Merelle, Pan!

Ylläolevan lausahduksen otti innoissaan sanastoonsa eräs VMTK:n puheenjohtaja vuonna 2006, kun kerroin hänelle, mitä sana Shanghai, eli 上海 tarkoittaa. Tietenkin kyseessä oli vain puoliksi lukutaidottoman, lapsena Suomeen muuttaneen ulkokiinalaisen muistin perältä kaivama tulkinta.

Silti nyt on ehkä paikallaan muistella tuota nimenomaista tulkintaa ja sen tuomia merkityksiä. Meri on kaikessa mahtavuudessaan ja suuruudessaan edustanut ihmiskunnan historiassa tuntematonta. Suomen kaltaisessa skaalassa meren merkitys ei ehkä ole aivan niin suuri - onhan Itämeri maailmaan suurmeriin verrattuna vain pienoinen lampi. Ehkä siksi sen vesi on niin herkästi pilaantuvaa.

Ei, merellä tarkoitan nyt sitä valtavaa vesimassaa, mikä aukeaa Shanghain kaupungista itään. Tyyni valtameri. Toivon hartaasti, että meri sisälläni voisi olla tyyni, mutta se ei ole. Paljon on tapahtunut näiden kuukausien aikana, jotka vietin Suomessa palatuani viime syksyn vaihto-opiskelumatkaltani. En tiedä onko Kiina edelleen se sama, johon astuin vain noin 9 kuukautta sitten. Toki Shanghai on paljon erilaisempi kuin Beijing. Olen jopa kuullut sanottavan, että ihminen, joka pitää Beijingistä, on vaikea tykästyä Shanghaihin. Luulen ainakin itse pitäneeni Beijingistä 4,5 kuukauden vaihto-opiskelujakson aikana. Katsotaan, miten nyt käy.

Myrskyä vesilasissa aiheuttavat myös tutut keskustan valtakunnan pääkaupungissa. Heti kesäkuun alussa olen menossa katsomaan aikanaan Tsinghuan yliopistoon taakse jättämiäni uusia ystäviä. Paljon on myös muuttunut heidän osaltaan, juorutasolla vain tosin. Heidän elämäänsä olen pystynyt poissa ollessani seuraamaan yhteisöllisen Xiaonei.com-palvelun kautta. Kuten aikaisemmin bloggasin, kyseessä on kiinalainen vastine Facebookille. Mielenkiintoista nähdä, miten meikäläinen otetaan taas vastaan siellä.

Kesäkuun 13.-21. päivä pidetään Shanghain kansainväliset elokuvafestivaalit. Jos luet tätä blogia, tiedät todennäköisesti jo, että uusin tuottamani elokuva, Mitä meistä tuli on valittu näytettäväksi sinne, ja ajankohta on juuri passeli oman Kiinan-matkani kanssa. Pääsen siis vippinä edustamaan elokuvaamme jättimäiseen, noin 300 000 juhlavierasta kestitseviin festivaaleihin. Ehkä näen julkkiksiakin, kukaties ;P

Lentoon on alle 48 tuntia, ja olo levoton. Vielä pitäisi tehdä NIIN monia asioita valmiiksi ennen matkaa. Sitten olenkin poissa taas seuraavat 3 kuukautta.

Image-lehden siteeraaman hyvän ystäväni Miika Ullakon sanoin, kuinka äijän käy?

Ps. ehkä huomasittekin eron edellisiin postauksiini. Kyllä, kirjoitan tällä kertaa suomeksi, koska pystyn ehkä kuitenkin ilmaisemaan itseäni paremmin "äidinkielelläni" (hyi kamala että edes ajattelen noin suomen kielestä). Toisekseen, en tunne enää tarvetta ilmaista itseäni ihmisille, jotka eivät suomea hallitse. Toki jos tilanne muuttuu, vaihdan kieltä lennossa. Aluksi kuitenkin näin.

Autumn or fall

Whichever way you call it, it is here. Leaves turn to yellow. Leaves fall. Another year is over and the nature is bracing for the apparently cold, dry and windy winter of Beijing. Especially cold and windy after rainfalls, that's what I've learned by bitter experience.

Thanks for all the comments on my previous post, looks like there really *are* people following my blog, which was a bit of a surprise to myself :) Well, now I know I have an audience, which kinda puts more pressure on myself too.

