Well as many of you may be aware, I recently took a ten-day trip to China as part of an intensive first-semester Chinese course.  It was me, four other students, our professor and a national tour guide riding around on a very ambitious schedule, visiting six cities in ten days.  Towards the end of it nobody could really remember where the hell we even were and who the idiots taking the trip with us were, but it ended up being a pretty awesome trip.  During my travels, I kept a journal, and this week I want to share some of the highlights of it with you, sort of like what I did before with my jury duty story only a lot longer and probably not as interesting.  Are you ready to get bored?

Beijing, China

Date of Arrival:  20 June 2005
Arrived Via:  2 hour flight from Boston to Chicago; 17 hour flight from Chicago to Beijing.
Distance Traveled:  7,462 miles (12,009 km)
City Population:  14.5 million
Local Temperature:  100°F (38°C)
Humidity Index:  74%

We all met at Logan International Airport in Boston on the morning of June 20, 2005, ready to embark on an excellent adventure of Bill and Ted magnitude.  I knew that the only way to prevent jet lag was to stay awake for the entire trip, so I pretty much prepared myself for the ride from hell.  I wasn't disappointed.
• We will be flying over the North Pole, Siberia, the Gobi Desert and Mongolia.  So it's pretty much every single one of the planet's most inhospitable places.  If our plane goes down at any point in this trip, it's going to turn into a scene from Alive pretty fucking quickly.  Only with less Mexians.  And more Chinese food.

• Our plane is completely packed out and I'm wedged in one of the middle seats, firmly lodged between some snooty asshole businessman and a horrifying bitch of a subsitute teacher.  She's wearing enough makeup to choke an army of donkeys and insists on talking to me despite the fact that I'm answering every one of her questions with an incomprehensible grunt and my best "shut the hell up" look.

• On a side note, people who feel like they should use both armrests at the same time should have their elbows broken by me.

• The inflight movies are all crap.  Whoever came up with the concept of The Pacifier needs to have their head crushed in a medieval-style spiked vice clamp while being beaten to death by Malaysian police officers.

• A note to all future overseas travelers:  please wear deoderant before you get on the plane.  The people around you will probably not want to set you on fire.

• A girl is walking around the plane wearing a pair of KISS pajama pants.  Maybe it's just me, but if my ass was that gigantic, I wouldn't want to have the word "kiss" written on it eight million times.

• The bitchy lady next to me responded to my request for her to move so I could go to the bathroom with the following statement:  "Is that the longest you've ever played a Game Boy for?  You've been at it for like eight hours now... I would think your ears would hurt from wearing those headphones for that long."

• Fire Emblem is a great game.

• I don't know what I expected the North Pole to look like, but it's really just ice as far as you can see in every direction.

  We arrived in China at 3AM Eastern time (3PM Beijing time) after one of the longest flights human beings can possibly take.

• The Chinese equivelant of the TSA wears these slick black uniforms.  Nothing really commands authority like a black uniform.  It just screams, "don't fuck with me or I'll break both your legs and then throw you in a hole for seven years."

• Our local tour guide is a woman named Chen, who is pretty skanky and looks like the kind of chick that could easily show you all the best places to get drunk and sleep with hookers.

• Chen:  "You may call me Cathy.  One American couple called me that because they couldn't say 'Chen' and I think that this is a beautiful American name".

• Beijing is hot as hell.  No wonder the Chinese government officials are always so pissed off.

• Our hotel, the "Chairman Hotel" is pretty swanky, though it seems like the sort of place that would mostly appeal to stuck-up French tourists who were expecting to see old-fashioned shit like pagodas and rickshaws instead of a rapidly industrializing nation.

• As I was writing that, a group of French tourists walked past us.

• Our hotel room has an excellent panoramic view of the rooftop air handling units and nothing else.  However, it also has the most awesome shit I've ever seen - tiny hocky-puck sized cloth things that expand and unravel in water to become full-sized bath towels.  They rule.

• I just read the thing that says the hotel will charge us 10 Yuan for every one of those towel thingies we use.  Looks like we're out 20 Yuan and we haven't been in the country longer than an hour.

• We went out to Tienanmen Square on our first night, and holy crap is it weird.  Everything there is illuminated with neon trim, which is pretty messed up.  I'm not sure whether I'd be happy or upset if my nation's capital was lit up like a Vegas pay-by-the-hour motel as soon as the sun goes down.
• I wish I had been counting how many people have tried to sell my kites.  It was probably at least twenty-five.  They just come up to you in the middle of Tienenanmen Square and push these damned kites in your face, and if you tell them you don't want them, they pull out some stupid postcards or something and shove them at you.  Then their fucking friends show up and try to sell you the exact same thing the other guy just showed you.  It's totally irritating.

