Chhaya

I remember that once I was angry with Chhaya, the driver for Palm Tree, because he wasn't around to drive the bus when I wanted to take everyone to the river for a boat ride. I was talking to Srey Art about it, how I was so upset about it. Half of the kids couldn't go because we didn't have any transportation. She told me that it couldn't be his fault. A few years ago, he and Phearun had gotten in a huge fight, and they didn't speak to each other any more after that. I'd only told Phearun about my plan, and he never told Chhaya. She also told me about how he would take care of her when she was little, like she was his own daughter even though he didn't have one yet and wouldn't for years, and how he'd put blankets on her at night when he thought she was cold.

He was a child soldier in the Khmer Rouge. He has tattoos all over his body because he, like many other terrified enlistees, believed they made them bullet proof. He can drive a tank.  He can play guitar.

Peace out.

All This Ringing in my Fingers

I haven't legitimately played a piano since July 6th.  It's now August 26th.  That's 51 days.  I think this is the longest I've ever gone without playing a piano in literally a full decade.  It makes me upset.  I feel uncreative.  I really hate not playing.

Even in the middle of the ocean, there were pianos, even though they tried to ban me from them.  Even in an orphanage in one of the poorest countries in the world, I could find something close enough to a piano.

Peace out.

//

Edit:  I also really miss roller hockey.  It's weird what things end up being the most irreplaceable.

泰

I found a Thai restaurant.  Did I mention this before?  It's located at the very northern end of the clubbing district in Nanjing, which is called 1912.  It's really quite nice, supposed to be kind of an upper-class restaurant, but of course I do my very best to cheapen the place as much as I can.

They do have pad thai there, which is typically called "Thai shi" or written like this: 泰式(炒虾).  The characters I put in parenthesis, "chao xia," means "fried shrimp," which is the variety that they have on the menu.  Of course, I really dislike shrimp, so I asked them if they could replace it with chicken.  When I tried this same maneuver in Shanghai with Hokwan, it worked perfectly fine.

I didn't know it would be a problem, though.  One of the waitresses was quite insistent that they could not do it.  This seemed ridiculous to me.  They have chicken on the menu.  They can take that chicken, and put it into this food.  It's simple mathematics, really.  Anyway, on the first night I went there, I ended up getting something that I thought was beef pad thai, which doesn't really exist, and of course I was very wrong.

This time I had a better excuse (or so I thought).  I told them that I wanted that, but that I was allergic to shrimp, so could I replace it with chicken?  They didn't seem to understand me when I said the Chinese word for chicken, so I tried it again more forcefully, and the waitress seemed to understand.  But then the forceful young waitress from last time approached the table and said it was impossible.  So I just had it with no chicken and no shrimp.

Like I said, I do my best to cheapen the place, but tonight I made some mistakes.  Really, they made the mistakes, though.  They put an appetizer on my table basically without asking, which is a very cheap thing in general so I assumed that probably it was free if you ordered an actual entree.  They also put a wet towel on the table, also without asking, which I never touched.

When I left, they charged me an extra 5R for the appetizer and 2R for the towel.  They also didn't reduce the price at all for not including the shrimp.  I know that the amount of money involved is very small, but it seemed like an especially dick move to pull that on someone who didn't speak your language.  I was pretty angry at them, but what could I do?  I guess bitch about them on the internet.  Oh, well.

//

Remember Taj Mahal?  Well, I noticed another sign that had the character 泰 in it on our street today.  I was on my way back to the school when I noticed it across the street and thought to myself, ooohhhh, that's the red and yellow sign they meant!  After stopping in the Suguo (Nanjing's awful version of Wawa), I headed down there to check it out.

As I approached, a family sitting in a room right outside what appeared to be the entrance noticed me, and the woman came out, probably about 50 years old.  She asked me what I was doing in Chinese, which I didn't really understand.  I stumbled through my explanation, because I hadn't been prepared for this.  "I don't know how to say this in Chinese.  Oh, um....  Thailand restaurant??"  They spoke, and also pantomimed sleeping.  I got the picture and said, "Oh, okay.  I saw 'tai'."  And another woman responded in Chinese, "No, hong tai."  Which means, of course, hotel or motel.

