My friend Akua showed me this video from Flight of the Conchords and I instantly fell in love with it. After my impromptu French immersion last weekend I have not been able to get it out of my head. It is hilarious and has the comedy duo singing a nonsenical song with the few French words that they know thrown together at random.
I have described or showed it to several friends (including my French friend Claire who laughed hysterically at it) and I have been promising them all that I would send them the link. I’ll do them one better: I’ll post it here.
When you’re an expat anywhere, you will inevitably fall in with crowds of fellow foreigners. After all, no matter where we are from, we are all sharing a common experience. This is magnified even further here in Asia, where all Westerners stand out and the cultural differences are universally jarring. (NOTE: Click on any of the pictures below to jump to my complete photo album from this night with lots more details. You can also see more videos from the night by visiting my YouTube channel here.)
So it is no surprise that I have met some really great fellow expats here and have been lucky enough to even call some of them friends. What has been a bit unexpected is the sheer number of French people about; or, at least, the sheer number of French people that I have found myself hanging out with.
Case in point: My attending of a double birthday party for two French expats: Pierre and Alexis. I’ve mentioned them before, when I met them during the Olympics and when I had my first night out as an expat. It had been a while since we had hung out (it has been a while since I have hung out with almost anybody, really) so it was a pleasant surprise to get an e-mail from Pierre’s girlfriend Ana with an invitation to a dinner party at a restaurant in Beijing’s Little Moscow (which I’d had no idea existed until this night). I asked her and she said that I could bring a couple of new people that I had met at a recent CouchSurfing meeting, one of whom happened to be French (of course!).
After getting a little lost with my companions, Lene & her roommate Caroline, we showed up at this over-the-top, borderline-gaudy restaurant. It was festive to be sure, but the décor was not so much Russian as it was “Random Western.” It looked like some Chinese had decided to make a place westerner-friendly and just threw anything that smacked of non-Asian culture into the walls. Frankly, it is par for the course in China, so I hardly notice it anymore.
But then things started getting really, really surreal.
As we sat down to dinner at a long table, I counted 20 of us in total: 18 French, 1 Dane (Lene) and me. That was kind of weird. Then, the lights went down and out onto the dance floor in front us came a bevy of scantily-clad dancing girls!
The acts continued with acrobats…
More dancing…
More acrobats…
And a final dance number that I really loved, with the whole troupe dressed in communist-era uniforms, doing some impressive traditional Russian dancing. Being a child of the Cold War, it really resonated with me and I couldn’t help but record some of it.
After the dancing, the food came out: Plates with piles of beef, chicken and sausage heaped onto them. Everybody just started stabbing things and eating, all the while, bottles of vodka got passed around and toast after toast was raised in honor of the birthday boys and whatever else struck the toasters’ fancy at that moment. Half of the time I didn’t even know what I was toasting to; every 5 minutes half of the table would stand up and shout, raise their glasses and down a shot or two. Being seated in the middle of the group, I got caught up in this… a lot.
As if this was not crazy enough, after a while the lights on the dance floor came back up and music started playing. Was it Russian? Chinese? Techno? Nope. Try Salsa. Really. In short order the dance floor was filling with inebriated revelers and even I couldn’t resist it for very long.
So there I was: In a Russian restaurant, at a birthday party with 18 French people and a Dane dancing to Salsa music in BEI-fucking-JING!
How is this my life?
Needless to say I had an amazing time. I got to re-connect with some friends and make some new ones. I drank vodka like a pro, danced a little salsa, got to practice the (very) little French that I know, and I had some fabulous sausage. My only question is when can I do this again?
Some of my best friends are architects, so I get lots of flack for hating the hell out of Boston’s City Hall building. They like to cling to its significance as a shining example of Brutalist design. I like to point out that whatever design it is, its juts plain ugly… and barely functional. (Why, oh why, are the most popular and important city services located in the bowels of the building and nearly impossible to find for newcomers? Because the acid-trip-in-a-cement-mixer layout of hallways, staircases and overhangs makes going from one point of the building to any other point a task that requires an iPhone with GPS functionality.)
Now the traveling masses have spoken, according to the Boston Globe.
A survey by Virtual Tourist has declared City Hall to be one of the 10 ugliest buildings or monuments on the planet. You can see some discussion on the topic here.
Any time that they want to tear that monstrosity down would be just fine with me.
With development not slowing down at all over here in Beijing, as it is back home in Boston and the rest of the US (the Chinese recently announced an almost $600 billion stimulus package that will focus on further infrastructure development), it was interesting to see this piece in last Saturday’s Globe about the last great period of vast infrastructure construction back home and who was the driving force behind it.
Probably best known as the inspiration for “The Last Hurrah” and the Bosstones’ tune “The Rascal King,” much has been said about his life and career. It was one that exhibited the absolute best and worst of public life. But what is less known was his unquenchable thirst to make Boston a better, more livable, city.
