An eventful first week of November

“Hey, how come this post only comes up so late, what has been happening in the meantime, and what about October stories?” Plain apologies, I have been kidnapped by a group of ferocious Sweet potatoes street vendors, and have not been able to write about my recent things until today! … more realistically, I have been busy trying to “activate” my life here while still spending most of my time studying for my chinese classes… It is also easier to tell you about a few “hot” stuff, although my recent stories will start with a rather cold one.

It has snowed in Beijing! Not a very small one either, the first snowfall on 1st November (the earliest since 1987!), was heavier than the light snowfalls Beijing will usually meet in the Winter. The snowfall has been overall extremely welcomed, should it be by the students of Tsinghua University who could be seen happily playing with the snow like they were some 10 years younger, and making dozens, or probably hundreds of Snowmen all around the campus (see some of the pictures – although the one by the sides of which I and my American friend Will were not made by us), or by myself taking this large white blanket as a temporary salvation to the dust and pollution, or more officially and perhaps importantly, by the farmers around Beijing for which this Snowfall is much providential. Providence, really? This brings us to an interesting subject, and I don’t know how much i may surprise you by saying the following, this snowfall may well not have been the action of mother Nature, but that of Big Brother CCP! Weather modification is an almost certain action undertaken by the Chinese government, the last important examples in date are the Ceremonies of the Beijing Olympics, and the Ceremony on national day just one month before on 1st October. At that latter’s time, the weather had been a dull grey foggy cover for a couple of days, before mysteriously rain broke out on the night before the Ceremony on the morning of the 1st, after what we were to find a perfect blue sky for the ceremony…! Normal, surprising, or rather shocking? I will let you judge by yourselves.

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Hopping back in time a little, on 31st October we were celebrating the popular Halloween. After deliberating for a while with friends for the best costume idea, my friend and I decided on becoming Korean for that night =) It is to be noted that Koreans are by far the dominating fraction of the exchange and foreign students in Tsinghua, and that they often have a pretty distinguishable style, namely thick black framed glasses, a cap set under a hood, a black shiny jacket, jeans and most importantly, an electric scooter with preferentially a pretty Korean girl at the back. I lacked the last part but did my best to reproduce the style. On that occasion we joined a Floor Halloween party with non-less original costumes as Pedophiles, Zombie and Heroes of the ancient Chinese history, all to be seen in the pictures. Later we went on with a pizza bar where we played an American style drinking game, and where it was funny that several people from the bar’s staff joined us in the end. We ended the night exploring night clubs the famous, slightly hip area of Sanlitun, where we enjoyed a Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” show in one of the club and a very nice atmosphere.

The rest of the week was full of other worthwhile events, such as an encounter with two french students of the Ecole Polytechnique Paris who invited me to attend a introduction lecture to Chinese Economy -
which gave me nothing less than answers on the mysteries of Chinese contemporary political and environmental situation – also counting my first “Chinese corner”, where the cultural exchange and mixing of local and foreign students is really the best and happiest thing I could be hoping for. These last two weeks has also been the International Culture festival in Tsinghua, with many events on the program (among which a International stands session where i ended up signing autographs at the Swiss stand in the name of the Swiss cause : other “Hop Schwytz!” and “Switzerland welcomes you!” included), and where non-surpringly, Korea played an important role as last thursday was the “Korean Day”. On the program of that day : drum, pop dance and Taekwondo demonstrations, initiation to the Korean language and writing, and costumed flirting sessions (cf my successful german friend Matthias ).

