A soft-spoken English-speaking employee of the constuction arm of SinoPec (Chinese state-run oil company) was sitting at one of the chairs watching the nightscape of Sichuan Province unfold. We had an eerie conversation in the darkness. The mining outposts in the mountains lit the train as we passed by. I had a vaque idea that somehow, in some way, the afterlife vaquely resembled being on a 27-hour Chinese train ride.

* * *
I tried falling back asleep. I turned to put my headphones on - Mogwai had knocked me out earlier in the night. I moved and felt something fall.

THUMP!

I had twice dropped my Chinese workbook to the floor during the voyage. A gruff looking man escorting his son to his first day of college lifted it back up to me both times.

I looked down. My pillow was slumped against his body and it had knocked his tea cantine against his head. CRAP! I rolled over facing the wall and fell into uncontrolable quiet laughter.

Play it cool. Pretend like it was the girl sleeping above me.

After a few minutes I rolled back over to plan my rescovery operation. The pillow was gone. I looked closely. The man's head was propped twice as high as it was last time, my pillow a kindly gift from the gods above.

* * *

Off The Grid

I move to Shenzhen tomorrow at noon. I'll be off the grid for during the 27-hour train ride and the subsequent moving in to my new apartment.




Not perfectly accurate. Brian insists I won't be going through Beijing, but this is the most direct route. China. Direct route. lol. Did I tell you guys they're sending another guy back up on the train to Tianjin and right back down because they forgot to take his picture during his physical in Tianjin? 50+ hours on a train for that!!! This on the heels of having the same ride up and down two weeks ago.

Last Photography from Tianjin

I spent too long here. I met too many people to leave so quickly. I know it reads like I'm vacation, and to an extent I am, but this lifestyle has its tough parts. You get tired of saying "goodbye." I can't recall how many "going away" parties I've been to, how many good people I've wished adieu. It's my turn now. Whenever someone leaves the apartment (two roommates have left so far), the office custodian comes and she cleans out the room. Tomorrow my room will be dusted and swept to make room some other fresh off the boat laowai. My time has come.

I began my day with a Sichuan lunch. Two of my students from the Jixian retreat - Chinese English teachers - wanted to say goodbye before I left. We met, they laughed at my new short hair and beardless complexion. And then we ate a standard atrociously large six plate meal. We spoke like old friends. Maybe it's because we were. We did spend two weeks in a mountain compound. I realized though that I was truly going to miss Tianjin in more than in a "it was fun" kind of way. I have Chinese friends here. People who care about me.

I left there and decided I needed to get some pictures of my neighborhood I'd been too embarrassed to grab earlier. I started in Carrefour. I deeply wanted a photo of one of the rollerskate security guys. That's the kind of Chinese thing you can't make up. I saw one in front of the registers when I walked in, but he was on the move and it was too crowded. I went upstairs. No luck. I walked around with my camera out for 10 minutes. I went downstairs. Another ten minutes, no sightings. All the time I held my giant FZ30 in hand waiting for my white whale. I walked out of the security checkpoint to find him amongst the registers again. No luck. I went back upstairs. Then downstairs. Then I left. I never got my photo.

I went from there to the kabab stands of the alley. I shot some men playing cards waiting for the bus. I shot a fruit vendor who was happy to play along after I bought some peaches. I walked a few feet further down to a kabab stand that's been my lunch stable since arriving. I'm unusually devoted to family-run businesses. Back in Jacksonville it was Flip's. If you knew, I mean really knew me, we've ate at Flip's. Jim sold Flip's right before I moved... just another sign telling me my time in Jacksonville was coming to a close. I was lucky enough to find out on the last day they were open under old management. These guys, a husband and wife team, were with me when all I knew how to say was "Ni hao" and still wondering if the meat was cat or dog. They were patient with me, so I stayed with them.

Thus, I present to you the photos from my last day in Tianjin:


Victoria and Jessica, two of the Chinese English teachers from the Jixian retreat.



Fruit vendor in my neighborhood street market.



Kababs cooking at my local street BBQ joint



The husband at the kabab stand I frequent.



Ditto.


Shirtless man inside Carrefour. It's hard to express how popular the shirt-over-nipple style is.

[more coming]


Tags: Treyopia Tianjin photos photography stories story Ali Baba Ali Baba's

Tianjin Nightlife Roundup / Last Night Out

The nightlife in Tianjin is limited. It begins at home. Chinese men love baijo, a grain liquor that tastes like jet fuel and leaves a scarring aftertaste hours later. I hate it. I cannot concieve how this became the national drink of China, but it is. The Japanese have saki, which is delicious, the Chinese have an Everclear + 409 cleaner concoction. The occasional homeless person has a 50 cent bottle and businessmen devour it at lunch. Very often, however, men drink it after work at home. Alcoholism seems a distant concept to the Chinese. The ability to hold your own, toast after toast, is ingrained in the Chinese machismo.

