5 normal things that can kill you in China.

         When people find out that I live in China, there usually is a series of questions they ask me, but one of the first questions is often, "Is it safe there?"
          This time last year, I would have said with full confidence that China is the safest place I've ever lived.  Now I would still say the same, as the other places I've lived are Washington, DC (murder capital of the country) and Moscow (murder capital of the world), but without the confidence.
        In the past year, I've been 1) robbed, 2) dragged out of my cab and almost down a set of stairs by a group of rabid drunk Chinese people and 3) got into a screaming showdown with the "leader of the taxi cab drivers of Dalian".
        That being said, that isn't the norm for foreigners in China. I just happen to be exceptionally unlucky, to the point where I don't even think Switzerland would be safe for me.  That being said, I wouldn't even put crime into my top 5 dangers in China because criminal activity is so scarce.  What would I put in my top 5 list?  5 things that every person in China encounters on a normal day basis.  


1) Death by Taxi cab drivers who live in a Grand Theft Auto World.
      Every single driver in China seems to think that he is Mad Max, and drives as such. 

At heart, every Chinese taxi driver is this man.

 However, even the Chinese people I met in Beijing noted how terrible the drivers are in Dalian, apparently Dalian is notorious for the death racers that are responsible for dozens of peoples' lives on a given day.  Worst of all, taxi drivers take it as a personal insult if one wants to wear a seat belt, indignantly informing the passenger that they are a good driver, then unbuckling the offending seatbelt.
 Just one example of a normal taxi drive.  
         While cheerfully asking if you like Chinese food and informing you that they like Obama/Kobe Bryant/some other American sports star I don't know, they are playing a chicken/bumper car hybrid game with their car: going into the wrong lane, driving full speed in reverse for over a mile (it was maybe the most impressive thing I've ever seen) and driving through active construction sites,  just of the top of my head.


2) Death by Mystery Meat Street Food
      "Fried tofu! How delicious!" It's not even meat, so it has to be okay right?
            Wrong. In street food, people often mix tofu with cardboard.  Can you imagine what they mix their meat with? As one might have heard, the Chinese culinary scope and width far exceeds ours in terms of what they will eat.  Which means that they will pretty much eat anything and everything, except for ice water. That means that a stick of chuar (a kabob) could be mutton, or it be the intestines of a rat.  There is a reason why Hepatitis B. is a huge problem here, and it pretty much starts and ends at mystery street food.  

Grasshoppers. 

             The worst part is that street food is curiously delicious, and most of the time, the street food is safe to eat, which lures people into a false sense of security about the food.  I've gotten around this problem by eating only seafood and vegetable chuar, which is delicious and easily recognizable.  


3) Death by being a Pedestrian 

     Being a pedestrian in China is a little like being in world where you are a bowling pin, and every car is a bowling ball that wants you dead. If you are lucky enough to make it to the safety of a sidewalk, one still must contend with the rickshaws.  As they are neither a car nor a pedestrian, they abide the laws of no man, and as such, are the lone source of anarchy in a country where everything is controlled by the government.

4) Death by Construction sites/random manholes
     When people say that China is a developing country, it isn't just economically.  It is literally developing, everywhere, in every city.  What happens when lots of buildings need to be torn down/built up in a short amount of time and there are no safety regulations?
       The question is, what doesn't happen.  Steel beams hanging above a sidewalk like an blade of destruction, sudden drops into the dark netherworld of Chinese sewage, skeletal buildings with frames held together by twine, and burning infernos of melded iron steps away from the sidewalk, these are not  occasional occurrences.  It's just a walk to the grocery store.

They'll get around to building the rest of this sometime

                      
5) Death by Fireworks
             The Chinese people are a moderate people, but when they celebrate, do they ever.  Going out for a few beers? Only if by a few, you mean "their body weight," and by beer you mean baijiu.  This is the country that only told their employees not to drink at lunchtime after heavy drinking competitions put one man in a coma and the other in a coffin in one week.  So throwing confetti? Eh, only if it is confetti of FIRE.
          As I've mentioned before, Spring Festival is the time of year when Chinese citizens throw fireworks (and caution) into the wind, with a reckless devil-may-care attitude of where the fire might land.  After all, what is the worst that can happen with millions of unmonitored pyromaniacs setting off fireworks in heavily populated cities?

Oops!

            Just to get an idea, this building is in the center of Beijing, and took up an entire block of downtown real estate.  It is now unusable, as no one can figure out what to do with the charred remains of the brand-new hotel that was build for the 2008 Olympics.

my street, full of fun and confetti

my street, under attack/"celebrating spring festival"

           For two weeks, China is under siege by people armed with a seemingly inexhaustible supply of fireworks.  And not just sparklers, but 4th of July-style fireworks as well.  They also have a cutesy type of firework that shoots balls of fire out of a tube, I discovered as I walked behind a group of little boys, all busy shooting the fireballs at the windows of the apartment buildings they saw.  
         Every year, dozens of people die, hundreds are hurt and several buildings burn to the ground, as tends to happen when dealing with combustible fire. 

