Travelogue

Since last I wrote, I’ve been to two more cities; spent 21 cumulative hours on trains; decided that hot water is just as good as cold; stayed in a hotel room where I had two beds to myself, and on the floor of a cheap apartment; and met the Marxist, the democrat, and the apathetic. Thus I have a good deal to say, and even a few pictures to share. Feel free to break this up into more than one sitting, as I probably won’t write until next weekend.


To begin where I left off: I spent my last day in Shanghai with David, Lisa, and David’s roommate Will. I have no photos, but here are the text highlights:
 - the weekend Marriage Market in the central square of Shanghai, where residents (mostly parents, it seems) post brief, 1-page personal ads and look for possible matches. Most of the ads (which are simple, and look like they were done on Microsoft Word, 60-point font or so) list height, weight, occupation, and skills, and they generally seem to be for men and women in their late 20s or 30s – which makes sense to me as I’ve noticed a lot of young couples with children, and it’s probably around that age that people (especially girls) start getting worried that they won’t be able to find a partner.
 - the Bund, the riverside portion of what used to be the old International Settlement (late 1800s to World War II) . A lot of the “colonial” architecture has been preserved, and it’s a beautiful area. When I was there, though, I was also imagining how it looked in the early ‘40s, after months of fighting with the Japanese in 1937. The Settlement itself was generally spared (partly to avoid angering the western powers and partly because the majority of its population was Japanese), but the area around was completely devastated by bombing; W.H. Auden once described it as “a watch stopped in the desert.”

Then began the 14-hour journey in a “hard seat” (fortunately it was in reality soft, this time) on the slow train to the city of Jinan.

Being packed like a sardine into a Chinese train is an experience everyone should have before they die.  (Disclaimer: You will not feel this way when you are trying, to no avail, to get some sleep at 3 AM; instead, you will be thinking, “Why oh why didn’t I spend the money for a sleeper?”) I drew a lot of stares as I boarded and wove/pushed/excused my way through the packed aisles (“no-seat” tickets are sold all the time, and trains to and from Shanghai are especially busy now because of the World Expo), and eventually found myself sitting across from a student. He was a nice guy, quite willing to talk, and after the preliminaries we got down to what he really wanted to discuss – the quality of the Chinese educational philosophy (high), the truth of certain of Marx’s words (obvious), etc. He was a nationalist but not a particularly angry one, and he forgave me a faux pas which I will not soon make again (“How long will you study in China?” “7 months; then I’ll go to Taipei for 7 months.” “Taiwan is part of China.”), taught me a card game, and now keeps in touch by text far too often.

In Jinan, a city of a few million (not large by Chinese standards), I was received by Kaili, a girl with whom I had set up a meeting on Couchsurfing. Kaili is a lovely girl but simply can’t find it within her to speak at a reasonable pace; the phrase I heard most often from her was, “You still don’t understand, do you.” For all that, we got along shockingly well but the best of Jinan was yet to come.

It turns out that Chinese ho(s)tels need a special permit to house foreigners – and as Jinan, unlike Beijing, isn’t a particular tourist destination (there are no hostels), only the larger and more expensive hotels hold such a permit. So since Kaili couldn’t actually host me herself (her parents, she had informed me when I first contacted her, wouldn’t allow guys to stay over) and neither of us had anticipated the permit situation, I ended up in a two-bed room at an unnecessarily pricey hotel - $25 per night is painful when you were expecting to spend that amount over all three nights – and was clearly not very happy about the outcome. She made some calls on my behalf throughout the day and eventually found me a male friend (though I found out later that she had never actually met him in person) to stay with for the next two nights.

 my room at the hotel

Lv Chengliang lives with his friend, and his friend’s girlfriend, in an apartment that’s worlds away from anywhere I’ve stayed before, and of a type that’s much more common in China than any given hotel. Below is the 2-minute video tour, which I think you’ll find interesting. (Disclaimer: I was under the impression that my camera didn’t record sound.)






