Le Home.

I wrote the following entry while sitting in my room, chilling out to the grooving sounds of pre-molestation charges michael jackson. here it is for your viewing pleasure:

Well, whats been going on lately? A whole lot. Theres been a lot of travel, a lot of sickness, and a whole lot of positivity to round the whole lot out. Was in Shanghai for about a week, before that (if we recall) was Guangzhou. Now I’m back in lovely lovely Beijing until Sunday. I really wish I could stay longer. It's starting to warm up and the Hutong is turning absolutely lovely. Not that it wasn’t lovely to begin with, but now I can walk around without my face freezing, peeling off, and shattering on the floor within moments of stepping into the courtyard. it’s a rather pleasant change.

Whats it like around the hutong? Well…

In addition to the weather, my roommates are extremely lovely. I’m very blessed to live with extremely good friends who are sweet, considerate, intelligent, and challenging. Scottie, my Australian roomie, is a musician (saxophone, drums, kazoo, young lady’s heartstrings), and a fabulously intelligent motivated guy. He’s our resident tai qi master, having just started the intermediate courses from the world famous masters at Bei Hai Park. He’s been studying for just over a year now, and is getting the whole hutong on the bandwagon. And he’s on a wicked health binge with no drinking and no animal products- yay! It’s nice to have someone else around who is not into drinking, and even nicer to have another resident vegan. I love living with vegans. Ohad, my Israeli roomie, is as sweet as sweet can be, and is slowly being convinced to go vegan! Slowly but surely, he’s making the change, and turning his formidable culinary skills to the task. This man has given me some seriously amazing Israeli rock and folk music, not to mention pleased my belly with some insane veganized Israeli grub. I’m just waiting for the day that we turn into a crazy vegan cook-tastic tai qi household- it’s going to be beautiful.

In terms of the hutong itself, it’s set off from the incredibly major and busy DongZhiMen Street, tucked back in the winding myriad alleyways that Beijingers traditionally live in. It’s about a ten minute walk from the street through alleyways that house other similar courtyard homes and various assorted open air markets and small (think really small. now cut that in half, and stick in your pocket.) restaurants. The hustle and bustle of the Hutong has an extremely different feel from that of the rest of the city. It’s a neighborhood, it’s small, intimate and for the most part peaceful. The hutongs are one of the very few places in the city that you can’t hear the honk of car horns, where neon advertisement’s don’t dog your every step, and where you forget for a while that you’re in the capital of an extremely populous and consumer driven country. One of the nicest things about the hutong is that every building is one story- you can see the sky and the leaves in the trees and the sun and the moon every step home.

Have I sung the Hutong’s praises long enough? I could go on for a while, but I think you get the picture. The thing is, the city’s Hutong’s are disappearing fast. They are being torn down to build new developments, high rises and shops and streamlined apartments. A few, maybe 40 or 50 of the city’s thousands, are bound (in my opinion) to be saved, gutted and renovated, for rent to foreigners and rich beijingers in the future. Hutongs are traditionally passed down through the generations, so for a lot of Beijingers this means losing a large piece of their family culture, and it means the dissaperance of neighborhoods that are rife with life and lore.

It’s not cool, and I’m extremely thankful that I’m getting to experience the hutong lifestyle before it disappears. I wake up, look out my ground story room window at the leaves in the trees, walk out my door across the open courtyard, and make my way across a few alleys to the market. It’s just so lovely, and such a rare mode of life in modern day beijing. I'm extremely grateful to live on the ground and shop at a local un-plastic laden open air market. Sigh. So lucky.

Peace
Jessie

A little rest, A little movement.

So, as i mentioned in the last post, things have not been the easiest in China. I've been sick since I arrived and experiencing the kind of shock only someone who was raised in a LA and made their home in Hawaii can experience upon their first introduction to a real winter. Much to my dismay, the changing of the seasons involves something more than a 20 degree shift in temperature...

But all that aside, all that in stride, I've had things pretty easy. I have somewhere to stay, I have good friends who I am fortunate enough to also live with, and I have food to eat. My health may not be the best, but its still much better than it could be. I've got electricity and I've got internet access (though both are a little tempermental...). Right now is just about shifting my proverbial weight until i hit the comfy spot on the couch that is Beijing. It'll come. At the moment I'm looking to move into a different spot, something a little less expensive than what I have right now. In addition to being a tad pricey, my current locale has me speaking English, and lots of it, on a daily basis- as such my Mandarin is rapidly deteriorating. I also need to get over the BeiHai park and enroll in their Taiji Chuan courses- 2400 rmb for the first 76 postures, as many classes for as long you want until you get them all down. I am stoked on this. I also need to either get a private tutor or enroll in some Mandarin courses. Since I can get a visa extension through a school, I'm leaning towards taking that path, but depending on price and convenience we'll see. I might have to take a jaunt down to Hong Kong come February to sort out visa business.

