First days in Nanjing

NOTE: It's been a long time since I last wrote. The last two weeks in Hong Kong I was working 16 hour days. I both had to finish the database I was building for Amity Foundation as part of my internship, as well completing a contract with Teach for America to build an online facebook/directory thingee. Then in China, I have been unable to log in to my blog do to problems with the Chinese character set. I finally asked my Dad to set up my computer at home so I could log in remotely and blog. This post is from a week and a half ago: Nanjing Oddly enough, Nanjing reminds me a little of back home in Massachusetts. Hong Kong is dense enough and wealthy enough that it seems like every square inch of it is developed and fully used. While the United States is rich, the country is big enough that sometimes we just ditch the building, park, or factory and build somewhere else (and sometimes we do this to entire cities - like New Haven) . Nanjing has brand new shopping malls and office towers, but also rusted amusement parks with broken slides. Cars and bicycles are everywhere, making crossing the street quite an adventure. The air is pretty bad, but probably not nearly as bad as Shanghai and Beijing. Nanjing feels really safe, and I am able to take long walks in the evening or later. It's very easy to stroll down a sidestreet where kids are playing the street, old men are playing mahjong on the sidewalk, and you can see others watching TV through the open door of their cramped house. Language Barrier In case you haven't heard, Chinese is a really difficult language. I try and ask for the laundromat (xiyidian) and people think I'm asking if it is 11 o'clock (shiyidian). I try and ask, "where did you go to college (da xue)?", and the person looks at me puzzled "big water?" (da shui). One syallable such as xi, third tone, can have 5 - 10 different meanings. If you count xi in all five tones, it can have a hundred meanings. If you count xi in five tones, plus shi, chi, qi, and the others that sound the same . . . well, you get the idea. Gradually, my pronounciation is starting to improve. I invested in an electronic dictionary that has speakers that say the words in Chinese. I've been looking up words and repeating them over and over. Today I am happy because I went to buy a replacement battery for my cell phone and the shopkeeper actually understood me when I explained that "I'm not sure if it's the cell phone that's broken or the battery, so could I test out a new battery for a bit so that I can figure it out?" She helped me test it, and now my cell phone is working again. Silly Foreigner Perhaps the most frustrating thing about China so far is making all these silly foreigner mistakes. For instance, I went to a restaurant and accidently ordered myself a meal for four people. I think the waitresses got quite a kick out of it. I go into a park, and a woman comes out and yells at me and tells me that I need to buy a ticket. (So much for it being a "public" garden, whatever happened to communism?) And then I was walking around the lake that sits in the middle of Nanjing. Unfortunately, I got half way around when I ran into a huge construction site. As I walked through, I ended up ankle deep in mud, with more dirt splattered all over my legs. As I kept walking through the park after that, I got plenty of stares from people wondering at this strange foreign/swamp creature. But then the remants of the taiphoon arrived and drenched everyone.