China

What do you call a person who speaks three or more languages? Multi-lingual

What do you call a person who speaks two languages? Bilingual

What do you call a person who speaks one language? American

 

I certainly felt like an American in China. Hardly anybody spoke English and we were the spectacle at a lot of the places that we visited.

 

We arrived in Hong on Thursday, April 3^rd. For the past two months, everyone has been saying that Hong Kong is the best port to arrive to. Sadly, the weather was rainy and cloudy. When I first began to see land and buildings, I was saying to myself, this is cool but nothing special. Then we kept sailing in further and further, and there were more and more buildings all around. I have never seen so many skyscrapers in my life. Hong Kong is a huge city, spread out on various islands. It was so hard to know what to do in one day. I ended up taking a Chinese cooking class, which was good, but I didn't really learn to cook dishes that I could replicate. In the afternoon and evening, I just explored the area and went to a great dinner with Dani, Allyson, George, and Connor.

 

The next day, we left early morning for Beijing. That day, we saw the Summer Palace and then explored some of Beijing at night. Saturday was the day that we were all waiting for – the Great Wall of China. As Allyson said, it was more like the Great Staircase of China. The wall was in a mountainous area, so the elevation keeps rising and falling. It is a total of 6000 kilometers long and is the only man-made structure that can be seen from space. We took a ski lift up to the wall and then a toboggan down. The toboggan was a lot of fun, except for the fact that I ran into the Chinese father and daughter in front of me when my breaks wouldn't work. I felt horrible, but they were really nice about it. I think George got it on video. For future showing…

 

The next two days in Beijing were spent exploring more of the sights such as Tiananmen Square, the Forbidden City, and the Temple of Heaven. We also did some shopping. In fact, I got two shirts tailored for when I start work in July. And if I need more, I can easily send an email to get more made. Bargaining has been essential is all of the countries that we visited. I hate bargaining, with a passion. Why can't they just give us a fair price to start with? And then when we finally do get the price that we want, we are still skeptical of whether or not we got ripped off. When we hear that someone bought the same item as us, we always ask the price that the other person paid and then one of the people is disappointed that they didn't get it for cheaper. At this market, it was the first time I had fun bargaining because the vendors were so desperate. Tips for bargaining that I learned:

·       Laugh at the original price

·       Say that a friend got it for cheaper (then they say "same same but different")

·       Keep chanting the same price over and over again

·       Buy in mass quantities

·       Find a defect in the quality

·       Walk away – most useful trick of all

 

The last day of our six-day China trip was spent in Shanghai. We just walked around the city, which had a mix of new and old architecture. There were lots of interesting buildings in both Beijing and Shanghai. These Chinese cities are growing incredibly fast and the economies are booming.

 

 

Olympics and Riots

 

As you probably know, the Olympics will be held in Beijing this summer. There were souvenir shops set up everywhere. We saw a few of the facilities being built for the games. They were awesome, but there is still a long way to go, with respect to facilities as well as general tourist services. Millions of people will be converging on China in four months. We arrived to the new terminal at the Beijing airport, which is first-class and now the world's largest building. However, very few of the taxi drivers or restaurant workers speak English. In fact, the guys on the street who are trying to sell us fake purses speak better English. I didn't find Beijing to be a tourist-friendly city. Without my guide, I don't know how we would have survived.

 

As for the controversy surrounding the Olympics, there are two reasons that people are rioting: their polluted cities and their human rights record. As for the pollution, it was definitely noticeable. For all four days that we were in Beijing, we never saw a blue sky or the skyline of the city. The air was always full of smog.

 

With respect to the human rights record, there is certainly quite a list of threats to human rights in China. China has executed more people in three months than the rest of the world has in 3 years. There is little legal representation and many of the executions happen soon after sentencing. As a result, the process that leads to execution is far from fair. There are 68 crimes for which the death penalty could be used including violent crime, tax fraud, stealing petrol, killing a panda, and disrupt ting the stock market. These executions accomplish another goal as well: organ transplants. Over 90% of all organs transplanted in China are from executed prisoners. Over two million Chinese need transplants every year, but only about 20,000 receive them. There is no system of voluntary donors, because cultural norms dictate that human body remains should enter the earth intact.

 

Some of the groups that are targeted by the executions in China are the Falun Gong and Tibetans. Both of these groups threaten the power that the Communist Party has over its people. The Falun Gong is a religious sect that has 30 to 100 million members worldwide and it is a mixture of qigong, Buddhism, and Daoism. I had heard of them before, because I have seen them demonstrating throughout the United States. They do their tai-chi like ceremonies as well as showing pictures of the torture of their followers back in China. When the group began, the Chinese government commended them, but for some reason, they went full circle and began persecution.

 

Tibet has also received international spotlight recently. It is especially tense because March 10^th is the anniversary of their revolt against Chinese rule in 1959. Ever since, their spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama, has been exiled in Dharamsala, India. Although the Dalai Lama has emphasized non-violence, this year the demonstrations seem to be especially tense. Since Chinese officials restrict visits to Tibet, it is hard to get credible information about the situation. To learn more about the Dalai Lama and the Tibetan situation, I would recommend checking out the documentary entitled 10 Questions for the Dalai Lama by Rick Ray. The Dalai Lama will meet with anybody and each person has ten questions. However, if a person is not sincere, no matter how much power and prestige that he or she has, the Dalai Lama will walk out of the appointment. Also, here is an article from The Economist about the Tibetan situation: http://www.economist.com/displayStory.cfm?story_id=10875823

 

 

Censorship

 

Censorship is an incredibly important tool used by the Chinese government to keep their citizens misinformed. For example, Allyson went on a university visit and talked with various college students. The students had no idea what was going on in Tibet. When I went to an Internet café and searched YouTube, a comment came up saying that I couldn't view that information in China. Just recently CNN and BBC were allowed into China just because the foreign journalists that are there for the Olympics demanded it. However, once the Olympics are over, those liberties will disappear.

 

There was an incredible sense of being watched wherever we went. Especially in Beijing, there were guards everywhere. When we were in Tiananmen Square, our guide mentioned nothing about the massacre that occurred in 1989. When someone asked about that event, he stated that he was not allowed to talk about it and said that there are a lot of taboo subjects in China.

 

 

Knock-offs and Scams

 

I felt like I always had to be on guard in China. There were knock-off purses. There were knock-off cars. There were knock-off shoes. There were tons of scams as well. So many college students would come up to us and practice their English. However, we were warned that some may want to take us to a tea ceremony and then charge us with a huge bill. I hated being skeptical of the intentions of college students that came up to us and wanted to speak English.