The Internet, Communication

Based on an except from an update email.

I think back on my experience on a WWOOF farm near Toledo:

Although that calm of the countryside was nice, the self-inflicted separation from the world caused by a lack of internet access was more than I would wish for again. Aside from not being able to write emails or to make Skype calls to friends and family, I was surprised at how much I desperately missed reading the blogs that I follow, world news, and the ability to look things up online. I often use the internet as a giant encyclopedia: if I want to know how to cook apple pie I search Google; if I want to know where the donuts were invented I look it up on Wikipedia; if I want to know how to translate, spell, or conjugate a particular word I crowdsource it to the internet to find out my answer. To learn a language, to read or download a book or an academic paper, to find song lyrics, to see what kind of communities are active in certain places, to compare products and prices, to look up exercises... I don't want to get all melodramatic, but the combination of innumerable resources on the internet really is almost everything for me. My time on the WWOOF farm taught me that I can live without internet access. But it also taught me how much I really do value having it. Even the times that I have been without internet access before, such as when I have moved to a new place, I have been able to get to an internet cafe or some location with a wireless network every couple of days. On the farm there weren't any places like that around, so I just had to go without. I am not going to go so far to say that life without internet access would not be worth living or anything so extreme as that, but it is easy and (for me) true to say that life without internet access would be very different and of much lower quality. The number of friends (either in the German sense of “very close and very important to me” friends or friends in a more casual sense as "someone I merely am acquainted with but whom I enjoy") I would be able to have would drop dramatically and my ability to learn about any subject area at all would be greatly lessened. These two things, (the ability to communicate with people I care about and the ability to learn (or to easily access information)) are the two main reasons that I consider access to the internet to be so important. Entertainment is there as well, but it is a very distant third after communication and learning/information.

Of course, if I chose to life a different lifestyle (and by that I mean, not a global nomad), this could greatly affect the first factor. There have been times during the past few years when I have felt like more or less of a nomad. During my senior year at Kalamazoo College I had a community of people who were physically located close to me, so I relied less on the internet for communication, since there were only a few geographically-distant people whom I was in touch with. When I lived in Beijing, I would regularly meet friends in person at juggling and improv events, or just for a meal, so the internet wasn't so terribly necessary to communicate with those friends, but I still used it intensely for information and for communicating with friends in the United States and in Europe. I assume that here in Albacete I will develop a group of contacts and friends here, and I am certainly going to try and go out more. While in China I became quite zhai, staying at home a couple nights a week and some weekends to read, watch movies, or have Skype chats. Although I don't feel that watching a movie or curling up with a book or studying at home is in anyway inferior to going out to a bar, I do feel that there is a cultural value that places going out to socialize with other people as a “higher” or a “better” things than doing something solitary at home, which makes me feel as though I need to justify myself each time I would prefer to not go out. I have to say, though: although I had loads of great times with good friends, at improv, and out on the town, one of my happiest memories of that year in Beijing was sitting at home alone on my couch, curled up with a blanket, crackers, peanut butter, and Cosmopolitanism.

But now I have people from two places in the world where I have lived in (Kalamazoo and Beijing) that I want to stay in touch with, not to mention all the people from those two places that are no longer there: friends have moved and now there are people from Seattle to Grenada to Quito, from Chicago to Beijing, from Minneapolis to Milwaukee to Madrid to Moscow, all of whom that I care about and that I want to have as a part of my life. Almost every continent in the world has people I know and care about.

I am still hoping to become less zhai and more Spanish during my time here, to go out for drinks and tapas, to find/create a group of local friends, and to adapt myself to the local culture here, but I do value the relationships that I have with people from far away, and I want to keep those going.

Hot springs, nutella, and more reasons to stay in Beijing

I don't have any major new or high quality reflections to share, but there are several small- and medium-sized things that I want to write about.

