I got to meet "Merry" from the Lord of the Rings after waiting in an airplane for almost 24 hours!

9/16

Time to go…or maybe not. We left our hostel and crammed who was leaving (about half of us stayed in China for a while longer, those who have already graduated) in a van and went to the airport.
Okay, this is where the real fun began.
We got on the plane at about 11:15 China time. We were SUPPOSED to leave at 11:30. So first one of the pilots emergency oxygen masks was missing and there was not one extra one on any other plane or in the entire airport. So they had one rush flown in from some place else. This took a couple hours.
Next there were some sick people on the plane and no doctors onboard to help them. So they had to get more doctors (and I found out later were supposed to take the plane away from the airport but refused to so the “punished” the American crew by making us all wait for the rest of the planes at the airport to leave). People became very pissed and restless by about the third or fourth hour onboard, but I actually was okay. I kept myself entertained with music, computer and cards. It was funny how ridiculous the whole situation was.
So next they had to get about half the people who left the plane back on board, which took another good hour or so. Then the our crew was over their limit in working hours for the day so they had to go find another crew off another plane to take us back. They eventually found a plane going to D.C., cancelled that flight because we had more people than they did, and the D.C. crew came to deal with hundreds of pissed as hell passengers (their lucky day). Speaking of which, the flight number was UA 888 CA 8888. All 8’s and in China, 8 is a lucky number meaning wealth. But if time was money, we were bankrupt. It was so ironic and even before we boarded the flight I thought to myself, “All these eights, I bet we’ll have bad luck instead of good.” God I hate it when I’m right.
So, new crew, passengers back on, it’s about 5-5:30 China time. Now they gotta check out the entire plane for safety and get some luggage back on and off for the people returning back and the people not returning back.
Then there was one more thing I think… what was it… I can’t remember right now and that’s actually fine with me. Guess what time we ended up leaving… If you guessed 6 you’re wrong, if you guess 7 you’re wrong. 7:40pm, China time. We weighted in one little area for over 8 hours. We sat parked at the Beijing airport and didn’t move for an entire working day.
So naturally our flight from San Fran back to Eugene was totally screwed. We traveled back in time and finally arrived 10.5 hours later at San Francisco about 3:30 pm Pacific standard time. We got home even before we left.
More long waiting in line to get our new flights.
Something really cool did turn out of it all. As I was finally checking my bags for a 9:20 pm flight back to Eugene I saw Dominic Monaghan (“Merry”, one of the hobbits from the Lord of the Rings movies). I went up to him and spoke with him for a bit, got my picture with him and was on my way. He was on his way to LA for business.
The airline gave us $15 for some dinner in the airport. I ate pepperoni pizza (awesome to have again) and some Kettle chips. I read a magazine, worked on some blogs, then got on the flight. And the UO girls soccer team was there coming back from some games at Salt Lake City.
The hour flight home felt lightning quick compared to the rest of the day. It’s good to be home. :)

A dollar saved is 7.5 yuan not spent on Chinese stuff.

9/15

Onto the largest market I’ve ever seen. If you wanted something Chinese, this was the place to come. It was like our Saturday market times 50. Needless to say I spent almost the rest of my money there and I got some really neat stuff to bring back home. (and I bought another bag so that I could get it all back!).
After I figured I had spent too much (actually it wasn’t too much but it sounded like a lot in Yuan) I went back to the hostel to finish up my final project to be shown at 4 to the group.
The project turned out fantastic. I did three time lapses of the last three places we had been. The Great Wall, Forbidden City, and Temple of Heaven. I was actually very pleased with how it turned out. I’m sure I’ll do another time lapse problem in the future.
On a side not I realize there are a lot of mistakes and typos in this blog. Some are mine but some are screwed up translations cause I posted many of these blogs on the Chinese version of blogspot.com, so that’s my excuse for that…
After the projects were shown we went to get some world famous Peking duck (awesome!)
After dinner we went to a Chinese show at a tea house. It was really cool. There were impressionists, kung fu artists, and shadow puppets. Very entertaining stuff.
Then we packed up and got ready to leave the next day.

