Trafficking and some other cool stuff!

Oh man!

Lot of stuff, lot of stuff...

First, I want talk to You about the Beijing traffic. I'm not sure about the statistics, but they say thousands of people die annually in Beijing in traffic accidents. I have not witnessed any accidents, which is quite miraculous considering the way people behave in the traffic; there are just too ****** many people here for it to work in any other way than it does. You see, when someone decides to break the rules, everyone gets pissed off and starts breaking the rules on their own. That way the police is also helpless - there is power in the masses. Policemen merely try to make the best out of it, preventing the traffic from turning into total chaos.

In Wudaokou, particularly the main crossroads, is quite chaotic. There are pedestrians, bikers, scooters, cars, LOTS of buses, MORE taxis, salespersons selling their stuff beside the street and thus occupying the precious space, and everybody tries to get to their destination as fast as possible. That's an unbalanced equation, dysfunctional. The result is some kind of controlled chaos, which, actually, very well depicts the whole country. There are moving objects EVERYWHERE. One had better to just follow the flow of the big masses and you'll do fine.

Another thing that occurred to me on Saturday as I visited alone the Beijing Military Museum was something about China's history. It is filled again and again with unprecedented violence. Which is probably the reason the museum was filled with guns for every fetish plus a very extensive historical depiction of China's most important stuff in the history. It is no wonder that you find this namely in the military museum - such violent history the country has lead. Throughout the history different emperors and tribes have either tried to unify or break up the country, whenever with a whatnot-agenda. And the westerners also in the 19th and 20th century with various wars have had their claws also involved with the Chinese war-waging.

The most impressive exhibition for me was the story of Mao Zedong. I mean, the guy reeeeeeaaaalllly did fight for the country a loooooong time before managing to unify China in a way, the result of which can be seen in concurrent China. No wonder they respect the guy. Zedong and the communist party members were betrayed by the Kuomingtang in 1927ish (Kuomingtang is with more capitalistic agenda) (although I'm not sure how much of this was plain propaganda, of course the communist party was always praised and THEY were betrayed and THEY were on the people's real agenda and everythin...), which resulted in the communist party members fleeing and scattering all over the country, establishing camps everywhere and doing some guerilla warfare tactics to survive. When the Japanese oppression really got bad in 1935 (Japanese started slaughtering Chinese people in China) Kuomingtang and communist party unified their forces to defeat the common foe. After defeating the Japanese Kuomintang (naturally) betrayed the communist party and started the same shit all over. It was not until 1950 that the last of the Kuomintang military forces could be annihilated and the peace and justice was restored throughout the galaxy.

Zedong made lot of books considering how to survive in the oppression and did hell of a lot of job to achieve the communistic way of revolution through violence against the capitalistic upper class. This he did. Unfortunately the man flipped in his later years, which resulted in lot of Chinese corpses. Buut, maybe he considered that to sacrifice some is for the greater good..or then not.

The mid-term examination week is nearing, but I'm not really specifically trying to study for it, because there's enough work as it is with the Chinese. I'm waiting for our exam week's last day, Friday 27th, when Armin Van Buuren is coming to town. I'm def gonna go there!

This weekend was veery nice! On Friday we went with Silja to Beijing acrobatics show, which was amazing! Almost as good as in Shanghai, although the staging, clothes, music, lights (especially the wavy cool lasers) were far more superior than in Shanghai. In Shanghai the content was bettert and far more better group spirit and coreography than in Beijing. The show was in Chaoyang theatre, which was filled with fat westerners. The hightlights of the show was this kind of a...dam, too hard to explain, u better check out the video below. Anyway, the guy was running outside the mousecage, even blind-folded and with a skipping rope, and both times we nearly had a heart-attack with Silja, because the guy was that close to falling, because he started to fumble and got too behind where he was supposed to be. I mean, he was at least 10 meters high without any securing nets under or ropes on him. The guy was quite scared himself, blowing air from his mouth after stopping for applauses. Or then we got hoaxed very well - either way it was amazing how one has such a balance of body and a daring nature. Only in China.

On Saturday I went to see the Beijing Millennium monument and the aforementioned war museum. In the evening it was time to celebrate Antti's birthday.

We began by eating at a local student cafeteria's restaurant side...all kinds of exquisite dishes, duck, chicken, beef, vegetables, everything was (too) plentiful. After that we came to my room to eat some doughnuts and start playing a game called "juomapeli", which was quite hazardous. Leaving Silja to work off her diarrhea related problems, we played the game for some while. After an hour we were quiite wasted. And we and I did stuff I dare not mention here. The people who have played this game get the picture ;). Any hou, after this we headed off to my classmate Lasse's apartment in central Wudaokou. The place was in the 20th floor and the view was amazing, the nightly Wudaokou was cool and the apartment was like some kind of a roof-apartment kind of classy place with floor heating and everything. The place was filled with lot of westerners, most of which probably were studying economics-related stuff. Lot of guys and girls... Having spent there a while we headed off to Helen's Cafe, drank some whisky-cola buckets and one tequila shot (which Nick veery kindly offered [Nick is Silja's Los Angelesian classmate and a very pleasant person in any case]), plus smoked some shisha. I promised to test out the Sanlitun bar district, if one of my classmates, Carolyn (U.S.) would teach me how to dance hip-hop. Reciprocally I would of course teach her how to dance off to some faster beats (4/4 beats). Sanlitun's first try was Vics, which was way too expensive for comfort: 200 kuai in, so we skipped it. Instead, we went to a place across from Vics: Mix - 50 kuai in. It had two dance floor and this splurgy feeling into it. We danced our sweats and feet away with Carolyn for almost 4 hours, at some point stopping to sit down to some table, which was filled with Chivas Regal whisk(e?)y bottles, I don't know but I felt as if I was in some rich people's upper class paateii, sipping some whiskey and mixers, which were completely free for me, and chatting with people. Ruslan and Jani hunt down some chicks, and got their phone numbers *thumbs up*. When the DJ finally winded down with the beats, the clock was something like 6 A.M. We decided to take a taxi and go to Wudaokou to have some breakfast, which Carolyn kindly did offer. We were totally wasted from all the dancing and waited for a while for the breakfast to come. Finally we got some zaofan, ate them and headed off to our own sweet dorms and apartments. When I went to sleep it was 8.30 A.M. on Sunday.

Here I am now, alive and well.

And here's some pics from all the stuff that has been going on, including the Finnish university representatives, who really had came all the way from Finland on an entourage through the major cities in China to tell Chinese students about our beloved universities. It was fun to talk to some puunjalostajat, who were apparently some kind of semi-professional musicians, as the other one played keyboards and the other one sang very powerfully and on tone something about jaloviina. Cool that they did come all the way from Finland to here to speak to us also :).

And yeah, the weather here is all the time about 0 degrees, and some snow is also on the ground, which was nice. I reilly feel like home now, though I'd rather it be something like +20, because as I am notoriously famous for being such a cheapskate, I try not to buy any more clothes, and I really do not have clothes for any colder weathers. We'll see if I freeze to death here...anyway, here's the pictures 'n' stuff:

Randomii

Beijing Acrobatic Show 13.11.2009

Beijing People's Revolutionary Military Museum 14.11.2009

Shame I really documented poorly last night:

Antti 24 14.11.2009

Zai jian!