Things to note:
 - the very simple bathroom: combination shower, water heater, and squat toilet. In China, sit-down toilets are reserved for nicer hotels or places that cater to foreigners, but I’ve found that I really don’t mind. When the whole apparatus is set up right and kept reasonably clean, squat toilets are both more sanitary – you’re not sitting where someone else has just sat – and, apparently, may also better for the prostate, some preliminary research shows.
 - the food left out in the kitchen/washroom. I didn’t see a single fly while I was there, though; I’m not sure how they do it.
 - the water heater (not cooler). In China, cold water is for noobs and generally considered less healthy; also, tapwater that hasn’t been boiled might well give you diarrhea. Hot water (but not cold) is free at restaurants, hostels, and even available from a spigot on every train.
 - the lack of air conditioning (or heat). When I was there it was already regularly above 90 degrees, but they make do with a fan, when need be.
 - rent per month: ~$120. This is considered semi-steep because the apartment is well situated in the city.

Chengliang's apartment: main entrance, 4th floor on the right

The three of them “很会过日子”－ a phrase that basically translates to “really know how to live life,” and includes the concept of saving money to be used at the right time instead of spending it on frivolities. (For example, Chengliang’s passion is travel, and hiking; he recently returned from a six-month tour around much of the country and is now looking for a new job.) We did a lot of walking around “Old Jinan,” including the semi-famous, potable (gasp) springs during the day, where the elderly all come to fill large jugs of water for tea, and the Great Ming Lake in the evening, where we saw someone throw a huge fish on the ground until it expired and met a friendly old man practicing the flute. We also hit the alleys a little bit, and Chengliang showed me a loud, merry little hole in the wall where people eat and drink outside and the old men clamber over the barricade to swim in the freezing cold water at dusk.

 filling my bottle with water from the Jinan springs

One of the things we talked about was why, although they’re friends on Couchsurfing and live in the same city, Chengliang and Kaili have never actually met up. Class is clearly an issue: Kaili is studying music, took me to some pretty trendy/expensive places, and didn’t bat an eye at the same hotel fee that made Chengliang blanch. Beyond that, though, Chengliang seemed to put a lot of stock in the idea of the ‘decade gap,’ saying that at 24 he wouldn’t have much common with a 20-year-old like Kaili, which surprised me. Apparently, conventional wisdom on birth year in China goes like this: Those born in the ’70s reaped some of the fruits of Reform and Opening prosperity but still do things the traditional way; those born in the ’80s are more capitalist and outward looking, borrowing money, traveling, etc; and those born in the ’90s are kind of coddled and just spend their parents’ money.

My favorite memory of Jinan will always be our lunch together in the apartment: eggs, sausage, beer (you get it measured out into a plastic bag, ~$.10 per mug, and take it home), salted peanuts (to encourage imbibing; apparently the men of Shandong Province are formidable drinkers), and salad with a little bit of everything in it. Just eating, talking, drinking (the rule: you say ‘cheers’ whenever you drink, and you don’t drink alone), and making merry. Then a siesta so that your body can comfortably digest everything you’ve just put into it.

 lunch

 beer in a bag

 from right: Chengliang, his friend, his friend's girlfriend

I’m tired of writing, so photos will have to suffice as the main diary of my two days in Beijing. The traveling is over, though, which is tragic. Now, I’m now happily in my Beijing Language and Culture University dorm room, forced to focus on practical matters – room key, internet, notebooks, which Chinese level I want to take, etc.

 the Chairman Mao Mausoleum, view from the Forward Gate

Tiananmen: the actual Gate of Heavenly Peace, looking north from the Square. "Long live the People's Republic of China. Long live the great solidarity of the people of the earth."

Tiananmen Square, from the northwest corner. I imagined the 1989 protests and felt cold all over. Note the massive TV screens occasionally flashing direct propaganda: "Remain committed to putting people first," etc. Another one I saw was, "Continue to support the unending liberation." Most Chinese nowadays, though, tend to be apolitical, and participation is no longer required.

The gates, palace, and in fact the entire old city are aligned along the north-south axis according to fengshui principles. The south is auspicious because it represents light and the male; the north, much less so for its association with the opposite.

the mouth of the large, touristy Qianmen Street leading south from the southernmost Archers' Gate

"We humbly wish Chairman Mao long life without end." Found on the wall of an alley.

 we all have our minorities to represent: a piece of the massive Chinese Museum of Women and Children

"As cranes fly in pairs, so humans walk hand in hand. Love deeply, and a hundred years will bring no regrets." Wall in an alley. 4x4 symmetry; end rhyme in all four lines; each line ends with a different one of the four spoken tones. Curious mixture of traditional, simplified, and archaic/alternative characters.  

And to end with, a few lists and some miscellany.

