Senses

[Note: am posting this hastily as it's the first time in days that I've been able to access the blog from over here. And it's slow... Will update with pictures later if I can. Note that any references to "today" in the below are actually about 4 days ago, if it matters to you. Update: pictures! Thank you IE6 (yeah, I know...).]

China is an all-out assault on one’s senses. Everything is at a level of intensity rarely encountered in the daily life of a mild mannered work-from-home-in-Northern-California fellow, even one who occasionally races powerboats, yells at the TV during Raider games, and loves Alice in Chains.

The most obvious day-to-day example is the way that traffic patterns work. There are no discernable patterns. It’s every person for his or herself. I’ll give an example. When the light turns green, the oncoming traffic that wants to turn left just turns left. If you are going straight, you honk at them and jam your way in between two of the left-turning cars. If you are walking across the street you just walk part way so you don’t get hit by the first left-turning car, and then you hurry the rest of the way across in parallel with one of the cars going straight that found a gap. And if a bus is involved, forget about it. The most useful thing I’ve observed thus far is that buses don’t stop. If a bus is coming, just get the hell out of the way.

A game of Frogger begins

Such an environment is the perfect breeding ground for the horn. It is past 11 pm here and in the time it took me to write “horn,” I heard two horns honk. Every morning I wake up a bit after 7 to excessive use of the horn by local drivers. (This morning I actually woke up at 6:30 to fireworks, multiple explosions, or gunshots, but in any case I always fall back to sleep). Our Indian colleagues are entirely unimpressed by such local traffic habits. My colleague Shruti explained it nicely when she said that in Western cultures, horns are a sign of aggression. In the East they are just helpful warnings that you are about to be crushed under a large steel object that is likely to drag you several blocks until your disintegrating carcass is knocked loose, where feral animals will eventually pick clean your unrecognizable skeleton.

One thing I rarely pick clean around here is my plate, mainly because you can buy a plate of food that would feed four for about $3, but also because everything is so flavorful and covered in spices that you just can’t go on. Don’t get me wrong, the food is fantastic. Even the “Trumpet She’ll Flesh” that Tom and I ate the other night (at that link you’ll see me both presenting and “getting in the zone” for presenting) was edible, and as far as we can tell that’s some sort of snail that lives in the sea (i.e., a mollusk, but “snail that lives in the sea” is much more fun to say). But it is intense. In my ongoing effort to eat Dan Dan Noodles as often as possible (Admittedly, I’ve had them only three times. Twice they were quite good. Once I’m about to explain.), we visited a nearby Sichuan restaurant with the team. Sichuan is sort of the Texas of China. Ok, I totally made that up but food from the Sichuan province is friggen spicy, as I learned with my first bite of noodles. It was really a bowl of chili oil with noodles lurking somewhere under the surface. Before I finished chewing the first bite I ordered two of the coldest item they had in the restaurant. Thankfully this was beer.

As the fourth glass of beer (for the record, they use really small glasses around here) evaporated on my scalding tongue, the rest of the team started taking pictures of me while laughing heartily. My face was redder than my red shirt, which was more red than usual due to the fact that it was soaked through with sweat. When I started to lose my hearing a little bit I set down my chopsticks. “I can’t go any further. Mukul?”

Mukul took a bite and said, “The noodles are not spicy. The lamb is spicy.” These Indians are really difficult to impress. I took a bite of the lamb that was about the size of the point of a ball point pen and I didn’t think it was that spicy. Actually, it tasted like taco seasoning.

On most days you can quite literally taste the Shijiazhuang air. It has a tannic, almost gritty taste like the aftertaste of too strong tea. There is dust everywhere, like the Central Valley of California if you picked it up, turned it upside down, shook it for about two weeks, and then placed 20 massive coal-fired power plants onto Highway 99. To keep down the dust, Shijiazhuang employs a highly entertaining method that I’m sure would fund itself if they would charge a few RMB for foreigners to have access to the schedule. A water tanker truck drives down the street at full speed, water spraying in every direction from underneath. Cars swerve out of the way. Pedestrians run for cover. Scooters take off in a desperate attempt to stay ahead of the spray. Meanwhile, the driver, as is the local custom, just honks the horn incessantly and never breaks his pace. I’d like to think he laughs maniacally but he probably is just bored. The bicyclists, however, are the ones who are worth the price of admission. To see a bicyclist’s face when recognizing the water tanker’s horn is to see fear in its purest form. It’s a moment of utter panic, followed by a frantic search for an escape route, seldom found easily on the streets of Shijiazhuang. Watching one man swerve hopelessly until careening into an alley and half falling from his bike, I began to wonder just how many bicyclists these guys kill every night.

You might taste the dust, but it is not usually what you smell. That honor is fought for by thousands of aggressively competing smells best appreciated when walking through a street market at lunchtime. Onions, bread, chili, exhaust fumes, some crazy spices, BO, they hit you in waves. It’s similar to when you are driving a boat across a lake and you suddenly hit a real cool spot, only here you just keep hitting a new smell. With each breath you’re not sure whether your reaction will be, “Ooh, where are they cooking that?” or “Did I just fall head first into a porta potty?” or something in between.

Deep breaths

Our guy cooks a mean sandwich

Despite all of the adventures on the street, I actually spend a significant amount of time seated at my desk in my hotel room in front of my laptop, fighting to get onto the Internet in order to do the proper research needed to build good presentations for my client (yes, or blog…). It’s well known that accessing the sites so popular in other parts of the world can be a challenge from China. Last Friday I noticed a new sound coming from the streets outside my window. It was a chant being played over a loudspeaker that sounded like an insane aerobics instructor or a highly amped up rapper practicing one line for two hours straight. As it wormed its way into my brain the walls of my small and “less than US business standard” room seemed to move a little closer, and I imagined it to be a repeated warning from some authority not to visit Google properties. Over the hours the sound evolved from intriguing to annoying to unsettling.

Today I happened to walk by one of the source machines for this noise. It was yelling at the world to buy meat on a stick.