First, I got to see Sūn Zhǎn (孙展) for, I think, the first time since summer. She lives really close to a bunch of hot springs out on the east side of Beijing. She lives so far to the east, in fact, that she lives in Hebei Province (河北省). Her parents both work at university which is only a few kilometers on the Hebei side of the Hebei-Beijing border, and they have a very nice apartment on the campus. Since Sūn Zhǎn lives so far away I rarely see her, but over Spring Festival we decided that we should get together, so this past Sunday I got up early to meet her at the DaWangLu (大望路) Subway stop, from which there is a bus that goes right by the hot springs, and to right in front of the university her parents work at. How convenient. The bus takes about an hour, but Sūn Zhǎn and I got lucky because there was a guy driving out that way who was willing to take us for twenty yuan. From there we got an illegal cabbie (just a guy trying to use his car for some extra cash without being a part of a taxi company really; a 黑车) to go straight to the hot springs (The TongZhou Imperial Hot Springs Water Park, officially).

We paid out entrance fee plus a deposit, and went into out separate areas to change into out swimsuits. I have never had a swimsuit that fit so tightly, and it felt really weird at first, but I then saw that none of the Chinese guys was wearing the kind of loose-fitting trunks that I had always considered to be normal swimwear for men, so that made me feel more at ease. The hot springs had a large area that was more like a water park than what I would think of as a hot spring, with slides, and kiddy play area, and a large pool with artificial waves. There was another area that was more hot though, in which the water was (supposedly) kept at 40° (Celsius of course! What kind of anti-progress backwater country do you think I live in, Belize?). There were also some smaller hot pools to the side, with temperatures ranging from 36° to 38°, although some of them felt a lot hotter. These small pools were Chinese medicine pools, and they functioned just like a pot of tea: you put the leaves or medicine in a pouch and let it steep in the hot water. Different pools were good for different things, but unfortunately the medicine which is good for sex drives wasn't out today. Sūn Zhǎn and I spent some time steeping in other medicinal pools. The Chinese word for soaking in a hot spring (or in a Chinese medicinal pool, for that matter) is 泡/pào, which is roughly "to steep" or "to soak." This is, logically, the same word which is used to talk about making tea or to describe soap suds. We soaked in one that increases the body's energy and one that increases the body's resistance to cold. Since I detest the frigid temperatures in Beijing so much, I felt that the later pool would do be a lot of good. We also managed to eat ice cream, lay on a heated stone floor, and eat an expansive buffet lunch. What a place! It was quite an experience in total, and it felt really good to take a full day to relax and treat myself to something nice like that.

Shin Kong Place (新光天地) is one a pretty upper class shopping center

After we left the hot springs we went to Sūn Zhǎn's home briefly so that she could show me where she and her parents lived. Then her mom took us out for a nice Peking Duck dinner, which left me thoroughly stuffed and satisfied. They bid me farewell, and I took the a very comfortable bus ride back to DaWangLu. Before I arrived at DaWangLu I had fully intended to get on the subway and go directly home. As I neared DaWangLu, however, I remember how Sūn Zhǎn had told me that a market, 新光天地 (Shin Kong Place) near there had just started carrying Nutella. The prospect of not only tasting Nutella again, but of owning my own jar and being able to consume copious amounts proved to be too much of a temptation. After wandering around one of the highest class market place I have even seen in Beijing I finally found one of the fanciest grocery stores I have ever seen in Beijing. After I finally asked a worker where they had the peanut butter I found the lovely nutella. What an expensive treat!

Another item is my renewed curiosity about the HSK. While having dinner with Nadia over the weekend, she mentioned to me that anyone testing at a 4 or higher on the HSK could get a full scholarship for any Chinese college. That could be for a master's degree, or it could be for just language courses and special short-term study. That sounds awesome! I don't want to a masters or any more Chinese language classes right now, but I am fairly confident that it would be relatively easy for me to scare at a 4 or higher. It is nice to know that the option is available to me: if I decided someday that I want to pursue a masters in China, I can not only get it tuition-free, but I would even get a small stipend from the Chinese government each month. I am thinking about taking the HSK just to see what level I score as.

Life gets even better, though! (mejor que nunca, as some might say) Nassau is in Beijing. She arrived on Sunday, and after a week of crashing at my place and adjusting to Beijing time she has found her own apartment and begun to officially work full time at American House. Nassau also tells me that Rochelle LaMacchio, another close friend from Kalamazoo is planning on moving to Beijing sometime within the next six months. This is exciting enough in itself, but Jamie Sturm, my longtime language learning buddy, eternal almost-roommate, and good friend is going to move back to Beijing as well! Add this to the potential to work with Fede as a juggling performer and teacher and Beijing is starting to look like a really good option for my the next year. If only Beijing was in Spain!