The next step up is the streetside kabob stand where men drink baijo or beer on micro-stools and micro-tables. Beer sells for 4 yuan a bottle. You have to return the bottles when you're finished with them. The stools come up maybe 10 inches and the tables maybe 2 feet. If your a normal Chinaman, it ends here. There are no bars, there are no clubs. You're neither interested nor can you afford it. Besides, you don't need to meet women there. Friends and family set you up with future wives who think throwing down 30 yuan for a beer is ludicrous.

Ali Baba's is the the next step. It's a laowai hangout. It's nearly impossible to find, which is fun. There are no signs and the website gives you an intersection to be dropped off at and GPS coordinates. I'm not kidding. You pass through a steel door followed by a thick blanket deadening the noise inside. The joint is small and is probably 30% European, American, and African. Guest grafitti and foreign flags drape the walls. Beer is cheap, they can cook up some decent Western dishes [grilled cheese!], and can mix a mean White Russian. [Public Service Announcement: Never, under any circumstances, order a margarita in China unless you are inside an American owned restaurant.]

Dance clubs are the next rung up. Beer starts costing nearly American prices, the music can be good, and one can enjoy a night chatting up the opposite sex with most basic of language skills. Cozy's is standard - a mix of lounge and danceclub, followed by Scarlet's which is likely the best club even though it can be overrun by laowai sometimes [it's very near Tianjin University and Nankai University], followed by the giant two-story Coco and the sketchy Seven, both off of "Bar Street" and staffed by paid dancers. I'm sure in Shanghai and parts of Beijing it gets more expensive, but these are the options open to most foreign teachers and tourists.

Photo's from my last night out in Tianjin


A photo of some new crew and some British teachers we met at Ali Baba's on Friday night


Me, Tony, Anna, and Betsy


Inside Ali Baba's.


Another shot inside Ali Baba's


The pen was dying, but I left my writing on the wall: "Trey was here in the summer of '06"

The Daeighlies

A very good friend of mine, Jessica Pounds [click for music], is on an East Coast tour with her new band The Daeighlies. I always knew she'd be big one day. Her voice is incredible. They're calling their style southern folk swing. It's an apt description for the eclectic sounds they make. I also have tremendous respect for Donovan King and Shawn Lightfoot, her bandmates and both stables of the Jacksonville music scene.

Here's an article from U.S. 1, an alt-weekly from New Jersey, about their tour.

Tags: Treyopia Daighlies Jessica Pounds Shawn Lightfoot Donovan King Music Jacksonville swingsouthern good

The Other China

I remember the second night I was in Tianjin we were having a small BBQ on a large outdoor patio on the 4th floor of the office building ACES is in. We have the 4th floor largely to ourselves. While we were eating sheep kababs I kept noticing the top floor of a building about 80 meters away. Later I would deduce it was on top of the Carrefour supermarket and KTV karaoke building that also hosts the new restaurant called "Hans" that features Chinese girls dressed as 19th century Dutch maidens.

What caught my eye was that there were men walking passed a window wearing what looked like chef's clothing. White hats, white clothes, the whole outfit. I laughed it off. It was a curiosity. Why would there be cooks on the 10th floor of a building? Other than Dru asking if I'd seen it too, I didn't think about it after that..

From different angles, inside my classroom, I noticed the building wasn't in the greatest condition. Windows were broken out on the top floors but it wasn't abandoned. I could see people walk by occasionally. The mystery deepened... what was going on up there? The photographer in me wanted to sneak around up there.

A week ago, in the middle of a class, I realized what it was. It was a dormitory. A dormitory filled with men of all ages. The structures I couldn't make out inside were bunk beds. It was obvious when I saw men laying down on them now at 8:30 at night.

I don't know who they are. I don't know where they work. My best guess is that they're unskilled laborers from the country. You hear of them in the Western press, but you never really see them. Brian told me they typically live at construction sites. This was confirmed a few weeks ago when I was looking for the antique market and found a construction site with a huge wall around it. Looking from a distance I could see cargo trailers piled three high with the walls cut off filled with bunks.

On my walks home I sometimes catch men near the same building standing outside at night with a hose and a bowl of soapy water. They stand in their underwear and bathe in the streets once the resteraunts close up and people start going home. I know who these men are. They are the cooks at one of the better, if slower, resteraunts in our neighborhood. They live in a dorm behind the resteraunt. Five-hundred yuan ($60) a month, free food, and lodging is their pay. The wage is about half of the GDP per capita ($1,700/year USD at current exchange rate, $6,800 USD if adjusted for purchasing power parity [a relative and sketchy measure of buying power that quadruples their GDP from 2.2 trillion USD to almost 9 trillion USD]).

I'm glad I'm seeing it. I've been getting a false exposure so far. Everyone I meet is educated. They're the only ones who speak English. Most everything I see is in one of the posher neighborhoods in town. I hang out at expat bars and college clubs. Even the mountain village I spent two weeks in was financed by tourist seeing the restored Wall. On Sunday I'll begin a 27 hour train ride to the bottom of China. It's a 1200 mile voyage nearly straight south. I think I'll see the real China there.


The red line running the length of the country is my voyage. Click to Enlarge.

Tags: Treyopia current events poverty Tianjin China trains train network poor