Last but not least for this week, and also the reason why I am still writing this blogpost at 2pm wearing pyjamas in my room, we celebrated our friend’s birthday last night, night on which we experienced the most diversified situations. Indeed, after starting with a delighting dinner at our favourite restaurant on campus, we (our birthday kid Matthias, an Australian born Chinese and myself) decided on going to explore the famous cultural shops and bar streets of Houhai (后海), an ancient area in the North-East of the forbidden city which has been turned into a successful entertainement area. The bar streets being endless there, we spent some one hour strolling around, tentatively being dragged by countless stalkers, after what we opted for an attractive bar which had an honest look and from which the stalker was particularly friendly. After making sure that there was no minimum charge for our stay there, we sat down with much content and ordered the usual Tsingdao. Soon after, two young ladies approached us with a flow of sweet words and smiles, to which we non-naively directly answered “do we have to pay? we’re not gonna pay anything for you to be here neither for any other service than what we ordered”. To this end, and in the following events, having improved my chinese proved very, very useful. After a couple of their lies, they still ended up here and chatting, soon after were to arrive mysterious plates of snacks and fruits, which we also strictly refused and put on the side without touching any of. While having the good hope that I might be able to handle the situation with words, I still felt relaxed and let things go such for a while. Only after I asked the girls : “we’re not gonna have to pay for the beers you two are drinking without us having ordered them, will we?” and they answered that of course, I had to pay, I realized things had already been driven a little too far. While kindly requesting them to leave, their smile gently disappeared, and that was Bill’s time. From the original 60Yuan that we would have to pay for our drinks, the Bills they presented to us was non-less than 6 times as much… While the situation seemed pretty bad and barmen were starting to accumulate around us, I convinced my friends that we were gonna get out of here without paying any more than the drinks that had been drunk. Letting out a 100Yuan bill, and along with some heavenly inspiration negotiating in Chinese, we rised and prepared for going out, and got blocked by the barmen, grabbed by the girls. It is useful to say at this point that I had taken a look around and had seen no staff with less than a headed shorter than me, which gave me confidence in our escape. Spending much time and using some tricks, we miraculously made our way out of the bar, out of which barmen got quite violent but were quickly restrained by the Boss calling them “Don’t hit, don’t hit!!”, certainly conscious of the bad consequence molesting foreigners might have for them. After some more firm “negotation”, we were even more surprised that they finally gave up and, tricking and cheating beasts they were, went back to their bar, after what we left with something of a pressed pace. This event has probably been the apotheausis of a series of bad experiences regarding Chinese’s very-developped cheating and tricking abilities, and we are getting more and more conscious and prepared on these sometime hostile grounds. A lesson is also that the so-called “ladies-bar” sometime have a very well concealed appearance, and that going out with 3 guys only was somewhat dangerous and annoying in such conditions. Fortunately, and also on own decision, the night wasn’t to be closed with such a bad event. Back to the entertainement area next to our University, Wudaokou, we decided to try our luck once more and went for a drink in a bar, although certainly with a much safer atmosphere there. While indeed enjoying a much happier time there, we were most “喜出望外” or “happy being our expectations”, as we were approached again but this time by a group of local female students, inviting us to play their favourite game, “The Killer”, which is a much popular role-play game all around China and also well known abroad. This much saner and enjoyable part was to conclude our bustling night, which proved once again this general fact about China: you are gonna live and find everything here, from the most terrible and disgusting things to the most positively surprising and enriching experience, it’s only up to you to expect, anticipate and favourably arrange your way through these!

Until next time (hopefully sooner this time ^^”), best greetings to you, family and friends, and thanks for reading!

Beijing welcomes you

Foreword : It has been a few days that I am struggling for passing through the “Great firewall of China” which prevents me from accessing as far as my innocent blog… thus I chose a temporary method, posting this article by a derived mean, please forgive the problems in presentation.

Beijing, there I am.

The question, was Beijing going to welcome me, as sung in the 2008 Beijing Olympics promotion song : 北京欢迎你 – “Beijing welcomes you”, seems to have found an answer. Although things are not neat, clean, and straightforward as I could previously experience with Hong Kong, I can already tell they have their own proper, strong character, and indeed have brought me a warm feeling entering this new world.

In the huge capital, I have found home in the non less immense campus of Tsinghua University. Located in the North-west part of Beijing, in an academic and technological area, the university can under my own estimation hold about 3 times the Forbidden City. Those who have visited the latter can have an idea of what it means… For the other, let’s say that I’ve used up my legs way enough in the two first days walking throughout the city in the city, before I was smart enough to decide acquiring a bike (a middle-ranged one, for a reasonable 260 Yuan = 43 CHF).

Somehow, this should have occured to me earlier, as I saw entire roads fenced by rows of hundreds, thousands of bikes… It seems reasonable to think that every student in the University should own a bike on his own, without what he would be wasting entire hours travelling around the campus. Considering that Tsinghua counts around 31’000 students (14’000 undergraduates and 17’000 postgraduates…!), and without counting the ghost-bikes forming whole cemitaries, this means a great bunch of bikes… But it seems I’m repeating stories of previous people visiting Beijing, yes it seems that bikes are still the actuality of the capital, and I may find my Chinese lessons taken in Hong Kong useful, and quote the following text :
“正好是下班的时间，街道两旁慢行道上成千上万的自行车像潮水一样流动。”
“Just at the getting-off-work time, the cycling lanes on both sides of the road holded tens of thousands (= a lot) of bicycles, looking like flowing tidewater.”

