Asians can't drive.
Ah yes, it's horrrible and horribly racist to believe that. Yet, here I am surrounded by Asians failing to drive.
Okay, that's a bit untrue. Chinese traffic has a different style to it, one quite alarming to western sensibilities. A double yellow line means next to nothing. Traffic cops are mocked contemptuously. Right of way isn't really a useful concept. Driving on the sidewalk? Sure, if you need to.What you do is you go when you want to and hope other people get out of the way. Seriously.
It does seem to work.
See, I'm used to traffic where there are rules and you expect people to obey the rules. Sure, in the back of your mind you realize that someone might do any crazy ass thing, but the rules are expected. Deviation from the rules can surprise, cause accidents.
In China there's no such expectation. Driving is slower (and a bit sparser, I might add) and the crazy radar is set on sensitive. When u-turns accross five lanes of traffic and a double yellow line are common place, there is nothing really too unexpected to expect.
Crossing the street is one of those terrifying alien things about China that you have to get used to. In fact is was the first terrifying an alien thing that I got used to. Generally it is done one lane at a time but with a nice steady, predictable pace. Crosswalks don't seem to matter. Pedestrian right of way is reduced to the principle of "I'll switch lanes in order not to hit you." And guess what? You probably aren't going to win any lawsuits if you get hit.
I never thought that one could stop walking in the middle of six lanes of downtown traffic "carefully."
Neither blogspot nor livejournal are accessible from within China. I hope this does not mean I will lose track of Claire and Josh F. utterly.
SWYDM is aok, possessing neither revolutionary impulse nor political impact, I suspect. Crumpled and Cornertable escape notice and are accessible.
The party doesn't care, but I am watching you.
There are two Dongyings. West Dongying is run by the state oil company and East Dongying which is run by some other part of the party. The school and Shelley's apartment are in West Dongying.
Thepeople are stylishly dressed, and the food is tasty. It also has not made me sick yet, and I have made a few questionable decisions (I ate some raw leeks without thinking about it). Still more attention has to be paid to the food you eat, and also where you are walking.
THey have no homeowners associations around here, and sidewalk maintainence consists of sweeping. There are smashed, cracked and nonexistant sections of most thoroughfares. Not to mention the pools of mysterious (and not so mysterious) liquids. Dongying is not a good place for high heels. Yet, the female residents, mostly stylishly dressed, somehow persist with them. Go figure.
Stinky tofu does a much better job of smelling like human urine than urine itself does. Miraculously it really doesn't taste bad at all. It does have the disadvantage of you needing to get near it to eat it.
Finding an internet connection is harder than I supposed. There are few internet cafes in Beijing.
So the plane trip passed and passed and passed. The toddler that I played peekaboo with got bored with it after the third hour. The only inflight movies I was interested in were the ones dubbed into Mandarin with English subtitles.
The inflight magazine served a cautionary tale on the perils of judging other cultures by their inflight magazines. Especially by the grammar free english subtitles underneath pictures. One can only imagine the horrible (though probably not untrue) things one would think about American culture from reading our inflight magazines. Particularly amusing was the phot spread of the "french girl with romantic endowments of french style" and her "Chinese darling, firm and frank and straight features." Phot-poetry tends to suck in any language.
Beijing is a sight. Driving is a whirlwind of cars, without any order. They have roundabouts, possible leftover from the British, but half the cars go the wrong way about them. It's polluted and murky, brightly lit and a little stylish at night. The food and beer are cheap and excellant.
There are skinny uniformed teenagers all over. These are the normal police, but I'm told they are quite useless. All they do is show up after the crime and take notes. They look quite intimidated even without anything happening. They do not carry guns and people brazenly ignore them when they try to direct traffic.
The police were on the scene when a theft occured at the restaurant last night. But when the theif tried to escape on foot, it was the restaurant's waiters that gave chase. I suspect that they also dispensed the justice if they caught him.
Today we're to see Tianamen square and do some touristy crap. oh yes, and tonight we drink in the expat quarter. Then to Qingdao tomorrow for more beer.
I guess I'll be seeing China through the bottom of a glass.
Details regarding the weirdness of my family reunion will come out in due time. Suffice it to say the blog is on hiatus until I'm on the other side of the ocean.
My visa is gotten, I'm still finishing up the TEFL, packing and straightening out finances.
My heart is aching. I will miss people.
I've never really been what you'd call a good barista. I'd rather entertain customers and coworkers than try to push some silly marketing agenda, sell people overpriced cups or upsell anything. I want to put in my hours, make some cash for the stockholders and not compromise my dignity.
Opportunities to compromise my dignity abound. Starbucks encourages a rah-rah atmosphere wherein foolish exercises that benefit the company are deemed "fun" by morons and toadies. Thankfully a frown and a furrowed brow, and a decision to do something of visible worth to the store can get you out of such silly exercises.
These people sometimes look at you askew when you don't want to play the reindeer games. "Why don't you want to make working fun?" they'll ask.
