Two Hasaam In As Many Days. Woah.

Day #64
Funds: $5500
Michael has replaced numerous vices with gross over-consumption of peanuts, and regrets nothing. Except for that one that was completely empty. I am NOT getting over that anytime soon.

Hmmm lessee here ... ok we'll do it this way: a 3in1 package for your reading pleasure!

[Trip to Zhu Jia Jiao]

(___________ = 15km, apparently)

So me and Joy decided to stick with the SISU Guesthouse until the 10th cos with the student discount things weren't so bad, and anyway I'd paid for the internet all of January so it would have been silly to walk away. (Then of course as I'm sure you're well aware by now my laptop died nice and proper within 2 days.) We could have easily spent all the time hanging out watching movies or whatever but - oh yeah, the disc drive had morphed into a smart-arse. So we decided we should do something touristy, originally we were thinking Su Zhou, but then Joy remembered some place she'd been when she was little which she assured me was very pretty, and I'd already been to Su Zhou last time I was here, so we went to this other place slightly closer instead. Pretty standard "Picturesque Chinese Tourist Site" meaning lots of photo ops and people trying to sell you reeeeeeeeally souvenir-type goods which might have made good presents if I could have been bothered stopping to really look at them properly. Sorry guys ^^" We rode on a boat and Joy took a couple videos which hopefully we'll find a way to put up somehow, including one or two of Crazy Turtle Lady, who we bought Presumably Sane If Possibly Traumatised Turtles from. Hmmm I could have said all that better huh? Well anyway yes, that was the bottom line. We have turtles now, terrapins if you wanna get anal about it. They are called Red-Eared Sliders (although we call them Bowser and Eddy) are very cute, and surprisingly lively at completely sporadic intervals. They are also, it turns out, so extremely illegal in Australia that if you are caught with them, you cop a $100,000 fine and/or 5 years jail time. So sorry Cameron, I did originally plan to sneak you one home but I'm thinking it's not really worth the trouble ^^" The plan now is to have Joy's Ah Gong (maternal Grandfather) adopt them and we'll visit them when we can.

So Crazy Turtle Lady did explain in great detail how lots of people get away with smuggling her turtles, she was in fact quite manic about the whole thing and all but threw her turtles at us. She insisted we never feed them or put them in very deep water until it gets warmer. I'm not really doing her justice, which is a shame because she had NOTHING on Insane Lizard Man, a merchant with similar wares and a similar sales pitch, only he was insisting we hide the tiny things in our mouths when we walked through. He demonstrated this once or twice. When it became apparent that we were quite happy with the turtles we'd already purchased he then asked us how we felt about "long", which I thought meant "dragon", and so did Joy. Next thing I know he's reached into a hidden bag, pulled this sinister-looking lizard out and thrown it on my scarf. Man that thing was awesome, could crawl upside-down on my arms and everything. They looked fast and pointy, so overall a sort of cross between Sonic the Hedgehog and Spiderman, I think. Awesome. Oh yeah and Zhu Jia Jiao is famous for its rice dumplings (sticky rice mixed with stuff molded into a triangular prism-shape and wrapped in a leaf of some sort). They have lots of different kinds, some with meat, eggs, red bean, pretty much everything. All the ones I sampled were pretty good. =D

[Brief Rundown of Booktown!]
THIS is a bookstore. The sign reads "Shanghai Shu Cheng" or "Shanghai Book City", Fuzhou Road has a couple little ones here and there, then suddenly here it is. The place is 7 floors, each floor specialising in a category or theme and in my opinion, this is something we could really do with back home. I mean, what have we got, a 2-storey Angus and Robertson? Is it A&R again or some other place that has the mini-Gloria Jeans sometimes? This place has an actual proper Starbucks somewhere in it (not that I'm saying we need Starbucks in Melbourne, I was quite proud of us for holding that off as well as we did). They also sell a huge variety of clearly burned PC games, probably legit CDs and a few nifty little gizmos as well as DVDs. But ... unlike some uhh, OTHER book places I may have encountered it doesn't allow itself to become a Timezone clone, hehe. Ohhh and this random pair of adorable Chinese girls came up to me and Joy and asked us if we could sign a book filled with random messages they were compiling from strangers as a birthday present for their friend. We thought this was a really cute idea, hope it wasn't some sort of scam, ahah. They'd gotten a few people to write in their native tongues so I figured rather than bastardise the birthday girl's native tongue I'd just write a heartfelt mini-essay about how crazy I thought her friends were. When I asked what their friend's name was, they said "Rabbit". AWWWWWW.


