On our first night in Tianjin the trio of non-Mandarin speakers were on our own, as Bryan went off to spend time with the rest of his family. Against the advice of a Frenchman at the hostel who told us that the city had no soul we went looking for some night life, or at least liveliness. After taking my first Chinese taxi, we found a block of Korean restaurants and a place called Zero Club to explore. Eating Korean food was funny, since Brennan and Max had left South Korea less than a week before. They pointed out familiar things to each other like people who were homesick. We ate fat noodles with clams and tomato sauce, spicy kimchee and peanuts in a sweet sauce before deciding that the early morning train ride had really left us with no great desire to go dancing at Zero or any other number. We meandered back towards our hostel, passing under Tianjin's huge TV tower.


Note, we did not take a ride in a helicopter and thus this is not my photograph. Our path beside the water and the TV tower led us to a little park full of teenagers rollerblading. We watched their antics for a while, until we couldn't help giggling from sleepiness and the bizarre experience of listening to Liva La Vida Loca from some kid's portable stereo while they sped around the park on their oh-so-1990's wheels. We got back to the hostel at a reasonable hour and went to bed. I was in the female dorm all by myself, so much for experiencing hostel life, but Max (a much more experienced hosteler than I) said that the male to female ratio is usually 2:1.

The sun the next morning was sickly, struggling to shine through thick smog and dust. Women would ride by on bicycles and scooters, their faces entirely swaddled in netting or scarves to keep out dust and smoke. This day (and most of the other days until halfway through the trip) I woke up too early, much earlier than the guys. I wish I'd had the gumption to go exploring further afield, but as it was I curled up in the downstairs common room and knitted. The woman who cleaned at the hostel came and admired my knitting and seemed to take a living to me, she remained friendly towards me the whole stay while Max was quite intimidated by the disapproving looks that she cast at everyone else.

I got a map of the city from the front desk and proceeded to fold is down to just the bit that I needed--I felt that somewhere my mother was cringing at the terrible fold mangling I submitted that poor map to.)

Our main aim of the day was the Monastery of Deep Compassion, which we found without much difficulty (but not before finding meaty breakfast baozi.)



This is the Fu Dog (or Foo Dog) guarding the gate into the monastery, which might be called a monastery but is really a temple? I dunno, the Buddhist stuff had me pretty gobsmacked, as far as iconography and terminology went. The buildings were gorgeous, even though the outside walls were sometimes grimy, the inside bits were incredible and the colors were gorgeous.

I want a ceiling painted so brilliantly:



People were actively praying and prostrate themselves in front of the various altars in the temple buildings. Incense was lit and adherents would kneel on vinyl mats in front of various altars set before Bodhisattva statues (which all look like Buddha to me, oops.)

In the courtyard in front of one temple there was a bell tower about two stories tall. People would throw little coins (probably the 1 jiao coins, worth about a tenth of a penny) up into the tower and hit the bells which made them peal in gorgeous clear tones. The whole thing was very aesthetically pleasing.




The temple buildings were, as I wrote in my paper journal, "hella glitzy, deep turquoise, purple and white in stylized waves, red interiors and gold as an accent color everywhere." Guanyin, the Goddess of Mercy (I can read a plaque, after all), sat behind her altar with her eight pairs of golden arms. She looked plush and comfortable, seated among stacks of fresh apples, each piled in a pyramid with three on the bottom and then one and then the last stacked on top and surrounded by silk flowers.

After the monastery Brennan limped back to the hostel, utterly limp from the heat (he would submit himself to Cloverfield in the relatively cool hostel common room, which was punishment enough.) Max and I found a huge, busy bazaar. I ate raisin ice cream and we wandered through food stalls and clothing stalls and looked at counterfeit watches and jewelry. There was such an abundance of stuff, which shouldn't surprise me at all, since it's where all of ours comes from. It reminded me of an overgrown flea market because stalls were set up willy-nilly and the lanes in between were extremely narrow.

When we got back to the hostel--in time for the dregs of Cloverfield--we met up with some other hostelers, the Singaporean Justin (whose first language was English, but with a very thick accent) and Helija (a Finn, heading to Japan after studying in Southern China for a year.) They came with us for our evening adventures. We waited until around sunset, and then hiked over to the Tianjin Eye, a ferris wheel modeled after the London Eye. By daylight the ferris wheel was pure white and appealing, but at night it was lit up and ever so grand. (Bright lights, ferris wheel, forgive the midway loving rube in me.)





The view of the city was funny, since one side of the river was obviously much more developed than the other. If we looked at the side of the city where our hostel was then we could see dark looming shapes of unfinished apartment buildings jutting up, scraping the sky and towering as strange silhouettes framed by cranes. To the other side of the city, further south along the river we saw neon and lights and more established cityscape, but even that was dotted with the odd empty lot where something had been knocked down to make way for something bigger and better.






At the base of the Eye an impromptu fair was going on, with merchants selling plastic gewgaws, toys, watches and jewelry squatting behind blankets spread on the sidewalk. There were also games of ring-toss and a game where you threw darts at balloons. Max was being goofy, and trying to impress Helija, so he stopped to throw darts. He won bubble solution, which he proceeded to blow rather fantastically for the rest of the night.



We ate dinner with our fellow hostelers in a dingy outdoor mall food court. Easily the worst food that I ate over the entire trip, a broth with noodles and quail eggs in it. I will be forever suspicious of quail eggs now. We left Justin at the hostel and went in search of a bar called Ali Baba's. I guess we didn't know to shout "open sesame!" from the taxi, since our driver couldn't find the place. Finally we settled on hopping out and checking out the KTV, instead. KTV is Chinese karaoke, which has a lot in common with Korean and Japanese karaoke. You get your own room for a set time, they bring you snacks and if you're lucky Max brings you lots of tall bottles of beer from the restaurant next door and Brennan will have a belt buckle suitable for opening bottle caps.

While most of the songs from the list we could choose from were in Chinese there were a number of familiar English tunes. Helija sang ABBA's Voulez Vous, we all sang The Beatles and I grooved to an extremely synthed-up version of April Come She Will. While the covers of popular songs were sometimes funny, far funnier were the videos that accompanied them. They all had a very homegrown quality to them, like someone just wandered around a city park and filmed people walking and sitting on benches with creepy, leering close-ups. One video was for a Chinese version (?) of a song /called/ Yellow Submarine that bore no relation to the Beatles song involving a boy and a dog walking across an otherwise deserted beach. One video just showed a woman dancing sexily/uncertainly beside a motorcycle. My favorite video was of a very early 1990's looking couple with big teased hair standing in front of a house, holding each other and smiling like an ad for real estate. That was the entire video.

And that night I fell asleep, and dreamed again that I was trying to use sign language to shape Chinese characters in the air so that people could understand me.