Temple of Heaven... and I bought a sword.

9/14

Today we went to the Temple of Heaven. It was a rainy day but Tim, Jen and I still decided we would rent bikes and ride there. It was about a 45 minute ride from our hostel to the temple. The rain wasn’t coming down too hard so it was really fun.
The temple was very beautiful. I must give it its due even though the great wall and the forbidden city completely blew it out of the water. But it was a nice tour till about noon then we went back to the hostel for lunch and had a free day for the rest of the day.
I took the freeness to go out and do a little bit of haggling for some gifts for friends and family back home and possible a suit. After a ridiculously long taxi ride by myself I got to the silk district in Beijing. I found no suit (I must have not looked hard enough) but I got a sword! (maybe I was a little distracted). Because of the long taxi ride I didn’t have a lot of time so I got back in time to leave for dinner.
It was a slower day, but that was nice.
Until the night. We went out partying. Very fun. And during our taxi rides we found that there are no open container laws in China.

Take shelter from the wind pond cuttlefish Zi!

9/13

Onward to the Forbidden City! The day started a little rough. Four of us got into a taxi and neither Ying nor Edwin was with us. The driver took advantage of us, charged us much more than we should have, and dropped us three or four blocks away from where we really needed to be. We were lost for about an hour and a half and walked all they way around the outside of the imperial city to the south entrance (and apparently we were supposed to enter at the north entrance).
It was worth it to finally make it in though. The four of us got over our frustration for being lost and enjoyed the sites. The buildings were beautiful and huge. It was a bummer though cause a few of the bigger ones were under construction (tidying up for the Olympics next year) and they were covered with stories and stories of bamboo for the workers to use.
We luckily ran into the rest of the group after about an hour but then everyone split up to do their own thing (some of us made plans to meet up at Tiananmen Square in a few hours). I went to the man made mountain just to the north of the Forbidden city so that I could check out the view and the incredibly organized layout. Also while I was up there I took the opportunity to dress up in an emperor’s clothing and get my picture on a thrown. It was pretty funny.
A few of us walked around Tienament square and around the surrounding area which is very under construction for the Olympics in 08.
We went out to eat and the menu had the funniest translation to English that we had seen yet. Menu items included, “Fragrant and hot pig hand. The fire explodes kidney. Take shelter from the wind pond cuttlefish Zi.” Just to name a few.

Great Wall trek and the hostle

9/12
What an amazing day! The trek on the Great Wall was absolutely incredible (the pics do not do justice)! It was so surreal (like I have said), the wall just goes on and on as far as the eye can see in both directions. I started my third project by taking a bunch of pictures of sunrise to the afternoon. I plan on making a time-lapse video out of it.
We woke up at around 5:30am but I’ve never been so awake with so little sleep. Our groups energy was awesome. It was so inspiring that Ying’s husband David (whose a little bit more heavyset) decided he would join the group on the 5 mile (or 7.5km to be exact) hike on some sketchy parts of the Great Wall.
The hike flew by so quickly even though it took us about 3 – 3.5 hours. I’ll tell much more about the wall if you ever ask me.
I was in the first of a few groups to reach the final tower of our hike (we went from tower 4 where we slept to tower 30). We waited and haggled a bit with the merchants waiting for tourists. It wasn’t too long for everyone to meet up and we started to head for lunch (we were STARVED!). We heard there was a cable car to take us down but we all didn’t want to pay for it. Then as I walked by it I realized it was a zip line. Instantly I was in and most of the group followed. It was only 35 yuan (a little over $4) and it was so much fun. It zipped us from next to the Great Wall down over a river to the base where we took a boat from there to get to where we would eat lunch.
We ate our fill as usual then headed out (and slept on the ride home, it felt like it should have been night). Two hours later we were back in Beijing and we headed over to our hostel. We all expected it to be shady but it turned out to be the living arrangement favorite. It was like a small community area. Our group took up most of the rooms but there were ironically a guy who was doing graduate school at U of Washington. There were also two girls traveling together, one had gone to George Fox in Oregon the other somewhere in Portland. Small world! And Andy (Washington guy) said that a few days before our arrival some Duck graduates had stayed there as well. Must be a popular place for people of the Northwest even though Ying had just randomly run into the site for it on the net.
There were also a mother cat, two kittens and a turtle for pets crawling around the area and letting themselves into our rooms which was really cool.

