Buenos Nochas!

I can assure you there's nothing funnier than a Chinese man greeting you in faux Mexican wardrobe with an enthusiastic "Buenos Nochas!" We had arrived alive at the Amigo Mex-Tex restaurant against all odds.

A cabbie with particular fondness for adrenaline, horns, and speed tore through town with astoundingly useless danger to deliver us to the "expensive part of town." My new multi-million dollar idea is either a) IMAX of the Tianjin driving experience, b) or bring the drivers to Universal Studios and throw passengers with them on a slalom recreation of Tianjin. I've said it before and I'll say it again... Tianjin drivers are either the best or the worst in the world. The drive with absolute disrespect for any traffic law or desire for self-preservation of the species. That said, one rarely sees so much as a scratch on their cars from a collision. Perhaps pedestrians don't leave marks.

Back to the restaurant; I wanted a margarita a badly. I had subtly passed the idea of Mexican food to my colleagues as dinner time approached. By the time we hit the cabs, the taste of quesadillas and burritos were being refreshed on our mental palettes in anticipation. Unfortunately, neither was served at Amigo.

I quickly ordered my margarita. I wanted it iced. I hadn't had much ice sense arriving and the thought of ice and tequila together sounded perfect. Ten minutes later I was handed something that strongly reminded me of a snowcone. There was a scoop of shaved ice in the middle of a classic margarita cup. The margarita had been poured over it and made an inch-deep lake surrounding my small mountain of ice. It did taste a bit like a margarita though.

Slowly, in perhaps five minute increments, everyone else's margaritas arrived. I had the largest for some reason. It was noted later that every item we ordered was delivered different in some way to what should have been it's twin that someone else has ordered. I got the large margarita. Everyone else got very small micro-gin glass margaritas. We also swore that the servers had fake Mexican accents when they spoke English.

We ate... and then the bill. 800 yuan for five people. Keep in mind my 3 bedroom middle-class apartment runs around 1200 yuan a month. We moved along and realized why there were only two parties in the restaurant. In Chinese terms, it was something like an $80/plate restaurant. On a positive note, it was very clean and the service was amazing, if a bit slow on the drinks. When my camera's battery died they quickly let me borrow some of the restaurants AA's.

We ended the night at a bar called Cozy's where a band called Solitaire was performing live hip-hop covers with a standard rock-band setup + keys. Interesting stuff. This was the first time I've seen live music performed (excepting the multi-instrumentalists playing at the Mexican restaurant and the outdoor karaoke) since arriving. Brian promised the margaritas would be better here. The man is a liar... I received a micro-gin glass with a shot of tequila and a splash of lime thrown in complete with table-salted edges. I let him finish mine and moved on to beer. Tsingchao is a new favorite of mine.

Before we left I saw some Americans come into the bar. I spoke to one of them for a few minutes. He was from Oklahoma studying at Nankai University in Tianjin, one of the top schools in China. At one point he mentioned how odd it was that a lot of Chinese there spoke some German, "apparently they're studyin' somethin' called 'textiles'..."

Ahhh, we send America's finest....

I'll have pictures on here as soon as they finish uploading. By the way, feel free to browse my Flickr photoset of Tianjin. I'll be storing photos in here till I leave the city.

Buenos Nochas!



The crew: Andres, Brian, Me, Dru, Kelly Anne




Dru refilling the Micro-Martini glass with Coke

Adventarrrr!!!

Dru and I decided to get a bit adventurous and go to a restaurant by ourselves. See... a foreigner can survive eating street vendor food by pointing and saying "dao shwaw chyen" [not pinyin, I know] and at worst just handing over five RMB and expecting change back. In the street you can look and point out the meat and veggies you want on the kabob or see the single offering being served. Restaurants are more expensive but it's harder communicating. I hadn't been yet without Brian, our boss, going with us. Like I said, we were feeling adventurous.

We stopped first in the BuyNow to look for headphones on the fourth floor hamfest-ish market. I quickly got beat in the haggling game buying a smaller pair of earphones... I pointed out some cool metallic looking units and I was told 80 quai, outrageously high for China but they looked quality and had a brand name on them. I quickly retorted by grabbing at the calculator and punching in 60. She quickly agreed. Damn. I couldn't negotiate down now. I probably could have had them for 15 yuan, but ey...

