My school was sending a car to pick me up Saturday morning at 6AM, so my last night in Jiaxing I decided not to go to sleep.  I figured if I did, I would need to wake up by 4:30, and since I had to go out till at least midnight to make my goodbyes to friends, I figured it wouldn’t be worth it to sleep.  My theory was that I could sleep on the plane (13 hours from Shanghai to Detroit, then an hour to Chicago), get home Saturday afternoon, see my family and friends, and hit the wall around midnight or so.  Well, I only slept a total of two hours on the flights (not because I was unable to sleep, but because it was a Delta flight and they have individual on-demand screens for every seat, it was great), and still managed to stay up very late last night.

But today I think maybe some jet lag kicked in, and I woke up at 8:30Am (my body thinking it was 10:30Pm still) and have managed to force myself not to sleep now till at least midnight.  So right now a bunch of us are watching The Hurt Locker, and I’m running on about six hours of sleep for the last 76 hours.  I’m starting to get a little delusional I think.  Actually that’s not completely true.  I actually feel kind of good right now, which is what makes me think I’m delusional.  Like, I know that I SHOULD be tired and sleeping, but I’m on my fifth wind right now and wonder if the next wall I hit will be the one that puts me out for about a dozen hours.  I know it’s coming, I just thought it would have been here well before now.  I must be that happy to be home right now.

Anyways, here’s a couple pics of the last few nights in Jiaxing (unfortunately, I didn’t think to bring out a camera last night, so I don’t have any of the coming home affair, I’ll have to rely on some Facebook pics – speaking of which, it’s so nice to have freedom on the internet again!).  I have a few more stories to type up from the time before I left, and since I’m not currently too busy, I should be getting those out to you quickly in the next few days.  I don’t know how many people will even be bothering to read this anymore, but I do still have a few good stories up my sleeve, so if at least a few people are still reading, I’ll continue to post for as long as possible.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/34831106/ns/technology_and_science-security

This doesn’t really have anything to do with anything else (other than the fact that I’ve been bitching about, and looking for ways around, the Great Firewall of China for the past 10 months), but I thought it was kind of interesting.

A sidenote: as of about three weeks ago, this blog has been accessible here in China.  I take that as a sign that I’m not bad-mouthing the government quite enough AND I need to ratchet up the American propagandizing in what little time I have left here.  Think they can find me in three days? We’ll see.

Why can’t they just learn the language?  Don’t they know that their 1.3 billion people should just accomodate ME?

I have an idea.  They should hire a bunch of native-English speakers (in addition to their normal English teachers) to teach their students all the way from middle school through college, then they would be great at it.

….. Oh, right.  That’s my job.

I’m a failure.

This gets only 2 Lil Red Commie Books.  As hard as not knowing the language can make daily life sometimes, it’s also a big part of what makes life different and exciting here.

Not really, but I did dominate a dumpling-eating contest last night.

And it wasn’t even close.

Of course, it was a two-man race between me and Kel, so the outcome was never in doubt (in my mind, at least).

A little history first.  There’s a small restaurant here that specializes in three things: dumplings, fried rice, and fried noodles.  They do a lot of carryout and delivery business (I never did figure out a way to order delivery where they would’ve known what I was talking about though).  When I lived in my old apartment here, it was about a 5 minute walk door-to-door.  Plus they were open late, so that was always a good 4th meal (no Mcdonald’s or Taco Bell for me).

Anyways, of all the dumplings I’ve eaten in China, this place has the best by far.  About three months ago, Kel came up with the great idea that we should have an eating contest.  I readily agreed (I don’t really know why we waited this long to make it happen).  I knew there was no chance of me losing.  Put aside the fact that my prodigious eating abilities have been well-documented in the past (walk into the Champaign Alexander’s Steahhouse and look at the wall, you’ll see my brother’s and my smiling faces more than once for eating their three pound steak), but more importantly, I knew I had the will to win. I would just not let myself lose.  I knew that if Kel ate five orders, I could do six, no matter how sick I might feel.  If he did nine, I would do 10, it was just that simple.

Unfortunately, Kel didn’t put up nearly enough of a fight for me to be truly proud of my accomplishment.  We walked in and started off by ordering two for each of us (one order is 10 dumplings).  This is nothing special, when we go there for a regular dinner, it’s common for each of us to eat this many AND a big order of noodles (note: we are STUFFED after this).