Beijing and the Great Wall

9/11

We woke up early yet again to head to Beijing. We caught our train at 7:00 and we rode first class!
When we arrived in Beijing we went to China central Academy of Fine Arts (one of the top revered Art universities in the world). It was awesome. A top notch campus full of everything a digital artist (amount all other artists) could every want. It really inspired me to apply for my masters even though they only accept less than 2% of their applicants (but they said that they really liked to accept more foreigners especially English speaking). We’ll see if anything every comes of that, but I was very inspired being at the campus.
After the lunch and tour of the campus it was off for sleeping on the great wall. The drove through some of the countryside for two hours until we arrived. It was surreal being there. We made it for sunset but there was too many clouds and smog to see the sun. We had an awesome home cooked meal from the people who host the overnights on the wall. Afterwards we hiked a little ways we arrived at the tower. We received a sleeping bag, pillow, and a bit of padding for the stone floor. There were odd bugs crawling around which was a little creepy but it was still amazing. We slept outside underneath the stars (but we could only see a few through the smog).

"Little Tiger"

9/10

Today is set up and show day. We met with the president of the Shandong University of Art and Design early in the morning. Then it was on to setting up the show. It went fairly smoothly. We were surprised to find that all of our projects were printed out already on foam core. Yao and my projects were simple enough although there was some confusion (big surprise) and we didn’t get a projector to put up our animation on so we just used my laptop.
I wasn’t particularly proud of all our projects but when the show started and the room was filled with people admiring our work, I had to have a little pride for what I had accomplished. It was pretty cool. And I made a speech on behalf of our UO students, which was pretty cool. I spoke a few sentences and then Edwin would translate (and the crowd thought it was pretty entertaining).
When the show was about finished we did another took another long sheet of paper for everyone to doodle on. A few students, including myself, took advantage of the sumi ink available and soaked our hands in it and painted like that. All in all it was very fun.
After we said our sad goodbyes to the students we headed back to the dooms to shower and get ready for dinner with the professors and president.
The dinner was very interesting to say the least. The restaurant was very beautiful and the food was very “richly” prepared (small amounts of different types of food). Many people including myself were served some small bottles of alcohol to drink. The bottles were full with about four shots worth of their 112 proof “bi-joe” (liquor). There were many toasts and we only drank about a 1/4 shot at a time. Before long the alcohol took effect and then came the randomness. First one of our waitress preformed some Chinese opera karaoke which was quite hard on our ears. Then the president did some Chinese opera, then Ying sang a song (not opera though), then Drew (brave) and then Jackie did another opera song (the only one my ears could really take). Then the lights dimmed and we were expected to start dancing to “rock and roll” (techno/hip-hop). When practically no one got up to dance they turned the lights back on and the president insisted we were too tired or not drunk enough, so more drinking commenced. Then I got a new nickname, “Little Tiger”. The president proposed a toast to people who were born in the year of the tiger (Myself, the president, and Ying’s husband David). Some where in the mix I commented that the president there was less in my little bottle than in his (oops). The president laughed and came over to me, got me another bottle, and poured me a full shots worth (which was insane). We toasted and someone translated later that he called me a Little Tiger.
Later that night many of us went for another round of massages.