• Our tour guide is hopelessly lost.  We just got on a public bus and took it one stop to some place that is definitely NOT our hotel.  I'm taking a taxi back.  Screw you guys.

• Taking a taxi in Beijing is like signing a waiver stating that you hate your life and want to die.  Traffic lights and signs are, according to my cab driver, "not so much rules; more like suggestions".  For a Communist police state, they certainly are lax in their enforcement of moving violations.

• Beijing is an incredibly gigantic city.  There are just block after block of thirty- and forty-story apartment buildings with the occasional humungor office building thrown in for good measure.  It's totally unbelievable.

• On what may be a related note, Beijing is also incredibly dirty and polluted.  The pollution is so bad that visibility can't be over two miles and all the dust from the nearby Gobi Desert just blows through the streets and gets in your eyes if you aren't careful.  It's definitely not what I expected.

• Oh, the Great Wall is huge.  I think if I was stationed there as a Chinese Imperial soldier I would have just quit right then and there because there is no way in hell you would ever get me to run up and down this fucking thing in a suit of armor, I'll tell you that right now.

• I bought a tacky "I climbed the Great Wall" metal plaque.  Making me lame.  However, Chairman Mao once said that you couldn't be a real man until you walked on the Great Wall.  So I guess today I'm a real man.  Are you?

• There are camel rides on the Great Wall.  I wish I was kidding.

• I was taking a picture with one of the other kids where he had his head in one of the holes in the wall and I had my foot on his back while I was flexing my huge biceps.  While I don't have a copy of the picture, there was a random group of Chinese tourists who asked me to recreate the picture with one of them.  I guess we're like the first "Da Bizi Meiguo Guizi" (Big-Nosed American Devils) they've ever met in person.

• We went to the Ming Dynasty underground tombs.  I am not impressed.

• The Summer Palace is cool.  They had this random art gallery full of Cultural Revolution crap and what Cathy Chen touted as "the longest corridor in China".  The guy working the art gallery referred to the Mao Era as the "crazy dynasty", and his assistant was this chick who spoke really good English considering that she had only been studying for one year.  Still, it seems to me that all native Chinese speakers tend to make the same grammatical errors in their English.  Maybe they just teach it incorrectly or something.

Cathy Chen:  "You are a handsome guy.  Do you like Chinese girls?  Because if you do, I can introduce you to some".

Amazing Ben (in perfect Mandarin Chinese):  "China has many beautiful women, but my girlfriend would kill me."

Mao Zedong's mausoleum is open to the public and you can walk through it and view his body, which is sealed in a hyperbaric chamber.  Unfortunately you can't take any pictures, so you'll have to take my word that it was pretty wild seeing the face of the deceased former Chairman of the Chinese Communist Party.  Even weirder than that is the fact that when you leave the room containing his body, you empty out into the official Mao Zedong Gift Shop where you can purchase everything from little red books to Chairman Mao Zippos that play the Chinese national anthem when you light them.

The Forbidden City is gigantic.  Unfortunately, most of it was closed off since it was being renovated for the 2008 Olympics.  Now if they could just find a way to renovate all the pollution and dust, this town would really be able to put on a good show.

The Emperor had over three thousand concubines in his palace.  That must have been a pretty sweet gig, especially considering that's probably more women than I've even MET in my entire life.

Here's a picture of me standing in the exact same spot of Tienanmen Square that the dude who was standing infront of the tank was.  I was going to do a better re-enactment of it, but the thought of being locked in a Chinese prison for the next decade was more than enough to discourage me.

We had Peking Duck lunch in (what used to be called) Peking.  I didn't know that you eat the entire fucking duck though.  You haven't lived until you've had duck brain tartar over a duck liver pateé.

After a couple of days in Beijing, we packed up and took an incredibly small overnight hard sleeper to Xi'an.  The sleeper train had about six people in each compartment and every bed was Chinaman-sized and incredibly close to the other.  Check out this photo for comparison.  I was like Godzilla over there or something.