Happiness and Victories:
 - my discovery that all of my ground travel so far, plus my World Expo ticket, fits into the amount that the Light Fellowship provides for a taxi to and from the airport
 - getting through my three days in Jinan, quite comfortably, using only Chinese
 - buying $10 sneakers at a supermarket
 - finally finishing Out of Africa on the curb outside of Chengliang’s apartment
 - while finishing Out of Africa, being approached by one of the adorable little girls playing outside, and given a teddy bear bookmark. “This is to put in your book so you can remember your place.” So cute I almost died.
 - bargaining. Mostly I just do it for fun – I especially love pretending I don’t speak Chinese, getting offered 4x the price I just heard a vendor offer a Chinese person, and then bargaining down to a quarter of the latter – but I did get the Little Red Book, with both Chinese and English text, for $1.50.

Pain and Defeats:
 - my discovery that I misread the price of a tea presentation/tasting at a pretty nice tea shop, and that I owed almost the equivalent of the aforementioned taxi budget. I’m still only 85% sure it wasn’t a scam – it had some of the hallmarks of one, but also various mitigating factors – but either way it was my own pride that got in the way. Well, live and learn.
 - being super proud of having given directions for the Beijing Railway Station to visitors from another part of China, and realizing the next day that I had made a mistake. Um… hopefully the made it to their train in time.
 - getting some kind of rash on the insides of both feet. The shoes? My socks? Well, 没什么大不了的。
 - Still being largely unable to understand what people are saying to each other, and what faster talkers or the older generation are saying to me. And don’t get me started on the dialects – China has 56 ethnic groups, and some cities even have their own way of speaking (for example, Shanghai… and Jinan.) Along with a host of things I already dislike about my Chinese, I’m suddenly acutely aware of how horrible my comprehension is – and I don’t see much hope for fixing it in the near future just by putting in a lot of classroom time.

Of interest:
 - All of the trees leading up to Beijing seem very young. A guy on the train said the oldest was probably planted 20 years ago.
 - Besides essentials like tonight’s World Cup and some random, insane Japanese channels, as well as channels in a whole bunch of languages (this is the Language Study University, after all),  my TV gets 光阴的故事. It’s this popular, melodramatic, and (I think) hilarious Taiwanese soap opera that my language exchange partner once told me about, and right now I’m watching this fantastic (and, to a lot of Taiwanese, very topical) episode where the daughter has decided to marry an American and the grandparents are all upset about it.
 - The closest that individual Chinese come to private land ownership, at least in this area of the country, is a 70-year lease; after that, it reverts to the government and it must be bought again. For this, I was given a reason I’ve heard for a lot of things throughout this past week: There are, I am reminded, a lot of people in China.
 - Jinan, not a particularly important or international city in terms of China as a whole, has an Alliance Française!

 - Speaking of the University of Shandong... I graduated, and have decided I don't need to go back to Yale.

Until next time.

Shanghai

Edited 6/7 for grammar and a French wedding.
 

Shanghai. In decades gone by, formerly known in the West as both "The Paris of the East" and "The Whore of Asia." Still arguably China's most international city - though Toby Lincoln (our "Urbanization in China" visiting professor this past year) makes a very reasonable case that no Chinese city can be considered international/global until the non-Chinese population actually becomes integrated into its fabric, which hasn't yet happened anywhere in China.

When I finally arrived at the city center after more than 24 hours of travel, the first thing I had to do was buy a train ticket for my next destination because travel to and from Shanghai is so difficult right now due to the World Expo. After a fairly harrowing set of interactions, during which I decided that the price on the automatic ticket machine was absurdly expensive for standing room only, I finally emerged from a different ticket window, the proud holder of a seat on a ~14-hour night train to Jinan. This is the kind of thing that my China compatriots had to do all the time last summer while I lived a fairly sheltered life in Taipei, I suppose; it feels like a great triumph to me anyway.

Then I stumbled across a public phone, called David, crashed at his luxurious Bulldogs-in-Shanghai apartment (do I have an entire two-bed room to myself? indeed I do), and made the most horrible Chinese phone call of my life to my soon-to-be host in Jinan. It involved multiple massive misunderstandings, but with a bit of help from David and a second phone call, we sorted it out. If nothing else, it rounded out the evening with a reminder of what every day in a Chinese-speaking country is like for me: a thrilling but nauseating roller coaster of peaks and drops, as my pride and self-confidence are continually shattered and rebuilt.