9/8

My partner did not arrive today until about noon which was very frustrating but he had something that needed to be done elsewhere. In the mean time I finished up our team project and my own personal projects.
When Yao arrived we turned our still image into an animation and put some music to it (this is a very condensed version of all that happened, the project finalization took us most of the afternoon). It’s not bad, but it’s not too good. The real hard work for this project was communicating, not actually coming out with a complex project. The projects are all done now. We went into the gallery on their campus where we will be presenting our work on the 10th. We’re both printing out our personal project as large as possible. It will be cool to have a couple pieces of my own that are taller than I am.
The project had its ups and downs and I’m glad it’s complete.
Oh and we also went out late to get a full hour of back/foot massage for about 6 bucks. It was awesome.

9/7

Today I reached a small boiling point in trying to communicate with my art partner Yao. He was very nice but it seemed to me that he kept changing his mind about what he thought we should do. I tried to piece together the poor articles he had translated on the computer and we started working. At first I was excited because I though we were going to create a 3D image or animation but apparently he only wanted to show me how to do a thing or two on Maya (3D imaging program). I could understand that he wanted to do paintings either physically or on the computer about our impressions of china. I really am not much of a painter and I had no idea of what to create. We worked a little on our own separate pieces to see if we could put them together. I created an image in Photoshop out of some of my pictures and he made a more cartoony piece on Photoshop.
We later came together and began making a mediocre piece on Photoshop. He made the back drop, I made a character (a traditional Chinese dragon). We still have more work to do.
Later the American students went around to an gallery and then to a park. One student from the school went with us. He was very interested in us and particularly me because I guess the other students told him that I was a fun and interesting guy. He spoke with me about his wishes to study in the United States and I told him about UO and gave him encouragement to get into a US University in the future.

9/6

Today we got our partners and a student named Yao asked me to be his (pictured). He speaks less English than anyone I’ve dealt with yet. I was patient and so was he. We went around and looked around their campus and dorms. Everyone started their work but got tired of working with the poor computer translator so we decided to go for a walk and then play some ping pong and pool in their rec center.
After the meeting we went to a very unappetizing Chinese country buffet where the waiters were in these ridiculous cowboy outfits (pictured). It was funny, up until I tried to take a bite out of my piece of chicken. I noticed it was just strait skin then bone. Then I noticed it had a frill, eyes, and half a beak. I stuck a chicken head in my mouth on accident! I wasn’t up for much more dinner after that.

9/5: Hanging out, getting to know Jinan

9/5

Today we had a couple of options. Either hang out around campus with some of the Chinese students and find something constructive to do, or drive another few hours on the bus with Mr. Blow my horn at everything on the road to get to a place that creates elaborate kites and stone prints. Needless to say, most students staid.
Hanging out with the Chinese students was a lot of fun. Some of them spoke enough English that we could get by communicating. First we hiked up the mountain that was directly behind our dorms. I can’t remember it’s significance but on the top was an awesome view. Also on the mountain was a gigantic Buddha statue. We all took a countless number of pictures. The students were very happy and excited that we were there, it felt really cool. There’s a guy named Li who is a lot of fun and he taught me some Chinese as we walked.
After we got down the mountain we had lunch at the university cafeteria. The students asked us what we wanted to eat and we weren’t sure so I told them to all order their favorites. The meal was very good! Everything tasted awesome.
Afterwards we all walked around town to go and get art supplies and drop by a internet café. There I showed all the students a bunch of pictures of my friends, family and home, then some of them did the same. On the way home we walked through their “Shandong Normal University”. I thought the word normal was kind of odd. It was the university where students study different subjects, primarily education.
For dinner, among many things, we had my new favorite meat, octopus!