I've noticed that after the first eight weeks (or the first half of the semester), my weekends will be extended to four days long, as I will only have classes from Monday through Wednesday. I'm thinking I should use the remaining weekends effectively and go traveling around China whenever I'm not swamped by cases or doing some Tsinghua TV channel gigs.

For that, I'm open to suggestions and might actually listen to your ideas so if you'd like to see some places, I can go check them for you.

New stuff and Old stuff

Sorry for my absence - the uni is killing me :) Suddenly it seems that every course is out there to get you. At least that's what the rush of deliverable assignments felt like.

Anyway, I've beginning to love the Tsinghua TV station. Ok, some situation recap needed. Previously on THTV: So, I learned there were tons of clubs and other activities looking for members in the beginning of the semester. One time I went to have a lunch when I spotted a very nice looking camera standing on a tripod. At first I thought it was a movie club or something, but turns out it's a student-run TV-station inside the campus. I registered immediately.

I believe that was the best decision I made here this far. I went on their welcome event for the "new" people and god there were just so many girls :). The "older" people are also really nice. I talked them about my past so they let me take some responsibility straight away without any practice. That's why I was able to go shoot the 2nd world university shooting championships. Now I'm working on shooting the campus-wide singing competition (the format taken from Idols I guess). I don't have to work alone since they partner up a reporter with a camera operator, which is so cool.

The TV station is a place I can go when I need to clear my mind from all the school shaite. Still, I don't think I'll be too buried with schoolwork. After all, it's just an attitude thing.

Oh did I mention my dad was here? Yeah, he came over here on the excuse of attending a conference. Was here last weekend. It was nice, toured me around the campus - the places he grew up around. More photos about that coming later.

Traveling back

The day of the departure was marked by a constant rain. Indeed, the whole train ride from Nanjing to the capital city of Beijing was chased by the rain. It's been a while since the last time I went on an overnight train ride. That was in Finland I think.

I got tickets to a "hardback" bed which means a cubicle of 2x3 beds (three levels on both sides). That's the usual ticket type we bought back in the day, when living in China :) I slept on the lowest one. It was comfortable enough to be able to fall asleep, although I kept waking up once in a few hours. Anyway, back and still alive :)

P.S. the photos are starting to flow into Flickr... I'll keep a constant pace of about 8-10 pictures / day so that if you check back every now and then, there should be some new ones (instead of lashing them all at once).

More China phenomena

Here's an interesting article on how the city of Beijing plans to continue the improvement of air quality even after the Olympics: http://english.sina.com/china/p/2008/0928/189001.html.

It's clearly a good sign of sustainability from the government, that everything wasn't just for the show. However, I'll definitely want to see the public reaction, some of what is already expressed in the article. Ultimately their actions will determine if the project is successful or not.

My dad says one reason why democracy is still far from actually happening here is because of the way the Chinese people are wired. There's no single excuse, it's just the way things are done. People look for strong leadership and guidance or they will be as lost as the sheep without their sheperds.

However, there's still hope. The youth here are much more individual and liberal than the old people - to a point even I am surprised - so perhaps slowly, as the generation change takes place, the new way of thinking will be injected into the system.

Inner change will take time. We may not see it in five, ten or even twenty years, despite rapid development on the outside. But perhaps in fifty years, the promises of One World, One Dream will finally come true.

Yes, I finally watched the Olympics opening ceremony, which I missed on the 8th August due to some business I had to take care of. I have to say, though, that I felt so proud after seeing the ceremony. It was an NBC rip with American hosts, but even they admired the show.

By the way, I think I won't be uploading any photos from my National Holiday travels until I get back to Beijing (that's Oct. 5th). I just can't be bothered to set up Internet connection to my laptop.

A little bit of this and that

Hmm, lots of stuff to write about, let's see where to start. Ok, school first. My home uni (HSE) put some tough requirements for outbound exchange students, so I'm taking a total of seven courses for this semester. Quite stupidly, as an undergrad student, I'm not able to take Chinese (Mandarin) language courses for credit. They are only for the MBA students.

