Taking in some Culture

This weekend we were encouraged to go for a solo travel weekend. Since my opportunities for solo travel after the semester are boundless (okay, about three weeks) I decided not to do a big trip, plus there is a small day-trip worthy water village (canals and wooden boats and tourist traps aplenty: think Venice but smaller, and with more Asians) that piqued my interest, so I decided to hang around except for a day trip on Saturday. Of course, when I woke up Saturday I felt like doing anything OTHER than hauling myself over to the bus station and going away all day, so I decided to stay in the city after all, especially since I haven’t had a proper weekend here yet, and next weekend we have more mandatory fun away from Hangzhou.

I didn’t do anything particularly exciting other than explore a few neighborhoods I’d yet to really look at, and spend a nice late morning on Saturday strolling around a very busy park by West Lake, weaving through the Chinese tourists and trying to find a shady spot to sit. I would have been content to settle on the grass somewhere and write postcards and the Chinese language journal I am keeping for one of my Midd professors, but unfortunately two barriers stood in my way. The first is that it seems to be impossible to buy postcards in China. No matter how many souvenir shops I pass with loud hawkers pushing boiled corn, film, paper parasols, beaded cell phone fobs, fans, jewelery, embroidered change purses and the like, I have yet to find the familiar rack of postcards featuring firework-lit skies over recognizable memorials. Once this thought occurred to me, I remembered that the only way I got my hands on any postcards in Beijing was to buy a pre-arranged set of ten unimpressive cards sold at a single shop off of Tiananmen Square. Had I remembered this ahead of time, I would have bought the tackiest New York postcards I could find to send out. Alas.

The second problem is that Chinese people do not walk on their grass. It is just not done. Practically every small patch of grass I pass has a small sign on it requesting or sometimes demanding that you stay away. In the park, all of the grass areas were fenced off, and while I did see one couple settling down under a tree, I also witnessed the security officer who arrived moments later and chased them off, not by asking them to leave but by rather insistently blowing a whistle at them as he approached to shoo them away. There is reason to this, I think, and it is the same reason that admission to many parks is on the expensive side: there are a lot of people in China. Not only that, but they all love to travel, and generally do so at the same time, on weekends and the “golden holiday” weeks that occur several times a year. Were all of these Chinese people allowed to traipse about through the grass or crowd en masse into the parks and scenic attractions, well, the scenery would be lost and the landscaping bills would be astronomical.

Saturday I went out with a few others who’d stayed behind this weekend. We headed to the Zhejiang University campus across town, the vicinity of which houses about half of the noteworthy bars in the Hangzhou guide magazines we’ve been perusing. (The other half are along a second road along the Southeastern side of West Lake). The bar we went to first was called “Reggae Bar”, and while the décor did feature lots of pictures of Bob Marley, nothing else about the place was reggae. (I mean they played that Umbrella song…come on). The other noteworthy thing about the bar was the inordinate amount of foreigners; among others, we sat next to some Germans, and there were white and black people of various nationalities everywhere. Hey, you know who’s German…? (Sorry, that was a two person joke). We were going to head off to a supposedly more interesting place, when, well, let’s call it “Chiang Kai-Shek’s Revenge” cut my night short. So my friends put me in a cab and sent me back.

It being my first time in a cab solo since getting here, I hadn’t previously had much chance to talk to the brave (or crazy) men who drive quite aggressively across the city to get us from A to B. Chinese drivers, of cabs and buses alike, have great faith in their brake systems, and exercise that faith regularly. They also like to play games of Chicken that involve pulling into oncoming traffic to make a light or cutting off small cars with big big buses. But back to my cabbie: he started chatting me up about my Chinese, where I was studying, etc. Then changed the subject to the fact that he’d just picked me up outside a bar. He mentioned that young Chinese girls pretty much just don’t go to bars or smoke or drink beer (this is mostly true: there are of course girls at the bars, but none of our roommates ever really go out, and neither do their friends). He didn’t say it judgementally, in fact he was impressed and said that Chinese people should be open minded about that kind of thing. Chinese people actually do not seem to insult easily, and take most of what we do in stride as being the way foreigners do things. I can’t think of a time I’ve seen a Chinese girl wearing a tank top, and yet I doubt of us feel uncomfortable wearing them. One of our classmates had someone ask her if she thought the weather was especially hot that day, but any cultural modesty on the part of the Chinese doesn’t transfer to us. I told him that America isn’t necessarily that open minded when it comes to alcohol (eg: drinking age), but that yes, in general, there’s less difference between male and female college students.