Highlights from yesterday:

1. Obtaining a SIM card and a bunch of cash. All of this turned out to be much easier than in Taiwan, where you had to be 21 to get the SIM card and getting foreign currency involved a whole mess of obnoxious fees. Note to fellow students: Get a Bank of America account now, and withdraw from ATMs at China Construction Bank [中国建设银行] for no fee; traveler's checks are also fine but unnecessarily bulky and you get a teensy bit less bang for your buck.
2. A lovely walk in the park at People's Square, some spying on the young men in fatigues drilling martial arts forms in the compound next door, and a tour of the Shanghai Museum. It didn't strike me as very impressive considering Shanghai's size and the English translations were surprisingly spotty, but it did have plenty of beautiful seals and paintings, as well as one of the famous oracle bones.
3. A trip to the Shanghai Library - I can't be staying in a big city and not inspect its library - where I decided I simply had to get a library card (for <1USD, who can blame me?) and take a look at some old maps of Shanghai in one of the reading rooms.
4. Running across the end of a French wedding as the group made its way out of the consulate and the groom executed a few worrying turns with his new bride on one of these funky little cycles with sidecars in the middle of the Shanghai streets. It turns out that this was the same wedding party that later ended up at the restaurant Lisa is working for.
5. The World Expo. I had been considering not going after a pretty disappointing review by my friend Shaun, but I didn't have any particular plans for the evening so I got a night ticket (also on Shaun's advice) and checked it out. While it was reasonably fun, I'm glad my expectations weren't too high. The Expo is basically place where each country (and, in China's case, province) gets to build or rent a structure - the word "pavilion" is definitely an understatement for many of these places, and in fact the architecture of these buildings is one of the principal highlights of the Expo - and then fill the place with a description of why that country is awesome. This is often done by an impressive entertainment system (e.g., a movie that plays on all four walls and the ceiling) and some interactive/high-tech systems which provide the highlights (e.g., Shandong Province as the home of the appliance/electronics giant Haier). Some pavilions have particularly good reputations - Japan's is supposed to be mindblowingly high-tech, and Saudi Arabia's has had the most money poured into it, and France's houses seven nearly priceless works of art - but anything in the top 40% or so had a line of almost 3 hours long at the very least, and since I was alone I just wasn't prepared to stand there for that long. So instead, I spent the evening patronizing authoritarian regimes: I saw some beautiful metalwork at Anhui Province, wove a stitch into a Persian rug at Iran, bought "The Life and Writings of Kim Jong-Il" for cheap at North Korea (I have to save a kitten sometime soon to atone for that), and visited the (fake) snow-and-ice room at Kazakhstan.
6. Getting home was an adventure. I decided I didn't want to take the bus out of the Expo (it couldn't be that far, right?), so I ended up being the only human being on a stretch of 8-lane parkway that had been shut down for the Expo. When I finally escaped, I let some random guy convince me that the nearest metro station was too far and I should take the ferry instead. That was actually a lot of fun, but I ended up semi-lost on a dark street and finally caught the last train to somewhere reasonably close to David's apartment.
7. My t-shirt: Rewon Child, it must be said, is a genius. His "老外" t-shirt ("laowai" is a slightly disrespectful term for "foreigner") is now #1 on my list of 'Things I Would Have Regretted Leaving at Home' - followed closely by items like 'my passport' and 'money.' Chinese people, it seems, think it's hilarious, and if I measure my success by how much laughter I cause in any given day, then yesterday was an epic win. Moreover, it turns out that having people laugh at a t-shirt has two excellent results for the wearer. One, it allows him to start a conversation: if I had wanted to make dozens of Shanghai friends yesterday, I'm sure I would have filled my quota. Two, it loosens people up: even the military policemen and subway security, whose principal duty seems to consist of looking tough and surly, smiled more often than not. In fact, the only photo we may ever see of me at the World Expo (I brought my camera along for the day only to discover that I had left the batteries in my backpack) was taken by an older woman who promised she'd e-mail me a copy.

And that's all, folks. David's finally come back with food from my favorite store in Asia (i.e., Carrefour), so we're going to have brunch soon. Later I'll go visit the Bund - the eastern, riverside end of the former International Concession in Shanghai - and take another trip to People's Square (apparently there's a 'Marriage Market'?). After that comes my train ride to Jinan, the centerpiece of my pre-class summer travels.

We'll catch up in Beijing.

