Villagers, Students, and Europeans

Yesterday we got out of the city. I didn’t even think it was possible. We had to drive for an hour before I really felt like we were in open space, but it was definitely the outskirts. And it was amazing. If there’s one thing this trip has already taught me about myself, it’s that I am not a city person. I’ve had suspicions before, but never having spent more than a few days in the heart of any city larger than Schenectady, I didn’t really know until now. Dirty air, dirty streets, traffic, noise, and crowds do not agree with me. But worst of all, the city makes me claustrophobic. Yeah, I think it’s weird, too. But it does. Being out from under the shadow of the high-rises for eight hours has really rejuvenated me. Or maybe it’s just because I’m no longer feeling any of the symptoms that have come and gone over the course of the past week and a half.

The reason we took the long drive was to observe village life in a typical Chinese village. We drove out to a fairly busy town; busy enough that we began to wonder why we had left Shanghai, as the streets and people looked just like the neighborhoods we walked through on Wednesday. After pulling into a large parking lot with many tour buses, we paid admission to the village and went to have a look at real Chinese villagers doing real Chinese village things.






So it wasn’t exactly a real village. But it sort of was. It was real in the sense that there were real people living there, living their own lives in their own homes. But then again, most real villages don’t advertise and charge admission to tourists to come and observe. The houses and shops were all of traditional Qing dynasty architecture, with clean, pleasant-smelling streets in between. The pharmacy and post office were both in full operation for the villagers, with informational displays set up for the tourists. It was all very peaceful and charming; a very impressive piece of propaganda.

Nearby the village is a place called University City, our next stop. Due to the economic boom in China, more and more students are getting higher education, so like everything else here, the universities are expanding at an alarming rate. The schools in the center of the city, however, don’t have any room to expand, so the government created University City on the farmland outside the city. The universities were given the land for free to build satellite campuses on, and they just built this place out of nothing. The buildings are all big and impressive, like a brand new Princeton or Harvard. But being so new, the place hasn’t really grown into itself yet, like a brand new housing development that has no large trees or signs of inhabitants. We walked around two of the campuses, one of which had architecture to match each department. The English department building had English architecture, the French department had French architecture, and so on.

When classes got out, the campus came alive with students and the military training began. After the Tiananmen Square incident it was decided that students needed to be reminded how to follow their government’s orders better, so they were required to do a year military service with school. It has since been reduced to a mere two weeks military training for new freshmen. As we walked around campus, “YI! ER! SAN! SI!” echoed from every direction as the students, male and female alike, learned to march in step.

In honor of Nora’s 21st birthday, we went out last night. A Swiss student we met told us about Bar Rouge, a bar in the European influence area of downtown that we visited last week for the boat tour. At the entrance to the bar, a European man was collecting the 50 kuai cover charge. He spoke in a sort of avante garde French accent:
“One?”
“Yeah”
(He looks me up and down… I’m wearing an untucked button-down shirt from the gap, my good pair of jeans, and Birkenstocks.)
“Ok, next time no [something something] shoes.”
…so that’s the kind of place Bar Rouge was. I walked up the stairs and through the door, and one single word threw itself into my head: Eurotrash.

Bar Rouge was half inside and half out, with the same view of downtown Shanghai that we had from the boat, plus seven stories of elevation. The drinks were good, but expensive. Most of the conversation was in English or any other European language, almost anything but Chinese. Nora and I had a conversation with a British man in a French bar in a Chinese city. Insane.