In which Dalian cabdrivers prove worthless and I pull a MacGuiver

So to continue the story of my first night out in Dalian.  My friend and I ended up going out to a restaurant for a little bit, then decided to head home.

And this is actually where my night begins.  Before getting into the cab, I told him where to go, carefully pronouncing each word as it was supposed to be said in Pinyin, and in the proper tone.  The cab driver smiled and nodded and motioned for me to get into the cab.  Once in the cab, I also showed him the chinese characters of my address.  Once again, he smiled and nodded and off we went.

Within a few minutes, I was started to get- not anxious- but puzzled.  I knew that the restaurant wasn't so far from where I lived, and yet we were merging onto the highway.  However, considering the fact that I had been living in Dalian for 48 hours and this man had most likely lived in Dalian his whole life, I decided to give it a minute.

Five minutes later, I repeated the address.  This time, he didn't smile and his eyes showed his confusion.  As I was discussing this with him, and by discuss, I mean repeat the pinyin of my address over and over repeatedly, he drove me up into a dark alley next to an empty lot filled with dark, vacant buses.

  He kept on driving slower and slower, until I finally shrieked at him to stop, then once again showed him the chinese characters.  This time, however, he looked perplexed and than had a fake moment of eureka! This address isn't right! Something that he was perfectly aware of the first time I showed him the same characters.  I was left to conclude that either 1) he never had any idea of where the address was or 2) he did, and drove me the opposite was to try to cheat the silly foreigner.  Either of these options was enough to send me into a mood best described as, " a murderous rage."  That was the point when he decided to pull over to the side of the road, turn off the car, and start calling different people for help with the directions. 

As I sat there, seething at the injustice that I should be at home in my bed, but instead was on the side of the road with a lost cabdriver in a bad part of town, I decided it was better to be proactive, because to be honest, I had no faith that the cabdriver would ever find his way to my apartment

That was when I remembered the map of Dalian given to me by my school manager, which had my apartment marked on it.  The map had sat, un-opened, in my bag for the past week, but I decided to pull it out.  I showed it to the cab driver, he looked at my blankly. I was starting to lose hope, when I suddenly recalled my lesson on map orientation and positioning that I had learned from the Australian Marine I'd met in Nanjing.  Miraculously, I remembered what he said and I was able to orientate the map properly, using only the barest memories of the bus routes and the position of the sea in relation to me. 

Using this, limited chinese and miming- the cab driver and I were able to find my apartment.  I arrived at my apartment an hour and a half after I got into the cab.  The cab driver, perhaps feeling guilty, only made me pay 10 RMB- 1.3 dollars. 

The next morning when I told my roommate what had happened, her response was, "but weren't you so scared? Alone, by yourself, on the side of an unknown road with a cab driver on a bad side of town." And once she put it that way, it did seem like a frightening scenario- and maybe it was, but my anger kept my fear at bay.  Or there is also the possibilitiy that it just wasn't a frightening scenario- it just sounds like one?

Thus started my Dalian cabdriver curse- for the next two days,  all three cabs I tried to take ended up taking me to the wrong address- despite saying the proper pinyin and having the characters for all the adresses.  Trying to get to Ikea- a 10 minute drive from my apartment- ended up taking longer than it took for me to fly from Jinan to Dalian. 

Don't underestimate little old ladies.

My first night out in Dalian, I wasn't sure what to expect, but since in Jinan the main attraction on a night off was to go to Wei Weis, to watch a crazed, old alcoholic do and say ridiculous things while his despairing family looked on, the bar had been set pretty low. I figured that it could only get better.

I was right and wrong. My first night out in Dalian started with me watching two grandparents drink my friend under the table, and ended with my cab driver recreating a scene from a horror movie.

The night began with the Dalian Aston dinner, where I sat at a table with an old british grandma and grandpa. Outspoken and prickly, but nice, I enjoyed just watching them bicker as they had bickered for at least the past 4o years. As I was in a reverie, people-watching the couple, and imagining their lives as a happily-married, adventurous British couple through the 20th century, I was not taking note of how quickly they were consuming beer.

Thus, I was shocked when the grandma uttered words I never expected, " Let's bring out the baijo!" - for those of you not in the know- baijo? is a strong, Chinese hard liquor. In terms of liquids, it resembles and tastes nothing as much as battery acid. In other words, baijo is not a drink you would ever choose to drink, and most people, myself included, try to avoid it. So there was that, and then there was the fact that this woman had to be at least 65: she had eight grandchildren and had referenced an event in the early 1960s.