Xi'an, Shaanxi Province

Date of Arrival:  23 June 2005
Arrived Via:  12 hour "hard sleeper" train from Beijing.
Distance Traveled:  649 miles (1,045 km)
City Population:  7.8 million
Local Temperature:  107°F (42°C)
Humidity Index:  9%

• On the train I spoke Chinese with a Beijing medical student for a while, until she realized that I was giving her really weird answers to all of her questions and she decided she would rather talk with our professor about medical school than hear me ask her questions about what music was on her iPod or who would win a fight between Shaq and Yao Ming.

• Our local guide for Xi'an wants us to call him Allen, because his favorite NBA player is Allen Iverson.  He says, "Five years ago you call me Michael.  I have Air Jordan shoes, Air Jordan shirts, Air Jordan hats... I even pierce my ear like Michael and my boss make me take it out because he thinks I like boys or something."

• Allen tells us that he's addicted to NBA Live and FIFA on the Xbox, but won't play the Playstation 2 because he doesn't want his money to "go towards buying bullets for the Japanese devil army".

• Allen:  "Chinese, we like you Americans.  You are cool, and in basketball you can really fly.  Chinese men cannot fly.  I know the movie say "White Men Cannot Fly", but this is even more true for Chinese men.  Only one thing though;  your President Bush, we all think he is... well... a little retarded."

• The "health balls" you grab in Dynasty Warriors are a breakfast favorite in China.  They are actually small amounts of pork or beef wrapped in a bread-like roll.  They are also the best Chinese breakfast food.

• The Chinese have centuries of tea brewing expertise, but they cannot make good coffee to save their lives.  The first thing I'm doing when I get back is going to a damned Starbucks.

• We went to a Buddhist temple in Xi'an.  I tried to challenge some of the monks to Kung Fu, but they either didn't understand me or were too awed by my physique to take me up on it.  They were actually a lot fatter than I was expecting them to do.  I guess the Buddhists just don't fast quite like the Hindus do.  They just burn a lot of incense and try to ignore the asshole Western tourists.

• The Terracotta Warriors are damned impressive.  Seeing that museum totally makes it worth trekking twenty-four hours out of our way and dying of dehydration in the middle of the Gobi Desert and its one hundred and seven degree weather.  If you ever go, be sure to see the cheesy Shaw-Vision style video about the history of the warriors.  It looks like it was done as part of the late 70's grindhouse movement, but it was actually produced in like 2000 or something.  Also, the farmer who discovered the warriors is at the museum every weekday to sign autographs, but he won't allow his picture to be taken because he's crazy.

• We've only been in Xi'an for ten hours and now it's time to get back on another twelve-hour hard sleeper train.

Nanjing, Jiangsu Province

Date of Arrival:  24 June 2005
Arrived Via:  13 hour "hard sleeper" train from Xi'an.
Distance Traveled:  659 miles (1,061 km)
City Population:  6.4 million
Local Temperature:  98°F (37°C)
Humidity Index:  83%

• On the train I tried to speak to a family of peasant farmers headed to Nanjing, but their accents were so heavy and they spoke so quickly that I had a really difficult time understanding them.  When I asked my professor what the dude just said to me, she was like, "He's asking you about American attitudes towareds human rights in China.  It's best that you don't continue this converation."

• China is fucking hot.  Nanjing is also humid as hell.

• We keep seeing this poster for Nestlé with the creepy blue-haired girl gesturing oddly towards us.
• They have an awesome ice cream bar here called MAGNUM.  I tried to explain to our national guide that Magnum was also a brand of super-sized condoms, but I don't think she really understood me.  She just smiled and nodded, much in the way that I do when I'm pretending to understand Chinese.

• Sun Yatsen's mausoleum is pretty impressive, even if it is a million degrees here and there are about seven billion steps you have to climb to get to the top.  You can tell that Mao sort of ripped him off when he designed his own tomb, but that he also had the good sense not to force people to die of exhaustion just to look at his body.

• A Chinese soldier yelled at me for taking a picture of a "No photos please" sign in the mausoleum.

• Sign in the Nanjing Museum:  "Jade S-Shaped Ornament with Sacred Fungus Design".

• We met our professor's grandmother and sister.  Her sister has a kickass apartment here in Nanjing, and her mother is a crazy Communist Party member who spent most of our time there talking about how much the Japanese fucked up China during World War II and telling us tales of her journey with the People's Liberation Army in their efforts to repel the Japanese invaders.  It was facinating and also depressing as hell.

