World Expo Shanghai

Final Post

I hope you enjoyed the China blog. My last post is the captions in my photo album posted on my homepage.

Getting Things Done in China

As I wrap up with my final week in China my goal is to publish this and one more wrap-up post.

Today's post is about "getting things done" in China. And no, I'm not referring to one of my favorite books by David Allen. I'm referring to the strange dichotomy in China between feeling like you are under close government control at all times but also the common everyday flouting of laws that occurs. 

1. Pirated Goods

It's fairly common knowledge in the US that pirated DVDs can be purchased easily in China. I recently experienced this after my purchase of the first season of Gossip Girl (yes, save the criticism of this DVD choice for the moment). After taking the box off the shelf in the store I shook it and heard nothing inside. When I took it up to the counter, the store manager went to a back cupboard and rifled through what looked like her own personal collection of DVDs in pink plastic sleeves and handed me the actual discs separate from the box itself. What should have cost something around 200 kuai (30 dollars) ended up being 40 kuai (6 dollars). And I think I got the special "expat price" (probably double what they'd quote a local Chinese person).

What surprised me though is that not only are DVDs and clothes pirated but the business has extended to alcohol! When going into a club one night I observed a rather large container being filled with 48 empty Grey Goose vodka bottles. The pirates apparently fill these with cheaper vodka and then try to resell them. The alcohol makers try to combat this by putting seals and stickers on their bottles but ofcourse these are quickly pirated as well.

It's an interesting question about why these practices flourish in China but not the US. One might think lack of enforcement but I'd bet the root cause is lower overall wages and living costs making pirating profitable compared to the US where it wouldn't cover living expenses.

2. The Black Audis

Government comes hand in hand with corruption and things are no different here in China. However, unlike the US there is one small part of government power flaunted on a regular basis each day on the streets of Beijing.

Audi at some point must have brokered an extremely large contract with the Communist Party in China, as all of the local government officials drive around the exact same model and color black Audi. They have police-like red and blue lights mounted internally.

What's interesting though is that you regularly see these black Audis turn on their lights to make illegal U-turns, get through rush hour traffic, or parked illegally on the sidewalk next to nice restaurants. 

3. National Day of Mourning

Last Wednesday China declared a national day of mourning for those that died in the earthquake in Qinghai Province. The usual US practice of flying flags at half-mast was practiced. But a few additional more unusual measures were also taken.

The local YouTube competitor in China is named Tudou (amusingly "potato" in Chinese, like "couch potato"). Performing searches for popular music or television shows resulted in the search failing with a big message about the earthquake and the national day of mourning. Apparently mourning involves not listening to your favorite song and not getting a choice about it.

Furthermore, "officially," bars and clubs were supposed to be closed for the day of mourning. There is a popular strip of clubs along the west side of the Workers Stadium (Gongti Xi) that we had not yet visited. We found the street that is usually filled with bright flashing multi-colored lights completely dark and empty. However, one or two of the clubs located off the main street, set in by a half-block were proudly displaying their open doors and ignoring the rules about the day of mourning.

We were set, however, on a particular club called Coco Banana on the main drag. We walked by and it too had its lights off. Mysteriously though we still heard a rumble of bass music coming through the front doors which were closed with no lights on. We pulled on the doors and found them open but a bouncer quickly rushed forward and shooed us away letting forth a string of Chinese which luckily a member of our group translated...

...it turned out to be instructions to turn around and turn right at the corner of the club. Down the alley past the dumpsters and around another corner we found the back entrance of the club wide open and busy with clubbers going in and out. National day of mourning in China dictates you close your club? No way. Just turn off the front lights and direct people around back.

This is how you get things done in China.

Funny chingrish of the day

Live Blogging China Night Train

I'm currently in my cabin getting ready to sleep on a night train from
Beijing to Pingyao. Four new friends, Ow and I decided to spend this 3
day weekend in a city that is famous to us from the movie "Raise the
Red Latern." Other Chinese have told me that it's not that great of a
place to go due to its province's reputation as a coal industrial area.