Elderly people, in my experience, don't drink, except for my great-aunts, but they are Italian alcoholics. It is especially unhealthy for them! However, referencing my great-aunts again, if elderly people do drink, one should NEVER, EVER drink with them, because chances are, they will be much better than you at it. You've had 2 years of drinking experience, they've have 60: who do you think is going to walk away unscathed?

The elderly couple started peer pressuring of the other people at the table to take shots of baijo, I begged off, explaining my repulsion of baijo, but my friend was roped in, as he was still new to china and thus did not understand the horrible nature of baijo.

"Let's do a drinking contest- whenever I have a bit of baijo, you have some too!" the elderly lady suggested to my friend, I desperately tried to warn him, but his reasoning was the hopeless naivete of a person whose family background is not Italian/Irish Catholic, "She's a little old lady, how bad can it be?"

Very bad, as it turned out. My friend was supposed to join my other friend and I to go out for drinks after the dinner- but by 7pm, he could barely sit at the table and was slurring his words. Meanwhile, the little old lady was still unaffected by their baijo drinking game.

New city, whole new world

I moved to Dalian this week, which is in far northern China. I was not sure what to expect, since every single chinese person I asked about Dalian had the exact same answer: "Dalian is a very beautiful and modern city." Trying to expand on that sentence is pretty much useless, because the one sentence is burned into the Chinese cultural memory, so that all they know and don't know about Dalian is wrapped up neatly into that one sentence. Circular flawed logic? is a speciality of the Chinese people.

Example:
Me: I'm excited about moving to Dalian.
Chinese Person: you should be, it is very beautiful and modern.
Me: I know, I've heard. How so?
CP: well, it is a modern Chinese city that is beautiful.
Me: Really? why is it so modern?
CP: because it is so beautiful.
Me: Is there anything else you can tell me about Dalian
CP: you might want to bring a jacket.
Me: ::exasperated sigh::

Also, side note: In China, no city is ever a godforsaken, antiquated communist shell of a city. It's either "traditional" (old and most likely poor) or "modern" (soulless, cold new buildings). That being said, as with any and every city, there are always redeeming, charming qualities. And as for me, I loved Russia, so obviously I have a thing for depressing architecture.

I arrived in Dalian, to bright blue skies, fresh air and a cool breeze. It was affection at first sight. The city is, as advertised, both beautiful and modern- most noticeably, it is clean. I live within walking distance to the beach, which is already to cold to swim in- Dalian is far enough north that it was controlled by Russia at one point, but I really don't mind after suffering through the dizzying heat of Cambodia and the oven that is Jinanian (sp?) summer. I've discovered that despite my best efforts and wishes, I handle extreme cold much better than extreme heat. Give me blizzards, white outs, black ice and hail. I'll drive all wheel-drive down an Appalachian mountain without a second thought and walk through a blizzard in stilettos. It doesn't mean I like doing it, but I've done before and I can do it again. However, put me in anything above 105 degrees, and I react not unlike the Wicked Witch of the West, in that I wilt, then melt away and am incapable of anything but the most simple thought processes, such as : "I want to lie here and not move until the Earth flies off of its rotation and away from the accursed sun."

Dalian is a bizarre muddle of the ultra-chinese version of modern architecture, which is best described as oddly shaped buildings with random cut-outs and arches, Czarist-period Russian buildings, and early 2000s-era D.C. suburbia.

I have been much better at settling into Dalian than I was in Jinan. Maybe its because this apartment isn't always on the verge of being resettled by its original occupants: cockroaches, maybe its because I'm more adjusted to China, or maybe its because I've exhausted of continually being in transit. It is nice knowing that I will be here for the next six months.

I've also found that I've picked up much more chinese by osmosis than I would have imagined. I successfully bought champagne-colored sheets, pillowcases and duvet cover for a mere $21.25 USD through hard bargaining. The fact that I haggled it down from the original issued price of around $80 USD made this hard-won purchase perhaps my most victorious moment in China so far.

I've also found since I've arrived to Dalian that I actually know a lot more Chinese than I thought. Still not nearly enough, but it was a nice surprise. I suppose in Jinan that since I had originally learned to survive and get around with no Chinese, that I just continued doing so out of habit and laziness. My moment of shock came when I was interrogating my cab driver- the 3rd I'd had gotten into on this single trip, about if he actually knew where Ikea was, or if, like the 2 previous cab drivers before him, just lied to me to get me in the cab and had no idea what Ikea was, much less where it was. I found myself using vocab that I didn't even know I had retained, and most shocking of all, he actually understood what I said, answered the questions, and I understood him. So it's a start, I suppose.