We walk out and head to a resteraunt where we knew there were pictures we could point to on the menu. We sat, ordered cokes, and browsed through the menu. Dru quickly found the symbol for beef on the back of the menu. I found a picture of what looked like green beans with onion. We both agreed the lamb ribs were an easy bet... fatty, but good with no surprises. The waitress came to take our order (as a funny side note, she wore a t-shirt yesterday proclaiming that she was "kinky stripper," though her command of English was lower than my command of Chinese).

I felt an urge of randomness inside of me and as Dru finished pointing everything out, I randomly flipped to the back of the menu and pointed to a random item. It was a 9 quai dish, a little more than a dollar, and felt it a good gamble. Maybe we'd stumple into something delicious.

Our first dish arrived. It was the green beans dish. Well... green, yes... but they weren't beans. They were tentacles from our fair cephalapod friends of the deep. With onions, of course. Buy the ticket, take the ride, right? I ate them. One or two out of a giant bowl, but I ate them nonetheless. Then the mystery dish came. Shrimp with scapploped potatoes (maybe?). Dru's dish came next. He won. Awesome sweet beef in an orange sauce with tomatoes and peppers.

We go for Mexican tonight... talk about sketch, huh? A Mexican resteraunt in a dirty industrial town. I'm graving a margarita though. I'll write later about the awesome raggae bar filled with internationals last night we found last night.

Quick Notes:
- I superglued earbuds to my ear
- The Chinese don't mind wearing the same clothes days on end
- Dru found a raggae bar by the University with other internationals. The only other non-Chinese I've seen so far are with our company and the French bigwig manager at Carrefour.

First Assignment

My lazy days floating around the street corners of Tianjin looking for trouble are coming to a close. Dru and I, the two newbies, are heading to the hills with two other co-workers to interact with a group of Chinese English teachers. All we know is that it will be on the outskirts of Tianjin in the countryside where the smog isn't so thick and one can see a sunset. I'll only have a dial-up connection while there.

I'll be leading discussion on several topics concerning education, like discipline and learning differences. I was also assigned as co-leader of the 3-hour "motivation" workshop/seminar. My suggestions that we run our Chinese friends up and down hills during those three hours were ignored.

Apologies for the drunken rambling-ness that came through in the previous post.

I leave you now with a collage of the city taken from the top of the "Tianjin Book Building," a 5 story building filled with copyrighted texts. I picked up three Chinese Language books for about $10.

One Year Later.

I don't think anything has affected my distanced existence more than Nick's death a year ago today. That "year ago" is an estimate. Nobody knows. He was found July 10 in his car "four to five days" after he died.

Nick's death dropped me to my knees, literally. Nothing does that to me anymore... not China, no being fired from teaching, not breakups... just Nick. Richard's suicide two months later was a punch in the gut reinforcing Nick's absence, but the tears shed then were more for Nick - no disrespect for the brilliant mind and heart of Richard.

Chances are you didn't know Nick. Few did. Nick kind of hid in his room for the two years we lived together. Before then, only Christine and a handful of others knew who he was. He kept to himself.

I'll spare you all the details of how he and I knew each other, just know that he holds a special place in my soul now and did when he was alive. If there were ever a "soulmate" version of a friend, it was Nick. I know the feeling was mutual. He didn't come out with me friends and I much, but the nights we spent on the roof talking life, girls, family... I miss it more than anything right now.

Nick was too kind. He wasn't of or for out world. To everyone else, he wouldn't stand up for himself. To me, he wouldn't play the game... he knew right from wrong on a very intimate level. He knew where he stood in our world. He knew he wasn't shit to a boss. He knew the world saw him as one more bag boy, one more stocker, one more person who could be told what to do if thrown a buck to pay the bills.

Nick knew this... he was too intelligent not too. It killed him inside when he was alive.

He made a stand a year ago. He decided to break rather than bend to the societal pressures commodifying his being into worthlessness.

Nick knew his options: work some shit job he hated, be homeless again, or check out. He had too much pride for the first two. I support him. That's what friends do. He knew what he was doing. No one has any right making judgment unless they walked a mile in his shoes.




"You've got the harder part,
I've got the easy part,
I've got the harder heart."
- Isaac Brock.