Not in Kansas anymore...
Trip Start
Aug 09, 2006
1
7
35
Trip End
May 2007
Yantai,
China
Friday, September 1, 2006
Just got to my home for the next 8 months: Yantai, China, and it's a bit of a shock. I got to the campus late at night, chauffeured by Jack, the Chinese director of our program. To begin with, Jack drove about 20MPH under the speed limit on the highway, and I felt myself cringing towards the inside of the car as semis screamed by us, honking angrily as we were buffeted by the wind that followed them. When driving, Jack erratically flips his turn signal on and off, whether or not he has any intention of turning, and he drives the same speed going through small alleys and on campus as he drove on the highway, pushing his way through students and fruit vendors without seeming to notice the rickshaws and small children diving towards the curb in an effort to avoid him.
Even at night, in Yantai your clothes cling to you, weighed down by air so thick you feel like you're swimming through it. During the day, the city is covered in a haze of humidity that makes the dilapidated fishing boats on the ocean almost disappear.
Yantai University and the city can be most easily compared to a Monet. From a distance, it is a beautiful seaside city with some of the oldest embassies and wineries in China, perched on the edge of beautiful green mountains that gracefully come to meet the Pacific ocean. The city has grown with the rest of China, rising from its humble beginnings in small courtyard villages to towering high rise apartments. The ocean is lined with a lovely stone walkway overlooking the beach that is scattered with great pieces of modern art depicting waves and celestial objects that tower over the heads of the hundreds of bathers and lovers that flock to its shores day and night.
Beach
Yantai University is a rapidly growing educational institution that bravely clings to its position by the sea as it expands outward. It has buildings old and new, hundreds of trees, a reflecting pool, and is crowned by a lofty bell tower. What a lovely picture to paint for your brochure!I could leave it like this, but I feel like you should all know what this city looks like when you look a little closer. Campus buildings seem ageless; they should be new looking structures, but they are covered in a film of soot that makes them drab and disgusting. The market smells of the pit toilets that I refused to go near when camping as a child. The beach is covered in bits of paper, broken glass, jellyfish, the occasional condom, and lone shoes whose owners may have never come back from their swim. Heeled "ladies of the night" stand outside clubs even during the day, one of them throwing a food wrapper on the ground with such a vengeance that I wondered if she and all of the other littering Chinese people neglect to use trashcans out of contempt for some higher authority...
The "hotel-like" dorm leaves something to be desired... The first thing I did when I got into my room was snap off the hot water handle in my shower. With that, I went promptly to bed, deciding to skip the much longed for shower. My experience was better than my neighbor's, who was greeted by a bat in the dark hallway on his first night in the dorms. The rock-hard beds, covered in sheets and a blanket that should be white, will take some getting used to. I just bought a new duvet cover in town...
Don't get me wrong - I'm really starting to love it here, and the negative aspects have become humorous anecdotes that I look forward to remembering in bits and pieces when I come home. For starters, Yantai has thousands of nuances and quirks that can't be visible in a city like Beijing on a sheltered program like the one I was on before. The five million lines I was sporadically pushed in and out of to register for classes, the entrance exam that the director was too impatient to let us take, the boy break dancing on the beach, the forty year old chubby balding man in rollerblades trying to dance with the boys on the beach.... I wonder if we seem as funny to foreigners when they come to the US...
Now I'm off to look for some dinner; the plan is squid on a stick and beers in the night market with some of the other students. Hope you're all enjoying my travel log - more to come!