9/4

Today up early again but I felt more rested than the night before and I felt find even after all the beer the night before. We headed to Qufu which is the birth place of Confusious who was a great Chinese philosophical pioneer. There was a lot to see and we had a lot of things to do so were went through the area quite quickly but I still got a lot of pictures. Afterwards we had lunch and a few of the Chinese students joined us, which was really fun to try and communicate. Afterwards we headed to Confusious’ grave site.
Then we hopped back in the bus and on for my driving to Mt. Tai. Oh and by the way, for some reason our driver has been on the horn all over the place. I’m not kidding. And the bus we are driving, the horn sounds like it’s blasting on the inside. It drove everyone crazy but we couldn’t ask him to stop because it would be rude. He honked for what appeared to us to be no reason at all. He was letting cars in front of us know he was coming. It was ridiculous.
Mt. Tai was an absolutely gorgeous place! We drove up to the cable car that would take us all the way to the top of the mountain. Up on the top, for the first time it was actually fairly cold. Once again we were rushed for time so we could only spend about 20 minutes looking around, which was really too bad cause there was a lot to see and it was much more interesting than anything that had to do with Confusious. I decided with my small amount of time that I would run, up many flights of stairs, to get to the very peak of the mountain. It wasn’t cold up there after that.
Then we drove home. Way too much driving for today (especially with the horn blowing in my ears so frequently).

Meeting with the Chinese students

9/3

Today we woke up bright and early at 6:30 (which we will for the rest of this week). No one was really hungry for breakfast this morning.
We hopped on the bus for our 40 minute ride to Shandong University of Art and Design’s new campus (we are staying on the older part because it is loser to downtown Jinan). We arrived to finally meet the students we will be working with over the next week. They all were very excited and very friendly and polite. A few spoke a decent English and most spoke enough to communicate a little bit. I felt bad that we didn’t know a little more Chinese but I think they were excited to practice English (they start learning it in elementary school).
I worked on communicating with a few different students though small words and drawing on a piece of paper. I showed them some stuff on my computer and they seemed to like it. We were shown a presentation of what some of their grad students had created and it was all really awesome. I was quite intimidated.
Our first project was just drawing on a long piece of butcher paper a bunch of sketches of our impression of China so far. Then their students would add to our drawings and make some more of their own. All in all it was a lot of fun and very interesting in trying to communicate.
The three hours we all spent together went by very quickly and then we separated to go have lunch. We ate in some separate rooms next to their large cafeteria that smelled really good. For lunch we had a couple more interesting items include fish with their heads and tails still on and octopus (which were both really good).
We came back and toured their campus museum’s collection of very old Shandong pieces. Afterwards we finally had our first break since off the train and instead of taking a nap like I should have, Drew, Tim, Edwin and I walked around downtown. Drew wanted to find some trendy shirts but it was difficult to find men’s clothing anywhere. There were an abundance of women’s clothing shops, but very few men’s.
For dinner we went out to a buffet. I was expecting it to be fairly sketchy, like most buffets in the states, but it was really nice. None of us were very hungry (as usual) but still we ate. Near the end of the meal we were poured glasses of beer and our host (a man named Jackie that is the head of the foreign exchange program at Shandong University of Art and Design) would toast and say “gam pei!” which means “bottoms up”. Immedeately after we had finished they were refilled and another person we were dining with shouted “Gam pei!” and we drank again. This continued for some time and most of us couldn’t drink any more because our stomachs were already full of food and then filled to the top with beer. The Chinese like their guests to be full of food and then full of beer, they say, “it makes people happy”, they were right. It was a blast. We got back to the dorms at about 9:30 and crashed hard!

9/2

We woke up around 6:30 and got ready. The train ride got to Jinan at a little after 7:00. The city is a lot cooler (temperature wise ) and a lot smaller (even though it is around 3 million in population). We went on a short city tour and then to our dorms.
The dorms really aren’t too bad. At least not as bad as I expected them to be. Their better than the dorm I had in Bean but a little worse than a typical hotel bedroom. And I only have to share the room with one other person, Drew.
For lunch we were served a fiasco of food of all sorts. There was so much! We must have had almost three plates of food per person. When the meal had ended there was close to a half dozen plates of food that hadn’t barely been touched if touched at all.
We were all really exhausted from the semi restless train ride but still we were sent out to go see the market. I really didn’t feel like it at the time but I’m glad we went. The market was much cooler than the markets we had been to previously in Shanghai. There was a lot bigger variety of different things (including soccer balls and swords and I took some interesting in). The merchants were also a lot more polite and not in your face trying to sell stuff. I did well in bartering for a nice Adidas soccer ball, the man wanted 180 Yuan and I got it for 105 ($14).
Walked around for a while longer and then we caught cabs back to our rooms.
Not long after we got back we headed for dinner. We were unaware of what was in store for us. We entered the Shark King Hotel which is by far the nicest hotel I’ve ever set foot in. Huge halls with marble everything. Our room was a huge luxurious banquet hall with the largest “lazy Susan” (a round platter for food to be set upon that can be rotated around the table for everyone to get to all the food items). We all sat around a gigantic circular table. Some of the Shandong University of Art and Design professors were there and some other higher ups to welcome us to their city. It was really something.

