Evan's Reeducation -- It's a Small World

First full day in China included good food, good people, and good hoops.

In the late morning, we began our tour of the city, with Lexi guiding me around town. Few observations: horn beeping is out of control. Both cars and motor scooters are constantly blaring their horns. Perhaps this is because people kind of just walk out in the road as vehicles are moving towards them. I was amazed that people don't get hit more often. Lexi says that the horn isn't an impolite 'get out of my way,' it's more of a 'just realize I'm coming,' but regardless, the shrilling horn is a ubiquitous feature of strolling through the city. Also, I found it kind of strange that a very decent percentage of the girls here are holding hands or interlocking arms when walking around. They weren't gay, or so Lexi said, but many of the girls walk in twos. That's just how friends stay together, I guess.

We had a really cool lunch, my initial meal in China, and my first attempt to conquer chopsticks. In America, my General Gao's chicken or Beef w/ Pea Pods are always consumed with forks. Here, not so much. Lexi ordered four dishes for the two of us: a sizzling beef dish, Grandma's potatoes (a type of mashed potatoes I have never had before), fried red beans, and a plate of broccoli. (These total cost: 42 yuan, or about 6 dollars!!! Food is crazy cheap!) To make my father proud, I stayed clear of the broccoli, but everything else was good/interesting. The gargantuan plate of fried beans was a strange concoction. I liked them at first, but they were very salty and it seemed strange to eat a crunchy bean, almost like a chip. The beef dish and mashed potatoes were both good. The potatoes were a world apart from typical American mashed potatoes though, seasoned w/ very different spices and other stuff. You think of mashed potatoes always containing some butter, but not these. They were really tasty though. My chopstick travails made quite a mess in front of me, and eventually I was either trying to use the chopsticks as more of a shovel-type utensil, or simply using my left hand to place the morsel of food inside the chopsticks that were in my right hand. I hope people were staring. I'm sure it was entertaining.

After lunch, we walked around the city more, browsing in and out of some shops, the most intriguing of which is a store that sells lots of American DVDs for ridiculously cheap prices. I may come home with Seasons 1-4 of Lost for less than 10 bucks. It was also cool to see The Wire, The West Wing, Mad Men, and other shows I liked available for cheap with Chinese writing on the front.

We eventually, at my urging, meandered over to the nearby university, or more specifically, the six outdoor basketball courts on that campus. Arriving mid/late-afternoon, there were tons of kids shooting around and playing pickup games. Despite my attire, jeans and running shoes, I was eager to play, and Lexi was nice enough to ask someone what the protocal was. I was encouraged to go shoot around, and about 15 minutes later, I was involved in a game of 3-on-3. Somehow, I was fortunate enough to end up on a team with two kids who could really play, and it was fantastic. At 5'10'', I was one of the tallest kids there, and really the only one who consistently boxed out. In addition, the biggest thing I saw from the Chinese players was the need to almost always double-pump when going up for a shot or layup. But it was an awesome time. With people waiting, they played very quick games to 5, winners take except when it's game-point. So if you score to go up 4-1, the other team gets the ball up top. My team won the first 6 or 7 games we played, and probably 17 out of 19 games we played overall. It helped that I was playing with the Ray Allen of China, who just kept draining outside shots. It was a really awesome time, despite our inability to communicate. We'd high-five after nice passes and good finishes, take responsibility for our mistakes, and overall the sportsmanship was excellent by everyone there. Definitely a really cool experience; I'm sure I'll play again before I leave.

For dinner, we met up w/ a very cool crew of Lexi's American friends who live here, mostly folks who she met playing frisbee. Included in the crew of 7 kids were twins who both played at Padeia in Atlanta (the top HS for ultimate in the country), one of whom played at Boston University, a team I played against when I was a freshman at Wake. He remembered the game: "I think we beat you guys," he said. Yea, you did. But we beat Duke the following game 13-11, so I remember the day fondly. I was not involved at all in the ordering of the food, but gradually a smorgasbord of dishes arrived at our table. Now, I want to be adventurous and try new things, so I was pretty open to tasting everything. My lasting perspective from the evening was how, at a single meal, there might be 8 different clashing flavors. They all were good and interesting, mostly unlike anything I've had before with differing levels of spicyness. But in China they don't give you water at a meal. They give you tea, in a cup the size of basically a double-shot glass. So at times I was reluctant to really delve into something I thought would be spicy, since I had very little to drink at the table. Following dinner, we proceeded to a trivia night at some bar. It was led by a crew of New Zealanders, and it seemed that there were "white people" from many different parts of the world in attendence. The beer was good, the trivia was challenging (particularly the questions exclusively about Kunming or China, I was completely worthless).

One day down, lots more to see. Stay tuned.