Even more interesting than the flow of bicycles is the corresponding human flow. What happens on the roads of Beijing seems to be naively comparable with what happens generally in China. And gliding your way through the flow of bicycles, without more specific rules, signs, but only being supported by a surrounding tide of people, forcing you into a unique but somehow comfortable way, can indeed give you an idea of living as a Chinese. What can just be observed is that, against all odds, this driving style works.

I had enough time (and I will certainly yet have much, much more) of the crude style of bicycle riding, as I was criss-crossing the campus to take the administrative steps along with my arrival here. Here, no “go take elevator n°23 to the admission office”, walking through the unique academic building of HKUST, but rather “take the 30min bus to the health and care department, dive into another crowd of incoming foreigners, and the next day, repeat the same steps for picking up the documents”. About foreigners, my thought and hope of Beijing turned out to be correct: although numerous foreigners are present in Beijing, they get insignificant and lost among the Chinese number. That is without saying that lots of them are not so easy to figure out, as a majority of foreigners is seemingly Korean, after what the fractions are more balanced between Europeans (of all kind), Americans, and other Asians.

As one of the interesting experiences in Tsinghua, I had a taste of Chinese military order as I was riding one morning through the campus alleys. A military theme started to be played at the distance (it might have been kms…!), and I was wondering if it was the normal morning motivation anthem for the students…! Riding a bit further, I caught sight of the source of the music, along with slogan shouted by apparently (again), a huge number of people. Some entire companies wearing military outfits were thus marching and exercising on one of the stadiums. The most shocking part is when I realized the groups were formed not only with men, but women along! Later, I learned from Eesa that these kind of “trainings” were compulsory part of the education for all Chinese students… Such 1 to 4-weeks trainings had to be followed up to 3 times by a Chinese student! However, no other compulsory military service exists for Chinese citizens, apparently for logistic reasons, no wonder…!

I’m surprising myself, I didn’t say anything about food yet! Here, not many surprises, I am pleasantly discovering the northern style of food and experiencing the differences with Hong Kong international diversity. Here, it seems (without asserting anything final since I have only explored few places yet) that the western food mostly has a place in fast-foods, with unsurprisingly MacDonalds, Pizza huts, KFCs and Starbucks Coffees. The second popular food might well be Korean food, which is understandable with their number here. Mostly Korean were thus populating the restaurant where I ate last night with Eesa and a fellow student from EPFL. Again, more interestingly for me, it seems that more diversity can be found in the Chinese style dishes in all restaurants, with an apparent preference for Sichuan spicy food. The food is also notably, the hell (paradise?) cheap. For reference, my last dinner in a canteen on-campus cost me 4.25 Yuan (5 including the drink), which is equivalent to… 0.7CHF. This is just to say that the extreme contrasts met in Hong Kong are here pushed way further. I haven’t yet experienced to higher side to really be speaking about contrasts though, but I’m not in a hurry to do so. I have a few dozens of canteens and restaurants to explore on-campus first! Good news is that my stomach had less trouble with “mainland food” this time, making an exception from the general rule of gastric troubles met during all previous visits to China.

For the down-town Beijing, my only exploration out of my administrative struggle has been to Xidan, which turned out to be a quite hip area, with huge shopping malls (nothing exciting here after spending 6 weeks in Hong Kong…), and a more stylished part of the population. It seemed that a couple of cool Hong Kong young people, although changing the style into something … less Hong Kong, blushing their skin white, and giving them 15 more centimeters. Hum, this is a quite poor way to summarize it. Anyway, I will have to experience and know more before giving more details. I also sadly ended up my mobile-phone enquiry there, which I have been carrying since soon after my arrival. The conclusion is that I won’t be able to make full use of my new mobile phone, as no 3G network is seriously set-up here, at least not under the same norms than Europe and conversely, Hong Kong.

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In one word, promissing!

A special day

Before I post more news and long stories (which are being delayed by my laziness and my somewhat busy though relaxing daily schedule here), I would like to give you a few simple words of a celebration that went on this last sunday.

