Still alive

No, the wolves didn't get to me in the end. But with a cosmology workshop going on and the crazy Italian being in town, I didn't have much time to write. The snow has thawed, the dogs finally came back and we're on our way again...

Last weekend brought a trip to Suzhou - the, or I should say one of the, Venice of the east. Well, I'd say it's more like the Mestre of the east (the industrialized suburb of Venice). There are some canals and lots of gardens (that's what it's famous for), but it is not exactly cozy. Some pictures of the "Humble Adminstrator's garden"...

suzhou

not so humble after all. Fortunately, my friend had insisted that we go to a small village and although I think he expected something more remote, where people still stare at the foreign "white devils" and not a cute renovated river town where you have to pay 80 yuan just to get into the old city, it was worth it (well, it was worth the 2 hour train and one-hour bus ride in any case). Tongli is much more like Venice. Especially in the sense that if you stray away from the main tourist road you find yourself in a residential area without any visitors and people look at you as if to say "what do you want here?" Oh, and there are also gondolas. And yes, the gondoliere (whatever that is in Chinese) also sings. Also terribly wrong. Instead of palazzi you can visit courthouse gardens and a "sex culture museum." That was quite interesting, actually. According to the exhibition there, homosexuality was never prosecuted in (ancient) China. I wonder if that's really true. Some of the paintings at least made it clear that it was not an absolute taboo.

Another cultural experience included a trip to the "Nanjing Massacre Memorial" Hall. It was not quite as depressing and gruesome as I had expected after several warnings. The architecture is quite oppressive, dark and looming, but in a modern, stylish way. The inside is m mostly a history museum, not just about the massacre itself, but also about the history of Sino-Japanese relations. The International Safety Zone is described as rather "unsafe" (Japanese would still invade the zone under the pretense of looking for hiding soldiers and weapons). But the fact that the Chinese Republican army basically abandoned the civilian population of Nanjing is only mentioned between the lines. Japanese atrocities are of course described in detail and condemned. It's certainly a political statement, but I think you can't blame the Chinese. Interestingly, the exhibition is in Chinese, English and Japanese; I guess they are making a point that no Japanese should be able to claim to not know about it.

I've also managed to get closer to my students. They seem to have accepted me as one of their own, in fact so much that one of them asked me a question in class... in rattling Chinese! I just stared at him horrified and then burst out laughing. I even had three of them over for dinner - my Italian friend just had to cook pasta for someone :) without cheese, of course. And then imagine what happened - one of them doesn't eat duck! Can you imagine?! I was just speechless. Incidentally that was the same guy who tried to talk to me in Chinese.

Surprises come in weird disguises. Today I met with an elderly physicist from the purple mountain observatory, who wanted to ask me questions about string theory! I wasn't all that thrilled at first, but we ended up having a rather nice discussion for 2 hours and then went for dinner together. Finally someone who wants to go to real restaurants! And it turns out, this guy, who is probably around 65, has studied Kung Fu for several years! I had already given up on ever meeting anyone who knows anything about traditional Kung Fu. Dinner turned into a discussion about proper iron palm technique (if you do it wrong, you ruin your eyes! seriously) and Qi as an effective theory :) Maybe I should mention that this guy grew up in Taiwan, I guess it's more likely to find traditional Kung Fu there. I was so happy that I even ignored the mediocre dinner for 100yuan. The roast pigeon was good though.

I have to say, I feel a bit let down by the food here. Somehow I expected less mediocrity. But then, why should China be different from any other place? There are always people who appreciate good food and those who don't. And I can't blame my students for not having the money to go to good restaurants. And if a place is really cheap, it means the ingredients aren't the freshest and they use inferior fat and spices, also here. It's just that all the Chinese I met in North America seem obsessed with food! In about the same degree I am. So I thought it must be infinitely better here than in any average Chinatown in the west. But I have no luck finding the really good places. Sometimes there is the occasional lucky find like the spicy eel in Suzhou or the Sichuan style smoked tofu in Tongli, but most of the time when I go out for dinner, the food is average (if I go with Chinese) or bad (if I go with the other foreigners). The sad truth is, I have been to a number of restaurants that were worth than the campus cafeteria!