The End Approaches

I realize that I have been thoroughly skimpy in my postings regarding China, and for that I can only blame the CCP (Chinese Communist Party) and their affinity for Internet blocks (particularly the on against this blogging platform). The blame, however, cannot fall fully on them. I have been rather lax in my commitment to providing you with moderately detailed accounts of the crazy things I keep putting myself through.

As such, I’m going to attempt to provide you with some highlights to get you up to speed. Since you heard from me last, I finished up my time in Beijing, went to Shanghai for the first time, had even more transit fiascos, and made it back to Turkey with my sanity and newly acquired Starbucks mugs in tact.

While in Beijing, I had one of the major highlights of my entire China trip – the massive bookstore that had an entire shelf on branding and brand management. I’m sure I must have seemed extremely strange as the little foreign boy skimming through books on the “power of the brand” in Chinese (and stranger still as I made my way over to women’s fashion magazines – they have excellent advertisements in them). Chinese magazines are, by the way, insanely cheap, so I bought a small army of them for around 2 or 3 US dollars. I’m not sure if they are all going to be relevant or provide much of any value; however, while skimming through one, I did discover a hilarious “visit Turkey” advertisement that took up the entire back page of a magazine – I literally snorted when I saw it in the Beijing airport (classy points for me).

That brings me to transportation woe number one – the flight to Shanghai. Long story short, it was about time to land when the pilot comes over the speaker and informs all the passengers that, due to weather, the plane could not land at Shanghai’s airport. Instead, we sat on the runway in a town called Hefei for around 5 or 6 hours until we could safely continue onwards to Shanghai – putting me there after midnight (thus after public transit runs). Thankfully, I spoke Chinese (unlike the Russian family on the flight) and was able to get on the shuttle bus to where I needed to go. It was quite a feeling of accomplishment to be the only foreigner who was able to take this option.

That brings us to Shanghai, the Paris of the East. Shanghai is, in a word, incredible. I was like a small child in a candy shop almost the entire time. The architecture is amazing, a mix of modern high-rises that look as if they’d been imported from Hong Kong or Tokyo and older traditional and colonial buildings. It’s easily the greatest city in Mainland China, far surpassing the People’s Republic’s grungy capital, Beijing. The people of Shanghai are the most prominent feature of this city. They carry themselves as if they were Japanese or Korean, beacons of fashion and refinement. Speaking constantly in Shanghainese (Wu Chinese), they assert their unique identity within the massive expanse of the Middle Kingdom. With a transit system that seems highly influenced by hyper-modern Hong Kong, Shanghai was easy to get around with only one small thing causing me grief – the weather. Pretty much the only rainstorm I have encountered the entire summer was in Shanghai, and it was not just one. Each day I was there featured a torrential downpour of at least several hours in the middle of the day, significantly inhibiting my ability to bounce around the city at will.

Finally leaving Shanghai, I spent the entire ride to the airport in complete terror that I wouldn’t manage to make the flight since public transit took much longer than I expected and my flight left a few hours earlier than I had remembered (good thing I checked when I got up in the morning). I finally managed to get to the airport and check in, only to discover that my flight was delayed, subsequently causing me to worry about catching my flight in Hong Kong to Turkey. At the end of the day, I managed to make my flights with no problems, and I have now reached my final day in Turkey, which I will spend, packing and being artsy, visiting the Istanbul Modern museum.

The Little White Boy that Could

Taking the overnight bus from Hangzhou to Beijing was nothing less than an extraordinary choice. The bus did not have reclining seats like the one I took from Shenzhen to Xiamen. Oh no, this bus had 3 rows of narrow bunk beds, which I found abnormally comfortable. Between being in a horizontal position and the movement of the bus, I slept like a baby for almost the entire 15-hour trip, shocking the Chinese people around me. To them, I was the little white boy who could sleep through anything and, when awake, converse in halfway decent Mandarin.

I have now arrived in Beijing and am in the process of eating lunch in the midst of Beijing’s hyper-artsy 798 district. My lunch is nothing of much excitement since I chose the location due to its internet and décor rather than it’s extensive menu of delicious dishes. It’s almost sacrilegious, but I’m eating pizza and drinking coffee in Beijing….. I assure you it’s only because the menu lacked Chinese food and I desperately needed a place use the internet and to charge up my electronics (first world problems, I know). More to come soon!

