Birthdays

It’s quite incredible how many people there are in my acquaintance whose birthdays all take place within the span of one week.

My partner’s father and sister celebrated their birthdays on the 18^th and 19^th respectively, no fewer than 4 previous classmates of mine were born between September 20^th and 24^th (one on each day, except for the 22^nd, funnily enough), and a German student here had a birthday party on Sunday, the eve of her birthday.

And, for all those who didn’t know, I turned 22 on the 22^nd.

Let me use this opportunity to thank everyone for the kind, lovely messages and texts I received. They meant and mean a lot to me and are part of the reason why this entry is titled “Birthdays” and not “Birthday Blues” (as I had vaguely envisioned prior to my birthday).

I actually had quite a lot of people asking me how I was spending/had spent my birthday, so I’ll try to answer this to the best of my ability.

~~~

There are two things about birthdays in China that are probably not general knowledge. Neither of them is common everywhere in the country, but they are common enough to definitely warrant mentioning.

The first is a rather weird, sweet little detail. When I first came here, I was informed that it is customary to thank your Mum on your birthday for having endured the pain of giving birth to you.

I have done this every year since. Now that I’m writing this, though, it occurs to me that I totally forgot about it this year. So, Mum, a bit belatedly, thanks for going through tremendous pain in order to give birth to me 22 years ago!

The second is much more common, but also took a lot more getting used to for me.

In some regions of China, age is calculated differently than it is in the western world. You start as a one-year-old and then add another year at every Chinese New Year’s Festival.

In 2019, the New Year’s Festival is on February the 5^th, so if a child is born at the end of January, it already turns two a couple of days later by this calculation.

I have also heard that in some parts of Tibet, apparently you start at nine months, so your first birthday is three months after you’re born.

This practice is still predominant in some provinces, but especially the younger generation turns to the western system of age calculation more and more, and I’ve had people tell me that they think in a few decades, nobody will use the traditional system anymore.

Now, as anyone who knows me well will surely confirm, I can be a bit of a traditionalist when it comes to certain things, so this development actually makes me quite sad. This is one of those distinct little cultural quirks that make immersing yourself in a different culture worthwhile and fascinating, and it’s a pity that some of that distinctness seems to die out.

~~~

Saturday started on a very good note. I woke up to two emails in my inbox, the first one (sent mere minutes after midnight in China) from Flo, the other one from my Mum. When you have to get up at 7 o’clock in the morning (and hate getting up before 9 as much as I do), it kind of doesn’t get better than that.

Still, the better part of my birthday was actually not at all exciting. I had a class from 8AM to 3PM (there was a lunch break, though), and after that, I spent all in all three hours getting from university to Skye’s place. The commute was significantly sweetened by the fact that I spent most of it videochatting with Flo, but still, I felt somewhat exhausted by the time I arrived at Skye’s family’s home.

In no news to anyone, they were absolutely wonderful to me. They had cooked several of my favourite dishes, including, of course, the obligatory birthday noodle soup, had bought a cake, and even opened a bottle of red wine (even though, judging by the time it took them to locate the corkscrew, that’s a rather rare occurrence for them), and we had a lovely dinner.

~~~

Noodle soup with long noodles is as much a necessity at a Chinese birthday party as a cake is in the west. The noodles are extremely long, which symbolises a long life. They are also extremely slippery (since it’s a noodle soup), so being able to eat them without any discernible problems definitely gives me some sense of achievement.

Everyone who ever had the misfortune to be present for one of my hour-long “I miss Chinese food so much” rants has probably also heard me say that the only thing I actively dislike when it comes to Chinese food are the desserts, and that birthday cakes here all taste artificial and terrible. That’s mostly due to the fact that there is no “birthday cake tradition” in China. Having a birthday cake for your birthday is only slowly becoming more popular now because of the influence of western films and television series.

A picture of Xinxin, the birthday, me, and the birthday cake

I won’t get into it too much here, since I’m sure I’ll do another post dedicated solely to Chinese cuisine, but somehow, Skye managed to find a cake that, while artificial, was actually edible, and I enjoyed eating it.

Speaking of the cake: Of course we ate it directly before the rest of the dinner. I still don’t understand why people in China do it in that way, they don’t even have any sort of cake (birthday or otherwise) tradition, but that’s their preferred order, and I’m already used to it…

~~~

After dinner, Skye told me that she had a present for me:

She took me to get a facial mask. At 9PM in the evening, just like that.

