Unchain Me

I’m like the marshmallow Fluff of light sleepers—it takes two earplugs with the highest possible noise reducing power and, until recently, a sleep mask, just to keep me from floating off the bed, so lightly do I slumber. I can’t deny that I am more easily roused than others by the going-ons of the world outside my bedroom window. But really, no matter how deeply and hard they might typically sleep, is anyone humanly capable of sleeping through the sounds of Unchained Melody being blasted from a loudspeaker outside their apartment at 6:15 every single weekday morning?

As surely as lonely rivers flow to the sea to the sea, those lucky individuals residing on the campus of the Beijing Sports University can be certain that their weekdays will begin with an involuntary dose of the Righteous Brothers. I’m still having a hard time coming to terms with the fact that:
a) I am not hallucinating, or actually dreaming about Patrick and Demi every single morning. (I confess that I vaguely remember once having a very long and convoluted Ghost-themed dream so this did seem like a distinct possibility for the first couple days.)
b) The school essentially has a mandated wake-up time for all its residents.
c) This wake-up time is 6:15. 6:15 AM. 6:15 in the morning.
d) This wake-up time is 6:15 in the morning EVERY DAY.
e) No one else is complaining about this!

Can you ever, even in your wildest possible dreams (dreams of the sort that are induced by the infiltration of Unchained Melody, for example) imagine a college in the United States that would not be met with a massive student uprising if it tried something along these lines?

Perhaps the daily military training that male sophomores are required to participate in is the school’s means of preventing such a student revolt. Thanks to morning marching drills, I am often actually awoken just a little before 6:15 by a ten-hut chorus of Yi! Er! San! Si!, ensuring that I am sentient enough to fully savor my Righteous Brothers wake-up call a few minutes later. However, in the unlucky circumstance that I might have missed the fist stanza because I am having a hard time pulling myself away from my restless, noise-infected dreams (about Ritz crackers that will light up if you plug them into light sockets and hanging out with Nicky Hilton, to name a few), I never have to fear: I can make up for the missed stanza and hear the song in its entirety when it plays again at noon!

Yep. At noon. It’s lunchtime, you see, and some students might not have a watch or a stomach, so the school kindly reminds them that it is time to take a break and feed themselves with another round of Unchained Melody.

Thankfully, especially considering my proclivity towards ear worms, the school sticks to the instrumental version of the song. Still, it’s not a short song. And I don’t need the words to remind me that time goes by so slowly and time can mean so much. Seriously, it‘s a sentiment that never rang truer than it does at 6:15 on a Beijing morning.

Beijing Dispatch

It's 8:44am on the start of my sixth full day in Beijing, and it feels really late because Mark and I have been falling in bed as early as 9 and waking up around 6. The days are exhausting, exciting, new, hard and long and the mornings come early because China wakes up at the crack of dawn. Many mornings, even on a Sunday, we hear the sounds of marching coming from the students doing military training on campus, and all students are required to attend morning exercises at 6am.

We kind of live out in the sticks--we have a map of urban Beijing and the Beijing Sports University is literally the last dot on the top left corner of the map. To get from our place to my school takes about 45 minutes in a taxi (and costs a whopping $2.50!). But that's mainly because of traffic—without it, the ride is only about 20 minutes. I think it's equivalent to, say, living in Queens and working in Manhattan. It's definitely a world away from my old Beijing neighborhood, with its Subway sandwiches and many street lights, its multitude of DVD stores and the expensive supermarket at the nearby fancy Western hotel where I could treat myself to delicacies like vegan margarine and Heinz baked beans.

Here, we are definitely the only Westerners walking around the streets, which means that this neighborhood, with its dirt and rough edges, is probably really good news for me. I keep worrying about how Mark will do, but he assures me that he’s taken a liking to our new digs. The campus itself is really pretty—green and quiet and filled with students wearing sports attire. It’s a nice respite from the extreme bustle of downtown Beijing. And there are dumplings made to order, and 20oz beers for 25 cents, and any fruit or vegetable you could ever imagine for pennies at the nearby market.

My Chinese is pathetic. Seriously. I get incredibly tongue tied speaking to strangers and my vocabulary is practically non-existent. I have hope that it will all come flooding back to me when classes start, but for now I sound like a toddler being strangled. This is especially unfortunate because we’ve had to tackle a whole range of unanticipated challenges, mostly in terms of our apartment, and things would have been faster, if not easier, if I my Chinese was better.

That said, I don’t think I ever knew how to say “There is a flood in my bathroom every time I take a shower because the floor is not angled toward the drain properly,” or “How do you plan to extract the Rock of Gibraltar from the pipe that leads to the sink?” This vocabulary is really important because the building that we live in is new, and all the marvels of modern Chinese construction are on display. For example, the aforementioned pipe for the sink: it was leaking, so we complained. In response, a man of average strength and size came and pulled the sink of the wall using just his bare hands in a maneuver that lasted approximately three seconds. After this sturdy structure had been removed, and the inside of the pipe made visible, and it became clear that there was a serious blockage in the pipe, one that could not even be slightly penetrated by a man of average size slamming the metal end of a broomstick using all of his average strength. Literal rocks, accompanied by lots of dust, came out of the pipe, but still the end of the broom stick could enter the pipe no more than an inch.

I was confused—how could there be such a blockage in a new pipe, in a new building, especially when our apartment is on the top floor? But Mark figured it out in an instant: the people constructing the building had clearly poured their leftover cement down the drain and it had dried there. This ingenious construction site cleaning technique stunned us momentarily, but was almost immediately rivaled by the action taken when we told the man working on our bathroom that the drain on our bathroom floor was also clogged. We watched in (diminishing) astonishment as he extracted the drain from the floor and then proceeded to clean it over the sink, washing handfuls of hair down the drain of the sink.

So, we’re living and learning, my friends. We’re taking things one step (and one drain) at a time.

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A HEADS-UP

One of the many other blocks over which I have stumbled this last week is the discovery that Blogger is blocked in China. While I can still access the main site to post, I can’t view my blog, or any others on Blogspot, or on several other blog hosting sites. More importantly, nobody else here in China can easily view my blog. This discovery shocked and depressed me—the last time I lived here I had no difficulty accessing virtually any site. But I should have done my homework better; apparently Blogger has been blocked in China for the last three years.

So, I am trying to decide what approach to take with my blog. I am considering paying to get it hosted with some kind of webpage provider, but I am so utterly inexperienced with this kind of thing that I don’t know how, or how quickly, I will manage to do this. I would love to hear any suggestions that anyone might have. For now, I think I will continue to post here for now, but I just wanted to give a heads-up that I hope to migrate soon.