When I first got to Guangzhou every new or interesting thing that I did or saw I thought of a person back home that I'd love to share the experience with. The longer that I'm here the more this becomes unfathomably difficult and I think that I hit overload this week. I now see that these experiences are for myself and what my poor memory is able to retain over my remaining years. I will try to give a much abbreviated version of my last 3 days, but we'll see how I do.
On Wednesday morning at 7 AM I ended a week long, sleep-deprived charrette by taking a train to Shenzhen to present our designs for the site of a corporate headquarters, a project on which I was made lead designer during my first hour of work. The presentation went well, the clients liked our work and I agreed very much with their comments, so we will be going on to develop this design. Unfortunately, this morning it was clear that the pain in my throat over the last couple of days had become a full blown sinus infection.
Hours after my train returned to Guangzhou. I bought a suitcase and hopped on a plane to Qingdao. During my flight the sinus infection turned into a shivering achy fever. I waited uncomfortably at the airport for the rest of my party to arrive and then got in a car with a driver for a two hour drive to Weifang. By the time we got to our super swanky hotel I took my second to last ibuprofen and settled in for the 4.5 hours that I had available to me for sleep. I then got back in the car and drove out to the site of what it to be a tournament level golf course and housing development. We drove to a makeshift meeting space in what I think were once ramshackle apartments on what I think was once an army base. We started by running through our Powerpoint with a room full of arguing, smoking Chinese men while I tried to look presentable but felt like I wanted to die. I didn't really have any options, though. The golf course designer was arriving from California in a couple of hours, my boss was leaving for another meeting a couple of hours after that and I would be left representing the wishes of our firm and our client for the next two days.
After the presentation we rode in a herd of golf carts to a vastly different space also on our site, a luxury modern restaruant/event/meeting space just down the hill, which you can see in the background of the photo that I found online. We had lunch and I think that there were as many 22 year old, uniformed and beautiful young ladies as there were diners. They brought dish after dish, eventually piling dishes on top of other dishes onto a giant glass lazy susan. The dishes showed an emphasis on fresh vegetables and had many strong and delicious flavors. However, the aspect of the meal that was most apparent to me was the size of the array of meats that were served. I have no idea what I ate, though I do know that at one point I ate donkey. There was a pile of steamed somethings that were somewhere between a large shrimp and the thing that crawled out of the guy's stomach in the Alien movie (a scene that I can still remember watching through my mother's fingers when the film came out and I was four). If you tear this creature apart there is something orange and about the consistency of a roasted chestnut at its core. I think that I dismembered the thing enough that no one could tell that I barely touched it. Meanwhile we were in an super fancy space with a glass wall looking out over rolling hills and golf courses. While the bathroom back at the compound where we work and meet is probably the dirtiest squat toilet situation I've seen in China thus far with a toilet that sprays water at your legs when you flush, the bathrooms at this place are marble and bronze with western toilets and complementary hand lotion.
Back in the golf carts we head out to view the site. Keep in mind that I was just acquainted with this project a couple of days earlier and I can't understand a word that anyone is saying. At this point the second ibuprofen has gotten rid of the fever, but now I have no voice. We take the golf carts as far as they can go and then climb hills and force our way through brush. I have no good shoes for this, I feel terrible, the site is enormous and I can't get my foggy head around it, the wind is as strong as I've ever felt whipping dust everywhere and blowing me backwards, and I cannot speak (I didn't mention the wind yet, nor the kite festival that was going on down the hill). The site, however, is lovely. I can see a reservoir in the distance, the hills are covered with volcanic rock, the densely packed poplars I can see down the hill are just getting their new leaves and they and the grasses on the hillside are dancing with the gusts of wind.
So, we head back to the base camp, the golf consultant arrives and we begin in earnest to discuss how we will divide this large but soon to be densely packed site. I like the golf guy quite a bit, and not only because I can speak with him in complete sentences. I found his expressions endearing, such as his tendency to say "Holy cats!" when something surprised him, or to call a reveal (when in environmental design you block a view and then allow a line of sight to see something at a distance) a "peek-a-boo". So, for instance, he would say something like " Driving down this road you will have a row of trees and then, all of a sudden, peek-a-boo! Then another peek-a-boo! Holy cats!"
So, then more meeting, discussion, bla bla bla. Then we all go out to dinner at an indoor/outdoor place in a forest that in feeling reminded me of Austin - with vastly different food. I thought Koreans could drink, but the Chinese, or at least these Chinese, were pros. The boss guy (or at least one of the boss guys, I still don't entirely understand what everyone's role was) had the two westerners, me and the golf guy sit at either side of him He had a young charismatic, swagger-y guy sit at the other end of the table and I was told that was his position because he is the most serious drinker and he will be leading a number of toasts. Again, more food, many more new dead animals that even with their heads I could not recognize. Much toasting, more eating. I was assigned to drink the local rice wine, which tasted like Everclear, because it was said to cure sickness. I drank the glass, but then switched to Chinese wine. This wine was said to be very good because it was made from "100% grapes". More food. Many declarations of cultural appreciation and optimism about cross cultural collaboration. I drank to at least 10 "last toasts". When the boss, a former member of government in Weifang and a big proponent of the region, learned that my father has been known to enjoy golf, he made me promise, at least 8 times, to extend to him an offer of his hospitality to come to Weifang after the course is completed to experience the result of our collaboration. So dad, if you're in the area in a couple of years...
It was becoming apparent that the sleep that I finally thought that I was going to have might once again elude me. However, at the golf guy's insistence that I needed to get some sleep a driver took us all to another very fancy hotel for too short a period of time. Thanks to the booze I got my voice back and thanks to some American NyQuil courtesy of the golf guy, I managed to get a reasonable, if not generous, amount of sleep. However, I also got a gall bladder attack. If you know me well you will know that this has happened to me a few times a year since I was 16, but no one can find stones and I'm not willing to remove an internal organ to save myself from the occasional attack if it's not doing me damage. For a couple of days after I get one of these attacks I cannot eat food with any fat content so as to avoid triggering a recurrence. This is difficult enough in the states, but even harder in China, especially when I am a the mercy of the hospitality of others and I don't feel like explaining through an interpreter why I am eating nothing but rice and this fruit that I don't know the name of.
Bla bla bla, meeting, another site visit, meeting. Driven to train station. I would love to spend more time talking about the texture of Weifang and how it is different from Guangzhou, what it is like to ride in a car in China and how beautiful Qingdao is, but I have some other things to do this afternoon. Suffice it to say, that I managed to eventually get to my apartment and get some serious sleep. I woke up this morning all set to do some of the errands that I haven't been able to do for the last couple of weeks but it seems that the monsoon season that I've been hearing so much about is upon us and the sky has cracked wide open. A few days ago I would have been annoyed, today I just find it amusing.
I will say that having another American to talk to did in some way highlight the strangeness of my life here to me. I have been so busy going with the flow and trying to behave as others do that to have another person there to remind me of my life back home changed my perspective a bit. Also, he gave me some good tips for traveling and some things I can to do make my life more comfortable here. He also seemed a bit concerned for me, and has further convinced me that I need to get formal language training so that I am not so dependent on others to take care of my needs. I've been trying to use the Rosetta Stone software, but I always have more important things to do and I'm not finding it very effective. I'll add this to the list.
