I mention it often, this CouchSurfing thing. If you’ve ever bothered to click on the hyperlink embedded in that name then you know what its all about. If you haven’t, then do it before going on, because if you don’t you might get a little lost. (NOTE: Click on any of the party pictures below to jump the complete photo album from that night. Believe me, there is a LOT more to see that did not get posted here.)

I first got involved with this community last October. I created a profile and offered my services in Boston as a local know-it-all. I gave walking tours of downtown full of stories that you won’t find in guidebooks, as well as a local’s perspective on the history that my home city is so rich in and proud of. I didn’t attend any meet-ups in those first months and my experiences were limited. It is one of those very first experiences that illustrate the amazing connections that can be forged via this website, and how, last weekend, it ended up helping me have one of my most fun nights out since arriving in Beijing.

Back in November, I met my second CSer, Marie-Line. She’s from Belgium and was working as an Au Pair on Long Island so that she could live in the US for a couple of years and travel around a bit. I gave her a tour of downtown Boston and took my baby brother Nick along for the ride. We all got along famously. On a whim, we ended up going to Blue Man Group (which I had never seen), and we had am awesome time. We hit it off so well, that when new Year’s Eve time rolled around Marie-Line decided to come back to Boston to check out First Night with me.

At the same time, Christine was a new resident in the city attending graduate school. Her best friend from college back in Buffalo, Liz, was coming to visit her for New Year’s and she posted an inquiry onto the CS Boston message board: What is this “First Night” thing all about, and what, exactly, should we see?

I replied with some basic info on what was going on and my recommendations on which events would be best/easiest to attend. There was some emailing between us, and we eventually decided that Christine, Liz & I, along with Marie-Line and another CSer that she was bringing, Darren, would all go out to First Night together. We would hop between art events and bars and have dinner at a really nice out-of-the-way restaurant to avoid the crowds.

It was, quite simply, one of the best New Year’s Eves that I’ve ever had. All of these disparate strangers had come together with a similar mindset and a willingness to meet new people and learn all that they could about their backgrounds and experiences. It was very welcoming and affirming. But even more, from it sprang a whole new path of life for one of the attendees.

Liz was fascinated with Marie-Line’s choice to become an Au Pair as a means to living overseas. She peppered her with questions about the job and her experiences throughout the night. Eventually, after some subsequent back-and-forth, Liz decided to take the plunge herself and she moved to Geneva, becoming an Au Pair and taking every opportunity to travel all across Europe.

While in Geneva, Liz has, of course, made many new friends, and one of them, Rafaella, took a trip to China recently for her job. Liz told her that she knew me, figured that we would hit it off, and told her to look me up when she arrived in Beijing.

Boy, was Liz ever right! Raffy & I clicked immediately and it was an immeasurable joy to hang out with her. And here the miracle and tragedy is illustrated most clearly: I never would have met Raffy had it not been for Liz and Marie-Line, two people that I never would have met without CS. But now that I have met her, she is gone just as quickly as she arrived.

I still keep in touch with both Liz & Marie-Line, as I am sure that I will keep in touch with Raffy, and I consider both of them to friends. Marie-Line has moved back to Belgium and Liz has visited her there, and I hope to be able to see them both when I take my hoped-for trip to Europe next year. Now, hopefully, I can add Rafaella to the list.

I hadn’t really given it too much thought to this whole social network thing until a fellow CSer back in Boston posted this article on the site. Its quite illuminating and I was interested to read that what I am living right now is a pretty new and evolving phenomenon. Nobody is really sure over the long run how our newfound ability to forge and maintain connections with so many people all over the world will effect us as individuals, within societies, or if we are seeing the first stages of the creation of a new kind of society.

Its all very exciting. I mean, this weekend I met with this crazy cast of characters who were all different sizes, shapes, colors and creeds and we all had an awesome time…

…We were all pretty much strangers, with only the Beijingers knowing each other, but we got along like we were an established group of friends. We vamped it up with each other.

We took embarrassing photos.

We demonstrated feats of strength.

And we most definitely danced together.

Some of us even danced with an old guy.

I really hope that I’m able to keep in touch with as many of these great folks as possible.

Anyway, I guess that what I’m saying is this: This whole social network thing -and CouchSurfing in particular- is pretty awesome. This really is a great tome to be alive… and it’s a great time to be in Beijing.

