Adventure in China.

Posted on August 7, 2006 by Meg

When I was younger, I really liked playing text-based computer games. I played a lot of Adventure, a game without any graphics in which you controlled the story by typing commands, like Open Door or Take Gold. Often, you needed to be very specific about your commands. Unlock Door might not be work where Use Key In Door did work, which led to pretty frustrating semantic arguments with my computer.

Sierra also did a bunch of text-based games, like the first few Kings’ Quest games. These games are why I almost always play a theif in games like Icewind Dale or WoW… I just feel the need to steal everything that’s not nailed down.

The other day, Stick and I were in a “Western” restaurant, and we wanted to get a plain pizza. Pizza’s pretty popular in most places I’ve visited in Shandong, and the menu had a vegetable pizza, a seafood pizza and a mayonaise fruit salad pizza.

I asked for a plain pizza. The waitress told me that that wasn’t possible, since a plain pizza wouldn’t taste good. I thought that perhaps one of us was using the wrong word for something, so we had the same conversation in broken Chinese and broken English. Yes, we have pizza. Yes, we cook it here. No, you can’t have a plain pizza because you won’t like it.

After promising not to complain if the plain pizza was unpalatable, and offering to pay the veggie pizza price for a plain pie, I wasn’t making any headway. A plain pizza, she assured me, would not taste good.

“Can I have a vegetable pizza with no tomatoes?” I asked, in broken Chinese.

“Yes,”

“Can I have a vegetable pizza with no onions?”

“Yes,”

“Can I have a vegetable pizza with no peppers?”

“Yes,”

“Can I have a vegetable pizza with no corn?”

“Yes,”

“Can I have a vegetable pizza with no tomato, onion, peppers or corn?”

“Yes,”

“Ok, that’s what I want.”

I went back to making googly eye with Stick, secure ing the knowledge that years of playing text-based games are finally paying off.

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Stick Eating Chinese Food

Posted on August 6, 2006 by Meg



Stick: What’s in this dish?
Meg: I’d rather not tell you.

The boy’s here, and we had disaster at the airport followed by a great time in Qingdao. More later.

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The White People Want More

Posted on August 4, 2006 by Meg

Stick and I went to Qingdao, and because he doesn’t speak any Chinese, even my rudimentary Chinese was pretty impressive. (He doesn’t know I’m saying “Buy Ticket Qingdao Two Yes?”) We walked by the beach, found a place for cucumber cold noodles (slightly different in Qingdao and Yantai, but still delicious) and walked around exploring the city for a while.

We visited St. Michael’s Cathedral. Although it’s an active church, and there were a few Chinese Catholics sitting in the pews saying the rosary, there were also signs in English and Chinese telling visitors who Jesus is and what a confessional is. Stick said that being in the church was a weird oasis of familiar in the unfamiliar… It was fun to see the Latin and Chinese side-by-side, but I didn’t feel like this bizarre German/Gothic/Chinese church was particularly home-like.

I didn’t take too many pictures because, although you’re allowed to take photos, it seemed a bit rude to the folks who where there to say a rosary. But I needed to document this Chinese-Latin inscription.

We found a little hotpot restaurant in our wanderings that afternoon. It was on Fei Chang Lu, right by our hotel, but thanks to my horrible sense of direction and not-so-great Chinese skills, we ended up taking a cab there. Actually, we ended up taking the cab to a sushi bar across the street that turned out to be closed by the time we got there.

It was great to have No Sense Of Direction Girl and No Plan Ahead Boy reunited again.

Hotpot is a strange and awesome Chinese dinner. It may be one of the rare foods I’ll miss when I go home. You are served a dish of boiling soup, I’ve heard that there are all different kinds but this place gave us half herbal and half spicy. It came in a little pan, divided into semicircles, and set on a hotplate to keep the soup at a tongue-burning tempature.

Then you pick what to cook in that broth. (Or, if you’re Stick, your girlfriend orders these dishes in flawless Chinese, because beef, mushrooms and tofu are in my very limited vocabulary) The staff all express their shock that the white woman has spoken Chinese, and then bring over a plate of spongy tofu, sall mushrooms and thin-sliced raw beef. You take, say, a piece of beef, and toss it in the spicy broth and in an amazingly short time, you pull out a piece of spicy cooked beef.

We ate awesome hotpot and drank nice, cold Tsingtao beer. In fact, it was so good that I asked the fuyuan to bring us a second plate of raw beef and she said ok, and shouted into the kitchen “The white people want more!”

More pictures from Qingdao — mostly for our parents. (Yay! I got to use the plural!)

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Shandong Stomach

Posted on August 3, 2006 by Meg

Shandong stomach — 1) n. Unexplained intestinal disturbance requiring immediate and frequent trips to the bathroom.

Usage: He won’t be in today, he’s got Shandong stomach.