"What the hell is fun about that?" is my usual response. Usually 'that' isn't fun at all, but an opportunity to do something tedious and engage in my own patented brand of awkward social interaction.
The thats in question have included playing a form of bingo wherein various sampling exercises are performed, participation in selling contests (a few of which I've won without consciously trying), putting on frappucino suits (don't ask) and my near pathological resistance to the nuisance of active sampling (going out and giving away free stuff to customers, accompanied by a perky descriptions). I could go on. Every month there's at least one suggestion of annoying things we can do with our copius spare time.
Some people really, really take to this stuff. They deride you as cynical and lazy for not wishing to deal with it. Not that these people aren't usually good employees or even occasionally good company as well. It's just funny how hard it can be to give enough of a crap for some of them.
My current store is not plagued by an excessive devotion to the annoying practices of the marketing department. We have quite the opposite problems: sloth and illiteracy make sure that marketing makes few beachheads into the store. Nowadays I find myself fantasizing about cruel and unusual punishments for coworkers who don't follow basic equipment maintenance procedures and giving tedious instructions about how to make iced tea.
But that's all behind me now. I am almost a Green Apron Monkey no more. It's Funny how hard it is to not give a crap.
Over at Crooked Timber John Quiggin gets something right:
State capacity tends to rise with income, so in wealthy countries the state can achieve more, with less obtrusive use of power, than in poor countries. It is strong and not weak states that produce economic freedom.
I have long believed that it is no paradox to insist that freedom requires a strong state. I do think that it is far from proven that this is the case, but certainly isn't one of those assertions that is false out of the gate.
Arguing against some libertarian organization with the standard libertarian tendentious handout of an economic freedom chart, Quiggan attacks the notion that less government is identical to more freedom. I'm sure all uncrazy libertarians agree that a sound, sensible and well-enforced system of laws is required for economic and political freedom. However, the idea that with less government the more freedom is one of those reflexive beliefs that many people have precisely because they have not quite examined it. It is a cliche, defended by no one and yet many, with accompanying silly Thoreau quote and everything. It is not just a straw man set up by some foreign socialist to snipe at the American Way of Things.
The difference between the size of a state and its capacity to do curtail freedom is easily illustrated. I once asked a teacher of mine, Scott Rozelle, which was more bureaucratic; the Chinese government or the Universities of California? Professor Rozelle had experienced both of these institutions in their fullness, and he wasted no time answering the question. "The UCs," he said.
The UC system is silly and time wasting and keeps files it doesn’t need. It also doesn’t give a crap about your political views, sexual orientation or what you do with your degree. It is bureaucratic and non-oppressive. You can figure out the rest of the analogy for yourself.
Let me just bring up a point that should be very clear to you and that you should remember for the rest of your life when thinking about politics. Big government versus small government, weak states versus strong states and more freedom versus less freedom are separate but related issues.
The debate over the size of government is one worth having on its own terms. The size of government may may be good or bad for long term growth (or if large government spending isn't bad for long term growth, then it is probably for reasons that most socialists would find very depressing). Heck, it could just make voters feel like a lot of their money is being wasted and turn them off to the civic process. But I don't think that the size of the government in dollars has all that much to do with the intrusiveness or power of the government.
Research remains to be done on what kinds of government are compatible with economic growth. This would help us to illuminate what kind of trade-offs that the developed and developing world face with their public choices. Let’s hope it isn’t just done by libertarian institutes making lists.
Starbucks has a 24-hour fixit line staffed by bored twentysomethings. It's called the FAST desk, which stands for something to do with facilities and services and some other words that make less sense but do the tough work of turning an otherwise meaningless series of intials into an acronym.
The thing about bored twentysomethings is that they crave entertainment. Especially at 9:30 pm on a wednesday.
FASTDBT: Hello my name is Bored Twentysomething what can I do for you tonight?
ME: I, uh, broke the pastry case.
FASTDBT: (suddenly awake) oooo, did you smash the glass part, or did you break the coolant system? Or was it something else?
ME: No. I was just changing the little plastic things around the light bulbs. When I started doing that the lights worked, when I finished they did not.
FASTDBT:(very disappointed with me and my silly, mundane problem) Have you tried wiggling them?
ME: I've wiggled everything that might bring the lights back.
FASTDBT:It says here we dispatched someone to fix your pastry lights this week.
ME: Yeah. They've been broken all week. That wasn't me though. The guy came out and did that this morning, but he didn't change the dirty little plastic tubes around the ligths while he was at it, so my boss asked me to.
FASTDBT: So then you broke it.
ME: Yup.
FASTDBT: Why didn't the tech change them himself?
ME: I'm not a psychologist.
FASTDBT: I'm going to assign the same tech to fix this. That will teach him.
ME: Teach him to trust us to finish his work?
FASTDBT: We aren't real big on that around here, no. In fact, I'm going to write down that this was his fault.
ME: rawk!