~Ethan

To Sail Beyond the Sunset

My flight to China is fast approaching - less than 48 hours! - and although it feels like I've been out of school for months, I'm still having trouble thinking of my looming departure as a real, upcoming event. I imagine I'll only start to feel the transition when my backpack is on, and then on the plane as it fills with Chinese people. (If my flight to Taiwan was any indication, there are always a lot more Chinese and Chinese-Americans going to China than there are white guys like myself.)

Maybe one of the reasons why this doesn't seem real yet is that I don't have a visa. I was supposed to get some documentation from the Chinese university so that I could apply for a student visa. I waited, and waited, and it simply... didn't come. According to the secretary of the Harvard program, I'm the only one she knows of who hasn't gotten the paperwork. Perhaps it's because I originally tried to send over my Spanish passport information to save money (note to future Light Fellows: don't do this. Just don't.), but I later sent in my American info and was told that they sorted that issue out before any of the paperwork was sent to the university... So maybe it's because my town's post office is horrible, or because my parents lost the letter when it arrived (I've been away from home for a few days at a time in the past weeks), or even because I've been to Taiwan and that requires further review. I don't know. All I know is that I'm taking the earliest train to New York tomorrow to try to get a tourist visa at the Chinese embassy, and that there are a few potential issues that could come up. I'm trying to keep a positive outlook, but I can't help dreading the possibility of missing out on Shanghai and Jinan and having to pay $300+ extra to change my flight if my visa isn't in hand by tomorrow afternoon.

How do you prepare for a year abroad? I'm sure everyone does it differently, but here's what I've been up to:

1. Spending a lot of time with friends. Maybe a year isn't all that long, but I intend to "go dark" to an extent while I'm away (deactivating facebook, lengthening my characteristically excellent response time to e-mails, etc), so I've recently been doing what some might call an excessive amount of camping, board games nights, and ice cream outings. A group of us from high school are still very close, and I definitely don't want to lose that.
2. Putting my house in order. E-mails, letters, paperwork... a lot of things piled up over the past year, including messages to people (the foreign-language ones are the worst; I'll put them off for months and months at a time), and I wanted to get through all of them. Also, to be honest I just don't want any unpaid debts from the U.S. haunting me while I'm abroad.
3. Making bank. I've worked 50 or so hours, some at Yale and some from home, to make sure I have some cash to pad my trip.
4. Gathering supplies. All you used to need on the Oregon Trail were bullets and food; but traveler's checks, a Bank of America debit card, and prescription drugs are some of the new must-haves for this particular journey.
5. Reading. I'm in the middle of Out of Africa, which happens to be a fantastic book, but more topically I've also been checking out some news sources and blogs on/from China, most of them English-language because that's much more efficient for me right now. Probably my favorite to date is ChinaSmack (for an absolute gem of a Chinese internet sensation, watch this video), but there are plenty of others and I can't possibly keep up with all of them. I've also borrowed Spence's Search for Modern China, and I was hoping to read it before I leave to solidify a semester of 'History of Modern China' learning, but tragically I don't think I'll even get to crack it open at this point.
6. Telling myself I'll review my Chinese but never really getting around to it. I'm kind of hoping to place down a level at my summer program anyway, to build my base.

Assuming I do get my visa in time, here's my itinerary for the coming year:

• 6/2: Wheels up in NYC.
• 6/3-6/5: Shanghai. World Expo (?) (I might not actually go. My friend Shaun tells me the lines are super long and it's kind of expensive.); visiting some places I've read and written about in my second essay for 'History of Modern China.' I'll be staying with David Demres, an excellent cook, traveler, and blogger who was also in Taipei with me last summer.
• 6/6-6/8: Jinan, a city in Shandong province. I'll be couchsurfing with someone I don't actually know, but this is actually the most exciting part of my pre-Beijing plans so far: staying in a random city with someone semi-average, and speaking Chinese.
• 6/9-6/10: Beijing, pre-program. Just walking around, staying in a hostel for two nights, etc. I'd like more time to get to know the city a bit before I get cooped up in the (luxurious) dorms offered by HBA (the Harvard program), but I had to make some compromises.
• 6/11-8/13: Beijing, HBA.
• 8/14-9/6:  A hitherto unplanned trip to The West (TM): Shanxi, Shaanxi, maybe Inner Mongolia, Gansu, Qinghai, and finally Xinjiang. My two requirements are that I 1) cross at least part of the Gobi Desert, and 2) take the 2-day train back from Urumqi to Beijing.
• 9/7-12/10: ACC in Beijing. (ACC = Associated Colleges in China, the Chinese language program run by Hamilton College.)
• [11/11-11/14]: vacation and visit to Laiwu No. 1 Middle School, a (high) school with which my high school in CT began a 'sister school' relationship during my senior year.
• 12/11-12/20: Travel toward the southwest somewhere. Very unplanned as of yet.
• 12/21+: Back in Taipei! attending ICLP (International Chinese Language Program), which I also went to last year. (See earlier entries in this blog for details.)
• Summer '11: I hope to secure an internship in Taiwan, ideally placement by the State Department at the AIT (American Institute in Taiwan) in Taipei.