[The Impromptu Trip To Nanjing]

(___________ = 100km)

On the 10th Joy had to leave Shanghai to go see her Dad's side of the family, who live someplace whose name I forgot but is close-ish to Qingdao, I think. At any rate she wanted to go it alone, I think because she doesn't know them as well as her maternal Grandparents so bringing me might have been weirder. That ultimately suited me just fine as it gave me these 5 days to be alone and do pretty much nothing, something I haven't been able to do for quite a while. Can't remember if I mentioned it or not, but Thursday I'll get on a plane to Qingdao and she'll meet me there in the afternoon. So we got up relatively early to catch a taxi to her uncle's place, he was supposed to see her off at Shanghai Railway Station and saw no harm in me coming along too. The place was packed, apparently lots of people are flooding the long-distance trains as Chinese New Year is coming up and everyone wants to go back to their hometowns to be with their families and everything, it's basically Christmas and New Years rolled into one. So the place was busier than anywhere I've ever seen, and that includes my stint in HK (come to think of it, HK's probably even worse right now ... hmmm). Joy's Uncle kept trying to get something called "Platform Tickets", which for all I know could be the done thing everywhere else too but the point is you need to get em if you wanna accompany somebody all the way to the train itself. They wouldn't sell them to him. Then he sent me and Joy there to act like I was a lost foreigner who needed my Chinese friend's help to find the right train. That didn't work either. So at this stage I wasn't sure what was going on, I just knew that Joy was getting scared she was going to miss her train, and considering the time of year another ticket might be tricky. Joy's Uncle disappeared and this time promptly returned with a man in a leather jacket. We were fairly sure they'd never met before and suspected he'd been slipped a bit of cash or something. Next thing I knew we were following this guy through the train station acting natural and nobody was trying to stop us. I had no idea why. Joy asked her Uncle, "who is this guy?" he just laughed and said "it doesn't matter!" and I laughed too =P "See, Joy? This is the way to get things done!" I chuckled, and probably went off on some sort of rant about how clever and resourceful her Uncle was if memory serves.
We found Joy's train with 15mins to go, and the three of us hopped on, me and her Uncle carrying her luggage. We had a quick look around to figure out where to put everything down and ... well by now you've probably guessed that at this point the doors slammed shut and the train started to move 10mins early. A train lady walked past and Joy's Uncle explained that we didn't have tickets and needed to get off. She politely explained that the train wouldn't stop until the next station, and since this was an express that would be Nanjing. In two hours (as seen in the above map). Joy's Uncle tried to be outraged but then she also politely pointed out that there was no such thing as an express train platform ticket, so it made no sense that we should have even been there. I tried to contain my excitement since after all, for him this was a massive inconvenience whereas for me, I was going to Nanjing! I would see a bit more of China after all! I wondered if it would be possible for me to sneak off, crash at a hostel for a little bit and return to Shangy in a couple of days but then it occurred to me that given the whole Chinese New Year crazy train situation, I couldn't be sure that tickets back would be easy enough to come by and/or affordable. Oh and all my luggage was waiting for me in the lobby of SISU Guesthouse, not sure what they would do with it after a couple days of me not coming to pick it up, so I gave that plan a miss. [Sigh] It would have been awesome though. I did get some nice pictures of Chinese countryside for a change though, as well as some not-so-nice pictures of some demolished houses or some sort of rubble. Perhaps I will show them to you all some day, when I have access to a computer that doesn't have facebook issues. For the moment, they sit on my nifty USB stick. Oh and I have a picture of a sign that says "Nanjing Station"!!! That PROVES I was in Nanjing! Sadly, we didn't even leave the platform, our train going back was already there for us. In case the map doesn't put it into perspective, this is probably the same as accidentally getting on the wrong train at Spencer Street Station (oh, I'm sorry, "Southern Cross" Station) finding yourself in Sydney, and then just coming straight home.

Phew, okay so I think I've covered most eventy-type goodness, at least I got all the Joy-content done for the moment, things have been kinda slow since she left so look forward to a relatively shorter entry about the last couple of days! Ahh who am I kidding, Japan stuff and arrangements have advanced, I'll probably wind up going on some sort of rant about my money situation, exchange rates and how I look forward to going like nothing else. Oh well, you wouldn't be reading this if you didn't enjoy it, right? I mean, it's not like I'm putting a gun to anyone's head, am I???

Fried Hasaam And Eggs

Day #63

(rough location of my hostel)
Location: Some Internet Cafe on Nanjing Road, near People's Square (still Shanghai but)
Michael has come to terms with the death of his laptop, Simon.