A Mobile Feast

Taking the train in China is never a dull experience; however, it is only when doing so without companions that you really get the full experience. In a massively complex turn of events (the details of which I will spare you), I ended up buying a ticket to go from Xiamen to Hangzhou, a city near Shanghai, as a half way point on my trek up to Beijing by the 8th of August. Little did I know, this train was not the 6 hour train Lonely Planet mentions, oh no…. this train takes a full 22 hours to get from Xiamen to Hangzhou. Needless to say, I found this out about 10 hours into the train ride and simply didn’t know what to say. Allow me to also interject the detail that I had sprung for the considerably cheaper “hard seat” ticket rather than a bed on the train. Luckily I was prepared for the train thanks in part to my 3 years of Chinese classes and to the large bag full of snacks and treats that Amy (my friend in Xiamen) insisted I take with me.

I had noticed before that Chinese people always tend to bring lots of ramen and other little snacks on the train, but I had forgotten the extent to which the train can become a veritable feast. Just to give you an idea, I saw a group of 4 near me during one part of the journey demolish 4 bowls of ramen, a family sized bag of wasabi peas, some chicken legs, fruit, and some other miscellaneous snacks (note they only were on the train for a few hours and it was not during lunch time). Gradually over the 22 hours on the train, I managed to demolish my apple, pre-packed sausage, coffee cake, mini-bread loaf, packet of Oreos, sleeve of gummy lifesaver-like candy, bowl of ramen, water, tea, and half of a giant bag of haw flakes that were in my goodie bag. The sights and sound of crunching and munching are essentially omnipresent on the train until about 1 am when people finally start to fall asleep in any and every position possible. I luckily got an entire row of 3 seats to myself for the last several hours of the journey from 3:00 am to roughly 8:00 am.

It’s really quite surreal now that I went through it all. The cherry on top of the proverbial pie is, of course, that in order to be in Beijing for Ben Turman’s 21st birthday, this afternoon (in fact, in 2 hours) I will be boarding a 15 or 16 hour bus to Beijing from Hangzhou. I already hit up some fruit stands, so I have my dinner of green tea, oranges and bananas in my bag.

It’s hard to explain the entirety of the 22 hours of that train trip, so instead, I will provide you with a few of the more “memorable” of my memories:

1. The man who (at 3 or 4 am) hacked up a massive amount of phlegm and subsequently spat it on the floor of the train. [note this woke me from my sleep for all of the 30 to 45 seconds it took for this to occur]

2. The young child who sat next to me (on his mother’s lap) who was inordinately terrified of me was nothing if not memorable. If I moved too close, he started to cry, until he finally started playing a game with me that involved holding his finger out E.T. style and coming very close to touching mine until he would get too scared and pull away. This eventually led to a game of passing the milk bottle around and pretending to drink it and saying that “it’s all gone.” (a much more entertaining game when played in Chinese) Making this entire thing more interesting still is the fact that he was dressed, in typical Chinese fashion, in pants that have a massive slit running from just north of his rear-end to just south of his navel (yes, that means that all of his business was out on display for the entire world to see. The existence of these outfits will NEVER make sense to me – NEVER).

3. The woman who could not understand why I can’t understand everything everyone always says in Chinese when I’ve studied abroad before in China and have actual Chinese people as Chinese professors. Note I could only understand about 30% to 40% of what she said in her garbled, mumbled, thick, rural, Southern Chinese accent. For those of you who are not as familiar with Chinese, the spark notes version of this irony is that in Southern China, they do not pronounce the Chinese sounds “r,” “zh,” “sh,” and “ch” the way it is “supposed” to be pronounced according to rules of standard Mandarin. This result of this is that the Southern pronunciations of Mandarin have about double the number of homophones than Chinese normally haves, making it 麻烦死了(troublesome to death) to understand.

I could probably go on and on, but I will leave it there, as I’m sure I will share many more memories from that ride later on. I can safely say, however, that my exhausting stint on the train was not for nothing. It essentially forced me to use my mandarin with no option of simply giving up, instead I had to use my dictionary and explain myself as best as possible, resulting in my Chinese vocabulary growing to include such important terms as 隧道(tunnel) and 营养(nutritious).