9/1

Another free day. Woke up about 8:00, went and got breakfast (I haven’t eaten so much breakfast since high school). Everyone just relaxed and did their own thing. Most walked around new parts of Shanghai (there’s so much to be seen it’s ridiculous). I came back after Edwin, Drew and I had lunch and worked on my documentary. It’s going well but it’s very time consuming. Edwin helped me translate everything, now I have to edit and add subtitles and such.
We leave tonight at 10:10 on a 12 hour train ride to Shandong University of Art and Design in Jinan, Shandong, China. We went out to a very nice vegetarian restaurant (very rare in China). Lots of the dishes were good, some nasty (at least to me). They had every kind of fake meat you can think up. Most of our projects were presented after dinner. I got a little though mine but still have a couple more hours to complete.
We were running a little late when our vans arrived to take us to the station. Our drivers tried to haggle with us for a higher price cause they knew were in a hurry. Ying staid strong and fixed it up. Our driver still persisted though, he was a real smart ass, weirdo. He made smart remarks to Edwin a whole bunch, and probably to us but we didn’t understand. He kept feeling Drew up in the passenger seat although we believe he was comparing Drew’s slight plumpness to his almost bare bones.
We made it to the train and got to our “suites”. We were in rooms of four and it was pretty much just bunk beds, very close together. It was fine, especially compared to the tickets priced lower than ours. They were all crammed into beds in the other cars.
For some reason being on the train gave us a second wind and some of the group got really hyper which was fun. The train ride was fun and fairly quick. We fell asleep (well, those that could get comfortable enough) some time around midnight.

Today is a free day. I got up at 9:50, ran down for breakfast cause it closed at 10. The group got together to go visit an art supply area where we went shopping for the stuff we needed.
I didn’t really need anything but I got a poster tube case because it was under $5 here when I’ve seen that they are easily $30-40 in the US. We waited outside a store for some of the group and I decided on what my project was going to be on because of what happened: A very poor, possibly homeless man with his young boy in a ratty stroller came up to us begging and I gave in. You think a homeless man with a puppy is saddening, how about a 4-5 year old little boy who just looks miserable. I really almost teared up, it was such a blow. I gave him some money and decided I would do a video documentary on the homeless here in Shanghai. Edwin agreed and is excited to go out onto the streets to interview the people around and the homeless. I will come up wish some questions right after I post this blog.
Edwin and I went out and interviewed some people about the homeless. It went really well and we interviewed all types of people. We were very respectful and worded the questions in a way that told the people we didn’t mean any harm or insult. Some commotion was brewed up when we interviewed a homeless lady. People started to crowd around us. I got it all on video and it will be very good. Edwin and I were uncomfortable with the attention we were getting so we decided to head home.
I worked with the video all afternoon and now it’s really close to finished.
We all went out to eat at a market place very close to our hotel. They had all sorts of different kinds of animals and fish to eat right outside. Drew and I decided we wanted one of the king snakes and everyone agreed. The snake was well near five feet long (alive). We were unaware though of how much it cost, 450 Yuan ($60!). They gave us the snake skins to eat for "free" (pictured). Ying and Edwin argued with the manager about the price for a while but eventually we gave in (it was only $11 a person for the whole meal).
We were gonna go out on the town again but people were really into their projects so we went to bed early (around 11:00).