according to my mandarin teacher, destiny - or mine at least -, fits in a tiny little post-it. and it is easy to predict: my birth date and time, some page flipping on some mysterious book, and there it is, my faith on a piece of paper.
and of course, a big part of chinese people believe in all that, but who can blame them? americans invented the fortune cookie and the world still believes they are chinese, so in the end who’s the folk story believer?
we live in a 31st floor. on a good day, the elevator takes a full minute to get up here. but that’s when it doesn’t stop every other floor, so in average it takes a lot more than that. and of course, this goes at least twice a day.
it could be quite a waste of time, but then we have a view over shanghai skyline that makes up for all those lost minutes.
photo by her.
it’s 6am. the sun is out and about for one hour and outside it’s already 30°c. down in the park i can see a bunch of old timers doing tai chi or playing badminton. and on the streets, streams of bikes and scooters ride in every direction.
yesterday she said that sometimes it’s still hard to believe we are in china. sometimes it’s not. :)
despite we are both having mandarin classes, none of us dares yet to speak it: even the very basics take a long time to grasp; and, since in general chinese people don’t have any english skills at all, we haven’t been talking much with locals here.
having said that, i would like to announce that yesterday we were able to communicate with one chinese couple we met in the elevator. in dutch.
ding-dong, ding-dong. said the intercom for the first time since we moved in.
- hello?
- wai?
- hello?, i repeated.
- do you… speak… mandarin?
- ah, no.
- ah, are you from… ah… pu tao ya*?
- hum?! erm, yes!
- i am police man. i want to see you.
i press the button to open the door downstairs and i raise an eyebrow while i put down the intercom. a police man? and he wants to see me? at 9.30pm? did i break any serious chinese law without being aware of?
18 floors after, he appears. very skinny and young, in a blue uniform, carrying a shy smile on his face and some papers on his hands. takes off his shoes at the doorstep despite our invitation to come in with them. his eyes always set on the papers.
- are you this?, he asks me pointing my name on the papers regarding the mandatory police registration i filled some days before.
- yes? is there any problem?
- no! no! no problem! i’m in charge of you, he explained.
- oh?
- can i see your passport? oh, and this number no work, pointing to my phone number on his papers.
we offered him a seat and a few quick questions later he jumps back into his shoes and leaves, even shyer than he arrived.
we closed the door and waited a few seconds for someone to come out and say ‘smile, you are in candid camera‘. or anything. but no.
so, now we have someone in charge of us.
* pu tao ya, is chinese for ‘portugal’
“Dá um mergulho no mar
Dá um mergulho sem olhar para trás
Dá um salto no ar
Só para veres do que és capaz
Arrisca mais uma vez
Nem que seja só por arriscar
Nunca se tem muito a perder
Dá um mergulho no mar
Há tantas coisas por fazer
E tantas por inventar
Dá um mergulho no mar
E tu vais ver
Tu vais jogar
Tu vais perder
Tu vais tentar
Mais uma vez
E tu vais ver
E tu vais rir
Tu vais ganhar
Tens pouco tempo para ser só teu
Não esperes nem deixes passar
Essa vontade que quer
Dar um mergulho no mar”
dá um mergulho no mar, xutos & pontapés
for those who don’t keep an eye on my synapse bar on the right side, i’ve been working on this last months on relocating to shanghai. after my abroad experiences in the netherlands and in the united states, the obvious step is… asia: my mom and i don’t exactly agree on this detail though.
holding hands with my special one, we’ll be flying this weekend to the largest chinese city. besides the new jobs, a cryptic language, new foods, new habits, a whole new culture waits for us. that and a city that has almost twice as much population as our home country.
perhaps because the cultural chock will be bigger than ever, this time there wont be an upper bound on the period i’ll be there. more importantly maybe, there is a lower one: 1-2 years. this should not only put things in the right perspective, but also be enough to properly evaluate this step and not make decisions on first impressions.
i’m going there to explore and to learn, to grow.
it’s so easy to classify something as strange. or odd. nothing is wrong with the act itself, but i’ve learned through time, that strange is most of the times, simply different. and that’s not the same. specially, when you are in a different country.
please don’t mistake me: i’m not about to explain the way the world works or anything. actually, the concept is very simple, i believe. but if it’s not obvious for you, bare with me a bit more.
from the couple of long term abroad experiences i had, it has become more clear to me that when one arrives to a different country he immediately goes through the this-is-strange phase. everything out of ordinary is strange. an uncommon habit, strange. an exotic food, strange. a weird bloke, strange. even the laws can be strange. it takes a while for one to realize that strange is frequently a strong and inadequate word. some never don’t.
go to a country with a closed mind, and everything will look strange, awkward if not offending. but if one does some effort to learn the why’s and how’s, the this-is-strange phase will slowly shift over the time to a this-is-different phase. and that’s when you can take the best out of that experience.
don’t mistake what i’m trying to explain with simply getting used to what is initially weird. it’s more than that actually. i believe that most of the times, it’s the tiny little bits of how a society works that explains it. all the unwritten rules, all the nuances that make a country more or less different than all the others, all the things that the unwary tourist doesn’t know about. it takes time to fully understand a different society or culture and it’s something one can hardly learn only from books. you really have to see it from close and sometimes, live it yourself.
to sum up, there will always be goods, bads and different points of view in each society and it’s up to us to take the best out of that. i believe that by understanding those differences, one has the best opportunity to question himself about some false dogmas and prejudices in himself or around the world and to learn from that. i truly believe that this makes us better persons.
