Chengdu, 2014-09-04 13:25:10 +0800
Day 11 in China
Last night was totally awesome. We partied so hard I almost forgot I’m not in Poland. There were nine of us: four Poles, two Brits, one Dutch, one Slovak, and one Austrian. We decided to go and eat huoguo first (火锅, known to the foreigners as hot pot.) I asked the woman at the reception about good places to eat huoguo in the vicinity, and she wrote us two place names, one of them called 胖妈火锅 (Pang4ma1 huo3guo3, “Fat Mama’s Hot Pot”!) We headed for Jiuyanqiao, the party and food area close to our dorms. They had ganguo (干锅) pretty much everywhere, but we didn’t see the hot pot anywhere, so I asked an elderly woman if they had any in their restaurant.
“Of course!,” she shouted. “We have everything!”
I was still a bit skeptic, but we sat down and ordered a few dishes.
“So, we want to eat huoguo,” I said.
“I’m sorry, but we don’t have any huoguo here.”
“Have you got gongbao chicken?” (宫保鸡丁 gong1bao3ji1ding1)
“No, but we have everything else.”
In the end, we ate 烤鱼 kao3yu2, roasted fish that I ordered in the 麻辣 ma2la4 variant, which is more or less as spicy as you can get.

2014-09-09 00:01:43 +0800
Day 16 in China, listening to the album Magical Mystery Tour by The Beatles
From a purely samsaric point of view, life in China and, more specifically, in Chengdu, has many things to offer to an open-minded foreigner. It is said to be relatively easy to find a job, and even if it’s just a part-time language teaching job, it’s usually enough to make a living. For a simple Polish boy on Confucius Institute Scholarship like me, it’s certainly enjoyable. You can choose from a wide variety of Sichuanese dishes or eat at Muslim noodle restaurants for just around 12 kuai (and their noodles, 拉面 la1mian4 and 拌面 ban3mian4 really taste great, and they don’t serve pork.) Then you can go to a bar and get a few free bottles of Tsingtao Beer or, if you are ready to spend some more, you can go to a club and take a table for 10 persons for up to 3000 kuai, and you will be served extravagant fruit salads with sculptures made of pineapples and grenades (as papayas and oranges are not very common in this area.) You can organize a picnic for 19 people on the roof of your dorms, (it was the best!) then go on a tour around bars, or try in vain to get drunk with Chinese people. A few days ago I drank tequila (龙舌兰 long2she2lan2) for the first time in this life. I pretty much enjoy living in a real metropolis after 18 years in Koszalin and 2 in Poznań (although I still think that Poznań miasto doznań is everything but exaggerated.) In Chengdu you can ride the metro for 40 minutes and get off at a random station 30 km from where you got on, and the landscape will be more or less the same (apparently, in Chengdu the main difference is that in farther parts of the city, the buildings only have five or so storeys, while downtown they have usually twenty to thirty.)

What bugs me is that I went to China to learn Chinese, at least in theory, and I ended up in a group called 高三, or Advanced 3, which only has classes three days a week. It’s the least classes I’ve had on any level of education, including early grades of elementary school. I already know very well that I’m not going to use my spare time to study extra or in advance, I’d much more probably end up indulging in what the Chinese call 花天酒地的生活 hua1tian1-jiu3di4 de sheng1huo2, literally spend-sky-alcohol-earth life, which is perfectly logical: you spend cash in amounts that go up to the sky, then the alcohol brings you back to earth. There is one guy in our dorms, a living legend, who supposedly spend 4000 kuai in a week, and he claims he doesn’t even remember how he did it.

I have a habit that I developed about a year of spend-sky-alcohol-earth life ago. Every time I go out, I usually have in my backpack a toothbrush and toothpaste. I am particularly pedantic about brushing my teeth in everyday life, and in case I randomly don’t get home in more than 30 hours, I can always brush my teeth in any public bathroom, at the university or at a friend’s place. My father even took this habit a step further when he was around my age: he told me he had used to carry around a spare T-shirt and a pair of underpants. I will definitely miss randomly sleeping at friends’ places in Poznań; I’m not so likely going to end up watching Titanic until 5 a.m. here in Chengdu. So today I was out and felt the need to brush my teeth. I went to the supermarket at Yangguang Plaza and got myself a toothbrush and toothpaste for around 13 kuai. I didn’t feel like taking risks too much, so I went for Colgate (called 高路洁 Gao1lu4jie2,) I chose the green variant of the one with cooling crystals. And guess what? It’s green tea-flavored. I wonder if the blue variant is blue tea-flavored.

My roommate hasn’t showed up for the last week.