Montag, 24. Dezember 2018

Chinese Medical Methods: Proceed With Caution

This is a weird entry, especially considering the fact that I'm posting this on Christmas. I was originally going to write about something completely different, but this was remarkable enough in my eyes to make me change my plans.

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First of all, and I don't know whether this makes it better or worse, really, but I don't want to dissuade anyone from trying Traditional Chinese Medicine at all - I have been pleasantly surprised by Chinese medicine more than once, and I don't intend on giving up on it at all.

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But from the beginning:


This weekend, I finally had the chance to see Skye and her family again. Even though we live in the same city, between my lecture-filled weekends, Skye’s short stay in Thailand, and 30 kilometres between my campus and her flat, I hadn’t gone to see them since the beginning of October.

(Even though I’m used to it, the proportions of everything here can still be quite overwhelming. I found out at dinner the other night that the residential estate where Skye lives with her husband is home to approximately ten thousand people!)

In her usual manner, Skye was absolutely lovely and invited me to a sauna close to her home. It was in a hairdresser’s backroom, but the decorations were decidedly fancy (or maybe it just seemed like that to me because I'm rather used to the wooden optic...)

In the sauna
That isn't the shocking part of the story, though. 

*~*~*

"You look as though you've been abused!" Flo told me, quite shocked, when I showed him my neck during our weekly videochatting session. 

He isn't wrong. My neck looks bruised and a little bit terrifying.

You see, after the sauna, Skye took me upstairs for a medical massage. One thing upfront, I love getting massages in China, and I used to get them quite often back in 2012. But I have never experienced anything like this.

Anyway, when Skye told me it was a medical massage, I should probably already have felt alarmed. Back when I was still staying with her family this summer, Skye went for a medical massage due to problems with her shoulder and came back with terribly bruised arms. 

But I had totally forgotten about that.

It was the most brutal facial and neck massage I have ever received in my life, but at the time, while it did hurt, it wasn't actually that painful, and I would never have guessed that it would leave any kind of mark. I had my eyes closed, so I don't know for sure what the masseuse did, but here's part of the result (as Skye took pictures during the massage process, for some unfathomable reason):

The dangers of massages
And now picture this, but covering basically my entire neck...

However, to end this story on a positive note: My neck has not felt this free of tension in a long time, so it was worth it in the end...

*~*~*

I wish everyone Happy Holidays and a wonderful last week of 2018!

Sonntag, 16. Dezember 2018

Time For Friends


This is going to be just a short update, but  still something I’ve been meaning to write about for a while.

Ever since my last exam mid-November, I’ve had more time to have a social life, so I’ve spent the past month spending time with old and new friends.

A couple of impressions here...

At Heidi's place
Pearl's niece Heidi, who is living in Shanghai, visited me on campus around a month ago, and then invited me to have a sleepover at her place the week afterwards, which was really lovely. She cooked for me (it was, unsurprisingly, delicious - everyone in that family can cook!) and took me out for breakfast in the morning.

Dinner with May
One of the absolutely most lovely things that happened in the past few weeks was seeing my friend May from high school again. She is the only one of my former Chinese classmates who I kept in touch with throughout the past six years, and she is studying and working in Beijing now. She came to Shanghai two weeks ago, though, and we had dinner together. It was so amazing to see her again; I can't wait to see her again in Zhengzhou in February!
Unfortunately, she is very camera-shy, so I only have a picture of the meal we shared...

Dinner with Rose and her friends
Last Sunday, I finally met up with Rose again. Rose was my Chinese teacher for five weeks when I lived in Shanghai for a short while in the summer of 2012, and she was in charge of preparing me for an all-Chinese day-to-day life. 
Since she lives and works in Shanghai, it's incredible that it took us so long to find a day that suited us both, but I had dinner with her and some of her friends last weekend, and we're planning to meet up again in the week after Christmas, when Flo is here as well.

Christkindlmarkt in Shanghai
On Friday, I went to the only Christkindlmarkt in Shanghai with some of my German friends. It looks very traditional on this picture, but it's tiny and while they sell some traditional things (such as Christmas tree ornaments, roasted almonds, or Advent wreaths), most of the things don't feel authentic. And don't get me started on the music - only one in three songs had anything to do with Christmas or winter, the rest was a weird mix.
Nevertheless, we had a great time, maybe even more so because of how surreal the entire thing was!

Montag, 10. Dezember 2018

What the FC Bayern, Chinese love songs, and the German-speaking Christian community in Shanghai have in common


So as not to get anyone’s curiosity up too much: The answer to the title question is “Not much”, but see for yourself.

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It’s Sunday and here I am (let’s ignore the fact that I was going to post this last Sunday instead of this one). And ever since I last wrote, I’ve been extremely busy having fun. In the past two and a half weeks, I’ve attended three completely different concerts (or, at the very least, concert-like events), and they were all tremendous fun (although for different reasons)!