With the Presidential race finally over (I’ll have some Beijing-centric wrap up on that soon), political junkies like me have little to follow except for the recount in Minnesota and process stories about Obama’s transition, so it was with nostalgic glee that I caught this column in today’s Boston Globe about the 1983 race for Mayor of Boston.
This is the first political event that I remember being aware of as a kid. I wasn’t around for the start of busing in Boston but I remember the racial troubles that were palpable throughout the city in the years that followed. The mayoral race between Mel King and Ray Flynn took place amidst an ocean of racial undercurrents, yet these two leaders strove to keep those debates -and problems arising from them- contained.
One of my earliest memories is from Election Day that year. I can remember walking to the Edward Everett School where I attended kindergarten that morning and seeing all of the people holding signs and handing out leaflets as people walked into the polling station that was in the basement there. Just before I got onto the school grounds, a bus drove by. It was filled with black kids and was on its way to a white neighborhood to drop them at a school that had been forcibly integrated just a few years prior.
What I remember was the entire busload of black kids all pushed up against one side of the bus, with half of them hanging out of the windows, yelling: “MEL KING!! MEL KING!!”
Now these kids couldn’t vote, but they were swept up in what was happening at the time: White Boston was in a race to beat back an insurgent Black Boston. It was truly the first racial electoral battle of Boston’s modern age. Previous battles had been fought between the Brahmins and the Irish in the late 19th and early 20th century, but now it was different.
Whites “won,” but they elected a guy who was pro-desegregation and who worked hard to keep the progress of race relations in the city on track. One generation later, Boston is a “majority-minority” city with far fewer racial troubles to speak of, and who voted overwhelmingly to elect America’s first black president. We’ve come a long way, baby!
So I have been off of the air of late. Like 6 weeks “of late.” Sorry about that. A bunch of stuff has gone down that has prevented me form being able to blog, and here it is in recipe form:
1 Cup of homesickness
1 Cup of crappy work schedule (2:00pm-10:00pm) that prevents you from going out or talking to anybody outside of your office for long stretches.
2 Tablespoons of heartbreak
1 Quart of Immigration fuck-ups and paperwork delays, mixed.
Combine these ingredients in a large bowl one after another, mixing thoroughly (try not to cry too much)… and viola! In no time at all you’ve got yourself a perfect concoction that will guarantee that you are unable to maintain relationships, engage yourself in the present in any meaningful way or focus on the future.
At any rate, I have finally finished off this steaming shitburger (for the most part). I’ve got some distance from the final act of my summer romance; my work schedule has changed to the overnights (10:00pm-6:00am) which actually affords me the opportunity to leave my house during the week for something other than work; and, finally, I was able to get all of my outstanding paperwork wrangled together and apply for my 1-year work visa. (Fingers crossed that it gets approved!)
So I’m back. The last 2 weekends have been action-packed for me and the next couple of weeks promise to be even busier. I’ll have time to blog and -even better- I’ll actually have a lot to blog about. I’ve got notes and photos from the few disperate events and activities that I have participated in over these past 6 weeks and I’ll be putting them online in the coming days.
So I watched the debate this morning (that’s “last night” for all of you folks in the US). No knockout blows and Biden looked like he was really holding back against Palin. He never really attacked her- which makes sense because his job is just to attack McCain. Unfortunately, because he had so many opportunities to ridicule Palin’s non-answers and her folksy ramblings, his failure to put her away goes as a negative in my book.
Of course, the strategy of “let her hang herself while I look more presidential than she can ever hope to be” didn’t necessarily fail. At least according to this CNN poll.
I guess that the idea of somebody as unqualified as Gov. Palin even running for Vice President is so offensive to me that I want the floor wiped with her at every opportunity. I mean, look at what our last unqualified candidate got us into.
On to other things…
Last night also saw the Ig Nobel Award ceremonies at Harvard University. These are so much fun and I love to attend them. An organization called The Annals of Improbable Research puts on this parody of the Nobel Prizes every October to highlight scientific research that “first makes people laugh, and then makes them think.”
Past winners have included:
1991 - Biology: Robert Klark Graham, selector of seeds and prophet of propagation, for his pioneering development of the Repository for Germinao Choise, a sperm bank that accepts donations only from Nobel laureates and Olympians.
1996 - Art: Don Featherstone of Fitchburg, MA for his “ornamentally evolutionary” invention, the plastic pink flamingo.
2001 - Astrophysics: Dr. Jack Van Impe & Rexella Van Impe of Jack Van Impe Ministries, for their discovery that black holes fulfill all of the technical requirements for the location of Hell.