Peace out.

Respect

So as written in prior entries, my phone had been messed up for a while. I eventually decided that it probably was a broken digitizer, which the internet had been suggesting since my very first search but which I had been trying to find my way around endlessly. I tried frying it with a hair dryer twice. Used a lot of electricity, but still no luck.

First I asked the foreign liaison here to help me find a place to fix it, and she called around a little bit while I was in the office and found the official Motorola repair store in town. When I went there one day, they told me it would be $100 to fix it. I mean, I could almost buy a new phone for that much money. No, I could buy a new phone for that much money. I decided to not agree to the price on the spot, walked away, and figured I'd give it one last go on my own before agreeing to such a ridiculous price.

I ended up finding a post online that was rather recent and had suggestions for cell phone repairs in Nanjing, so I tried the number listed there. It said that he always had one English speaker on staff, but I discovered immediately upon calling that they did not. I asked the class master for my Canadian kids to call for me, and I felt bad because she was watching a TV show during her lunch break when I called. She said that they could out how much it would cost and that they would call back.

I got wrangled into doing some office clean up on the way out of her office, but he called back shortly after. I had already forgotten how to say "Wait a minute" in Chinese, which Sarah had just told me, so I just had to keep saying "Okay" or "Ni hao" or "Hao de" or something like that while running to Sarah's office. They said they could do it for 200RMB, which is roughly $30, which is a way better deal. So I said I'd go there. I got the address and went.

The place where I went to get it fixed was really quite crazy. It's this enormous underground market (literally underground, you have to take a 10m subway down to get to it) that's filled to the brim with all types of cell phone vendors. And when I say filled to the brim, I mean very definitely more than 100 shops, possibly more than 200, all just in one big room, more or less. It took me a few minutes to even find the store I was looking for, #011.

The store that we had called ended up not having the part themselves, so they took me to another store that did. It was pretty crazy; they just had bucket after bucket of cell phone screen and digitizer replacement sorted by brand and make, literally hundreds of them, some from companies I didn't even know existed. I had printed out a paper describing my problem, and with the help of that and a woman who spoke a little bit of English, we were able to get things under way.

The real muscle of the entire operation at this store, though, appeared to be this one guy, quite tall, strangely muscular considering his job, with a markedly flatter face than most Chinese people, wearing an athletic shirt with a shiny black main portion and yellow mesh sides, sitting straight up at a work bench fixing every phone that came his way, testing the ones he fixed, and often working on more than one at a time. He had a bunch of drills, dryers, coolers, soldering irons, and everything else you'd need to fix a phone right in front of him, which made me feel a bit relieved with the whole operation.

Beyond that, it was clear that this guy had serious skill. When he got a phone in his hand, it always looked like he knew exactly what to do with it. It didn't even look like he'd just memorized all the different styles of phones, which was totally impossible, but more like he understood the motifs behind phone design and how to get to every part of each one. For instance, in my phone you have to peel up half of the sticker underneath the battery to get to the screws that hold the casing together. I don't think my phone is sold in China, but he still knew exactly where to look. And he swapped back and forth between working on mine and three or four other phones, never seeming to lose track of where he was.

I did notice that at the very end, he put my phone all the way back together and turned it on. Then he looked to the case where he'd been keeping all of its parts, and noticed that the speaker was still in there. He had to pry it back open quickly and click it back into place. He then tested it for a few minutes, declared it good, and handed it back to me.

I have so little skill with my hands, but I have so much respect for people that do. I don't care if it's sewing, drawing, painting, fixing cars, electronics, phones, whatever. I can't do any of it, and it seems like it's some kind of magic to me. It took about an hour for him to fix my phone and the other ones he was working on, but it was mesmerizing to just sit there and watch him pound through them. I found myself wishing that I could do something like that. I realize that I probably never will, that it's not even 1/100th worth the investment unless I make some kind of job of it, but I thought the whole time, damn, I wish I could do anything like this.