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The School Recital

I probably should have predicted how crazy the Tongji university recital would turn out to be, but I didn’t.

There’s an auditorium on campus that looks like an oversized movie theatre, and the recital took place there. It was an impossibly weird event, but I enjoyed every second (and there were many seconds, more on that in a moment).

The entire thing started when every audience member was handed a bag full of various gifts upon entering the room instead of a programme (there were even different gift bags for guys and girls).

The second thing that I found interesting (and unusual) was that, much like in a cinema, advertisements and student-produced short films were shown on the screen behind the stage until the event actually started. I’d expect that at a cinema, but I wasn’t expecting it for a university recital.

The last thing that’s really notable is that whoever planned the event has obviously never sat through a concert, no matter how entertaining – it ended after three hours, and there was no break! Then again, audience members weren’t really expected to stay in their seats or be quiet; people were talking to their friends both during and between performances, some had brought food and drinks, and others kept leaving the hall and returning again.



All of that’s not to say that I didn’t thoroughly enjoy myself. Most performances were a blend of Chinese traditional dancing and hip-hop, but there was also a university rock band (with a lead singer who could actually sing), several sketches, a group that performed a traditional Chinese dancing routine, two choirs, and a slew of solo singers with varying levels of skill, (almost) all of whom sang saccharine Chinese love songs. The audience loved it; everyone turned on the “lamp function” (or whatever it’s called) on their smartphones and emotionally waved them in the air.

In between all of that there was a sort of raffle where a spotlight would randomly land on a member of the audience, who then had to go onstage, banter with the hosts, and finally got a small prize. This happened four times and was fun in the beginning, but when the concert has already been going on for close to three hours, it sort of loses its charm.

All in all, it definitely was an Experience.

*~*~*

The Church Service

Yes, I went to church. I mean, it wasn’t an actual church, it was a meeting room in the German consulate, but the ecumenical service took place there.

To be honest, I went there first and foremost because I was told that there was going to be a lot of singing and Christmas music, and I wasn’t disappointed.

Anyone who knows how much I love both Christmas and singing be able to imagine just how much I enjoyed an entire hour of being in a room full of people, enthusiastically singing Christmas carol after Christmas carol at the top our voices.



There was also a small Christmas bazaar afterwards, where some members of the community sold punch, mulled wine, waffles, and a selection of home-made Christmas biscuits, which was accompanied by more Christmas songs, performed by a couple of brass players. It was probably the height of this Christmas season for me.



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The International Institute Recital

On the first glance, this is similar to the school recital. It took place just this Thursday, and was an absolute blast for the first two hours. Honestly, I don’t know why whoever organises these things doesn’t consider the fact that three hours without a break might be difficult to sit through.

Once again, there were gift bags at the entrance, and the performances consisted mainly a lot of hip-hop groups (Chinese style), several male solo singers, all of whom, without exception, went for unbearable Chinese love songs (on their own, there wasn’t anything wrong with any of the songs, but when there are five love songs that sound essentially the same back to back, it’s a bit much.

Nevertheless, the event was fundamentally different from the first university recital, because it was specifically for (and by) the students of the Sino-German institute on campus, so three of the six hosts were German students (well, two of them, one was Swiss).



Some international students were even part of some of the performances. Easily the most fun part of the evening was a tongue-twister contests, in which several Chinese students and professors competed against each other, trying their hand at a multitude of German tongue-twisters.

Even though it was exhausting, due to its length, it ended on a high note: Towards the end, a local American-style bakery gave a piece of cake to every member of the audience, which was a sweet little surprise and very much appreciated by everyone.

*~*~*

And, just because this little snippet is so strange, an extra one here - this one goes back to the beginning of November:

The FC Bayern

In the beginning of November, I attended a classical concert on my university’s main campus. The performers were both German and Chinese teenagers who had won youth music competitions. It was a lovely evening with a surprisingly diverse programme, and the performances were mind-blowingly good.

However, it started off unexpectedly different.

Apparently – and I hadn’t known this beforehand – the FC Bayern, for some reason, grants a full scholarship for one year at Tongji University to three promising students, and the concert was held in honour of this year’s scholarship recipients.

Which meant that a representative of the FC Bayern was present at the concert, and that a group of Chinese students enthusiastically chanted “Stern des Südens” (the club’s official hymn) to get the concert started, even before the representative and headmaster and everyone else held their speeches.
Since I was not aware of the scholarship thing at the time, I rather felt like I was in the wrong film at the beginning.



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As if they had guessed that I was just about to post this blog entry, a friend of mine just invited me to a concert tomorrow, where a couple of German students studying music here are performing their original compositions. The “concert season” continues…