We held a party at our little home in North Point, which was quite a challenge given the size of the 2 people apartment, and the fact that our guest list comprised 10 people. Once the problem of finding a large enough table solved, with the help of a furniture and ironing boards, we had to bought an extra 4 chairs and clean up the whole flat.

The next decision was that of the menu, and we picked the easy solution of a hotpot. For non-initiated people, the original chinese hotpot (or “Fondue Chinoise”, actually originally from Chongqing, ex-city of Sichuan province now a state on its own) is quite different from the one we know in Europe. Here the goal is to find as many diverse food as possible (meat, fish, meat and fish balls, dumplings, vegetables, mushrooms, noodles, etc…) and cook it altogether in a meat or fish based soup. We made it simple and accessible for everybody, so we avoided the more exotic meat parts that are usually available in restaurants, such as pig/beef intestine, brains, lungs, stomach, liver, throat, testi… you got the picture.

Anyway let’s save up some words for the next post, and let pictures talk for us.

A nice hotpot celebration with our common HKUST friends, from left to right: Florence, Jeannette, Len Foong, Berto, Eesa, me, Kangol, Yoanna, William

~Happy birthday Eesa~

A blog about home

After a long, very long time, I finally gathered enough courage and energy to start writing this blog, a tool that should help my close friends, family, and anyone else with an interest to follow up my “new life”, back to Asia. Writing a blog is not an easy thing, or at least, it has never been for me. The last attempt was probably almost 10 years ago,  when I proudly opened my first ever personal website: “Loloworld”, which basically had no content at all. More recently, I was considering writing a blog during my exchange year at HKUST (Hong Kong University of Science and Technology), but instead, I simply posted pictures album on Facebook with somewhat extended comments, which however became thiner and thiner with time. Anyhow, I still have a greater interest in capturing visual impressions, and thus I shall also post some of the numerous pictures I already took along with the text posts here.

Writing a blog is difficult, and a first difficulty for me was the choice of language. Unfortunately, I have received lots of negative comments on my english lately, which seemingly has become worse after lack of practice (with native english speakers or I should say, non-chinese english speakers). I still chose to start writing my blog in english. The second difficulty is then to accept a medium quality posts… Anyway, I may later write in french, and who knows, in Chinese?

Anyway, let’s come to the real thing.

My third visit to Hong Kong, actually the fourth if considering a stopover on the way back from Australia some 4 years ago, began with several familiar feelings. It all started very soon, with a distinguishable Chinese flavour in the airport’s air. I might have made that smell up, or it may have been carried by the passengers. Anyway, anyone who has travelled to Asia must agree that exotic perfumes are always here to remind you where you are. The big face-on-sticking smile is now well known among the typical Hong Kong syndroms, and I hardly noticed the stretching of my cheeks as soon as I took my first step back in the familiar environment. I should not have been surprised by the first breath of “non-conditioned” air out of the airport gates either, but the first gulp of the thick, heavy atmosphere, so different from the fresh Swiss mountains air a few days before still gave me a chill. Once these first basic feelings passed, I took the same steps as in February visiting Eesa, although this time, I took them together with her. I was happy to find back the busy apartment at 183 King’s Road, 14th floor. We’ve lived there alone for more than a week, as one of her roommates has already moved out, and the other was spending some time at his home in mainland, some 2 weeks after our arrival back to Hong Kong, we moved from Fortress Hill to Eesa’s new apartment in North Point : only a 10min walk from each other.

Fortunately, Luck has smiled back at me for a few months now, and indeed the stay in Hong Kong has had a much better start than 6 months ago. At that time, I basically had the same experience as in “Le Poisson”, a novel by Nicolas Bouvier (tribute to my highschool friends if they happen to read this blog) in which the Hero catches a nasty illness while travelling in a far away foreign country, lost somewhere deep in Africa with a high fever, hallucinating in a small hut with nothing like a comforting hand nearby. All points of reference lost, a little bit of a Hell. In my case, it was a serious stomach problem which took me back then, after overestimating my digesting skills in a Japanese food all-you-can-eat buffet in Shenzhen. I may not repeat the same mistake. Next time, I will just devour everything in the buffet avoiding the frozen sushis (hic…) and seafood. Anyway, this time is better and way better.

And as every story about magnificent Hong Kong begins with a picture of HK Skyline, I shall not break with the tradition.

Hong Kong Skyline from the Golden Bauhinia Square