Hangzhou also proved to be a veritable smorgasbord of examples for my research. I ran around collecting photos that I was probably not supposed to be taking inside of the mall of example after example of many of the things I’m attempting to prove for my honors thesis. I felt like Templeton in Charlotte’s Web, only I am leaving Hangzhou with a large number photographs rather than bloating to three times my natural size – though my eating has not be largely incessant since arriving in China. The crown jewels of my eating experiences thus far have occurred in Xiamen, where I was taken to eat by Amy and her boyfriend (now Fiancé) Aaron. For lunch we went to a restaurant acclaimed for it’s spicy dishes and devoured some spicy green beans, cabbage, chicken, and beef which were only surpassed by that evening’s meal at one of Xiamen’s most famous seafood restaurants where you select the fresh seafood you want and they cook it up for you. We were number 50 something on the waiting list when we arrived around 8:30pm (note that I’ve only once ever waited to be seated at a Chinese restaurant before and that was at a famous Peking Duck place in Beijing). The seafood was incredible – shrimp, octopus, fried noodles, and a plate food of clams that were, in a word, incredible. We feasted and feasted until we could feast no more.

I fully expect Beijing to be more of the same since I have birthday festivities to look forward to. I’ll keep posting as I can since the CCP isn’t exactly a fan of blogspot.

As pictures are difficult to upload at this point, I will provide a link to my snapfish account where you can few what I've managed to get up thus far (this should work, please let me know if it doesn't): http://www5.snapfish.ca/snapfishca/thumbnailshare/AlbumID=4130747028/a=6541516028_6541516028/

Fragrant Harbor

Hong Kong, 香港, literally “fragrant harbor” in Chinese is exactly that. After landing at the airport following a nightmarish 9 and a half hour flight on Turkish Airlines (involving at least 40% of people in my vicinity including myself having broken tray tables and the staff seeming completely unconcerned), I trotted myself right along to the information counter to locate where I can apply for my Chinese visa. Upon arriving at the counter I make my one big realization. As I was packing, I wasn’t overly concerned about forgetting something small because as long as I have my passport, money, and western deodorant I can get everything else in China. I had, of course, overlooked the fact that I needed to apply for my visa in the airport; thus, my filled out application form and passport photos were sitting in my suitcase in Istanbul. Luckily, my thinking was correct and since I had my money and my passport, I was able to go get passport photos made for a couple dollars in the airport in 18 seconds (that’s what the booth advertised – Photos in just 18 seconds). A large chunk of cash and 24 hours later, I now have a Chinese visa allowing me to enter the mainland as many times as my heart desires so long as it’s before February 2012 and I don’t stay more than a month each visit.

Entering Hong Kong was surreal. I recognized almost everything from when I was here 2 years ago, and it was every bit as incredible as I remembered. Hong Kong, for those of you who have not been, is essentially 60% New York and 40% Asian Grocery Store. It’s gorgeous high-rise buildings with the smell of incense wafting up from some unseen location and the occasional blast of the odor of roasted duck. Confession – I’m leaving this afternoon to cross to the Mainland, and I have yet to have Chinese food in Hong Kong. I have had Japanese curry and Indian curry and even a chicken salad sandwich (don’t judge – I was having some serious cravings for celery which Turkey apparently does not view as a staple ingredient as I have not been able to find it anywhere). All in all, Hong Kong is very much a fragrant harbor; its streets are filled with the most incredible mixture of things from all over the world. Yesterday, I was on the hunt for a book store for research purposes (look at me dutifully pursuing what I’m supposed to rather than stuffing my face), when I came across a shop called (if memory serves me right) Voi La La. This place was a wine emporium, so I had to go in of course (psh, and there I go ruining my productivity). Hong Kong wine prices are about 25%-50% cheaper than Turkey’s so I walked around and gawked at the decently priced bottles. The shopkeeper (who, note this, speaks fluent English) comes up and asks me if I need any help. I say, “No, I’m just looking around.” Then I spy a bottle that I’d seen several times before, but had never tried. Judging by the classiness of the establishment, I took a chance and asked the guy if he’d tried it before. He said no, but that the same vineyard (Oveja Negra – the black sheep in Spanish) was on sample today. He asked me if I’d like to try it. My answer was “yes,” while in my head I was going “does a bear crap in the woods!?” I went on to sample three of the four wines available, and actually purchased a bottle of the Oveja Negra which was absolutely superb. I figured that the roughly $11 purchase was justifiable as a joint present to me and birthday present to Ben Turman with whom I extend to share the bottle in Beijing in honor of his 21st birthday which means exactly nothing in China since he’s been able to drink legally there for about 3 years and in actual practice, drink since he could see over the counter. I will check out the details on the bottle as well as the other name I wrote down from the sampling and offer them up as my erudite wine recommendations soon.