The highlight of the ride besides for hanging out with our new friends
was talking to the family of three sharing our cabin. They had the
cutest little 8 year old girl who practiced her English on me while I
practiced my Chinese on her.

She asked if I spoke Chinese, and I said in reply "Yi, er, san, si, wo."

She giggled and then said "Liu chi ba" continuing my count from one to
five.

My Chinese Tutor

My blog has recently taken a bit of, how should I say, "flack" for not being updated in a while and being too similar to Ow's in content of posts. I will remedy one problem here while further exacerbating the other.

Let me tell you about my experience learning Mandarin. It has been quite different than Ow's especially given that I am white and really have no expectation by others that I will speak even a tiny bit. This luckily gets me lots of praise and smiles when I'm able to utter just the smallest phrases. A few "hen hao's" and "ni hen piao liang" have gotten me very far.

My Chinese instruction has come largely from a tutor that my company has been generous enough to hire for 5 hours a week. Growing up, French was always my least favorite subject and I expected to dislike my Chinese classes but I've actually enjoyed them so far as a nice break in the middle of the day from work - and largely due to my entertaining, and somewhat flirty, tutor. These are the engineers at my table at my office.

I first knew something was up with my tutor when we started to learn how to ask "where did you go." In our questions, sometimes we will role play asking about each other's sisters and brothers even though she has none and I only have sisters. But other times we give real answers to questions, so there is always this strange blurry line when we're not quite sure whether we're being serious.  For example, I asked my tutor where she went on Friday night. She replied "to the gym." Serious? Just helping me with vocabulary? Her response was accompanied with the famous "asian crying eyes" pose:

I believe this was trying to imply that she wished she had someone to go out with on Friday, but I wasn't sure. However, the next tutoring session took things further.

"Where did you go" was somewhere around chapter 3 in our book. I flipped ahead to Chapter 4 and noticed that the words for "friends", "wife/husband", and "boyfriend/girlfriend" were coming up. Oh boy.

This next lesson she said "Time to practice, suppose." and then in Chinese "Where are you from?"

"America." My real answer, obviously.

"Where is your girlfriend from?"

Having none, I said, "My girlfriend is from France."

"Where is your wife from?"

Trying to practice the name of the country that I am in, I said "My wife is from China." Lots of laugher by my tutor.

"Now we switch." She said.

I asked, "Where is your sister from?" knowing she had none. One child policy in China.

"I have no sisters. But suppose, my sister is from China."

"Where is your brother from?"

"My brother is from Germany." Mutual laughter.

"Where is your boyfriend from?" Upon this question, silence. My tutor gets out her pen and starts drawing on a sheet of paper. The drawing appears to be a picture of the planet Saturn. She then proceeds to teach me the word for Saturn in Chinese. Finally, she draws an alien complete with antennas and says that her boyfriend is an alien from Saturn. Then again, this pose (thanks asianposes.com):

It gets worse.

Normally, she writes down words on the fly onto a sheet of paper as we are learning, as if writing on a chalk board. But I came into my following Wednesday lesson with a particular sentence already written on paper. It was the sentence for "My phone number is XXX-XXXX-XXXX." It contained her real phone number. We practiced the usual Q & A routine and strangely didn't reference the usual textbook during this lesson. I thought that was a bit strange so afterwards I looked at the book.

The good news: the book does indeed go over how to ask for someone's phone number in Chapter 11. The bad news: we hadn't yet passed Chapter 5.

And then finally today, things started to get very blatant. Somewhere around Chapter 7 in talking about what to eat and drink I excitedly learned how to say "beef noodles", "niu rou mian", one of my favorite Chinese dishes. I tell her how much I like beef noodles and that's really the only food vocabulary word I need to learn how to say. Laughter. Then, the usual Q & A exchange.

She says, "Time to practice, suppose. What do you eat?"

"I eat beef noodles."

"What does your wife drink?"

"My wife drinks beer." Ha ha ha.

"What does your girlfriend drink?"

"My girlfriend drinks bei jiu." Bei jiu is an extremely strong Chinese liquor. More mutual laughter.

