ChinaBlog Day 03

We spent today setting up our studio spaces and buying cell phones. I have 50 Yuan on my new phone. How many minutes is that? No idea. Absolutely none. Nobody else knows either. So we're just waiting until we run out to see approximately how long 50 Yuan gives us. But I am now the proud new owner of a Motorola C118. It cost 90 Yuan, which is a bit over $10. Then another 50 Yuan for a sim card (with the minutes on it), and I was good to go. This is apparently how Chinese people get their phones. No contracts, no credit cards, just good old fashioned cash for goods. Here's how it works: You walk into the first room of the electronics store where they sell sim cards. They flip open a binder with pages and pages of phone numbers written on it with prices next to them. The prices are all different, not for how many minutes are associated with the card, but for how lucky the digits in the number are. So, and I'm completely serious here, I saw a number on one page that ended in 8808, and it was 1300 Yuan. That's almost $200. I took one that ended in 1536 (it was the cheapest one not taken on the first page, and it's similar to my grandparents’ address), and it cost $50 Yuan. It had $50 Yuan worth of minutes on it. The 8808 number also had $50 Yuan on it. No difference but whether or not you get hit by a bus in the near future. Actually, it’s not a bad deal. But I’m just going to take my chances.
--Getting hit by a bus is not all that farfetched. I can’t believe what I’m seeing when I’m in a cab or walking on the street. There is an obvious pecking order strictly related to size on Chinese streets. Buses rule like iron-fisted lions. If a bus is coming your way, I don’t care if you are rolling around in a Sherman tank, you get your butt up on the sidewalk. Cabs occupy the next rung down, and will literally push people on scooters and bicycles out from in front of them with their bumpers. Next come all kinds of the teensiest little ‘cars’ that ever did putt. They are shaped exactly like cars back home, but at two-thirds scale. My favorite automobile on the road is a minivan (and I mean that so very literally) that looks like those 80s Mitsubishi box-vans with the little wheels, but they are so small that only two people can fit side to side in the seats. Just a driver and passenger shoulder to shoulder up front, and two similar seats in back. The wheels look like they came from a 1960s Mini Cooper. I can’t tell you how hilarious it is to find one of these things rolling up on you at 50km/hr, horn blaring like a stuck pig, 4 feet wide, 5 feet tall, weaving between the bicycles with a bus complex, expecting the cab you’re in to just hop out of the way. Sorry, little dude, we eat you for breakfast. Go find a sidewalk to play on. Before I came here I thought it might be a good idea to pick up a cheap bicycle just to get around town. Now I’m not so sure. Even though there are tons of bikes on the streets at all times, I think the idea of being ended by one of these ovens on wheels would just be too embarrassing to handle. I heard that if you are run over by a car that you could otherwise pat on the head and read a bedtime story to, you are forever relegated to a special in-between place.
--So I hope everyone is doing well. I’m managing to survive. Tomorrow we look for apartments.
*UPDATE*
--Oh man. Dinner was crazy. Think of any vertebrate animal on land or in the ocean, and it probably met its demise for our dinner, whole and smoking. Turtle, crab, duck, fish, pig, rabbit, chicken, tofu. Whole. Smoking. They clearly just grabbed whatever they could find out back, threw it in the fryer, and slapped it down on a plate. I was out to dinner with 6 other people at our professors' favorite restaurant. It came highly recommended. I think they were messing with us. We spent so much time working the tiny bit of meat out from between the myriad bones, shells, and exoskeletons, that by the time it got to our mouths, we'd forgotten why we came to China in the first place. By the way, I'm not quite sure how they did it, but the tofu was the worst dish of the night. It smelled. Exactly. Like dirty pig butt. And I know it smelled. Exactly. Like dirty pig butt, because one of the guys at the table, when attempting to discern what this awful stench emanating from the tofu bowl was, exclaimed, "Oh, I know! I used to own a pig. And that's. EXACTLY. What his butt used to smell like! I knew I recognized that stench!" To the point where we had to continually shift the tofu on the lazy suzan to the one empty spot at our 8 person table, because otherwise the stench would waft past the other non-food on your plate and make the whole thing rear-endy. We tried to wash it down with liquid, but the water we asked for came steaming hot. So we ordered wine, which came even hotter and in a special double-decanter full of boiling water that the hot wine container sat in to keep it nice and hot. The hot fumes from the hot water and the hot wine mixed with the gag-inducing butt-soy stench and the interminable cracking and spitting out of bones, shells, and exoskeletons. I can still smell it, and now I'm both incredibly hungry and incredibly not. 300 Yuan ($40) total for all seven people. What a bargain.
-c