Peace out.

Dry Socks

I washed my clothes last week. I have enough clothes here that I only have to wash them every 14 days or so, assuming that I don't wear shirts twice or any of that stuff. So I did it last Sunday.

We don't have a dryer in our apartments, and I don't have a drying rack. All we have is some space outside the back of our apartment with big iron rods held above the ground, which is where we're supposed to do our drying regardless of season, temperature, or precipitation.

It has rained every single day since Sunday, often times when I'm teaching, eating lunch, or otherwise away from my room. I tried to dry my things in my room, but they just ended up smelling like a swamp. Today, it rained three separate times. I was out for one of them, so they're still wet.

It's just weird to think that it took me a week to dry some socks. That's something that really shouldn't take so long.

Peace out.

Sodome

I got an electric bike! I'm glad that I finally worked up the courage to do it. I'm so afraid of making big purchases. I mean, this was only $350, but to me, that feels like a lot a lot a lot. The only thing I've ever really bought that was more expensive was plane tickets, and those are easy to justify to myself.

When I went to the store, I looked up and down at the rows of bikes for about twenty minutes, then thought to myself, "If they sell locks and helmets, I'll just buy it now." I spotted the locks, but not any helmets. I asked a lady if they had them with the help of a Chinese dictionary on my phone, and she just laughed and said, "Haha, no." In Chinese, of course, but the emotion was clear.

She actually got me the keys of the bike and let me drive it around the store, which was called Carrefour. I found that pretty weird, but I guess it's a normal thing there.

Actually, before I got to that point, I walked out of the store. I saw an ATM machine, which would be the only way for me to get the 2,200RMB needed to pay for it. I stood there, leaning against it, for about ten minutes, possibly more, mulling over the decision. Should I buy it? Shouldn't I? Will they have locks? If I get the money in my hand, will I feel forced? Is it worth it? Will I die? Will I use it enough? Is $350 really cheap enough? Do I want an electric? Should I just say f*** the license and plates and get a gas one? They're faster, you know!

While I was mulling, a white guy and an Asian guy (native English speaker) walked over to me and said, "Hey, random question." Seriously: "Do you or any other non-Chinese people you know have a really good knowledge of Tai Qi? We're making a documentary about it and need foreigners that are good at it. Not that good, just pretty good." Unfortunately, I didn't, but I told them that I worked with a bunch of foreigners and I could ask around on Monday.

(Today was Monday. I forgot to do it, and would have continued forgetting if I hadn't written this post.)

After they left, I decided to just screw it and do it. I told myself I was going to stop living like such a poor person when I came to China and not be afraid to buy a little bit of convenience from time to time, and now seemed like the time to do it. I should mention that earlier in the day, I had spent 2 hours walking to a western store to get a towel, pillow, and pillow case. It would have taken me minutes on a bike. I realized that I could have made about $60 at my job online if I had biked instead of walked, at which point I realized my cheapness was getting ridiculous.

It's a pretty nice bike as far as electrics go, actually. It has two huge batteries, so it has a good range - apparently you can safely take three or four round-trips to fairly distant locations in the city before you have to worry about it, especially if you're light, alone, or not pushing it all the way. It looks pretty nice, has a nice seat, a storage space in the back and underneath the seat, etc.

I actually drove it out of the store and back to the school. I went down a little street with not too many lights on and not too many people. I realized that I would have been straight up petrified had I been in the US, but in China, I felt very secure that no one would try to hurt me. It's really amazing how freeing that kind of feeling is.

Anyway, I'm getting away from the detail of the moment, so I'll stop here so I don't ramble. I'll finish just by saying that I'm glad I made myself do it. It makes the world much more convenient, and I think it'll be worth it, definitely so if nothing gets stolen/broken and I can resell it at the end.

//

Phone is still screwed. I think it's the digitizer. I'm going to try a Motorola repair shop tomorrow. I sure hope they have this model of phone! (DOUBT IT, YOU GUYS!)

Peace out.