Oh man the amount of getting up tos I've been doing since I last saw my blog has been crazy!!! If I could have, I would have posted about 3 blogs since the last one, I even had the time to do it occasionally, but unfortunately my laptop no longer wants to load windows. All it will do is spit the DVD drive in and out at me, quite disrespectfully, I feel. As usual when I have a crisis which turns my life upside-down for stupid reasons, Joy came to the rescue and together we went and bought a usb that contains 16gb - Simon could hold 20. I also now have a USB that can accept any camera memory card, which saves a lot of hassle loading photos. All up this cost me about $AUS30, it is unclear how the guy on the street obtained these goods =[

The reason photos have not been going up is because for some reason the computers at these net cafes seem to despise facebook for some reason. In fact, my laptop was unusual in that I could access facebook at all, in hindsight a couple other Monash people had similar problems, so I may have to investigate a new means of getting them across the pond. Hmmm I'm thinking I may do a couple entries tonight just to make it more readable for my loyal viewers ... oh who am I kidding, hi Mum and Nana =P (jk I know there's a couple more ^^)

So Joy's Uncle and his lot are the real deal, crazy Chinese politeness is not restricted to religious nuts like my experience may have led me to believe. Before last week, the treatment I've been used to in Shanghai as a foreigner has generally been a sort of attitude that I'm basically a walking cash machine with no brains. I've taken this on board as a half-truth. In all fairness though, some taxi drivers and waiters have been awesome patient with my terrible directions, and in the market if I tell people I'm just following my friends but have no money they'll hang out for a chat too here and there. But anyway!
Joy knew her Uncle, Aunty and cousin. Everyone else was as random to her as they were to me. I struggled terribly following their Shanghai accents - most people put on a standard sort of accent for dealings with anyone but these guys were just hanging out. We had dinner at a restaurant and then a couple nights later her Aunty cooked, but the food was equally good. I've never had such good food in China. They made a point of ensuring there was plenty of vego stuff for me, which is a massive deal because even though Chinese cuisine has more diverse vegetarian (su de) dishes, they seem to be more freaked out by the notion of vegetarianism than Australians (case in point, after I explained that I don't eat meat, one waitress stared for 5 seconds before asking "is lamb or dog ok then?"). Joy whispered tips in English here and there to make sure I didn't commit any horrible manners, and made me promise not to finish every last grain of rice like usual - this makes the host feel like they haven't given you enough, and they WILL keep offering you food until they're sure you've been satisfied.
I decided that one couple at the table were basically the Shanghainese version of Rat and Jenny. Most of you have no idea who that is. If you were at my 21st, you may recall me singing in Chinese. If you're still with me, you may remember somebody yelling, "oy! Speak English!" That was Rat. Anyway this Shangy guy was hilarious but his accent was so strong I had no hope of understanding even basic stuff. Joy can follow Shanghainese but still had trouble because he loved his slangso much. He kept interupting people with bizarre statements that they all seemed to find hilarious and some of the younger guys kept laughing and saying stuff like "shut up none of us can understand you!" Heheheh. He insisted I drink as much as possible and mistakenly assumed I was holding back because of Joy, which wound up with her being labelled "Lao Hu" (= "Old Tiger", apparently what you call a wife who won't let her husband have any fun cos she's too naggy and dominating, kinda like "The Old Ball and Chain" in English I suppose). But he told me not to worry because "And old tiger is just a sick cat when she's weak", so the solution to my "problem" was to hit her, apparently xD His wife was very nice, spoke really carefully and slowly, we had a nice little chat =]

Aw man this blog-stuff is wearing me out. From the top of my memory, here's a list of stuff I wanna get people up to speed on:

Trip to Zhu Jia Jiao
The Impromptu Trip To Nanjing
Brief Rundown of Booktown!
Kicking it with Eugene and Co. (a.k.a. "Trilingual Conversations That Fried My Brain And Exposed Just How Much Japanese I Really Have Forgotten")
Comments On Living in The Same Hostel As Last Time

6 Hasaams Go So Fast

Day #55
Location: SISU Guesthouse, Countdown!!!
Michael is done. Ball's in Monash's court now. Gimme Graduation!!!

Gotta clean up ... geez this room is in an awful state ... finished the course yesterday. Because we were allowed dictionaries this time the exam was much easier. Although, to be fair, there were no ridiculous surprises in this one so it's possible I could have done nearly this well even without one (ok who am I kidding the mini-essay q's at the end worth 30% featured a bunch of words I didn't know I couldn't have begun answering them without it!!!"