Still, Beijing is lovely. I've got a fresh produce market right around the corner, and a nut hut a few yards beyond that. I love the nut hut. Partially because when i see it i think 'Nut hut!' and partially because, well, i can get lots of raw nuts and seeds for cheap. Yay cheap!

How is the 200 kuai per week going, you ask? Heres a break down of the past two days.

Bag Oatmeal, bag each dried apricots, dried dates, dried something-tangy: 40 kuai
Bag Carrots, Spinach, Cucumber, Parsely, Oranges, Bananas; 9 kuai
Bag Raw Walnuts, Roasted Peanuts: 43 Kuai

So far I'm at 92 kuai. Not too bad, as the oatmeal will be food for at least the whole week. I'll keep you guys posted.

Jess

Mmm, sleep.

I need to update, and thusly, I am updating.

See, I do this thing whenever a thought occurs to me that I want to blog about, or whenever I see something that I want to make mention of- I make up a little outline in my head of how the blog post is going to go. The problem with this is it makes me feel as though I've already blogged for the day. And I haven't. But I think i have. It's a vicious cycle, especially when I start to do little blog outlines in my head that detail how I haven't been blogging lately. I've done this for the past two days.

In the past week or so since I've blogged I've gotten better (Sicksies no more!) And gotten a little more work. A lot of things that I've wanted to comment on have also happened (like Transgender Victims of Violence Day, Thanksgiving, and finding out that I make more in a month than the Chinese girls i work with make in a year), and I haven't commented on any of them. But I'm going to. At least, the last one. And there is a new J.Filth Challenge. By new, I also mean first.

I just wrote a long paragraph talking about why it is that I'm doing the challenge I'm doing, but then i read it over and realized that I'm too tired right now to write it in the proper, analytical way it needs to written. If you don't believe me, read over that sentence I just wrote and then imagine an entire explanative paragraph full of ones just like it. No good. So I'm going to settle for telling you the challenge and then giving you one sentence on why, with more to come tomorrow or the next day. Probably the next day. I have a lot of classes to teach tomorrow.

I'm going to be living, for the next month at least, on 200 kaui per week. Relatively speaking it should be easy, since every trip to the market costs between 4 and 7 kuai (for a bag full of veggies) and the oatmeal i make every morning (including the dried fruit i buy to go into it) costs about 40 kuai per supermarket trip. It's easy to get into this habit on converting prices to dollars in your head, but thats no good. I want to start counting a kuai as a kuai and not as a fraction of a dollar. This also means little (or at least price concious) going out, no frivolous taxi rides, and no spending anything without thinking about it. I'm going to update on here, everyday, about what got spent on what.

Why? Cause I know it's possible and i'm looking to both simplify and be more concious of exactly what it is i need to get by (i have a sneaking suspicion it's not much, and much less than what I currently consume). I want to cut back my consumption to things I actually need.

Now I'm going to do something else I actually need, like sleep. I'll be cool and analytical on my next post. Swear!

love&luz

tiredjessie

Wicked ill, homegirl.

This post comes to you courtesy of my sick bed.
I'm sprawled out right now, blinds drawn and windows closed, my only companions a large cup of hot soymilk and waaay too many used tissues.
Gross.

So I thought I'd take a little time in between naps to keep you guys up to date on whats going down in Chinatown (....haha, get it?).

I've been pretty busy the last few days and as such haven't had any time to get on over here and be charming and witty. Well, I guess its more like try to be charming and witty, right? I think the last actual post was about refrigerators and my crazy hippy opinions on them, so i think i'll give this post a little more mass appeal.

I got my first actual chinese foot massage yesterday. I've since decided I'm not ever going to leave China, I'm just going to stay here and blow all my money on massages. 6 months from now I'll probably be on the street panhandling just so i can get a fix- me love you long time baby. Now, off colour jokes aside, it really was fantastic- the thing about this whole foot massage business was that even though its called a 'foot massage' they start out by working on your neck and back to loosen you up. Feet in a steaming wood tub full of tea, my back got the works before the real foot massage even started. Neck, back, shoulders, arms, even some slight spinal adjustment. And they did that thing with the glass cups and the fire. Talk about fantastic. I will definately be back for more. And more, and some more after that. (Thats what she said! haha, ha.)

