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