So today's the last day in the SISU Guesthouse. Everyone's bailing really quickly and really abruptly, we've labelled it the Mass Exodus because this place is gonna feel like a ghost house for those 2 or 3 of us who choose to stay here after the student discount is gone. Lots of people are hopping on a train to Beijing today, a handful of others are heading west to find some mountains so they can get some peace and quiet and breathe some fresh air before they head on to Xin Jiang, which is where our favourite Chinese Ethnic minority habituate, the wegar food here is kick-arse so I can't imagine what it's like over there. One or two people are actually just going home in the next two days.
As for me, still one of the least-travelled in the lot of us, I'm leaving the guesthouse with Joy but I'm not leaving Shanghai. Lenny, Sue Kim, Eric and Lian will all be around somewhere over the next couple days and so will I. Joy's family insisted on figuring out my plane ticket to Qingdao and it's less than $AUS100, so I certainly can't complain about that. Depending on how cheap a place me and Joy end up staying in in Shanghai, I may not be online until the 15th, when I rock up in Qingdao. Hopefully I'll have at least another entry in by then though. I just caught a spare moment, Dylan hasn't packed his laptop yet, Joy's in the shower, in an hour and a half the guesthouse people will be checking out our room so I better get a wriggle on.
Oh and today's Miranda's birthday! I'll send her a text soon. (Eric's bday in a couple days too, we'll have to dinner with him)

I'm really glad this course is over. I'll miss the people, I'll miss my teachers and definitely my tutor, who would have been such a great teacher if it weren't for the fact that we had that silly silly curricullum. My Chinese level has barely improved at all. Even my confidence hasn't risen that much because I've actually spent way too much time relying on other students who were better than me, and trying so hard to remember all the useless crap seemed to leave little space in my head for the stuff I wanted to learn. No more though, no more whinging, course is over. I can already feel my Chinese ability improving!!!

Last night I saw a Broadway musical with Joy's family, it was pretty good! I like her Mum, hadn't met her before, and I get a good feeling from her Dad too. Kayson, the 4-year-old brother, is the best. Why can I relate to 4-year-olds so well??? Anyway as a result I missed out on the craziness of the last night, having already missed the craziness of new year's eve. My understanding is, both involved a lot of people randomly hooking up drinking far too much and dancing like crazy. Some of those things I'm not allowed to do, and others I'm not really much good at =P We're all gonna do a brunch thing to see ourselves off though. That'll be soon after we all suddenly lose our rooms.

New Year's Eve me and Joy walked to the Bund from the Guesthouse, that was pretty nice ^^

________ = 1kmish



So I have officially completed all of my prescribed learning. Even if I go back to uni it'll be for a postgrad that'll be something I can finally study in my own way. From now on I can relax and properly enjoy this holiday, without too much pressure beyond the stress that might come from having to survive. On the other hand, it'll be an adventure!!! Yayyyyyyyy! Charrrrrrlieeeeeee!!!

Love you all, will send out new postcards soon I hope.

Merry Jingly and a Hasaam New Year!!!

Day #48
Funds: Much the same as last time
Location: ditto.
Michael got right into the Christmas spirit!

Argh so ok tons to write about that happened in the last 4 days, fortunately I took lotsa photos this time round ...
So Christmas Eve comes around and we had class as usual. Nothing too exciting there. Then I skipped my tute to practice for the talent show. The fruits of my labour can be viewed here [http://www.facebook.com/video/video.php?v=52132336213&subj=637056881] provided you have facebook. I'll say it went alright, but I could have done a little better. I could have sounded a lot worse though, and reactions from my classmates were overall positive. There's this dude we call Waiguoren (literally, "Foreigner", because he's from Pakenham, loves his bogan accent and makes it his business to stick out as much as possible around here) who just kinda stared at me for 10 seconds before finally saying "you should be busking!" ... that was my favourite comment. It normally doesn't take Waiguoren 10 seconds to think of something to say. I was nervous, as usual, but somehow doing that was easier than my last oral presentation. My theory is I practiced the absolute bejeezus out of the piece I wrote for the talent show, and the oral I'd just finished writing a minute or so before I stood up in front of my class.
When the act was done, I met my tutor from last time! Tutors take us for the last hour of a day, and are generally Linguistics postgrads and such. Mia remembered me from 2 years ago when she saw me playing the flute. I recognised her the instant she came running out of nowhere yelling "MIIIIIIICHAAAAAAAAAAEL!!!" So that was nice. She was like "I teach English at this Uni now!!!" and I was all "Oh. I'm still the same type of student as last time." Hahaha. I never thought I'd see her again. How awesome.