• Here's a picture of a garbage can shaped like a mushroom.
• That night we went to the "Confucius Temple", which is actually a gigantic shopping district where you can haggle with merchants and buy cheap knock-offs of quality jade, silk and porcelain shit for less than a dollar.  It was pretty awesome.

• The Confucius temple by day, and then by night:

I have decided that I love China.

Suzhou, Jiangsu Province

Date of Arrival:  25 June 2005
Arrived Via:  2 hour "soft seat" train from Nanjing.
Distance Traveled:  97 miles (157 km)
City Population:  5.9 million
Local Temperature:  97°F (36°C)
Humidity Index:  74%

• We took a really nice air conditioned train with a super-hot conductor chick from Nanjing to Suzhou, and it was nice.  I spoke Chinese to a guy who was really interested in American Ham radio and the Houston Rockets.

• All Chinese girls look hot from behind.  Whether or not they remain hot once they turn around is usually a toss-up.  It also helps that the Chinese really don't fuck around when it comes to putting their women in hot uniforms.  The best outfits I've seen have been on the hostesses in restaurants;  sort of a long, form-fitting Mandarin-collared dress with slits up both sides that go to about mid-thigh.  Second on the list is probably the train and airplane stewardess uniforms.  I'm also a big fan of the outfits our waitresses have been wearing.  I have to remember to buy something like that for Andrea, though I have my doubts as to whether or not her rack will fit into something like that.

• We saw some classical gardens and an impressive musical performance at night.  The Chinese have some really crazy-sounding instruments, but they can play the shit out of them.  The only thing I really don't get is that high-pitched shrieking crap that the women do in the Chinese opera.  It's generally only at a pitch level audible to canines and in the rare even that it drifts into a frequency recognized by the human ear it's usually enough to make your eardrums explode.  I think I'd rather listen to a Rush album while being stabbed with chopsticks.

• At dinner we met some waitresses who were obviously in love with me and my classmates Justin and Vinnie.  One of them even gave Vinnie a napkin with her address, phone number and email on it, and a short message that was either a detailed love letter or a declaration of "I want your green card - get me the hell out of here".

• We left Suzhou for Hangzhou via the most awful train ride of my entire life.  The train had no air conditioning; they just had electric fans from the ceiling (ours was broken) and the windows were open.  On top of all that, it was like eight thousand degrees outside, so by the time we got to the fucking Hangzhou train station, I was completely devoid of any sort of water in my system and begging the nearby farmers for swift death at the receiving end of their pitchforks.  They didn't oblige me, but some guy did give Vinnie a cucumber that he pulled out of his pocket.

Hangzhou, Zhejiang Province

Date of Arrival:  26 June 2005
Arrived Via:  5 hour "hard seat" hell ride from Suzhou by way of Shanghai.
Distance Traveled:  192 miles (310 km)
City Population:  1.8 million
Local Temperature:  95°F (35°C)
Humidity Index:  66%

In Hangzhou we almost accidentally solicited a prostitute.

We had returned to our hotel after a busy day of visiting a tea farm, taking a boat cruise and going to a Chinese pharmacy, and my classmates Justin and Brianna wanted to go out and get some beers.  I decided to tag along and we headed out along to see what we could find.  Not knowing enough Chinese to really get around too well, we somehow ended up at a weirdo karaoke bar where all the men were dressed up as American sailors and all the women were wearing wedding dresses.  When they couldn't understand what we were trying to ask them, we decided it would be best to just return to the hotel and call it a night.

When we got back to the hotel, there was a Chinese woman wearing a very tight, very short dress who sidled up to Justin and was like, "do you want to come to the fourth floor and get some drinks with me?".  Justin politely turned her down, and she handed him a card indicating that her name was Lucy and that she was the manager of the fourth floor night club.  We showed the card to our national guide, and she was like, "this foot massage.  You don't want this."  However, when we returned to our room, Justin informed Brianna and I that he was going to check it out to see if he could get something to drink.  We didn't have a whole lot else going on and another night of Chinese soap operas and South American interleague soccer matches didn't seem all that appealing compared to cocktails with half-naked Chinese women.  So we went to the fourth floor.

