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Published: February 28th 2012
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First Impressions
We’re in the town of Xiasha (
Shia-sha), about 40 minutes bus ride from downtown Hangzhou. Xiasha is an artificial city along the lines of say, Brasilia. Like the capitol of Brazil, it didn't arise spontaneously. It was created for a specific purpose, namely to house some fourteen universities and colleges where over 100,000 students are being prepared to lead the New China.
It’s an odd place, Xiasha. There’s not much soul, no links to the country's storied past, no culture outside of what you might find in the Universities themselves. Ten years ago this town was all farmers’ fields. Now it’s one sky scraper after another.
I've come here to teach a month-long course in public speaking at Zhejiang Sci-Tech University. We arrived here last Friday, February 24, and were met at the airport by our waiban (minder) Fanny. Fanny speaks perfect, unaccented English which she learned entirely in school. She’s never been outside the country.
Fanny escorted us to our apartment, which is located in a gated community called Beyin Gongu. A number of foreign university professors are housed here. Our building is a California walkup; each apartment has its
own front door opening on to a common landing.
The south gate fronts onto 4
th Street, a commercial strip with sky scrapers and shops on either side of a very wide thoroughfare. The pedestrian walkways are capacious. Mostly who you see on the streets are young people. Students.
They're stylishly -- and appropriately (considering the weather) -- dressed in designer down jackets, hats and scarves. It's abysmally cold outside. We've seen full-on sunshine exactly twice since we got here. Mostly it appears high in the sky as a dull communion wafer obscured by fog. We were not prepared for the cold, which is damp and refrigerates the bones if you're not dressed for it.
The apartment is a two bedroom affair on the 2
nd level, with stark white walls, dark hardwood patterned Formica flooring, two bedrooms, one of which I use as an office/study. The living room is large. There’s a small kitchen and a bathroom with no enclosed shower, so we’ve been taking sponge baths. The kitchen comes with a fridge, microwave, hotplate and a flash boiler for heating water for tea and coffee. We buy drinking water in five gallon bottles from the store around
the corner.
Fanny’s been great about getting us up and running. We now have a working telephone, a LAN line for internet, and a TV with a half dozen Chinese stations and one English language one that broadcasts mostly boring interviews with American diplomats that nobody's ever heard of.
Our apartment did not come with chinaware, so we went out and bought bowls and cutlery at Wu-Mart (seriously), a giant three-story shopping center with clothing on the ground floor, dry goods on the second, and groceries on the third. First thing I did was buy myself a down jacket and knitted watch cap. Surprised at the prices, which in many cases exceed Stateside prices. There’s no such thing as a Dollar Store here either.
Food on the other hand is way cheap. The other day I got us each a noodle bowl with veggies and a floating tofu cutlet for around 48 cents each. Lunch at the point-and-eat cafeteria around the corner runs around $7.00 for the two of us; five dishes, plus all the rice you can eat.
We’re trying to be adventursome in our food choices, but last night we met our match in
a tofu and veggie dish that sort of smelled like shit. It also tasted like shit. We later learned the tofu was fermented, which I guess is an acquired taste, but one which I have no intention of acquiring. We paid for it anyway and gave it to the guard at the complex gate, who I'm guessing chucked it into the trash as soon as we were out of sight.
Another surprise: The scooters in this part of China are all electric. “E-Scooters,” they’re called. Dead quiet and emission free. Zhejiang Province resolved a few years ago to cut their emissions by 15% by the year 2010. It must be working, because the air is clean and there’s very little noise pollution either. Nothing like the Asia I remember from previous trips, where the sound of motorcycles and tuk-tuks roared day and night and the air was all but unbreathable. They saw the need, made the change, and that was that. If China can do it, why can’t we?
Management, of course, is top-down, which may explain why things can get done so efficiently and quickly here. On the other hand, for a nominally totalitarian country, there seems
to be a refreshing disregard for authority here. The other night we were having dinner at a popular spot and noticed that just about everybody was smoking. This in defiance of the prominently posted no-smoking signs. Ya gotta love the Chinese.
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ARooney
non-member comment
Good post
DonNancy - Good first post. Lots of good wandering around detail. Anxious to hear more, esp about classes. Looking forward to hearing about your little side trips too. AR