So we bailed on the talent show early. As a result I have no idea if I won anything. I was just SO hungry!!! Miranda came to watch me and had her guitar from something she did earlier in the day, so we brought it with us to the little Muslim restaurant that all the Monash students seem to like eating at so much. Sam bumped into us randomly and had dinner with us. The two of them play left-handed guitar so they had a lot to talk about, the sum of which saw us singing to their music (first a piece Miranda wrote and Sam played "I'm a believer") in said tiny restaurant. The chefs applauded them. =D Having gotten well and truly into the mood, I found some leftover lyric sheets from the carolling night in Miranda's guitar case. From there we paid our bill, and sang carols as we walked back to the guesthouse, and up the elevator. Somebody with a Christmas hat joined in until he got to his floor. Lenny saw us and ran away. He came back shortly with another guitar and joined as for the whole rest of the night! Zara and Adam came out of nowhere as well. Somewhere in the middle of all this I got a text from Monica saying "Christmas time is family time! Come drink with us!!!" but we all reasoned that, going out to not-all-that-exciting clubs with cheap drinks had been done before and hardly appealed to any of us, what we'd got caught up in doing was Christmassy, and had possibly never been done before at SISU ^^
We rode the elevator up and down a few times, getting people in on our act, then we sat around the hall for a half hour or so. Some people joined us, some people filmed us. An American actually thanked us and said it hadn't felt like Christmas til he heard us. Security came around midnight to tell us to calm down and we wished him a Merry Christmas. First time I ever saw a security guard smile here =D
Then we saw Miranda off into a taxi. Now that we were outside we felt like walking and singing again. People in shops smiled at us crazy foreigners and waved back at us. Within 10 minutes 4 random local Chinese girls had jumped out of their taxi and joined us. It seemed like I was the only one of us aware that we'd never seen these people before, the others all assumed one of us knew them xD They feature in photos on facebook also.
So yeah, haha good night that was.

Christmas day, Dylan let me use his computer for Skype, which meant I could talk to NANA and AUNTIES and Mum and DAD and Dude n J'Mak! Hooray! I only got an hours sleep between eve and day so I felt that throughout. We were at an all-you-can-eat buffet place that was built like a crazy elaborate food court. Look at THOSE photos cos seriously, the place had to be seen to be believed. 200RMB (approx $AUS50) to get in and that was all we had to worry about. Well that and exploding. As you all know, I do that sometimes. Awwww my aching Christmas Gut! It was a bit weird eating all that dessert without Uncle Lorry there egging me on though.
The majority of Monash students were there and we all fit comfortably. A girl from my class arranged the whole thing. Good on her! Oh and The Jie Ke (Jack) dressed as Skanky Mrs Claus. He enjoyed it far too much! After we all went back to SISU to try and watch a movie but I fell asleep =[

Internet's Hasaam and Dandy

Day #44
Funds: $6200ish
Location: ... SISU Guesthouse ... STILL ...
Michael should really get started on the next essay now that the first essay is finished.