We got to the fourth floor and couldn't find anything.  We wandered the labrynthine hallways for a while when we came across two Chinese dudes sitting in lounge chairs wearing bathrobes and laughing at us.  We were like, "ok, we're done here" and headed back to the elevators.  On the way back, we heard some loud music coming from behind one of the doors on the hall.  We peeked inside and saw a giant dance floor with karaoke machines, couches, flashing lights, and loud music, but it was completely empty.  We were ready to leave when all of a sudden a guy popped his head out and asked us if he could help us.  Justin (in perfect Chinese) asked for beer, and he nodded knowingly, gesturing for us to follow him.  He led us out the back door to the dance hall, down a narrow corridor, through another very similar dance hall, out the back door of that and down another couple of corridors until we arrived at a very small room occupied by a big-screen TV and two 70's porn-styled velour couches.  He then presented me with a menu as Justin and Brianna sat on the couch.  I looked at the menu, which did not actually feature beer but rather contained several different wines that they were charging exorbitant amounts of money for.  I peeked over the top of the wine list and saw that the TV was showing two chicks rubbing up against each other, and it occured to me that we were probably going to be charged by the minute just for occupying the room.  I was like, "uh, I gotta go" and quickly walked out of the room.  On the way out, I brushed past Lucy, who was making her way in to see what Justin wanted.  I quickly went down the hall and out the exit, but noticed that Justin and Brianna were not behind me.

I peeked back down the hallway I had come from and saw Lucy and the other guy blocking Justin and Bri into the room, saying things like, "No, where are you going?  I give you discount!  Student discount!".  I was like, "screw these guys" and made my way to the hotel café.

Justin and Bri were in there shortly, and we settled for a couple cans of cheap Chinese beer instead of the $800 "wine" they were selling upstairs.  Justin swore that she wasn't a hooker, but I was quick to inform him that she could quickly become a hooker if he managed to front enough cash.

Shanghai, China

Date of Arrival:  27 June 2005
Arrived Via:  3 hour train ride.
Distance Traveled:  105 miles (170 km)
City Population:  17.1 million
Local Temperature:  97°F (36°C)
Humidity Index:  96%

• On the way to Shanghai, we took a train along with an entire Hangzhou University architecture class.  We rapped about Xbox, bootleg DVDs, music and electronics.  It turns out that Chinese kids aren't all that different from American kids.  Also, I learned that "kou jiao" is the Chinese word for "blowjob", and that "cao" (pronounced "tsao") is Chinese for "fuck".  Some of the students didn't speak a whole lot of English, but every once in a while they would bust out with "suck my dick" or some other American phrase that they learned by listening to 50 Cent.

• They have this awesome building in Shanghai that looks like either a giant claw reaching up to the sky or an enormous doomsday device of some kind.  I told this to a Chinese girl and she was like, "yes, it looks like a lotus blossom".  I guess the Chinese just don't have the same eye for Fascist architecture as the Americans.

• We saw the Shanghai acrobatics show and it was the most impressive display of human ability that I have ever seen.  I informed Vinnie that he needs to stop the waitress thing and start hitting on the girls who can do a complete backbend and pick a rose up with their teeth while standing on another girl who is doing a full split and twirling seven dishes at the same time while hanging between two balance beams.

• I bought a dubiously legal Chinese language version of Jade Empire for the Xbox.  You can buy a ton of shit really cheap in Shanghai.

• There's a store across the street from our hotel that sells obviously bootleg DVDs.  Some of the movies are still new releases in the theatres, and the DVDs are just unstamped blank DVDs inside a plastic sleeve with a photocopy of the actual movie case taped to the outside.  The good news is that you can buy them for the equivalent of about $0.80 US.

• Justin and I ditched the Shanghai Museum and ended up running into a couple of college kids from Beijing who took us to this wacky tea ceremony.  It was expensive as hell, but all of the tea was really awesome.  However, we got back to the museum after our class had already abandoned us so we had to take a taxi back to our hotel and hang out there for the rest of the night.  It wasn't too bad, especially considering that we took a break from the Chinese food and went out for McDonald's.  You can get an extra value meal there for about a buck and a half US.  Not too bad.

• In short, Shanghai is awesome.  It's totally huge, but it kicks ass.  It's probably my favorite city in China (except maybe for Hangzhou).

Trip Summary

Elapsed Time:  10 Days
# of Hours on Trains or Planes:  69, dudes
Total Distance Traveled:  18,018 miles (29,000 km)
Number of Songs on My iPod:  2,496
Inflight Movies:  8
Number of Times I Listened to "Freak Out Hell Ride" by Wesley Willis:  4

Well, it might not have been the most entertaining update I've ever written, but it was an awesome trip and I had a really great time touring the country, practicing my Chinese and seeing everything that there is to see.  This week I decided to share my experiences with you, but I'll be back next week with something that might actually make you laugh.