Luckily there's a add/drop period in which students can try different courses. I pre-registered a course called "Commercial Bank Management". Sounds fairly easy, huh? But it was actually an "Economics of Banking" course, with loads of maths. But Chinese people are quite smart. As Bagher (the other exchange from HSE) said, even the most beautiful girls are smart (there's no trade-off) and even not bitchy. Well, another friend of mine would disagree on the last part, but let's just leave it at that.

Yeah, back to the topic: I'm changing the math-happy course to something more relaxed but overall the courses are okay. Some teachers are more open to the idea of speaking English, some are less. The extreme case was one course where the teacher would repeat the English part in Mandarin just to make sure all the Chinese people understand it. However, the same course is also the easiest to pass, because there's no final exam for foreigners. Communication with the locals is quite easy since most people speak English from good to well. On one course, I'm doing teamwork in a team of 2 exchange students (another one is a Thai student from Erasmus Rotterdam) and 2 locals. So far the teamwork's been working well.

On Tuesday I visited the National Stadium, or commonly, the Bird's Nest. It's the main venue of the olympic and paralympic games. I went there with my cousin, and our tickets let us see some of the paralympic finals. For example, we saw China win in the Women's 4x100m wheelchair relays (just follow the Youtube links on the right side). Anyway, the Nest and its surroundings, including the National Aquatics Center (can't remember the common term... well, the water cube?). The whole place in night lightning just look so stunning and no photo from my camera would capture and do justice to the atmosphere. This one comes pretty close, though.

Yesterday I climbed the Great Wall with one of my new friends here (actually my mom's colleague's daughter from England). Anyways, we almost missed, being so late, every possible method of transportation to the Wall (the nearest accessible point about 50 km from Beijing). With a little bit of luck and extra money spent, we caught up with the rest of the tourist flow, though. There we climbed to one of the peak points for some of the most breathtaking view I've seen for a while. The sky was blue on that day, so it was perfect. I'm a bit lazy with the photos, so they'll be uploaded when I have time.

Today they lifted the even/odd day restriction on cars and you could feel it immediately. On my way to my relatives', I sat in the bus for over 2 and half hours. Of course the rain might've also have something to do with it. You can't sense the traffic in Tsinghua campus, though, because it's always so quiet and calm inside.

The national holidays (the holiday around independence day on Oct 1) will be soon, which means a pause of over a week to all the studying, which is like yay! I'm flying to Hangzhou to see my dad, who is working over there. Then we'll drive to Nanjing to see the rest of my dad's family. I'm hoping I'd see Wall-E at some point, been reading the reviews and just can't wait to see it.

Blazing Beijing

Someone said that Beijing’s air is rather poor, which I admit is true. However, today it breathed at its best, offering a clear blue sky and up to 26 degrees celcius of warmth. As it was an even day, we set out on foot. And by bus. And why wouldn't you ride public transportation. The local bus/subway card costs like nothing. Zit. Bus fare starts from 0.40 RMB which is like 4 euro cents. Subway costs about 10 euro cents. And subway is fast compared to sitting in traffic jam :P

But oh boy did that sun burn warmly out there today! I can already notice a nice tan coming up and there will be more sunny days coming up.

We went to a lake near the center of Beijing (which would be the Forbidden City and stuff like that), called Bei Hai (or Hou Hai, depending on which side of the lake you are). It’s a bar and restaurant area around a beautiful scenery, with lots of foreigners. And those little boats you can paddle on (see the photos on the right hand side). We didn’t go to those foreigner restaurant places – yet. Instead, we went in on this little alley maze and found a traditional Beijing snacks restaurant. They serve snacks that in the ancient times were the food for the poor people. Both sweet and salty snacks were at offer, and we also saw a talking parrot there. Mandarin, of course :D

Tomorrow would be the start of the semester, I believe, since it’s orientation day. I’ll finally meet the other exchange students. On Friday we’re going on a tour to the Forbidden City together.

Rollin' like a local

Today I finally met my Tsinghua buddy. If you don't know what I mean, try imagining a tutor, except personal one. Seems like every exchange student gets their own. My buddy is a from a minority group from western China. They have their own language and stuff and they are muslims. But my buddy also speaks good Mandarin and English, and today he helped me get a bike so that I can haul my ass around the campus more quickly. I'd better be able to, because the campus is huge. My legs are still sore after all that walking around bikeless...

