Day 2: Brave Old World

I didn’t sleep terribly long in my first night in my new home. I thought I would! I felt like I had it all set up, but the body clock is still on US time, I guess. 11pm-2am sleep + restful shuteye until 0445am is all I was running on today. The view from my room is very nice. I looked across a lush, mostly green mall surrounding by newly planted trees and decent looking new campus buildings (everything is new, so), with some construction cranes in the distance. I could see decently far, so things were looking up.

I haven't actually been inside, yet.

Eventually, breakfast hour rolled around and Bai, Bilin and I headed to the dining hall across the street. I was given a brief rundown of the choices and we ordered cafeteria-style. I selected the Baotze (BOW tzuh), which is essentially a spongy dinner roll stuffed with meat or vegetables and the Qiambin (cham PING), a sesame/spinach flatbread. There was also a Yiu Tyo(?) Which is just deep fried dough (Bilin got this). Apparently it goes very well with soy milk – a Chinese coffee and donuts, say. The soy milk comes in a plastic bag (like a frozen sweet-corn bag) and you drink out of that. Related – I have already seen a ton of plastic waste that could be easily avoided, if not for convenience, I guess. So far, I have seen a conversationally-conflicted China. Plastics, smog, etc, but also windmills in the distance, a system where if your hotel card is not in a specific slot within the room, there is no access to electricity (except A/C or heat) and a sign in the elevator reminding me that taking the stairs saves energy. Given the reliance on coal in China to produce power, I can see how such a campaign against electricity use is seen as a more important issue than that of plastic use. Maybe they’ll get there eventually.

It was then on to the office, a 9^th floor room partitioned into about 8 desks, though I wouldn’t describe the situation as a cubicle. I was given a desk underneath the A/C (nobody wants this, it’s too cold, I was told – and while it was chilly, I think it is ok, especially with warmer days ahead) that came with a comfortable chair and a brand new monitor. I set up my desk as my sponsoring professor, Tian, came in and very graciously greeted me. I had met him 3 years earlier during his farewell dinner at Maine, so our interaction had been minimal up to this point. He and Bai assisted me in setting up my internet connection behind the Great Firewall before Tian showed me the terms of my position there. This included a salary of $6000 yuan/mo, which apparently is the salary of a professor there, if I am not mistaken, a meal/access card with $900 yuan, which should be plenty. This card has something in it that can be scanned for payment and access – just place on a reader and you are good! I met other faculty in the morning, whose names I will have difficulty remembering here, but everyone has been very polite. From our office window, there were boats in a water feature running through campus that were applying buckets of some sort of salt, I believe, that turned the water a chalky brown, from a deep brown. Apparently, I arrived after some pretty serious rainfall and this may have been a measure to prevent algae from growing.

It's hazy, I know, but there are windmills in the background

Looking good, guys! I'm sure it's fixed now.

For lunch, we walked to another dining hall, where professors eat lunch free (but not me). Here I had rice, some sort of leek-type water vegetable, bok choi, and shrimp. Bai describes this cafeteria as the worst on campus out of the three, citing that there must be a reason professors eat free. To me, this was reflected in the shrimp, which were not great. The Chinese serve their fish whole, as Bilin had a whole mackerel, as opposed to Bai and mine’s whole shrimp. Apparently, it is custom to eat the shelled shrimp whole, and spit out the husk, but I just peeled mine. We swung by the market before leaving and I picked up some juice. A fruit label and a big ‘30%’ is all I could understand, but it was a good choice, very similar to the Fruit V8 drinks in the U.S.

Though a relatively cool day, it was very sticky. Beyond this, I realized on my way to lunch, but the air was very thick. I hope it is due to the humidity, not smog, that it felt like breathing through a straw, or while being choked by a very weak person, or having a small child on your chest...you get the idea. I just felt as though I couldn’t get a full breath. Perhaps this, and not lack of sleep, is the reason my head feels slightly detached and in the clouds. In any case, it was a little startling.

Aftermath.

After an afternoon of work, I was invited to Tian’s farewell dinner for his graduate students. They will compete for jobs in Fiji, Shanghai and other places, I was told. Two, in fact, had interviews for the same position. A tough job market, fisheries, I think. We, along with Tian’s wife, Qing(?), went to a traditional Japanese restaurant downtown. As Tian said, “Welcome to China. Your first dinner in China? Japanese food!” And traditional it was! Taking of my shoes (I was the only one! Everyone else put shoe-covers on) and sitting at a sunken table. This table…nobody knew how to properly sit down, but everyone successfully did, albeit feeling foolish in doing so. I ordered a dinner platter with the help of English subtitles on the menus. Grilled eel, some odd egg dish that Qing loved, but I found dense and not great, tofu soup that I ate avoiding the tofu part, coconut shrimp. It was a full meal. We toasted our Sake to congratulate the graduates and there was a lot of talk about the future plans. I was often asked my opinion on something and always replied in the affirmative. One student picked up on this and said that I was ‘acting like the Romans’ which was a great way of putting the situation, I think.

After we finished eating, we just got up and left! The waitress didn’t bring any check, Tian just paid at the greeting desk/register as we left. It was very abrupt and strange to me, but we did leave and then wandered downtown to a man-made water feature/lake. It was Tian and Qing’s first trip to this, apparently. The downtown area was very clean and beautiful, everything is so new and modern. After some pictures (some with me, some without – at my begging, as it was an event for the graduates, not me), we headed home.

Linggang New City

Upon arrival, I promptly fell unconscious. It was 1930 and my lack of sleep finally hit me. Hard. I had left my door open, as to listen for Bai’s return and make plans for tomorrow with her. She called into my room questioning why the door was ajar and received confirmation, apparently, to close it. I cannot say I recall the interaction.