Return to the dictionary.

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Populusque

Posted on August 3, 2006 by Meg

In Qingdao, there’s a stretch of coastline for the tourists. There are vendors with polished seashells, strings of Qingdao pearls, postcards and the inevitable cheap plastic crap. There’s a toilet for which you’re expected to pay admission. (Stick: I’m not paying to get closer to that smell! I’ll just pee on the street like everyone else!) Tour guides and taxidrivers shout for customers. Maybe because Qingdao has so many tourists, or maybe I’m learning to bargain better, but I didn’t feel like my white skin was blood in the water for vendor sharks.

And there are beggars. Old China hands, you don’t need to tell me that most of the beggars in China are scams. I know that begging children are usually part of a pickpocketing scheme, but they make me sad, even as I’m checking to make sure my wallet’s still there.

The beggars in Qingdao are really disturbing, with wounds and scars and missing limbs. And there are so many that I’m walking past people in dire need, because I already gave my money to the first three or four beggars I saw. Somehow you have to accept that, as you’re walking around enjoying the sea breezes, other people are not on vacation. I guess there are always other people in need, but in China, they’re literally lying in your path.

There are all kinds of food vendors, so there’s the smell of melting red-bean ice cream, hot fried fish, oniony pancakes and sausage all around.

Across the street from this hub of commerce is a Starbucks-ripoff coffeeshop. Stick and I went inside for a break from the commotion, and to take advantage of the Western toilets. Like most Chinese coffeeshops, it combined coffeehouse, pizzeria and bar.

Everything was Starbucks green, and even the name was written in Starbucks font. (There are real Starbuckses in China, the one at the Badaling Great Wall springs to mind) But the name of the coffeeshop was SPR, which we thought was a very good Roman name. As Stick pointed out, Populusque is really one word.

Sitting on a silk-covered couch, in the air-conditioning, sipping what was almost a margarita, it was hard to believe that the Qingdao tourist bazaar was just a few yards away.

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Imperfect, Tense

Posted on August 2, 2006 by Meg

Stick called midway through my teenage girls class — I was telling them that they had to be more focused, that they needed to pay attention instead of coming to class with their minds somewhere else, and then my cell phone rang. Universe: 1, Meg: 0.

“I’m here,” he said.

“What? Here? You mean, Yantai? You said you’d be here this afternoon!” I looked down at my blouse and skirt and thought lovingly of my carefully assembled airport outfit, lying in readiness on my bed at home. (I also thought of the pile of clothes that didn’t make the Perfect Meeting cut and were now lying in disgrace on my closet floor.)

“I’ll come get you in one hour,” I said. The girls were lucky — for the rest of the class, none of us really had our brains in the classroom. We had a very creative lesson on imperfect tense, that’s the interrupted or incomplete action. I was teaching when the boy called. And 12:01 I was running down the stairs into a taxi.

I fished in my bag for something to put in my face, thinking of the lipstick, eyeliner and earrings, arranged next to my sink like little soldiers ready for action. I found some strawberry lipgloss, but everyone who’s been in China is laughing at the futility of putting on makeup in a moving cab.

The taxi driver wanted to know who I was meeting, and when he was arriving, and what airline, and how long he’d be staying and all sorts of questions and didn’t bleive me when I said I didn’t know enough Chinese to answer him. But we were in the one and only cab in Kaifaqu with A/C so I just smiled and repeated the few phrases I could say. I imagined a hungry, tired and disoriented boy would be walking though the airport and wondering when I’d show up.

We pulled up outside the airport, and I started to ask the driver to wait a moment while I got Stick and then drive us back to Kaifaqu, when he said “Look, your husband!”

And there was Stick, standing in front of the terminal, surrounded by bags that held peanut butter cups, Nutella, lotion, tampons and — alas for him — only one shirt. My boy. In China.

I stared at him in the cab. He’s been going to the gym with Hugo. I know he doesn’t want to hear this, but there’s more gray in his hair. The stress of dating me, perhaps?

“You look exactly the same,” he said. “You’re beautiful.”

Perfect.

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Seventeen Hours Late

Posted on August 1, 2006 by Meg

Pie2k is a webcomic my old boyfriend Matt writes about a bunch of crazy characters who bear an uncanny resemblance to his college friends. In one strip, a young man called “Miko” is waiting for a visit from his friend “Anja”, who lives in Massachusetts. Poor Anja is unavoidably detained on her way, and ends up seventeen hours late. I’m not saying she’s got anything to do with me, of course. Not at all. And clearly Miko is exaggerating because Anja was really only about 40 minutes late or something. Not seventeen hours!

Stick’s plane to Beijing is now more than seven hours late, so he’s missed the last flight to Yantai by about 4 1/2 hours. That means I won’t see him until he arrives in Yantai tomorrow… seventeen hours late.