On to the second bit of fantasticness. Now, I know this is going to sound a little chauvinistic, but one of the best parts was how extremely attractive the masseurs were. I mean, as if having my muscles kneaded and drummed upon wasn't nice enough, i got to be kneaded and drummed upon by an incredibly attractive asian man. Big fat (or, rather, cut and trim) yay for that. If only he had been vegan...

Oh, what? How much was it? Yea. It converts to something like 7 dollars.
For an hour and a half.

Yatta!

And on that note, im going to go curl up in a fetal position on my shower floor and waste copious amounts of hot water before I pass out (again) from congestion and the aches. Hopefully this knowledge of my misery will temper any jealousy about the ridiculous fantasticity of my foot massage access, unless of course you're just being jealous of my shower floor :)

love&luz
ill jessie

Radio Silence

Sorry for the hiatus, guys. Jessie’s been super busy running around Beijing.
I really appreciated everyone who said they like my blog. You guys are super sweet, and I definitely want to keep updating now. Yay!

So this weekend, what a weekend. I did, as promised, purchase a camera. In order to attain said camera, I road through the streets of Beijing at breakneck speed on the back of a tiny scooter capable of going 70 miles an hour. Harrowing? Death defying? Thrill of a lifetime? Oh, all those rolled into one, plus convenient and economical! In addition, I made it out to the silk district with liz. We hopped a bus, then the subway, and made it (without incident!) to the silk market.

Oh, you wanted details? And pictures? Well, I guess we can do that.

So, to start off with. Camera shopping at the technological center of Beijing. 7 towers filled with floor after floor of electronics. Matt Damon (real name: Matt Diemer. Reason for nickname: coordinator of our group cannot pronounce his name and refers to him, in all seriousness, as Matt Damon) started off the day by picking me up from my bus stop with his scooter. Note; this scooter could kick some serious ass. I’m not talking little moped vroom vroom beep beep type thing, I’m talking just short of a racing motorcycle type vehicle.

[warning: you might learn something in the next paragraph]

Lets talk for a minute about the layout of the city of Beijing and how this affects the transportation situation (haha, I rhymed!) There is a lot of traffic here, a lot, and a significant lack of traffic law. Beijing is built in a series of rings, with the innermost being where the Forbbiden City is located. The districts of Beijing then radiate outward from this ring in concentric rings- as of right now there are five rings (with more, as the city expands). The pattern is as though you dropped a stone into a pond, with the radiating ripples being the main districts of Beijing. Each of these rings is delineated by a huge highway called a ring road- I live directly on the third ring road. Each ring road is such that if you hop on in front of my university you can go all the way around and come back to where you started- cause it’s a ring. Just thought I’d clarify that. Of course, Beijing is so huge that within each ring road there are many different districts, but we don’t care about that right now. What we care about is the traffic law. There is some, and it obeyed mostly (kind of…sort of..) on the ring roads, but when it comes down to side streets its every woman for herself. Cars go where they want, people cross where they want, bikes bike where they want…you get the picture. There are traffic lights and lanes and crosswalks, but in all honesty none of it matters. As long as you’ve got a bigger clit (that’s right, I didn’t say bigger balls, cause why should I? down with the patriarchy!) than the drivers, and can tell which ones really would run you over, you’ll do fine.

[we now return to our regularly scheduled program]

So theres a large number of bikes and scooters that wind their way daringly through the haphazard cars. More specifically, I was going to comment on Matt Damon’s scooter and the way it winds, with me on the back, in and out of this seemingly careless jumble of vehicles. The thing about the whole thing is that there is a definitive method to the madness. For all of the incredibly close calls I’ve witnessed (and been part of) No one has actually hit anyone. Cars go on reds, people cross against signals, bikes dart into the middle of moving traffic, and it all occurs with a kind of common understanding. It amazes me, like a symphony moving just ahead of the beat, you sit on the edge of your seat waiting for the inevitable train wreck but it doesn’t quite come.

As I’m reading over what I’ve written, I’ve come to the conclusion that I lied to you guys when I said I’d elaborate on my escapades and provide pictures in this post. This has already gotten longer than I anticipated and in order to elaborate adequately I’d have to more than double it.
So we’ll leave it till next time.

For now, ponder the city layout of Beijing. (I promise I’ll update in the morning)


love&luz

ps. i just tried to tack some pictures on to the bottom of this, but m internet is being funny. sorry!