conquering the "china badittude"

Ok, I admit it… every now and then I have a bad attitude. I get a little cranky, and don’t work that hard to get rid of it. It happens to all of us at some point. However, living in China makes it especially easy to get such a badittude. For the most part, I really do love living here, and I love the people here and the culture and the food, but sometimes… all you can do is raise a fist at the frustrations of daily life.

I think my bad attitude first reared it’s ugly head on Sunday afternoon. This weekend started out so promising! My good friend Alli came in on Saturday, and we had a wonderful chat over Starbucks iced coffees, and then went for a peaceful two-hour stroll around Tsinghua University next door. It was fabulous, being outside on a beautiful day, walking around one of the very few areas in Beijing that has green grass, tree-lined streets, and open spaces. After the walking adventure, we then decided to perpetuate our day of goodness by making a trek across town (and really, getting across town is quite a feat--it took us over an hour via public transportation) to grab some dinner with friends at Pete’s Tex Mex. On our way home, we bought some obviously illegally-copied books from a guy selling them out of the back of his bike on the street for 15 kwai. If there’s one thing that makes me happy, it’s cheap books. All in all, these events made for a great day.

However, Sunday rolls around, and the attitude slowly changes. It started out with a cold shower (very little good comes after a cold shower). Alli and I grabbed a quick breakfast at an old fav down the street, “The Bridge”, and sat on the roof, eating our yogurt and granola in the beautiful sunshine, watching…the subway across the street (so, it’s not so scenic). We then caught a taxi (going the wrong direction, and consequently making us late) to fellowship. After considering a few lunch options, we decided to grab a quickie lunch and head across town to grab tickets for this week’s much anticipated “Good Luck” games. The Good Luck games are a sort of pre-event events for the Olympics (my baseball game a few weeks ago was a “Good Luck” game), and I’m not exactly sure of the purpose of these events, but they’re fun. We were really looking forward to getting some tickets for the Synchronized Swimming event this week; Lindsay is coming to visit (yay!), and I thought it would be fun to take her to an event in the infamous blue Aquatic Cube built for the Olympics. We thought we would just head down to the Cube and get tickets… but obviously, things are never that easy in China. It is quite a hassle to get anywhere, but especially to the Olympic Stadium, because the subway lines that take us there aren’t open yet, and it is a little spendy just to go by taxi… so we trekked over to the subway and crammed into this hot, smelly subway car, rubbing sweaty arms with the people next to us (it was close to 78 degrees F on Sunday). We rode this way for awhile, then had to switch trains, and ride this way for another while. THEN, we had to catch a taxi to the stadium. We arrive around 4:30, hot, sweaty and exasperated by the torturous travel request to get to the actual stadium… only to find that they sold out of tickets by noon. Argh. Apparently, they are selling 300 tickets a day, for five days, to be bought only at this inconvenient location. Everything is harder in China. So, we left the stadium, hot, sweaty and defeated…our bad attitudes oozing out of our pores. I was ready to give up on the “Good Luck” games, but… I would not be defeated by China.

So yesterday, we re-made the stupid long trek and got our tickets. Victory.

It is just another example of how life in China is consistently inconsistent. Ahhhh.