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Extreme Teaching!

Posted on July 31, 2006 by Meg

English summer camp started last week. I like my girls, and I’m glad that I have a job, but I still feel a little bit bad for these kids. They don’t really get a proper vacation, sincea break from regular school is a chance to take extra math lessons, tae kwon do classes, English lessons, dance classes. My students have fuller schedules than I do! (That is not hyperbole) Every minute I spend reading a book or acting like a teenager with Dave and Zorro is a minute our students need to spend studying.

I love pre-teens and teenagers. It’s kind of a joke in the office that I wish I had all teenage classes, since the other teachers like to avoid them. Honestly, I would trade my adults for teenagers in a heartbeat. My girls play games, tease each other and ask questions. The adults are usually fine products of the Chinese school system who just want to sit quietly and learn English via repetition and lao wai osmosis. They base their English level on how many words they’ve memorized, not on how much they can express in English.

And that’s why I love teenagers. With girls, though, you need to show no weakness. I spent quite a while planning my first-day activities and my contingency plan in case my lessons flopped or turned out to be too difficult. A slight sign of hesitation, and they swarm like sharks smelling blood in the water. They are a rabid fashion paparazzi regarding the American teacher. But they’re worse to each other, and they turn on each other Lord Of The Flies style in seconds. If it sounds like teaching 15-year-old girls is an extreme sport, well, that’s because is it.

(This is not a photo of me teaching. It’s a photo of me after a few bottles of sake with Dave. But this is how I look in class with the teenagers. Happy, I mean. Not half-drunk. Yeah.)

Today I was covering past progressive with past simple. I started by telling them about the time our class stole a car.

“While the man was shopping inside, I stole his sports car.” I said. “When I was driving it away, I saw it was low on gas,” Recognition showed on their faces, they realized I was kidding. Then they started to add to the story, telling me that they stole a car and robbed a bank. But the bank only had 2 kwai, so they robbed a store with a gun, hid the money in the zoo under the tigers and spent rest of the money on candy.

I don’t know if their English has improved yet, but their creativity surely has.

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Maturity Level

Posted on July 30, 2006 by Meg

Last night, Dave, Zorro and I went to play pool. Actually, they played pool and I cheered. I tried to take pictures, but as soon as I took this one, an employee told me not to. (I was thrilled when she repeated it in English and I asked her if they served cocktails at the bar, but her entire vocabulary was “Forbidden take photos”. Oh well.)

“If you had to date a cartoon character, who would it be?” Dave asked after a few minutes of playing. Maybe he just wanted a break in our highly-mature stick and ball jokes. “Mine would be She-Ra… or Jessica Rabbit. Meg, you’re next.”

“I don’t know.”

“Optimus Prime is a nice Jewish boy,” Dave suggested.

“Nah… Tenchi Muyo!” I said. “No, wait, can I date Sluggy Freelance? Even if he’s not strictly a cartoon character?”

“You are such a nerd,” Zorro told me.

“Only another nerd would know,” I said. “Go on, who would you pick?”

“Um. Jasmine.”

“Oh, yeah, she’s hot,” Dave said. “Heh, you knocked my balls in,”

I can’t believe we’re in charge of children.

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RPG Withdrawal

Posted on July 27, 2006 by Meg

I watched Lord of the Rings the other day, and I started to really miss my D&D group. That’s a nerdy compliment to my RPG friends back home. And then Dave came by with Superman Returns, and even though it wasn’t so great, I started to miss playing Abberrent. Evan, my old GM, would never had allowed such a lame storyline in one of our games! Dave still owes me 5 jiao for guessing the ending.

So today, when I was in Dave’s DVD Store (Hey Nick, where is your DVD store? Is it in Kaifaqu?), and I saw the sequel to the D&D movie… I just had to pay the 5 kwai and go home to watch my gaming movie.

When will I learn my lesson about sequels? I mean, the original D&D movie was barely worth watching, and that was only because I had a crowd of nerds. This time, it was The opening sequence is a lot like the opening sequence of LOTR, only terrible. It’s almost a parody, but parodies are usually funny. Here is a sample of the narration:

I, the evil villian of this piece, am undead, which means I’m not alive any more but I’m still alive and thinking of ways to ruin the protagonists’ lives. I am after an orb of power which will enable to me CONTROL THE WHOLE WORLD!!!!

“An artifact of extreme power? I bet the GM’s girlfriend has it.” I said. My coffeetable thought this was very funny, but unfortunately it responded to this, and all my other witty comments, with resounding silence.

Then later on:

Mages like me use arcane magic, which means we study and read old books. There’s also divine magic which comes direct from the gods. I took that as my restricted school, but if I pick up the Mountain Dew for next week’s game, I bet the GM will let me.

Unfortunately I have no other quotes because I had to turn it off.

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