In case anyone is surprised, so was I. But although I’m not sure that I want to repeat the experience, I actually enjoyed it a lot.

After the facial mask... I look like a frog.

Now, since this was my first facial mask I have no idea how it compares to facial masks in Austria or anywhere else in Europe. Here’s what stood out for me though:

• The place she took me to is in a shopping mall. And it doesn’t have walls or a door. Everyone who passes that place in the shopping mall can stop and watch as you’re getting your treatment. I had my eyes closed (and my glasses off), so I have no idea if anyone did that. It didn’t bother me, either. The lack of privacy just seems notable.
• The woman giving me the facial was lovely. She also was impossibly excited about the entire thing. She kept talking about the fact that I’m just the second foreigner she has “worked on” in her entire life, and how exciting that was, and what a good practice for her since the faces are different, and how lovely I am. Literally, in the almost forty minutes I was lying there she was talking almost non-stop, and about nothing else, to Skye, to me, and to whoever else wanted to hear about it.
• She still was very nice and gave me a free facial massage because apparently I’m a “lovely and beautiful foreigner”.

~~~

The day ended on a high note when I skyped with my family in Austria around midnight.

My birthday didn’t end there, though. This weekend, I am going to have a belated birthday dinner with a couple of students I have met here, which I’m already quite excited about.

A wonderful rest of the week to everyone! And, whenever it is, happy birthday!

Adventures in Traveling: Bus trips, train stations, and taxi drivers

Last Friday saw me leaving Shanghai for the first time since I arrived here at the end of August to attend a wedding in Ji’nan (more on that in a few weeks).

It’s not very far from Shanghai to Ji’nan, merely three and a half hours by bullet train, which is quite okay for a distance of around 730 km.

But let me start from the beginning. And, because I am who I am, and have been heavily influenced by Victor Hugo’s writing style, let me start by giving you an incomplete overview about Shanghai’s transportation system in general. In fact, let me take this opportunity to warn you: This is a very long post. There is an (extremely brief) summary at the end though, so feel free to skip everything and read the summary. 

~~~

The metro system in Shanghai is great. And I encourage anyone who doesn’t read Chinese incredibly well (people like me, for instance) to stick to it. At the moment, there are 17 metro lines, which can take you to almost any area in Shanghai, and all the signs in and around the metro station and the metro itself are both in Chinese and English. They even announce the stops in English!

With a combination of taxis and the metro, you can go pretty much anywhere in Shanghai without having to be able to read even a single character, and if your destination isn’t super remote, it won’t cost a lot of money either.

~~~

Of course, there are busses in Shanghai too. Many of them, in fact. There are more than 1000 (read: one thousand) regular bus lines and some special lines in addition to that. But for non-Chinese-readers, they are very difficult to navigate, because absolutely everything (from the stop signs to the bus schedule) is written in Chinese characters only, and I wouldn’t hold out hope that the bus driver speaks English.

Riding a bus in China is actually quite the experience. Once you’re on the bus, and miraculously on the right one, it’s a combination of good timing, thorough preparation, and pure luck to get off at the correct stop. The busses are usually crowded, you can’t rely on the driver to always stop at red lights or stay on the bus lane when they could drive on the motorcycle lane equally as well, and I’ve been on busses whose doors wouldn’t close on more than one occasion.

What’s most difficult, though, is finding out if you can even take the bus. There is no English trip planning tool available online for Shanghai, or at least not one that’s complete and doesn’t require you to know the actual Chinese names of the bus stops nearest to your location. More than anything else, this is what makes incorporating a short trip by bus, no matter how convenient it might be, almost impossible for foreigners – you can’t take the bus if you don’t know that there’s supposed to be one, or if you have no idea where the bus is going and stopping.

So, when at the beginning of the semester, Ms Zhang from the international office of my university sent an email to all of us and attached a bus schedule in English for all the busses that stop at our campus, I was delighted.

And I was even more delighted to find that there is a bus that stops both at the campus and at Shanghai Hongqiao Railway Station (which is the railway station you’ll likely need to go to in Shanghai if you’re going somewhere by high speed train).

Because, you see, my campus is on the outskirts of Shanghai, and so is Hongqiao Railway Station. They are actually not that far apart (well, for Shanghai’s standard, anyway), but going there by metro requires taking Line 11 for around an hour into the city centre to change to Line 2 and go to the railway station, whereas a bus can follow a more direct route.

Naturally, due to some very poor phrasing, some of the information on the schedule is rather difficult to interpret at times (such as where on campus each of the bus stops is to be found), but I wasn’t too worried. I figured that I could easily enough ask about the stops’ location when I actually needed them.