Those first batches went down great, and so we ordered the next round.  The workers were a little confused at first when I asked for four more, they were thinking I was trying to pay for the previous ones, but after a little explanation and broken Chinese, they came out.  The third order went down well for each of us, but that’s where we both started to hit the wall.  Being a nice person, I gave Kel the option that we could call it off now, before we felt sick, and neither of us would be the loser.  I think he took this as weakness on my part.  He was wrong.

As we each started #4, each of us said that this was the point where they started to not be enjoyable anymore.  We were making sure to chew so much, that we compared it to a cow chewing her cud.  But I kept moving on, and Kel kept pace.  I grabbed a bottle of water from next door while #s 5 and 6 were ordered.  I fully expected to find Kel done with at least one of them by the time I got back, but he was only two dumplings in.

This is where I knew it was over.

I not only ratcheted up the speed a bit, but my trash-talking as well.  By the time I finished #5, Kel was listing a bit and visibly uncomfortable.  Now I knew I had him, but I think I talked a little too much.  He talked about ceding, but when I started going on about how he never had a chance in the first place, he soldiered on… for a little bit.  I took his perseverance as an insult to my ability, like, “How dare you continue? Don’t you know that you’re through?” and proceeded to finish my sixth order while he looked at me with a sick look on his face.  I was like Jordan in the 4th, icing the game away (yeah, I know, comparing gluttony to basketball is a great match).

And then I giggled.

So that’s why I won the crown.  In all, I ate 60 dumplings in 21 minutes.  I feel like if I had had a worthy competitor (or if Kel had just brought his A game), I could have been like Rick Ross and pushed it to the limit, maybe going as high as eight orders (and really, if i was that close, why not just go for double digits, just so I could say that I did?).  As is, I was a little happy that he quit when he did; it’s not like I felt good eating all of them, but there was no way I would lose.

One thing I do know now: I won’t be missing dumplings when I return home.

P.S… And then we each got an ice cream bar. Nice.

Now, I don’t know if this is something that you can only get in China or what, but I do know that I’ve never seen anything like it in America.

I’m not sure if they were roasted beforehand or not, but either way they were delicious.  What I do know is that they were ribs that were breaded and fried.  If I had to describe them, I’d say it was like a cross between a chicken wing and ribs.  If only they’d have been covered in hot sauce and served with ranch dressing, they’d have been perfect.  Uh-oh, did I just find a new Super Bowl food? I think maybe I did.

And I know this isn’t really China’s fault.  I mean, I can’t blame the country for being so far away (or can I?), but it still sucks (By the way, the FINAL COUNTDOWN is now at 5 days.  Get ready Amurrrrica!).

But yeah, family and friends, you deserve a special prize.  Not only does missing you get a perfect 10 Red Mao Books on my hating China scale, but it also wins a quote from the great leader himself (this doesn’t have anything to do with the post itself, just look at it as a special treat from the Chairman… plus, it kind of reminds me of a rap lyric):

“Every Communist must grasp the truth, ‘Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.’”

So when I got the opportunity to get some suits properly tailored for me here for approximately $65 each, I jumped at the chance.

And these aren’t just suits off the rack that they fit to you.  No, you walk into the Silk Market and there is stall after stall of tailors, each filled with every kind of fabric you could want for a suit or coat.  In all, there’s 3 floors of this.

In actuality, these places are essentially contractors, looking to get the best price they can before taking it to any tailor that they do business with who will give them a low enough price (this was learned when Christina tried to get a second pair of pants made exactly the same as a first pair, and they came back different).  So you definitely bargain at these places (which can be either fun or irritating depending on how you feel that day… the day I was there, I played it like Ken Jennings on Jeopardy).  I don’t know if I got a good price or not, though I know I paid less than a couple other foreigners who have gone to the same place, and the teachers at my school say that my price is very cheap.  Either way, within a week, I had four brand new suits, completely made for me, in whatever style I wanted (they have books with various designers’ different styles and cuts).  Essentially, you’re getting fake Armani and Versace suits made-to-order.  I love it.