Those of you paying attention to my funds track may have become a little confused by some discrepencies. While it is possible to live relatively cheaply in China (Shanghai being one of the pricier zones) my figures so far may have been a tad misleading. Somehow I managed to miscalculate my annual leave, which was a nice surprise since it turns out I UNDERestimated it considerably. I don't think I'm getting any more money from Casey Cardinia though, but still, I'm a couple hundred ahead of where I thought I'd be when I planned this out. I guess, I still haven't bought Christmas presents, and SISU kindly gave us a teeny stipend to cover the rise in cost of accomodation (250RMB each, like $AUS60abouts) of course this didn't cover the huge difference caused by the market crash everyone's over sooking about, so I'm really surprised the money's been sitting this quietly. I've mostly stuck to my 150RMB/day thing pretty strongly, which is easy enough since 20 kuai ("bucks") for a decent meal is about average, and this course has mostly left me a bit too knackered from sheer crappiness.
It's not really an intensive course by design, it's just the year's course at Monash, crammed into days instead of weeks. I have completely lost the ability to sustain interest in certain classes. And the content of our textbook ... ugh. Amanda Chan, if you're still keeping up with these entries, we're doing the exact same texts as you did. I even remember you mentioning an argument with somebody about the silly man who let his woman go to save face.
Mostly, it's the same chapter, over and over. No new grammar, which is what always gets me excited (don't judge me!), even though it's not like we know everything there is to know about Mandarin morphosyntax, just a list of new words. Every (artificial) dialogue in this book centres around the premise that Chinese people are super-awesome, super-polite friendly people who could never directly say anything that could even slightly offend their apparently terribly sensitive friends, and white people are pretty ignorant and come from a fairly empty culture, since all the foreign characters always need basic concepts explained like "the teacher saying your handwriting could be improved means he WANTS you to improve your handwriting!!! He's just too polite to say so!!!" To this, replies the white man in my book, "ohhhh. Shit. I completely ignored that and assumed my essay was awesome. How foolish of me! How wonderfully intricate is this elaborate system of ettiquette!!!"
Have I mentioned I loathe our textbook? The teachers are wonderful though. Our guy is really animated and enjoys making jokes and physically acting out words that he has trouble describing using other Chinese words. My tutor is as adorable as a 12 year old and is really patient with me and all my little oddities. She's more than willing to just sit and have a chat (in Chinese of course) about pretty much anything, so I have brought up absolutely everything I could think of to avoid The Book. Usually I just bring up Chinese culture that I'm at least vaguely familiar with (today we had an argument about whether Qiao Feng or Duan Yu was the best character on Tian Long Ba Bu, Qiao Feng being the manliest mo'fo ever to appear in a Wu Xia drama, Duan Yu being a dumbarse pretty-boy prince who tends to find out an inopportune moments that his current love interest is actually his half-sister). Sometimes I have to go to other extremes, once I found myself singing Qiu Ai Ge (the first song I did at my 21st ==") to prompt her into singing for us and another time played Love For a Thousand Years (very popular Chinese song) on my flute to stall - although to be fair the flute was with me cos I had to go to Miranda's straight after to practise for the Christmas Carols.
Oh the carolling, it was awesome ^^ Photos and locales are together on facebook, it was a good night. Miranda is really good on her guitar considering she's not even been playing a full year yet. Lenny, Sue Kim and Eric came with me, it was Miranda's church group's thing but the four of us Monash kids made up nearly a quarter of the group hehe. Church people are so nice and so much fun around Christmastime ^^
Doing essays with Monica (think Michelle Chew only slightly lighter and classier ... but not by much) is a BAD idea. Combined, we have the attention span of a single caffeinated squirrel. That has A.D.D.. We tend to take several hours to do a couple sentences each here and there. Essays with Lian, however, is a GOOD idea. Her Chinese is really good and she's really good for bouncing ideas back and forth with. Problem is, Monica and my behaviour seems to keep driving her to politely leave us to do her own essay elsewhere =[
So many characters on this trip ... argh I could never do them all justice in a silly little blog. There's something really weird about seeing the same people every moment of every day, it's rare to even get more than a single hour to yourself, even when you sleep there's another guy lying two feet away usually. It's not like people are clinging to eachother or anything, it's more that we just don't want to miss anything. I wish I were capable of doing what Quincy does, which is when he feels like he's sort of had enough, he just ignores everyone and if approached, stares at the floor and says in a vaguely apologetic tone: "I'm not ... socialising" XD
Lots of silly little gossip too. Me and Monica are enjoying the idea that there's rumours going on about us cos we usually hang out and have noticed people noticing. Sunday night we had another failed essay-writing session that saw us in bed at 7am and so we both just gave our essays to Lian to hand up and went to bed ... people did notice and comment on the fact that we both skipped class on the same day, which we find hilarious. (Although the teacher was more focused on the fact that I was probably dying from hypothermia or something, apparently she said something like "Well I hope he puts on a jumper from now on!") I look forward to hearing what certain people are going to make of me when Joy shows up IN A MERE SEVEN DAYS.
Merry Jingly To All! Doubt I'll get another blog in before Christmas, although I'll definitely have more photos put up soon.
Oh and tomorrow's my big night, me n Marcello gonna see what we can do. Starting to feel a bit nervous hehe. Hopefully I'll have that video up for everyone soon too.

I Am Eighty-Hasaam =]

Day #39
Funds: $6300ish

Sorry, internet problems. Still got em. Dunno when the next entry'll be. Want my damn net back damnit!!!

