So, this is a blog where I basically just complain about how hot and how hard it is to do anything here and also I try to make myself look really cool and independent. But I needed to write it to validate the last two days of my life.



So, here is what I have to do re-learn this summer: Never assume anything and that I love and hate this place.On Wednesday I went to the Vietnam Embassy to pick up my visa. The embassy is about an hour away by public transportation and you have to stand the whole time, switch subways, and go to a totally different station at one point. And keep in mind it is ridiculously hot and humid. Anyway, I shouldn't have assumed my visa would be ready after 4 working days. They told me to come back on Monday. So since I was sort of in the area I took the subway to the Beijing Train Station to buy my train ticket from Beijing to Hanoi. When you get off the station there are like a million people all saying "Fa Piao" over and over and over again. It is like you are in some Buddhist Temple and everyone is saying their mantra out loud. "Fa Piao" means "receipt" they are illegally selling people fake receipts so that people can use them to get money from their companies, I think. That is what I read in some book. But I don't understand why they all wait by the train station. Anyway, I wait in line for a good 40 minutes, there is a lot of pushing, there are a million people everywhere sleeping, selling things, and don't forget the loud speaker with the annoying shrill voice screaming things the entire time to everyone. I finally get to the window and I tell the lady the speech I have practically memorized by now: I want to go from Beijing to Hanoi on a hard sleeper on August 24." She says through her microphone so everyone and their mother can here, "We don't sell those tickets." I guess I shouldn't have assumed that the train station would be the best place to buy a train ticket. I know a lot of people just go to travel companies and pay an extra amount of money so that they don't have to deal with the hassle but I hardly ever do because A. I am totally cheap and B. I sort of like getting the tickets on my own (which I am changing my mind about right now...) Anyway, I ask the lady where I can buy a ticket. She says, "I don't know, why don't you check a tourist company." By then it was 4:30 in the afternoon, it would take me an hour to get home, and I was so exhausted so I just had a Popsicle and went home. (I eat 3-5 Popsicles a day to get me through the heat)

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div>Obviously, this is not going to be a very academic argument. I read Memoirs ten years ago and although this was my pre-liberal arts education time and my mind had not yet been ideologically molded to fit films into theory I was still aware that there was something incredibly disturbing about the book. A white man writing about what life is like as a glorified Asian prostitute. Asian women who find their only power through sex (or what I would now label "hypersexual behavior").

So this last weekend I met three youngsters, as my dad would call them, two 13 year olds and one 11 year old. All three were spending their summer in Beijing living with a Chinese family and studying Chinese. They were American and they lived in Singapore. They went to an American school there and their parents were diplomats. One of the youngsters' parent used to be the ambassador to Honk Kong. They were very smart. Very mature. Two of them were already learning their third language. One of them had an older sister who spoke four languages at the age of 22-French, Mandarin Chinese, English, and Arabic. They were nice and cool and polite and I was extremely jealous.

My Chinese cooking teacher told me there was store in town that you could buy shoes woman used to wear when they had bound feet and they had a history of bound feet in all of the different dynasties with pictures. So today it was pouring rain (winter officially began yesterday I think) and I dragged the other foreign teacher into town with me to check out this shoe store/museum. After taking the bus and asking a million people where this shoe place was—we found it! And guess what, it was just a really big shoe store.

I have no idea where the place she was talking about was. I am pretty sure that we were at the place she said to go, and the other teacher asked me, “So what exactly did she tell you this was?” When I told her what I thought she said it was, she asked, “Did she tell you this all in Chinese or English?” I said “Chinese.” And then I kind of figured out my Chinese must be really horrible! I completely misunderstood her. How can you think you are having a discussion about something but in fact you are talking about completely other things? I guess I misunderstood her. Well we still found a big shoe store and even though China is sometimes not a slave to fashion I think China has some really cool shoes! After looking at shoes we explored some of the markets around town, you can buy live turtles for soup and all sorts of live animal and sea creatures are crawling around everywhere.

Chinese Students and Military