For now, I will leave you with the simple statement that Hong Kong is absolutely amazing (and far cheaper than Turkey). If you ever get the opportunity to go, you simply must because it is a world in and of itself. You can rest assured that it will be the destination of quite a few of my job applications in the coming months, until then, I’ll going to be prepping myself for my return to the mainland, the land of the Great Wall of China, the land of the Terra Cotta Warriors, the land of the Great Fire-wall of China, and the land of the Chinese Communist Party and their “Communism with Chinese characteristics” (of course those characteristics are not capitalism, they’re just lessened market controls and economic restrictions and more free flowing capital… not capitalism at all).

My Life in Lists

As I have less than a week left in Turkey (only 4 days in fact), I have begun compiling lists galore to remind myself of various tasks and experiences I need to take care of before heading onwards to China. And of course, I have my running list of things I must eat as soon as I arrive there. Thus, I’m going to share with you my life in lists.

Top 5 things I haven’t done yet in Turkey and must do:
1. Turkish Bath
2. Basilica Cistern
3. Eat the street chestnuts
4. Spice Bazaar
5. Eat fresh figs

Top 10 things I’ve done in Turkey and have to do again before leaving:
1. Tombik
2. Turkish delight
3. The Hagia Sophia, Blue Mosque, and surrounding area at night
4. Künefe (a Turkish desert that is like a sweet, cheesy, frosted mini-wheat)
5. Spend hours shopping at Mephisto (my favorite Book Store/DVD emporium/CD vendor/café)
6. Watch the sunset from the bridge
7. haggle in a bazaar and use the phrase “I can get it cheaper in China” to force the price lower
8. Turkish cake (aka “pasta”)
9. Recreate the accent of the Dolmabahçe Palace guide (“Dear guests, all togethers we will go see the pyalace of the sultan midget and the second biggest carpet in the Turkey……”)
10. Either regain my American accent or embrace my newly adopted Canadianisms , eh

Top 10 musts in China:
1. Get my hair washed
2. Get a discount for speaking decent Chinese
3. Street food – all of it
4. At least one completely massive, disgustingly indulgent meal that costs less than 10 USD
5. Understand a Beijing cab driver (I’m convinced they only speak Troll, not Mandarin)
6. Buy a tailored suit
7. Tree Bar (peach beer – enough said)
8. 798 (the insanely quirky, avant-garde art district of Beijing that I’ve never visited but was told to spend quality time in by my honors thesis advisor)
9. Watch 80 year old Chinese people get up at the crack of dawn to do tai chi in public parks
10. Victoria Peak (Hong Kong’s skyline, need I say more?)

The Time Approaches

I now have less than one week left in Turkey before I head over to East Asia, and there is a lot going on – a lot of last minute shopping, a lot of goodbye dinners (most of my friends here are leaving at various points during the week), a lot of a lot.

As I’ve made very clear, I’m quite excited to be going back to China; however, things seem to happening one after the other. I have to do some planning before I head over there that I’ve hardly started as well as an application to take part in a company sponsored forum in Germany in October. This is, of course, on top of my work which so ruthlessly begins every morning at 7:15, only to end at 5:15. I also need to hunt down some films by my favorite director (Ferzan Õzpetek) who is Turkish-Italian before I leave.

One thing I will definitely miss as I venture 5 time zones further east is the musical taste here in Turkey. It’s almost as if the country is running on my iTunes… almost. You walk down the street and you hear some Alexandra Stan, or some “Englishman in New York.” I have actually discovered a whole handful of music while I’ve been here that I simply must get my hands on as soon as possible. Despite the excellent taste in music selection that seems to be pretty pervasive here, the placement of this music is not generally the best – sometime to quite hilarious results. By far the most shocking occurred when grocery shopping in a store that is attached to a neighborhood mosque. While selecting which of the thousands of similar looking cheeses to select, I hear, of all songs, “S&M” come on which could very well be one of the filthiest songs generated in recent memory. My fellow shoppers, clearly incapable of speaking English (like the vast majority of the population here), just carried on with the selection of their vegetables as if they were listening to a Beethoven piano concerto, completely oblivious of the North American women belting out line after line about “sex in the air” and how they “love the smell of it.” It was a classy moment. I think my jaw hung wide open for a good 30 seconds before I was able to regain my composure just enough to glance around for awkward facial expressions that would indicate some degree of comprehension among the others – there was, of course, none.

