Commuting in Beijing

Does Beijing have so much traffic that it forces cabdrivers to bring reading materials or is it that the morning reading of cabdrivers causes the traffic?

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"Reading the morning paper...while driving. Yes, his car was on and in driving gear.

40 minute Flash flood= Disaster of Dongzhimen

The importance of proper urban planning: so that every mildly heavy rainfall isn't moments away from drowning thousands of people on the metro station.


This water was actually at a low point in this picture. It took me approximately 60 minutes to fight the waves of water (...in downtown beijing) to walk the 1/4th of a mile to my apartment. One 40 minute flash flood turned all of Dongzhimen into a filthy, sewage-y chinese version of venice without boats, as the water was up to my calves. 4 scathing hot showers later, I could still smell Beijing on my skin.


And yes, the girl on the right is wearing plastic bags over her shoes.  

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"Flash flood in Beijing"

Accidentally getting Shock Therapy treatment: The 5th Worst China Hospital Experience I've had.

"Bzzz! Bzzzz!" the doctor explained to me, jerking his hands spasmodically to show the effect of electricity on one's body.  It was at this time that I first noticed that the doctor was not wearing a shirt under his doctor's coat.  My doctor was no more legitimate than my Chloe bag. Conned again.

I considered my options.  My first instinct was to fling myself off the table,  emphatically stating that there will be no electrocution of Meghan today!  Only... there were needles on my head, neck, hands, feet, arms, and chest.  The needles were attached to electric wires.  The electric wires were connected to what I could only hope was a safe-for-humans voltage box.  And the voltage box was controlled by Dr. Qu, who was currently miming the word electricity in a very theatrical way.  

Obviously, jumping off the table in a righteous fury would be challenging.  Righteous fury is often lost in translation, I don't know the word for electrocution, and most importantly, I had dozens of tiny needles piercing my skin.  

My Dr. Kevorkian/Qu smiled benevolently down at me, and I was filled with a sense of foreboding.  But the idea of plucking each needle out of my skin while trying to convey my horror seemed dismally time consuming, and I made the executive decision to just let this happen.  After all, the worst that worst that could happen: my brain frizzles. 

I passively watched as Dr. Qu turned the dial on the voltage box.  The needles started jumping around in my head while Dr. Qu interrogated me as to my favorite type of Chinese food and how I could possibly prefer Greek food to Chinese food.  

"Greece is so small!  How could you like their food more?  So strange!" he marveled.  When I noted that actually, this (meaning the electric needles) was more strange than my food preference, he and the other patients and nurses in the ward all laughed at me. 

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. 

Swine flu and Chinese hospitals: Not an ideal combination

For the past several months, I've watched the Chinese people panic over "the swine." I laughed as they became OCD in taking our temperatures on a daily basis, mocked as we were ominously warned about N1H1 via verbal and written announcements, and rolled my eyes in contempt when my coworkers and classmates started wearing face masks. 

Turns out? Swine flu? Not fun.  Swine flu with asthmatic complications? stressful. Swine flu with complications in China? Horrific.  A few months ago, I wrote about the terrible chinese hospitals and how I hoped I would never have to be in one.  I really shouldn't tempt fate. 

I had swine flu for two weeks, in which I was unable to do anything except be miserable, take the sugar pills that the Chinese refer to as medicine and get IVs.  I couldn't go to the university- my professor called me to tell me I was very sick, I shouldn't come to class, and I should be in the hospital- so I missed two whole weeks of class.  I was afraid to see anyone- I managed to infect at least seven people and made them ill as well.

When I finally emerged from the swine flu- 10 pounds lighter, dehydrated, with hands that were bruised purple from the multiple IVs I was coerced into getting and the voice of a dying cat- I emerged with the knowledge that Chinese medicine is pretty much worthless and their whole theory of medicine is based on the premise that hot water and heat heals all, which is most likely derived from the Chinese people's hatred of cold water, ice and all cold things.

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. 

Flying into Cambodia at night? Not the best idea

As I cautiously walked across the empty, stifling baggage check in Phnom Penh, still weak from being food poisoned by a tuna sandwich in the Korean airport and the resulting vomiting on a tiny, claustrophobic shuttle plane for three hours, I found myself questioning the wisdom of traveling to the 3rd world.

A few seconds later, after I emerged from the airport and saw a sea of faces staring at the door that I just came through, and was led by a man who held up a sign of Meghan and called me "egan" to a tuk tuk ( a wagon pulled by a motorbike), I was in the back of the tuk tuk driving through small, dark streets lined by piles of burning trash.

I had foolishly watched Slumdog Millionaire in the plane to Korea- and as I fearfully watched from my tuk tuk, I realized that I had seen this place before- as the slums of India in the movie. I was in Slumdog Millionaire. As the tuk tuk took me deeper and deeper into the ghetto abyss that was Phnom Penh, I had a horrifying moment of clarity.  

1) I had no idea where this man was taking me.

2) No one else did either.  

3) my organs? worth around 400,000 dollars on the black market

4) being sold into the human slave market is very prevalent in southeast asia.

5) the minute I left the phnom penh airport, I vanished. If something happened to me, no one would ever find me.  

I tried to hold back the tears and remain calm, but I couldn't help sobbing as I contemplated my fate of being sold or killed for my organs- all by my own foolish doing.  Unfortunately, since I had taken a class and done many papers on organized crime syndicates and the human trafficking, I had a cornucopia of dire visions of what was in store for me. I tried analyze my options- I had been carefully tracking our journey since we left the airport- so i knew that 3 lefts, 1 right, half a circle and 2 lefts bought me to the "villa."  I weighed my option of leaping out of the tuk tuk and making a break for it- but i knew that I would be free of the tuk tuk but still in the middle of slumdog millionaire.  

I stayed in the tuk tuk until we arrived at the villa that was surrounded by a barbwire fence.  Every window had bars on it, every door in the bleak gray building had a deadlock, the sides were covered in pieces of sharp, rusted tin to either keep me in or keep others out.  Either way, it wasn't that reassuring.  

"Where is everyone?" I asked the tuk tuk driver.  

"What?"

"Everyone else in the program- where are they?"

(pause) " they asleep." he answered as he unlocked the door to a small, sweltering room with faded white walls upon which a fresco of sad dinosaurs was painted.  The man shut the door behind me and as I took in the cracked glass of the mirror and the fact that my windows had heavy duty bars on them, I realized I really, really wanted my parents.  Then I heard the noise that I would now know as the fighting of the packs of wild dogs that roam the street of Phnom Penh at night.  

I haven't cried myself to sleep since I was 13, but I cried myself to sleep that night. I woke up at 6 am to await the awakening of fictitious "other people" that were part of the "program" which I was 95% sure was a front to capture people in Cambodia.  I also started drafting an exit strategy that consisted of me stealing the tuk tuk and driving away.  

Finally, at 9 am, my patience wore out, and I opened one of the many doors to see ....another American girl.  I have never, in my entire life, been so happy to see someone else.  

So I've just arrived back in Cambodia from Thailand- for the first time I saw the drive to the airport in the daylight- which was much less terrifying than it was the original time I arrived in the Phnom Penh airport.