Throw in the dress shirts that I had made for something like $11 each in Beijing, and I’m coming home with the start of a nice lil wardrobe (now if only I could find a job where I actually need these clothes).

Tailored clothing, and it’s incredible inexpensiveness, gets a whopping 9 Little Mao heads.  It probably would’ve been a perfect 10, but I didn’t take full advantage and get any jeans or regular polos made (or any Mao suits… and yes, I really did think about that one).

The strange thing is that it comes from so many different sources, it’s hard to pinpoint just one offending smell.  Whether it’s:

- the durian stinking up the fruit stand,

- the “stinky tofu” being fried on a cart (this is the smell that I originally had thought was rotting garbage in the alley, then realizing where the smell was coming from, proceeded to order some for myself… yeah, it’s not so tasty),

- the stench of the water system (there’s a reason that we don’t drink the tap water here, and that reason is that god gave us noses. To be honest, even showering in it doesn’t seem completely right, but you do what you gotta do),

- the urine collecting in the neighborhood’s favorite peeing corner,

- or just the general lack of hygiene by a sizable chunk of the population, there is always a smell to make you turn your head a little.

Now I’m not saying that it’s so bad that you notice it all the time, but that’s mostly because you get used to it (and even then, I always know when the tofu guy is out or not from 50 yards away).  Plus, living in a city, there’s the requisite amount of Chinese pollution, so it’s not as if I have fresh air around the bad-smelling places.  The smog must do an efficient job of trapping in odor.

It’s definitely not something that makes life miserable, but I could certainly do without it, so The Stench That Is China gets only 4 Little Red Books.

Completely opposite in fact.  China is the best country I’ve ever lived in in terms of fresh fruit (and yeah, I’ve only lived in one other country, so it’s really just 1st in a 2-man race).  No matter what city you go to, every street is lined with fruit vendors of every kind.  And it’s all really good too.  I think that’s due to the lack of refrigeration or trucking industry (come to think of it, I don’t remember seeing big semi-trucks at all here… and with the traffic, that’s certainly understandable).  So everything you eat is definitely fresh off the farm.

So I think I’ve mentioned before that walking down most any street, the most common sight you see are little bodegas whose main products are cigarettes and drinks (both alcoholic and non).  Well, thankfully, the second most prolific sight are fruit stands.  And not just stands, but whole mini-markets filled with most every kind of fruit, both “normal” and not (durian, the stinky fruit, will be eaten this week), plus vendors with carts (usually specializing in just one fruit, like bananas).  In any one-block stretch, it is perfectly normal to pass two proper shops with up to three mobile vendors, that’s how many we’re talking about.

Oh, and it’s cheap too (not surprising with the amount of competition).  I can pick up a week’s worth of various kinds for about $2-3 (not that I ever buy that much at once. Why bother when there’s 3 sellers within 100 feet of the school’s gates?).

And to top it all off, my school’s favorite gift to its teachers is fruit.  Cases. And cases. And cases of it.  In my time here, my school has given me two boxes of pears (about 80 per), a box of 50-60 apples, a box of mini watermelons, and a box of prickly cucumber.  So at various times, I’ve had to go into fruit overdrive, eating 5-10 pears a day.  In fact, for New Year’s I got a box each of apples and pears, so I had 15 days to eat it all (to drive that point home, I’ve had three pears just while typing this).  And Kel isn’t any help, as his school has given him even more than me (he’s currently working on a box of apples, a box of clementines, and a box of mandarin oranges (yeah I know, who’d have thought that mandarin oranges came any way other than canned and in fruit coctail)).

To summarize, fruit is good.  And there’s a lot of it.  In the Red Book scale, the fruit in China receives a solid 5 Lil Maos.

Either way, all I know is that shrimp here are great.  Even for the cheap school lunch, we are served them regularly.

They’re just so cheap (approximately $1.45/lb), fresh (still jumping as I fry them up), and delicious.

Of course, I loved shrimp before, but the sheer inexpensiveness of them here makes China great.

How great? Well, shrimp in China gets an impressive 7 Red Books on the LOVE scale.  It would be higher, but like I said, I already loved the suckers before.  If you want to get any higher up the list, you need some creatvity, a little imagination, a little something… extra (but we’ll get to those things later).