Here’s a fascinating piece from NPR just before the election about the first political soundbites. They popped up in the historic election of 1908 on phonograph and they are uncanny, almost scary echoes of this year’s race. Give it a listen and you’ll understand why it is always beneficial to remember our history. As we keep forgetting what has gone before, we keep repeating the same mistakes… At least this time it looks like we might just have learned something.

What’s it like being overseas when your fellow citizens back home change the world? Strangely, it wasn’t as bad as I thought that it would have been.

On the morning of November 5 -Beijing time, of course- I walked on over to The Rickshaw, an expat bar in Sanlitun. The place was packed on both floors with Americans who had either gone the night without sleep (like me), or were playing hooky from work so that they could gather together and watch election returns come in.

It was a more than a little weird to be watching CNN as if they were broadcasting the Super Bowl. Breakfast -and a fair amount of booze- was flowing and people were booing and cheering as states were called. We were all hanging on every one of Wolf Blitzer’s words and staring with rapt attention at John King’s demon maps.

I’m a political junkie, but an election returns viewing party? I’d hung out with some friends back in 2000, but it was nothing like this. As the hours went by and it started to become to clear that Barack was going to win, the crowd started getting bigger and tangibly excited. There was a definite electricity in the air.

One of my best memories from that night came when Obama took Virginia and on CNN Campbell Brown turned to John King and his map and asked him, “Please show us the path for John McCain to victory form here.”

King looks at Brown kind of incredulously, waits for a FULL FIVE SECONDS and says, “Uh, O-Kay…”

We all broke out into laughter.

Then, as 12:00pm rolled around (11:00pm, ET) and everybody knew that Obama was going to sweep the West Coast and Hawaii, there was a countdown and room went nuts:

 

I go crazy for the 4^th of July. I am as patriotic an American as you’ll ever find. But I have never felt such pride for my country as when I found myself sitting in a bar in Beijing, China, with a couple of hundred fellow Americans, reveling in an historic victory such as this one.

And it still hasn’t faded. Many of my foreign friends, and the CSers who pass through, all comment on how great an election it was and how excited they are for Obama to take office. I can’t wait to see how this all turns out.

A final note: When John McCain walked out and gave his concession speech, I was floored. I turned to a woman standing next to me and wondered aloud: “Where was THIS guy during the campaign?” This was the John McCain who I had voted for back in 2000 and who I was so excited for just after the New Hampshire primary. If only he had been able to make it through the crazy right-wing South we might have had a more substantive and interesting campaign. I know that we still wouldn’t have ever heard of Sarah Palin.

Well, that’s all behind us now. The future is ours, I guess.

It’s frustrating. My hometown paper just doesn’t get it. They keep printing stories about how Boston’s City Hall is such a great structure. They did it earlier this week and today they gave space on their Op/Ed page to yet another Brutalism apologist.

The people of Boston overwhelmingly hate the “new” City Hall. Yet the Globe keeps on giving voice to the minority of effete, smarter-than-thou architects and design aficionados who continue to try to tell us that what we have is not, in fact, a hulking monstrosity. It’s not really a barely-functional public works disaster. Actually, it’s a gem that should be preserved for future generations.

After all, didn’t Parisians want to tear down the Eiffel Tower after it was built?

Bollocks, I say. The Eiffel Tower was built to be a monument, to evoke something about the city of Paris and the French people. City halls, while they can be monuments (Toronto’s is a fine example), are supposed to be facilities that serve the public. This is where we come to transact the business of governing ourselves, and right now it can barely do that.

My feelings on this are pretty clear: I want the building gone yesterday and replaced -in its current location- with something more appropriate, functional and, if needs be, less “exciting” to architects. Here are some of my favorite comments so far from fellow Bostonians who get enraged whenever somebody tries to tell them what’s good for them when it comes to City Hall:

I am so tired of elitist critics telling us how unenlightened we are! The great majority of us think that Boston City Hall is ugly because it IS ugly. Who cares that it was the darling of a microscopic percentage of the population many decades ago? I’m sure the — pick a past culture, any past culture — Sumerians built a lot of crappy looking structures, too, and guess what? They’re gone! The world moved on! Let Boston move on. You preening/can’t-ever-let-go-of-the-supposedly-glorious-1960s types can circle your Eurocars for a tailgate party and cry into your overpriced wines and cheeses. Emphasis on the whine. And cheese. — by tjdurant November 21, 10:53 AM