~~~

I probably should have predicted what was going to happen. But it seems even though this is my fourth time in this country, I’m still quite naïve in some regards.

When I planned my trip to the train station on Friday I was uncharacteristically careful to plan for enough time. My train was set to leave at 6pm, so I decided I would take the bus at 2pm. 

It was the perfect plan: I had an appointment with Ms Zhang at the International Office at 1:15pm anyway, and when I was there I would simply seize the opportunity to ask her where I had to go to get on the bus.

I was told by Ms Zhang (who, remember, had compiled all the information on the busses and sent it to us) that she actually had no idea where the bus stop was, but not to worry, she would make a phone call. On the phone, she was told that nobody was quite sure if the bus in question still existed, or otherwise, if it still stopped next to our campus.

Ms Zhang assured me that it would all be cleared up if I just went to the entrance gate, where I was sure to find the bus stop. I wasn’t quite so sure, but I wasn’t really worried either. In case I didn’t find the bus stop, I told myself, I would simply take a taxi to the next metro station. Not ideal, as I knew it was going to take significantly longer by metro, but okay. It was 1:45pm, and I still had plenty of time.

In no surprise to anyone, I found two bus stops, neither of which has any bus going to the railway station stopping at them. So I turned towards the street to get a taxi.

~~~

Some of the most baffling things I learnt when I was in China for the first time were somehow related to taxis.

For one thing, there aren’t any seat belts on the back seats. For another, the driving varies between chaotic and downright terrifying. It’s also no good expecting the taxi driver to understand any English. Print out the address of wherever you want to go in Chinese. Ideally in a big font size – I’ve had taxi drivers turn me down because their eyesight wasn’t good enough to read the address (which doesn’t really inspire my particular trust in a driver).

But, for the sake of my story, none of those things are relevant.

Here’s what is relevant: You can’t simply call a taxi in China. I had never questioned the Austrian way of doing this, but here, you don’t make a phone call ordering a taxi to your location. Instead, you go find a big, ideally busy, street and hope that a free taxi passes you by.

Don’t rejoice once you’ve seen one, though. There is absolutely no guarantee that the driver will react to your beckoning it over, and even if he does, in my experience you need to stop at least two taxis before someone will agree to take you. This, especially, still feels weird to me. We’re apparently spoilt like queens and kings in Europe, because we simply get into the taxi and tell the driver where to go.

Stop. Not so fast. In China, you tell the driver through an open window where you want to go, and if they’re agreeable and the distance you want to go is neither too short nor too far, and your chosen destination isn’t, heaven forbid, in an area that’s in any way inconvenient to the driver, they might agree to take you in.

In all honesty, you have to realise that I am exaggerating, but not by very much, promise.

~~~

Anyway, that’s exactly what happened to me on Friday. I couldn’t say anymore how many taxis I tried to wave over; most of them ignored them, but quite a few stopped. Not a single one wanted to take me to the metro station. It’s quite a short trip (5 minutes by car, because there is a sort of highway between the university and the metro station), but too far to walk if time is at least somewhat of the essence. At that point, it was 3pm.

So I turned to one of the men guarding the entrance, asking him to help me. He was incredibly friendly, but even when he tried to recruit people to take me to the metro station, he failed.

There’s a shuttle going to the closest metro station from university. It’s even free of charge, and I wanted to take it, but they leave only once an hour, on the other end of the campus (which we’ve already established is very big) and I didn’t know when. I approached the guard about it, and immediately realised that I wouldn’t make it there in time to catch the next one.

I was ready to stop a random car and offering the driver an exorbitant sum for taking me to the bus station. The fact that, instead, ended up catching the free shuttle bus after all is only thanks to the guard, who stopped the bus when it drove through the entrance gate and convinced the driver to let me in. I haven’t seen him since, otherwise I’d have already given him a packet of cigarettes (the gift of choice for men in China). Because of him, I finally, at 3:45pm, reached the metro station.