Ok! Lu Xun Park! All young white people should go to work out there!
Have I mentioned the public gyms? In parks in Shanghai and HK where we would have playgrounds for kids, they have gyms for old people. Some of these guys are insane. Upon seeing myself (in all my t-shirted and sandal-ed glory), Dylan (fairly standard-looking white guy, no disfiguring scars or the like) and Lenny (part EVERYTHING born in Singapore and sporting a mohawk), we were immediately approached. Lenny is a tank. I believe I have mentioned this before. So anyway I was the first to cop it. People here have decided I'm insane for two reasons:
1. I don't eat meat. Asking "does this have meat in it?" never gets an answer, just a confused look. I must always clarify it with an "i don't eat meat" which will be met with an even more confused, slightly horrified expression, but this can all be settled if I then follow up with "so does this have meat? I don't want to eat any meat." (And then they serve me chicken, pronounced "ji-rou" because THAT has no meat/"rou" in it =S)
2. I very rarely wear more than one layer. As you all know I have quite a speedy metabolism or something which results in me sweating like some sort of a chocolate rabbit upon any sort of physical activity, turns out whatever the deal with that is, it also causes me to be pretty warm pretty much all the time. We haven't gotten too bad, just single digits (someone tried to tell me we'd hit zero degrees one time, wasn't sure that was true), but while lots of other people are up to 3 layers, I still can't hack wearing so much. I have practically memorised the conversation where some old Chinese person freaks out and demands to know why I'm not cold then proceeds to tell me I'm awesome or something.
So obviously the 1st one didn't come up but that damned 2nd point was mighty topical for a while. While I got caught up in the conversation, Lenny and Dylan snuck off to try and do some dips n chin-ups etc. This also caught the attention of my new friends. Lenny, massive guy, was struggling to get as many dips in as he could, and he was doing them nice and slow. This guy comes up to him, and is all "Nah sonny you're doing it wrong" then immediately launched into about 5 times as many as Lenny had done in half the time. Then he dropped, all the old people clapped, and he yelled the now immortal words, "WO SHI BA SHI BA SUI!!!" (I AM 88 YEARS OLD!!!) Everyone clapped. Then some guy appeared on the same monkey bars as Dylan. He lifted himself up using only two fingers on each hand and thrashed Dylan in a similar fashion.
I gotta admit, I'm a TEENY bit proud of the next bit ^^ So finally I make it clear that I wanna try some sort of exercise when this old dude maybe a foot shorter than me came out of nowhere and said a bunch of stuff, the only part I really got being "Let's have a competition! I challenge you!" Next thing I know, dudeman is standing on his head, using one thumb and one finger on each hand for balance, as far away from his head as possible (the further away the more strength and focus is needed). So I'm thinking, haha awesome what were the odds I'd get a chance to show off? Then I was upside-down, too. That got a lot of applause actually. I noticed his arms reached out a lot farther than mine. I hoped nobody else did. Thing is, I never tried any fancy stuff before like using only one finger and one thumb for balance, but for those who didn't know I can generally stay on my head indefinitely, until I get bored, so I really wasn't sure what to expect in terms of a challenge. I never lost this game with Mishy or Neo. Then my LaoRival started doing all this weird stuff with his legs, like stretching and kicking them and stuff. I tried to copy him, fell over instantly. The crowd clapped some more and one person tried to console me. Then a second person came to translate from the first guy's Shanghainese into Mandarin. Then I caught my LaoRival with his legs folded in the lotus position (i.e., like a genie, or in meditation). He lifted himself straight up like this and balanced on his hands. I followed suit, and then he started going up and down like it was push-ups or something. So I fell over again and everyone started clapping. "WO SHI BA SHI BA SUI!!!" he yelled again. Then he felt like a bit of a chat.
"How old are you?"
"Aw I'm just 21."
"Wahahahaha! So young! No wonder you suck and are so weak and stuff! Don't worry, you'll get there!"
"Ahah, um, thanks ... How can you do that?"
[LaoRival strikes dramatic tai chi kinda pose and takes a few deep controlled breaths]
"It's qi gong (breathing/energy power)"
[Mykal mimics pose, LaoRival lights a cigarette and starts rambling in between draughts way too fast for Mykal to understand anything past "yeah, breathing control and power is important, oxygen gives us strength"] It was around this point that I realised about a quarter of the old folks at this park were smoking while they worked out like madmen. We left with our tails between our legs.

Had a good coupla weeks besides just that. Lots of fun stuff, some of it in a sort of you-had-to-be-there kinda way. Been studying reasonably hard, even though perhaps my conduct in class may not reflect that and I could be better behaved. My contributions to class discussion (in Chinese of course) have basically centred around how I really enjoy the food that I brought to class and am perhaps eating a little noisily, would he like some, how no sir, i'm not cold, this weather isn't so bad, how i hate wearing shoes so i don't if I can avoid it, and how it doesn't matter what Ivy says to win my heart, she is a vampire, and has no chance with me. Probably just as well I'm sharing the position of Class Rep with Claire, she does all the fun stuff I don't find interesting, like arranging christmas parties and all, while I do lots of interesting things that she might not have found fun, like running around making sure photocopies of revision sheets essential for exam preparation are available to our class more than 30 hours before the exam itself. Our course is quite poorly structured, and matters are made worse by what feels like poor communication between teachers here and home. The Linguistics nerd in me is getting all excited about the prospect of some sort of postgrad centred around studying teaching methods of second language acquisition, Australia clearly needs some work.

And Joy bought a phone. We beened texting!!! She's in Qingdao (to Shanghai what Sydney is to Melbourne distance and direction -wise) right now, less than 2 weeks til she's here ^^ Ok I'm starting to fall asleep. Hopefully I'll be able to post again real soon. Who knows when these damn techies are gonna actually figure out what's wrong with our net connection? Sigh.

Lately Hasaam's Been Underway

Day #25
Funds: [figure it out later I'm in a hurry!]