And finally, a note on this blog's content: My posts are going to become somewhat less kid-friendly this time around, not so much in terms of language but rather in terms of content. I've made this decision mostly because of my increasing desire to link things, some of which may not be appropriate for children (some of the ChinaSmack content, for example, isn't). Also, I definitely want to self-censor a bit less this time around - maybe I'll put the Light Fellowship staff's claim, that we can write anything we want, to the test one day. This doesn't mean that it will become unreadable by any means, but it should probably be given a quick once-over (mostly the links) before any little cousins/etc are allowed to read/click.

My next update will either be from China (if I do get my visa), or my house (if I don't). Let's hope for the former.

祝你天天快樂，
~Ethan

New Forums for New Adventures (The Motherblog)

Not-so-faithful readers,

As some of you may know, I kept a Taiwan blog last summer. With the prospect of newer and (dare I say?) greater adventures looming, I thought that instead of sticking with the old one ("Ethan in Taipei" might throw people off if I ever start blogging about, say, a visit to Montréal), or creating blog after blog (an "Ethan in ___" series would be cute, but "Ethan in China" is already taken), I would instead create an umbrella blog to encompass my hopefully multitudinous adventures. This is it.

So far all I have are the old Taiwan posts (imported from "Ethan in Taipei"), but once I get to China (June 3 - that's three weeks from now!) I will be updating about my adventures in Shanghai, Shandong Province, Beijing, "The north and west" (specifics undecided), Beijing again, "the center and south" (same), and Taiwan.

The name for this blog, and the two lines in the photo up top, come from the poem Ulysses, by Alfred Lord Tennyson. It is the most beautiful poem ever penned and I encourage you to read it if you haven't yet.

~Ethan

Wrapping it Up

Things have been crazy lately, what with moving out of Taipei into Banqiao/Penghu, out of Banqiao and into my house, and then out of my house again and into my new Yale dorm. I've also been enjoying the company of people I haven't seen in a long time and/or won't see again for a very long time. So this update comes a bit later than expected (and promised). But it's here! Look for Snapshots 3 sometime next week if I find a few extra minutes.


Moving out of Taipei: On Saturday morning, the day after I posted my last blog entry, I moved out of my apartment. Because I bought way too much in Taiwan, I added another sizeable bag to my luggage; in total I was probably lugging around at least 70 pounds. I made it to the subway and eventually to Jun Xiang's house, where I packed a "Penghu bag." To fast-forward a bit, we all got on a bus, drove to Songshan Airport (the Taipei area's domestic/regional airport), and took a plane to 馬公 (Magong), the main island of 澎湖 (Penghu), a small archipelago off the southwest coast of Taiwan. The Zhangs (and friends) had rented a house from relatives for a low price, and while we all slept about 3 to a room (there were 19 of us in total), it was a clean, peaceful home base with a beautiful balcony view.

I had thought we were just going to hang out on the beach or something to that effect, but the Zhangs had other plans: on each of the two full days that we spent there (not counting the part-days on either end), we got into a car, were driven to a boat, and were then brough to a different one (or three) of Penghu's several small islands. The mornings were for "water recreation" - picture a guy on a small motorboat (Waverunner-type) pulling various inflatable craft behind him, or just taking passengers, in the aquatic version of a roller coaster. Then we would eat some sort of delicious seafood lunch. The first afternoon was spent snorkeling, which was way more fun and amazing than I expected it to be; I saw colorful fish, explored some coral reef, and picked up hermit crabs and a huge sea urchin, among other things. The first afternoon was also when I discovered I had developed a wicked sunburn on my feet, exacerbated before and during snorkeling by the sand in my special coral-friendly socks & shoes; more on that later.