It was pretty smooth sailing from there, and I arrived at the railway station at half past 5. It’s a miracle that I ended up catching my train.

~~~

Why, you ask? Couldn’t I simply buy a ticket and go to the platform?

The short answer is: No.

There’s a long answer, too.

First of all, Hongqiao Railway Station is huge. It took me 10 minutes of jogging to get from the metro station to the actual train station. I also still had to pick up my ticket. I had bought it online weeks ago, but you can’t travel without an officially issued ticket – simply printing the payment confirmation isn’t enough. And there was a long queue, as it was a busy day.

More importantly, (and time-consumingly) though, Chinese railway stations are a bit like mini-airports. You have to queue for the security check (and, as previously mentioned, there were a lot of people), your bags are checked, and you need to present your passport (or, if you’re a Chinese citizen, your ID card) in order for them to even let you into the station, never mind the train.

Once you’re through security and got ticket, you can’t simply waltz straight onto the platform, either.

You have to find your gate, and there is a window of five to ten minutes where the gate is open and you can get onto the platform. Once the gate is closed (five minutes before the train leaves, in my experience), you won’t get onto the platform anymore, even if the train hasn’t left and you’ve got a valid ticket.

~~~

I managed to get onto the train, and I had a great time in Ji’nan. And in the grand scheme of things, this little adventure was no real adventure at all. It was, however, a great opportunity to provide everyone with a comprehensive introduction to different means of public transport in China.

One more thing: I hope nobody thinks I’m complaining about poor Ms Zhang. Releasing a bus guide for international students without really understanding what they have written (or having any further information on the busses) is very typical for many Chinese people in my experience, which is why I mentioned it.
She is a lovely person, though, and has helped me a lot since I’ve arrived here.

~~~

In summary: Research thoroughly before planning on taking the bus, plan for enough time if you are at a remote location (or want to go somewhere far from the city centre) to find a willing taxi driver, and don’t mistake Chinese railway stations for the ones your familiar with – you’ll need a lot more time here.

~~~

I’ll try to be back on Sunday or Monday, but no promises. Until then I wish you all a wonderful weekend!

Moving In

Quite a lot has happened since I’ve updated my blog last week.

Most importantly, I’ve moved to the dormitory. It’s a single room in the international dormitory (which is unfair in and of itself – Chinese students aren’t even offered the option of living in a single room. As far as I’m aware, they can choose between a 6-bed or an 8-bed dorm.)

I’m not going to lie, the first few days have been quite difficult – the room was quite impersonal at first, it was hot, I didn’t know anyone here, there is no internet connection in my room and the internet everywhere else works unreliably at best, so at times I felt like I was cut off from the entire world. It was certainly a little bit of an emotional rollercoaster.

~~~

But now to the positive side of things, because although there were moments where it didn’t feel like that at all, it was actually a really good week in hindsight.

Let’s start with the least interesting thing: I’ve finished (almost) all of my administrative duties. Like finally registering for my courses, getting my Chinese student ID, and getting my residence officially recognised.

More excitingly, I had some Austrian/Chinese company on Tuesday – Hong Ling, my former Chinese teacher was in Shanghai with her husband (Michael) and her daughter (Lilia), and I was generously invited to join them for cocktails in their hotel bar (in the Waldorf Astoria, of all places. It’s going to be a while until I even enter a hotel of that calibre again!) It was very fancy – and I was terribly under-dressed…

Lilia and me in the entrance hall

Another thing that’s really great is the campus. It’s so huge that basically the first thing I did was to buy a bicycle to get everywhere quickly (which, given my tendency to be late to everything, was definitely a good idea). I’ve had a look at it on Google Maps, and it’s around 560.000 m², which, to put it in “Graz” terms, is like a rectangle (one side is the distance between Griesplatz and the opera house; the other side is the distance from the opera to the Dom/Burg/theatre). Just to give all of you an idea of just how huge this area really is…

It’s also quite obvious that someone put a lot of effort into making it a really beautiful place.
There’s a lot of green (especially a lot of trees), and there’s a river that meanders through the entire campus, and it really looks lovely. The air quality is better than in most places in Shanghai, and from my (tiny) balcony, I can see the stars and moon at night.

The campus at night

Finally, and particularly delightfully, there was a student event for all the new German-speaking students on Friday, where I finally met some people, and since then, my social life here has improved a lot. Three days are not enough time to really befriend anyone, but there is a group of people that I’ve been talking to a lot throughout the weekend, and everything is suddenly looking up.

Next week will be an exciting one: My classes start tomorrow, and at the end of the week, I’ll be joining my friends Skye and Xinxin on a trip to Ji’nan, the capital of Shandong Province (山东省), where we will be attending Skye’s nephew’s wedding on Saturday. As I’ve mentioned in last week’s post already, I’m looking forward to it a lot.

To everyone who’s reading this: I hope you had a great week. Thanks for stopping by to read my rambling week review – I’ll try to be back next Sunday.