A hilarious entertaining not-at-all boring introduction to the culture of Jinan China
A lot of Americans who go to China don’t go outside Beijing. One Chinese tour guide told me that Beijing is like the NYC of China, very international and classic. Shanghai is like the LA, the “newer” city, up and coming, a hotspot for entertainment. And Tianjin is like the Washington DC, the place where the government stuff gets done.
I have no idea what Jinan is. It was a much larger city than I thought it would be, with a population 3x as large as my hometown Houston. Jinan was 7 million. And 13 million in the greater metropolitan area. It was huge, considering I had never even heard of it before.
It was funny telling people back home about this and getting the 360: “How quaint, you were in some village outside of Beijing we’ve never heard of, OH SNAP CHINA IS SCARY.”
Jinan felt more like an Atlanta or a Boston, honestly, with how much was available to do there.
As I’m writing this and doing a little research, such as Googling “theater in Jinan,” I’m realizing I have no fucking idea what I’m talking about and should probably shut up about it. I’m trying to compare this Chinese city to something in America, and it isn’t working. #thankstourguide Because even though China is a first world country, the populace is so much larger and poorer than in America. That makes Jinan feel both denser and shabbier. There was rich shit to do in downtown Jinan, but I had very little contact with the area.
Except for this one mall called Parc 66. It was in the center of the city and it was my haven. I remember the 3rd week I was there, after realizing I had to get out of that apartment even if I didn’t have cell phone data or help, I downloaded this picture on my phone, showed it to the cab driver and was off on my way. It was a $7–10 ride.
Of course the trickier part was trying to get a cab driver to understand how to take me back out of the middle of the city, with no major landmarks near the apartment. The apartment was vaguely near a university, but I never learned what that university was called. My cousin’s wife, whom I’ve decided to call Jane…
…gave me a scrap of cardboard about the thickness of the boxes you keep paper or envelopes in. On it, in sharpie-inked Chinese, was supposedly written our address. The missionaries had given it to her. I was to show this to the cab driver and hope he didn’t kick me out of the cab in frustration, as had occasionally happened to them.
Jane and Jesse both had e-bikes and got around on those. I never learned to ride one because largely they were off using them. Also I’ve never ridden a bike and didn’t feel like Chinese roads and sidewalks were the places to start.
Oh, and this is important:
People speak English in Beijing. People do not speak English in Jinan.
Are there exceptions to this? Probably, but that never helped me.
The people in Jinan kind of expected you to understand them, too. I guess they figured if you’d ventured this far off the beaten path, you must know some Chinese.
Paradoxically, whenever you tried to speak Chinese to them, even with what I was assured was perfect inflection, they would stare at you stone-faced.
Some helpful phrases I learned were:
- Ting bu dong. I hear but I don’t understand. My college friend relayed this gem via Facebook a week into the trip after I’d had some trouble with whatever “I don’t understand” phrase Jesse and Jane had given me. Jesse and Jane assured me that ting bu dong must be a Beijing thing and no one in Jinan would get it, but by the end of my tenure they had adopted it as well.
- Bu yao. I don’t want it. Leave me the hell alone. This phrase was SO hard to remember quickly, until I associated it with that part in Emporer’s New Groove.
- The numbers 1–10, of course, which were about as easy to build on from 11–100 as Spanish. And I learned to add -ga when saying “<number> of that” when requesting something. I found a good jingle on YouTube, which I shared with Jane by the end of the month since she was having trouble recalling numbers quickly (I’m so helpful like that)(It’s a good fucking jingle and I still remember my numbers).
I mention that to say: This will come up later. The fact that I think to research shit and I assume people who have been in a situation longer than me have researched shit more. This was not so with Jesse and Jane, and it took me way too long to figure that out.
- Shay-shay. Thank you.
- Shay-shay ni. Thank you, and I’m kissing your ass.
Googling “xie xie nin” brought up “xie xie ni” and I realize I was saying that wrong the whole time. There is no “n” at the end of ni. Thank God it’s mostly silent if you do mistakenly say it… Although I’m pretty sure I nailed that “n” since in Chinese the consonants are the only things you can be positive about.
Whatever. Shit.
You would think this stuff would be the sort of stuff I’d google while I was in China, but (1) they don’t have Google, (2) just kidding, you can turn on a VPN, but (3) you’re too busy recovering from the horrors of the outside world.
Anyway, Parc 66, spelt with a c.
I loved it here. This was when I felt a nice “Yeah China!” energy. Lately I’ve been living in a place far from civilization, so I also felt a nice “Yeah civilization!” energy too.
There was a store here that was my favorite place in the world and probably saved the whole trip for me.
You’ll hear more about that in the flooding bathroom story.