Christmas time is coming

The past few days have been busy, stressful, frustrating, and various other emotions that are not always negative, but often are. A combination of work-related stress due to long hours and high pressure, and social frustrations. I would write in detail about a few stressful things that have happened recently, but I see that as pointless a waste of energy, so instead I will recognize those negative emotions, and then let them go. I have been enjoying the Buddhist podcasts lately.

Since coming into (something which vaguely resembles) adulthood, I have never found myself overly pre-occupied with Christmas. I recall that during December of my Junior year of college I was traveling through the south of China, and I was only vaguely aware when it was Christmas: a lack of westerners around combined with being immersed in a culture to which Christmas is still fairly foreign made me not realize until partway though the day, and at that point not care. I was in XiaMen at the point, and a stroll on the beach, kicking Jianzi with Zhang Hui or a climb up to a local temple seemed much more interesting to me. Most years, what I felt around Christmas time boredom of being away from school and friends combined with an impression of (what I saw as) a fairly artificial presentation of affection and gift giving (why not give presents at other points of the year to show your appreciation without having a social pressure to do so?). Conversely, I am finding myself strangely preoccupied with it this year.

Christmas is this weekend; It is a strange feeling, but I am suddenly (somewhat desperately) getting in touch with people to try and set up plans to spend time together with other people this weekend. I am suddenly and unexplainably very averse to spending this weekend alone. Logically, it's not horribly unusual for me to spend an evening without going out: although I often try to go out to a music show or a theater event or something, it sometimes happens that my Friday consists of getting off from work, having dinner, reading and writing, watching a movie and going to sleep. Likewise, sometimes I find no interesting events going on for a Saturday and I can't get in touch with a friend to go out dancing, so sometimes my Saturday is just going to dance class in the afternoon and chilling at home for the evening. I feel that there is a big social pressure against spending time alone like that (I recall back in college mentioning to someone that I watched a movie and I was asked "who did you watch it with," as though it wasn't even considered that I would watch it alone) I am pretty okay with spending an evening alone in my apartment. I don't want every weekend to be like that, but neither do I feel the necessity to avoid that kind of weekend completely. In fact, I sometimes yearn for it when I feel overwhelmed with other tasks. However, that doesn't change the fact that I have felt a great need to make plans with people for this weekend.

A side-effect of my chosen lifestyle as a globe trotter, a world traveller, a citizen of the world is that I am far away from family, the people that Christmas is normally spent with. I am also far away from most of the friends that I have met throughout the recent years of my life. Indeed, I hardly know anyone from my high school nowadays, and I believe that if it wasn't for Facebook most of them wouldn't even know that I still exist (and vice-versa, if I must be frank). Communication with friends from college has been minimal: I send out updates to some close friends every now and then, and maybe 15% of those get some kind of response. I try to keep in touch with those people, but lack of responses makes it seem like I am the only one that cares about keeping a relationship going, which is super demotivating. One way or another, I am most distant from those people than I perceive others my age to be. Of course, all the other foreigners in Beijing are in the same boat, so I can;t really justify my whining by that line of logic.

I haven't been a hermit in Beijing though! Between juggling club and improv I have met quite a community of fun energetic people. Some are just acquaintances that I see regularly, and some of them are friends whose company I enjoy immensely and want to grow closer to. Since I obviously am unable to spend Christmas with family, friends from high school, or friends from college, it is this group that I am looking at. Some of the people I enjoy spending time with the most (Dave, the Brit who plays in a pirate-themed rock band, and Fede, the Italian juggling master or Beijing) are out of town for the weekend. I would feel it most like a family setting if I could sit down for an evening of meal, conversation, and general merriment with one of those two and their social circle. Perhaps the fact that they are a bit older than me would make it feel more familial, more like a legitimate Christmas dinner.

That being out of the picture, I have begun searching for companions in the young fun crowd that I hang out with at music shows and other events. They are all students, though, and being students I suspect that they have on-campus connections that I lack. I think back to when I was a student here, and I certainly knew loads of people from my classes. So far it seems that those people have other plans for Christmas with other friends, and as a group I am not a part of I'm not sure how comfortable I would feel pushing myself into that. I certainly have co-workers, but none of them are very close friends. I don't think I would feel comfortable spending the holidays with co-workers, nor would I enjoy it. 