2006 - Acoustics: D. Lynn Halpern of Harvard Vanguard Medical Associates, and Brandeis University, and Northwestern University, Randolph Blake of Vanderbilt University and Northwestern University and James Hillenbrand of Western Michigan University and Northwestern University for conducting experiments to learn why people dislike the sound of fingernails scraping chalkboard.
The ceremony is always fun and includes presentations by actual Nobel Prize winners. A lecture series usually follows during the weekend where winner have a chance to explain their research. What started as a way to critisize bad science has turned into a notable event within the scientific community and the number of people submitting their work for consideration has jumped from none to over 10,000 per year. Scientists, it seems, are almost as eager to get this prize -which has no financial reward- as they are the Nobel Prize itself.
Anyway, this is just another one of the events taking place in Boston during this, my favorite time of year in the city. Attending funky, genre-bending music festivals is all well and good, but sometimes I just want to watch the Sox beat the Angles at The Good Life, go apple picking and head on over to Harvard for some good clean scientific fun.
Yes, I miss the weather, the Red Sox, apple-picking, my brother and my friends. But I’ve gotta say, I also miss the politics. It isn’t something that is discussed much here. And when it is, it becomes a bit of a teaching session where I try to explain American political process and theory to local Chinese or expats from other countries. And while I enjoy spouting off and being the know-it-all in the room, sometimes I just wish that there were others around who were literate and well-versed in these areas that I could clash with.
Hard-hitting political debates just aren’t that common here. The Guys With Guns tend to break them up when they get too loud.
Last week I caught the first Obama-McCain debate. It was in a cool bar near my apartment and there were about 25-30 of us in attendance. Most were Americans. It was a quiet affair, but it was probably the most at-home that I have felt since I arrived in Beijing. I look forward to a similar experience tomorrow for the Biden-Palin debate.
I consider myself an open-minded guy when it comes to who I will vote for, but I just can’t keep giving this lady any more chances. When she speaks, its like listening to a high school student in civics class try to muddle through a give-and-take with her teacher as she tries to cover up the fact that she hasn’t done the required class reading in a few weeks.
Matt Damon took the words right out of my mouth yesterday. Check out the frustration and fear in his eyes:
I have always liked Joe Biden. I can remember watching him give a speech in South Carolina back in early 2007 (when about 45 people were running for president, not just the crew that made it to the NH primary). He inspired me then and he is one of the most fun politicians to listen to today. Check out this exchange from the 1988 campaign. Its like Aaron Sorkin wrote it:
Now check out his side-by-side with Palin on Supreme Court rulings. WTF??!!!??? You mean somebody might actually pull the lever for the bumbling mental midget who can’t name a single Supreme Court case other than Roe v. Wade over the guy who speaks knowledgeably about enumerated powers and has overseen THOUSANDS of hours of hearings in Congress about such matters?
There is something endearingly annoying about John Hodgeman. He’s the “I’m a PC” guy who often contributes hilarious segments to The Daily Show. This weekend he contributed this piece in the Sunday Globe’s Ideas section where is seems to revel in the misery of being from an annoying state like Massachusetts.
While I certainly don’t share his sentiments on being almost ashamed of his birthplace, I do admit that a lot of the quirks and inconsistencies that he points out are accurate. The difference with me is that I think that these are the very things that sets my home apart from everywhere else, making it a special kind of place where only a special breed of folks can excel.
To me, Massachusetts will always be my endearingly annoying home.
Today I was asked to join the Editing staff at Xinhua PR Newswire here in Beijing. I’ll be the assigned English editor on the overnight staff, which means that I’ll be working for mostly US- and European-based clients. My shift? 10:00pm-6:00am local time. I start on October 6.
This schedule will make it tough to host CouchSurfers, but I will have my weekends free so it will not be impossible. As for the hours, well, as any of my friends would tell you, I am a natural night person. In fact, as soon as the Olympics were over and I had no more reasons to get up at 9:00am to meet people or go to events, I was going to bed around 6:00am-7:00am and sleeping until 1:00pm-2:00pm. Even when I was working the 9-5 shift back home, there would still be a time each night where if I wasn’t in bed already, something would click in my body and I would get a burst of energy. Basically, I’d be up until 4-5 in the morning.
Getting to bed at night has always been a struggle, so this shift wont be a problem for me. What’s more, it will actually make it easier for me to keep in touch with friends in the US and watch the baseball playoffs, football and basketball at the 24-hour bars. (Though I’m not sure of I *want* to watch many Pats games after last weekend’s debacle.)
The only problem? The job starts on October 6, which is the date that my current stay on my Tourist visa runs out and the company can’t actually get me my work/resident visa until I start. To stay legal (and avoid possible jail time and a 500 Yuan/day fine), I either have to get permission from the government to extend the validity for a couple of weeks, or I have to leave the country and re-enter to get another 60-day stay.
I’m not sure what I’ll have to do right now. I’ll know in the next 2-3 days and I’ll keep you updated. Stay tuned!