My cousin got a few free tickets to see the paralympics, so I guess I'll tag along. You've read that joke about paralympics on the internet right? I'm going to be PC and not say it... But anyway, the tickets are for next Monday and Tuesday. I'm not that keen on sports (didn't watch "real" olympics either), but the Bird's Nest Stadium should be a cool place to visit. I saw it from the outside and pretty close the day we drove from airport. It is a very magnificent looking building.

Orientation day on Thursday. That'll leave me few more days to wander around this great city (getting around is a bit time-consuming because you can spend over one and half hours and twice on roundtrip, even on subway system -- things will get better when I move to the campus, though).

I can only drive on every other day? I'll buy another car!

(Previously on Tiger Returns: I discussed the fact that vehicle restrictions are in place and that on odd days, only the cars with a license plate ending with an odd number are allowed to drive and vice versa, except for cabs which are allowed to drive always.)

In related to that topic, they are now contemplating whether to extend the restriction after 20th September. My cousin says they probably won't do it, because an interesting phenomenon has come from it.

They say that when they introduced the semi-"banning" of cars, they tried to encourage people to use public transportation instead of their own cars. However, as the price of the cars are so cheap nowadays, people just bought another car with a different ending to a license plate so that they can switch cars every day. And believe me, I've seen it: two identical cars, one with an odd number and another with an even number sitting next to each other.

Oh by the way, the gasoline is also cheap. Hooray. To hell with global warming when I can pwn the streets! ;P

Things will get better though, because regardless of the outcome on decision to lift the car restrictions, the olympic lanes will be freed. My cousin told me that now if a car is caught using the lane, the driver can get a roughly 1400 euro ticket + one week jail time. The horror!

First impressions

Hot! Gusts of warmth began immediately after stepping out the plane. In the afternoon heat, mercury rose up to 35 degrees celcius. Dang!

The first day is nover now and I've already spent over 1200 euros for administrative and registeration costs, paying for the room for 5 or 6 months in advance, for example, although they'll return the money for unused days when I check out at the end of my studies.

Lucky for me, I can speak a little Mandarin and understand most of what people say. I can imagine how it feels not being able to understand a thing. Saw a raggae-funk-soul-brotha from Namibia or somewhere looking pretty lost even with his local Chinese buddy / interpreter.

But hey, at least now I've got an apartment (roughly the same size and price than mine in Finland), Internet connection (not tested yet, might be slow, I'm at my cousin's place 512k broadband yay!), a campus dining card, and a Chinese prepaid mobile phone number. Ican still receive sms or calls for that matter on my Finnish number, but I still won't pick them up.

The first day also involved lots of "running around" in Tsinghua campus to get this and that. Good that my cousin who picked me from airport has a car and we were able to drive around campus area, though it's discouraged as most of the roads are blocked and only open to bikes. Speaking of them, I still have to get my hands on one of those...

Beijing is HUGE. But that wasn't a surprise :) Lots of driving to do, lots of places to go... My cousin's car licence plate ends with an odd number, which means that until September 20th or something she's not able to drive on even days (in relation with Olympic and Paralympic games). Despite that fact, the traffic during peak hours is still stiffy, and I can't imagine the situation when every car is allowed onto streets again. However, they now have these special olympic lanes reserved for olympic traffic, which will be freed when the car ban is lifted, that'll help the situation a bit. The other "relief" is that people use a lot of liberty in interpreting rules and thus traffic is more "elastic" if you may.

I'm dead tired now for all the running and stuff, need a good night's sleep!

All my bags are packed I'm ready to go

Wait, hold it. Slash the topic. I still haven't packed a thing. It's just Jewel's song is so sweet that I've borrowed the first line from it.

The handles of the clock has now officially turned into first of September, the month my exchange studies begin.

I've set up this blog as a "base of operations" from which all essential parts of my trip can be tracked. I believe I've got everything here, but of course if I discover new resources, as I like to call them, I'll put them here. Right now I've already got feeds for twitter (for quick status updates) and flickr (for, obviously, my trip-related photos) and some other stuff. If you don't like it, then remember kids: you can always skip the extra stuff by subscribing to my blog feed.

Anyway, this is just my opening post, more will follow after my jet lands onto Chinese soil (hopefully runway though :)

Edit: (September 4, 18.28 Helsinki time) Well, now I'm packed. :) Flight delayed for 2 hours, so I'm still sitting at home, waiting.