Actually, if I can't get together with any of my young and fun friends for the weekend, I think I will just spend my time reading, applying for the Spain program, eating pizza and watching movies. I have no less than seven books that I plan to read before June, and I have finished a total of one of them in the past five months. Not to mention the movies that I have had since mid-way through my Senior year of college. A dozen Spanish films, a dozen more English language movies, and a dozen more in other languages, some from India, some in Korean, and some a mish-mash of European languages.

Cast of Characters

The people in my life tend to influence me a lot. In terms of activities, their participation or lack thereof basically dictates my social life. If no body I know wants to go to the folk music show but they all want to go to the rock concert, I am probably gonna end up going to the rock concert. They also play a major role in my emotional state. After sharing a friend's victorious moment I feel excellent, and after an ambiguous conversation with a female friend I feel confused (which has happened several times recently). So, without more introduction, I will try and set down who the people in my life are at the moment:

Fede is well known in Beijing

Federico is undoubtedly one of the most prominent figures in the life of Joe at the moment. An 31 year old Italian according to his passport, Fede has lived in Beijing for the past six years or so, and is one of the proud owners of Beijing's best juggling shop, as well as the founder of the juggling club. I have been helping Fede out with the editing and the transcribing of his Body Foundation method, which is a health and fitness curriculum that he is forming with the intent of sharing it with NGOs and schools around the world. He is out of Beijing surprisingly often, and is currently back in Italy for a few weeks, after which he will spend a month or two in and near the Central African Republic. He is also putting together the Beijing Performers, and has the eventual hope of making both that and a teaching program (focused around juggling and acrobatics) self-sustaining efforts that he (and I, potentially) can make a living off of.

David is from England, and is either 9 or 11 years my senior (I always forget). I enjoy his accent, and he always makes me smile. Both his energetic humor and his more serious side make me enjoy his company. Although Dave has a PhD in some kind of computer science thing (networking systems, I think?) and he teaches CS at a local university, he shares a lot of my interests and hobbies. He goes to improv and he goes to juggling club, so I often see him twice a week at those events. He also has his own band in Beijing, the Red Pirates. A fan of snowboarding, he has recently started his own advanced improv group, in which he wants more commitment from the participants. He lives in the northwest part of Beijing with his girlfriend, Liz, also British, who works as a scientific researcher her. She has excellent dreads and is also very fun. No wonder they are together.

Ines is invited all over the world to perform

Ines Brun and her boyfriend Julien (both 30 something) work in and run Natooke with Fede, selling fixed gear bicycles and pollution masks. Ines is a world famous acrobat, and also has a PhD in physics. She worked for a German company in Beijing before she decided to start her own bicycle shop. She is very organized and focused, and very committed to her work, often staying at her shop until 9 or 10 at night

Nadia is a 22 year old girl from Hawai'i, and is a mix of Hawaiian, Chinese, and European ancestry. I first met her as juggling club, where she showed up one day to learn contact juggling. She has been coming regularly since then, and has begun to work for Fede in his shop. She has also agreed to be my new acrobatics partner, which I hope will work well. She used to do wushu at Beijing Sports University, and has traveled to fifteen different countries, settling on Sweden as her favorite. She did a lot of WWOOFing, and is currently studying some kind of finance at a university in Beijing. She also wears what I believe to be the cutest pair of white earmuffs in Beijing, which I hold as one of her defining characteristics. Nadia seems to be quite good friends with Xian Hong.

Gus was an international student night MC at his university

Gus, two years my senior, is studying for a masters degree in teaching Chinese as a foreign language at Beijing Normal University. He taught English via the Princeton in Asia program for two years in Guangzhou, and before that he majored in Chinese at a college in the United States. He has excellent Chinese (as would be expected), and he is also quite a good juggler, with a solid five ball cascade. He works for Fede every now and then, and writes a blog of his own about his language and cultural adventures here in China. Gus is a strange combination of calm and goofy, and it is very enjoyable to be able to talk juggling to an American near my age. Oh, and he also plays the Ukulele.