I also had my first encounter with a phenomenon that's apparently very common in mainland China: as Jun Xiang, Yu Zhong and I were exploring one of the smaller 澎湖 islands, a cute little boy who lived in a house we were passing looked up at us, pointed at me, and said, "外國人！" ("Foreigner!") A handful of times in Taipei I was reasonably sure that people were talking about me, but as a Westerner I wasn't rare enough and they weren't impolite enough for that to happen. Penghu, though, feels a little bit like another world: drier and cooler (sea breeze), calmer, quiter, and very rural. There must have been at most twenty houses on the little boy's island, some of them made half out of dead coral, and I imagine they don't often have the opportunity to take a plane to Taiwan proper. Moreover, tourism is largely local; apart from the main town and beaches on 馬公, where (I hear) you can find Western expats vacationing and surfing, none of the smaller islands we went to seemed to cater to English speakers. In fact, I saw two other Westerners during my entire 3-day stay at 澎湖, and that was in the 馬公 airport.

We ended the day on a large restaurant-boat, drifting about and barbecueing various seafood; there was also karaoke and plenty of random family games organized by Dai Ling, the oldest sister.

The second afternoon/evening was all about eating and scooters, which we rented and rode around 馬公 and the adjoining island. For the first time ever in Taiwan, I felt slightly chilly! While on the adjoining island, we enjoyed the most delicious seafood dinner imagineable, which also doubled as my favorite dinner of the entire summer. All I can remember now is that it involved oysters, seaweed, and breaded shrimp as big as my hand, among many other wonderful things.

That night also saw a double celebration: it was Jun Xiang's birthday, which was duly celebrated, but his party kind of took a backseat to my going-away party. The siblings re-performed some of their Father's Day skits; there were games (Dai Ling again); and then there was a slightly uncomfortable but unforgettably sweet section in which all the young people stepped up to me one by one and told me in very simple Chinese what they liked about me and how much they would miss me.

In the morning we woke up obscenely early to try to catch the sunrise, which is apparently a Zhang family 澎湖 tradition. It was cloudy, though, so everyone went back to bed except Jun Xiang and me; we ended up walking around and had probably our most personal conversation of the summer, almost all in Chinese because he was too tired to want to translate.

All too soon, 澎湖 was over; we did all the transportation backwards, ate a delicious but very sweet seafood lunch, and ended up back at the Zhangs' house. It was all a bit jarring because Penghu had been entirely peaceful and carefree, and it was now clearly over - and it didn't help that we all ended up sitting awkwardly in the living room listening to an aunt angrily shouting "Why do you have to be like that?!" (in Chinese) into the phone because she had discovered that a store in 澎湖 boxed the wrong food for her. I was also forced by the fam to go see a dermatologist, because my feet were both very red and the left one was swollen; the aforementioned sunburn had relegated me to wearing thong sandals and made walking very painful. Jun Xiang's mom had chopped up some aloe leaves before my eyes and applied the goo inside, but it never really helped; the doc said she wouldn't expect it to because the burn was so serious. She gave me three different pills to take four times daily, plus a tube of special ointment to ease the pain. Total cost of the visit and meds: $15, because I'm not on the national insurance.

That night, we ate out - our last dinner together, so it was fancy and different (i.e., pretty good pasta, or "Italian noodles" as they call them). Based on an earlier suggestion I reciprocated the previous night's farewells; Jun Xiang and Li Wei actually cried. Like someone (Dai Ling?) wrote to me later, it's a horrible shame that I had to leave just as we were really becoming friends.

Anyway, then we went off to sing some karaoke. The Zhangs own their own little karaoke room above the little general store that they operate, so it was convenient and entirely free. I wish Americans were more into karaoke, but alas! it is not so. I sang the old classic from my SCLCEP days, when I came to Yale once a week to study Chinese almost five years ago (對面的女孩: The girls across the street; pop-y), as well as bits and pieces of a song I had just learned (月亮代表我的心: The Moon Represents My Heart; more traditional but still well-loved by all generations). Then was the last night's sleep, the last breakfast, the last car ride... and the airport. Goodbyes, a sheaf of handwritten notes which I have yet to have translated (can only do bits and pieces on my own), and the long flight back.

I must away - classes start tomorrow morning - but before I go I'll leave you with just a few of the 600 澎湖 photos I have on my computer.