| | 1/27/05
Korean Travel Tips
· Strengthen your fingers. The steel chopsticks are so thin and
heavy that, on many occasions, I’ve had to resort to a spoon.
- To avoid numb taste buds, learn to pronounce the following sentence:
Ahn my eep jang ay heh jew say oh (Please don’t make it spicy).
- Wear socks without holes. At all homes and many restaurants, you
must take off your shoes and sit on the floor, which is usually heated.
- Bow at all times for almost all reasons: hello, goodbye, thank you.
2/14/05
Top 5 Questions to Ask a Foreigner During
Chinese New Year
- How old are you?
- Are you married?
- How much do you weigh?
- How much money do you make?
- What do you think of President Bush?
Yes, in that order.
12/28/05
Bike Mafan
No stay in China would be complete without bike mafan, or bike trouble. Though my silver bike with the handy basket and friendly bell gave me my first view of the city square, allowed me to stock up at the weekly farmer’s market, and endured bumpy paths in the neighboring corn fields, it also led to more headaches than I care to completely recount. Here are only the high- uh, lowlights:
Dominoes
There are about a million bikes on campus. In order to find room for their bikes, which are usually parked so tightly that you can barely see the sidewalk beneath, people usually have to make room, squeezing their bikes between others, practically stacking them. This leads to two problems. First, short of flying a flag above my handles, it’s nearly impossible for me to find my bike. Second, my bike is usually buried so deep in the pile that I have to dig it out. On one such excavation attempt, I accidentally tipped over the bike next to mine, which tipped over the one next to it, which tipped over the next bike . . . With dread, I knew that every bike in that row would go toppling down like a life-sized domino game. Fortunately, my bike was parked fairly close to the end so I only had to reset about five bikes. Whew!
Hide and Seek
In order to later easily find my bike among the hundreds of others at the library parking lot, I parked it near the farthest building window. When I was ready to leave, I headed to the farthest window but could not find my bike. For me, this was not an uncommon occurrence. Since my light-colored bike was so easy to overlook, especially under the other bikes that had since parked, I often had to check two or three times for my bike. After checking the area very carefully, I thought that perhaps I had remembered the wrong window so I checked the area around the other windows several times as well. Finally, after about 10 minutes of very careful searching, I found my bike in a different area. Apparently, when necessary, lot attendants reorganize the bikes—sometimes even moving bikes from one end of the lot to the other.
Gone Forever
At the local market, I wrapped my bike lock around the frame and front tire of my bike and set about shopping for the party that I had planned later that night. Later, with about ten pounds of groceries in hand, I found that my bike was nowhere to be seen. I described my bike to the nearest vendor and asked if he had seen it.
“Did you lock it?” he asked.
“Of course,” I said.
“No, did you lock it?” he repeated.
“Yes!” I replied, a little impatiently.
“Show me how.”
Feeling like he was treating me condescendingly for being a foreigner, I briskly made the motions of wrapping a lock around the frame and tires.
“No,” he said, “that’s not locking it.” Grabbing ahold of a water pipe and circling it with his other arm, he said, “You have to lock it.”
I later found out that bike theft is rampant in my city. Some people have had up to three bikes stolen in the last year—even from right outside their businesses in broad daylight. It is so bad that one person even suggested that if I cannot park in a paid lot with an attendant, I should not even stop.
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