EDIT: Gus has informed me that he did not major in Chinese, but in Computer Science. Oh, and he went to Princeton. This is officially the first person I personally know who went to an Ivy League school. Gus, I am impressed.

Kelvin is a busy man whom I first met at improv. I would guess that he is about 30. He is Chinese and he has excellent English, usually serving as the interpreter for the improv group (which is bilingual). Kelvin is extremely energetic and really fun. He stays very busy with all of his work, and he takes a lot of freelance translation work. He occasionally calls me to ask for help with this work, and I have helped with listen to and understand a couple of British TV shows that he couldn't understand. Mostly slang, but many phrases that are made difficult to understand due to background noise in the show.

Cutler went to Perpich with me for the junior year of high school back in '04-'05. We were both in the theater department, but I switched to the dance department. I hadn't heard from him since high school, and suddenly we see that we are both in Beijing. He is studying to improv his Chinese, doing a year of preparation before starting a masters program in history at RenMin University, for which he has a full scholarship, I think due to his excellent language skills. We have gotten together for a few times to see some live music and to have some dinner. His cell phone doesn't let him send text messages, and he lives with his Chinese girlfriend. His Chinese is a good step better than mine, and he even went onstage to rap in Mandarin at the underground rap battle last weekend!

My first meeting with Lao Zhou

I first met Lao Zhou more than a year ago at the Temple of Heaven, in the winter of 2009, right around the time of Spring Festival. That was back when I was a student. When I returned to Beijing in the summer of 2010 after graduating from college I was very surprised to see him again, but apparently he found Fede and has been coming to juggling club regularly for several months now. He is a 50 something and retired Chinese man who lives a very comfortable life; he once described his daily schedule as waking up and doing some juggling before lunch, then making some food and riding his unicycle for a while before going online to look at whatever is interesting. Lao Zhou is a part of the performance group which Fede is organizing. From a conversation that Lao Zhou and I had about the whole world having a single government at juggling club a week ago, I suspect that Lao Zhou is also quite the idealist.
 
Xian Hong, age 25 (although she looks 21 or 19), was born to Chinese parents in Beijing and went to Germany with her mother when her parents separated when she was ten years old. She never leaves her room without her black hat and her blue scarf, and she rarely takes them off. Gus met her in his dorm, and brought her to juggling club. She does poi, and she has started to learn some contact juggling. She spent a year in France, and she is now spending a year in Beijing to get in touch with her roots. She goes to Beijing Normal University and she is studying Chinese and Directing. She is in China for the full year, so she won't leave until June, but she has a Polish/German boyfriend back in Germany. She speaks English quite well, but prefers to communicate in Chinese. She is really into hip-hop, so we tend to check out cool events in Beijing together. To date we have been to dance classes and an underground rap battle together, and there is a hip-hop event this weekend that we are gonna check out. I tried to teach her some breakdance, but she doesn't have the arm muscles for it. I want to learn the hip-hop dance that she knows. She and Nadia seem to get along very well.

EDIT: Gus informs me that he met Xian Hong at Natooke, only finding out after meeting her that they live the the same dormitory building.

I first met DuoYi at the beijing improv workshop, and she is really fun. She majored in Philosophy in college, and now she works with some kind of an NGO. She like improv and dance, and she tends to go to improv and dance events every week. Unfortunately, she seems to have developed a big crush on me, which makes me pretty uncomfortable, because I desire neither for her to be my girlfriend nor to sleep with her. 

Nassau shows happiness through smiles

Special mention: Nassau is not in Beijing right now. She is one year my senior, and she should be arriving in the first few days of January, though. She went to my college (Kalamazoo College) in the U.S., studied in China, and in addition to some conversational Chinese language ability she has artistic skills too. She is one of the few friends that I ever modeled for (most of my modeling as been for people I did not have a personal relationship with). She has been looking for a change in her life, and she is going to start working at the same preschool that I work at. I am excited for her to come to Beijing, and I expect that since we are already fairly good friends she will easily be included in this list of people who I spend most of my time with.

There are some more minor characters as well. Seamus, the (possible) first Irish language teacher in China who comes to my Spanish Conversation Night every week; The big German guy that goes to improv; ZhangQiang, who is in her final year of college and who I have known since 2008, the Colombians... But pretty much all of the primary players in my social life (read: outside of work life) in Beijing are listed above.