So I've been slumming it pretty much, just hangin around campus and the local area while people have been going crazy-touristy. I must admit this time round I've been a little disappointed with people's attitude towards bargaining. We seem to have a lot more 'shoppers' this time around, in that it almost seems like the spending of money is what's making them happy, nobody seems interested in the chase, and nobody wants to believe that yes, absolutely everything you buy here no matter where it's from or what label it has is equally likely to be of horrendous quality - it's not worth paying top dollar for it, just in case it is. People are bragging about having 5 kuai marked off, that's slightly more than a dollar, aw man no wonder the hawkers love us whiteys and try to rip me off all the time, ugh what a precedent some of these guys are setting ...
So yeah while people have been running around checking out sites I saw two years ago, I've pretty much been lounging around, going for walks or doing my homework sorta thing. Nice and simple, relaxing, is goooooood. The only problem is I pretty much don't take photos at all these days, just because I can't be bothered bringing my camera around all the time - I've settled. Whipping out a camera at a moment's notice isn't really part of my series of usual habits.
Oh went to the House of Jazz and Blues the other night, instead of Bonbons. Good call, Dylan! The ambience was very chilled, the music was awesome, and I caught up with this guy I met from the Shanghai Train there too. He brought a fellow student who also went to his Taiwanese Uni and we quickly realised she was Japanese. Cue the hilariously mind-bending 3-language conversation. Eugene and Rui with their awesome Mandarin + Me and Eugene with our native English dominated, but amazingly, there were occasions where I remembered a Jap word or two that Eugene didn't know the Mandarin for, and I tried to use as much Chinese as I could. I can't describe the weirdness of the using Japanese after so long. It was kind of like, you know when you sit on your leg or something for a while and then you try to walk and the blood just comes rushing back to it? It was kinda like that feeling, only IN MY BRAIN. I was even able to eventually come up with the sentence in Jap "remembering all these words feels like flowers blossoming in my mind", that was funny. [この言葉を覚えてるのは頭で花が咲いてるみたい/kono kotoba wo oboeteru no wa atama de hana ga saiteru mitai!] Part of me was reignited I spose, I'm really psyched about Japan all over again, like the way I was years ago. I can't really say or do anything useful, but I got a good feeling about how much I'm going to improve once I'm there.
But yeah, Bonbons = 150RMB to get in, then drinks are free. Drinks are incredibly strong, and water is an insane price. We swung by after to go make sure our terribly drunk friends were okay (didn't go in of course) and helped them taxi home. Monica was a little nuts, and wouldn't shut up about water. I continue to give her shit for this.
Me and this guy Quincy have begun distributing nicknames. I like this very much. I'm still Killer Mike cos that's what they called me for some reason last time, Shaun = Stinger and David = Deadly Dave. Man, we are out of control. Quincy also helped us discover that bread here actually isn't as bad as you might think, and I've been eating SO MUCH LATELY.
The food here tastes nice, but my goodness is it loaded with MSG and sugar and grease. I have no idea how I managed to eat out every meal last time. Me and Dylan snapped the other day and bought Australian-Made Oats (gooooo Patriotism!) and fruit and bread and yoghurt and juice, and having that stuff for breakfast really feels different. I feel all kinds of awesome having dodged the grease lately.
Uhhhh what else? Uh, got beaten up in the hallway. Sort of. This guy Lenny is a little nuts about physical fitness, boxing, martial arts, etc. The other night he taught me a few things to do with grappling, we drew a small crowd outside our rooms as we rolled around the floor pretty much dripping sweat all over, man did we smell bad. But it actually was pretty fun, this guy's a total tank so he had to go easy on me, let me get a few shots in and all that.
My dreams are becoming more vivid again. Lots of colour n stuff. Does that mean I'm sleeping properly or badly? Dylan reckons one night I sat bolt upright, mumbled something frantic in Japanese and stared at him. Then I apparently said nothing to him when he asked me if I'd just had a Jap nightmare, I went to the toilet and came back still ignoring him. I have no memory of this whatsoever, but Dylan can't seem to tell the story without laughing. =S
The vibe here is becoming gradually more high school as we go along. I'm trying to stay mature, last time it was so much easier to do that since I barely knew anybody. This time I'm just gonna have to stay grounded on my own merit/awesome. People are basically good now, few clashes of personality here and there though I guess. We'll see what happens. 1 week = 1 essay. That's doing my head in a little, too, since the material is OH SO MUNDANE AND DRY. More on that later, Dylan's trying to get me to go work-out in the park with him and the oldies. More on that later. Oh and I have a different story about old people in the park, maybe soon I'll just do a whole blog about that XD