In more recent news, I had an excellent day of Shopping with friends this past weekend that took me for the first time to the Egyptian Bazaar where spices abound and make me wish that I had something too do with incredibly discounted saffron and vanilla bean. It also really makes me wonder what they put in the confection “Turkish Viagra” or “the sultans’ aphrodisiacs.”

Lastly, my concern: the Turkish Lira. Thanks to a vide variety of recent occurrences, the currency that was being exchanged for a bit under 1.5 to the US dollar when I arrived is now valued at around 1.72 (or at least it was at some point yesterday). As I am, of course, being paid in Lira, that wonderful little turn of events is going to really help me out when I have to exchange to Chinese RMB, Hong Kong Dollars, and Taiwanese Dollars very soon. Hopefully it will bounce back a bit.

Looking Ahead, Thinking Back, and Living for Today

Today marks the 2 week point. After today I have two Mondays left in Turkey, and on the second of those two, I will say goodbye to my coworkers and my abnormally slow work computer in the morning. That afternoon, however, will feature some frantic last-minute packing as late that evening I will board my Turkish Airways flight direct to Hong Kong.

I’m not really excited to be leaving Turkey, especially my new friends here; however, the prospect of going back to what just might be my favorite city on earth where I have the ability to communicate with people on the street is almost overwhelmingly exciting. I literally spent an hour or two last night gushing with my Chinese room mate over coffee about how good the food is in Hong Kong, and I simply have no idea how I’m going to eat everything I need to eat in such a short period. I will only be in Hong Kong for a couple of days since my main purpose of going there is just so that I can get a visa for Mainland China.

This trip to China is going to be an incredible mix of revisiting the familiar and experiencing the new as I will be seeing many of my close friends in Beijing and revisiting Xiamen where I studied abroad; however, this time, I will also be going to Shanghai and Taipei, Taiwan (provided I get a multi-entry visa for the mainland, which I should).

I’m actually quite tempted to fast for a couple days before I leave Turkey just to prepare myself for the frenzy of eating that will take place upon arrival. You can be sure that you will see pictures of Starbucks’ peppery chicken puff (Hong Kong), 辣子鸡丁– spicy chicken pieces (Xiamen), 炒面– real fried noodles (EVERYWHERE), candied plums on a stick (Beijing), 百香冰沙– passion fruit slushy (Taipei/Xiamen), and who knows what else…

Despite what I make it sound like, I am, in fact, not going back to China to eat until I look like a stereotypical American. Actually, I’m going to complete my field research for my honors thesis on branding in modern China. In essence, what I’m doing is observing the way in which companies use aesthetics, images, and other forms of product communication (advertisements, jingles etc.). As I completed the fist part of this project as a integral part of my coursework while studying abroad in Xiamen, I already have a 30-page paper worth of research to get me started. As I continue to do online research in my spare time here in Turkey, I believe that I may have narrowed my subject matter down a bit to the point that I may have a title for my thesis: “Communicating Luxury: trends in contemporary Chinese brand establishment, adjustment, communication and management”

What I plan to do, more specifically, is to examine overarching trends in business practices of both domestic (Chinese) and international (foreign) companies and the ways in which they communicate messages of luxury to Chinese consumers. It will encompass field research, which is basically shopping supplemented with marketing theory blended with other disciplines, particularly the study of urban aesthetics and postmodernism. From what I see right now, my argument can be boiled down to the thought that both Chinese and Western companies are adapting the essence of their brand, what their product/name means, in a way that conveys the concept of “luxury” to the Chinese consumer, and they are doing so in 3 key ways:
1. Exoticizing
2. Urbanizing
3. Modernizing
Companies are creating these brand messages for their products, and I intend to explore these trends, their effectiveness, and what this phenomenon means in the grander context of modern Chinese society, the Chinese economy at-large, and future expansion.

As much as I’m sure you are all as deeply fascinated by my thesis topic as I am, I’m going to save the explosion of china-related blog material until I’m actually there. For now, I’m going to continue making to most of the time I have left in Turkey and with my new friends here. Also, I am hitting the streets with a vengeance to improve my photography, so hopefully you’ll be seeing some incredible shots in the near future. Until then…