A foreign friend of mine, upon seeing it for the first time, said “It looks like that building on the penny, but turned upside-down.” I think she got it right. It’s wrong because it does not rest on a broad foundation and aspire up towards an ideal, but looms over us from a narrower base. The interior is dark and unwelcoming– that concrete is cold and impersonal, not rugged and populist. The windows look like something you’d shoot an arrow out of, not the open eyes of clear-sighted leaders. Do I need to go on? The visceral reaction is valid. — by kate2468 November 21, 8:15 AM

Mr. Gorbachev tear down this wall….ur I mean eyesore. — by lriggs November 21, 8:30 AM

…The building has all the personality of an East German security headquarters and deserves to blown up, along with the hideous parking garage that goes with it… — by tedso November 21, 10:41 AM

I couldn’t agree more.

I am continually struck by all of the differences that there are between Chinese and American culture. And, just as often, I am struck by just how the same all of the people that make up those respective cultures are. (NOTE: Click on any of the pictures below to jump to the complete photo album on Flickr, where you’ll find a lot more details on our day!)

Take last Sunday, for instance. My good friend Yansu came across some promotional tickets for the Beijing Amusement Park for 5 people. Fall weather in Beijing is clear, dry and crisp (usually in the upper 40s to low 50s) every day, so it sounded like a lot of fun. Plus, a Chinese amusement park? This, I had to see.

This was like the equivalent of Canobie Lake Park. It was a smaller venue than, say, Six Flags, in terms of the number of rides, but the layout is very different from what you’d see in the US. Back home, these places tend to have a carnival-like atmosphere, with an attempt made to squeeze as many rides and games into the area as possible. Here, there is a premium placed on open spaces, long walkways and scenery. The artificial lake surrounding the park is pretty striking. Also, there weren’t any carnival games that I could see anywhere.

This was like a piece of Americana copied painstakingly by the Chinese, but re-built with Chinese sensibilities in mind. For instance, all of the rides are things that you’d recognize in America: Merry-Go-Round, Ferris Wheel, Roller Coaster, etc. The buildings had a western aesthetic. No hutong-esque structures here. Everything looked like it came straight out of a “Typical Amusement Park Structures” box.

Even the lines to get onto the rides were American. No jostling, pushing or shoving, as is typical everywhere else here. (Just try to ride the subway during rush hour.) Everybody was orderly, and even happy, to wait their turn.

Now the food served at some of the snack stands… that was a different story. This stand was waiting for us after we got off of the roller coaster.

I loved this setup; it was so Chinese, in several ways. First, it was reminiscent of the food vendors that you see in the streets in the mornings and evenings all around the city. They often have the best food and it is unbelievably cheap.

Second, the food was unusual. It was all on a stick, and you had 3 choices: chicken, beef or squid. And when I say “squid,” I mean an honest-to-goodness squid impaled on a stick and boiled. Even being from New England and used to all kinds of seafood, it was an odd thing to see. I’ve actually tried squid in China before and don’t care for it (I’m partial to New England style fried calamari).

Finally, there was no “line” for the food like there was for the rides. It was a scrum to get to the front and get your order in to the vendor. And when you finally got your food, you had to push your way through to the little area to the side where the spices and sauces were laid out.

It all tasted great, as Lena can attest.

As you’d expect in a place like this, everywhere you went there were kids. And families. When you see a dad chasing after his kids, or an older brother looking exasperated at the antics of a younger sister, you realize that for all of our stupid differences, everybody is the really the same. Maybe we see things a little differently sometimes, or maybe our governments take what we think are crazy stances on some issues, but when you put folks into an amusement park, that all just goes away.

I had a really great time, and while it wasn’t as crazy and alcohol-soaked as my French adventure the night before, it was rewarding in its own ways. I got to chill out with some great friends, get a little taste of home in the process, and then wrap it all up with a fun meal at the end.

Life certainly is good.

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.

Honestly, I would love to learn French. I think that it is an awesome language. But first things first; I gotta learn Mandarin.

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.

  Russian Dance, part 1

Russian Dance, part 2

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.

James Michael Curley.

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.

Agree or disagree with some of the things that he did or said, “in the end, they knew his name…”

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!

Damn, I love my hometown.