"OK, now we switch."

"What does your sister eat?"

"My sister eats carrots." She replied.

"What does your boyfriend eat?"

She replies, first in English "Oh, you are getting back at me." Then in Chinese, "My boyfriend eats... niu rou mian."

Funny Chinglish of the Day

My friend Peng said it'ssupposed to refer to recycling.

20 million people small

A comment a friend made last night at dinner that really holds true about Beijing. She said, "In Beijing among expats it's easy to meet people because no one really has 'their group.' No one wants to be alone in Beijing." She remembered later that she had started to quote part of this song. 

This past Saturday I went on an all day hike at the Great Wall with Ow and friends from my office, Xiao Dai (QQ), Henry, and QQ's friend JiJi. The hike involved getting up at 7:30am and finding food and water which we were supposed to have purchased the day before while making everyone on the bus wait. Whoops! We then boarded a bus that wound through the mountains up to the wall so quickly that multiple people vomited in the aisle. Yikes. Luckily things got better when we had a beautiful view from the wall with no tourists since we took a completely "hiking trail way" up.

Despite this all day intensive hike, however, we still decided to go out to a club called Latte. The club has a cool 1920s + steam punk decor to it. When you come in, you see a small hotel-like lobby with tiny decorations on the walls and red couches. Then, as you enter the club there is a giant boiler-room machine complete with spinning propellors and pipes. The dance floor itself is tiny and entirely up on a 4 foot high platform so everyone sitting around at tables can watch you dance. It gives you a bit of that "stage fright" experience that adds to the fun.

Sure enough though at the club we ran into a native Chinese friend we had made earlier in the trip. He was the best friend of another native Chinese girl I had met at my apartment the first night when I couldn't figure out how to open the door to my studio and we had all had dinner together earlier in the week.

This trend of running into people I knew only continued for the next few days. On the way to work Monday I saw someone we had met for the first time at the club on Saturday and briefly said hello because I was running late. And finally at dinner that night, Mo and Hanna introduced us to some of their friends and it turned out they knew the girlfriend of the founder of the company I'm working at.

Anyways - amazing how after being here for only 3 weeks and I'm already running into folks on the street I know.

Live from the Great Wall

Amazingly Ow and I woke up at 7am today for a Great Wall hike. We are
now literally ON the wall with Internet access and eating lunch. Too
bad this email will go through a second Great "Firewall" on it's way
to my blog.

Propoganda with Fu Fei

Tonight I am live blogging from Propoganda with Jean's cousin Fu Fei!

Arrival in Beijing - It's the Small Things

I've been in Beijing now for 2 weeks and am obviously a bit behind in my blogging. It's been a great time so far and I've started to adjust and feel at home. In the past weeks I've celebrated the end of Chinese New Year, gotten two massages, visited the Bird's Nest, walked by the "Harvard and MIT of Beijing" in Haidian, and ofcourse started work.

I'd like to share though a few notes about some of the small things that have taken a bit of getting used you that you might not come across in your travel book or even vacation trip in China:

1. Google is the new Napster
Remember Napster? Well it's now called Google. It turns out Google offers a popular free music streaming service on google.cn that is blocked to non-Chinese IPs. This is apparently to compete with Baidu and I'm not sure exactly how legal it is. But given that piracy is so rampant over here - no one rents DVDs when they're less than a dollar to buy - I'm not too surprised. Eat your heart out RIAA.

2. Going Which Way?
In my first 24 hours, I found it interesting observing myself and learning what a person's most basic needs are in a place completely foreign to them - above the classic food, shelter, clothes sort of stuff. It turns out that communication (phone, language, internet) and a map come pretty high on the top of the list.

I learned the hard way on the first day though that the street signs here hang on a different side of an intersection than the US. So if you're approaching an intersection in the US there are signs facing you marking the perpendicular street. But here the signs facing you mark the street you are already on. Watch out for this when navigating on the first day!

3. The Toothpaste Tastes Different
My studio was supposed to be "fully furnished" and sure enough it came with all the bare essentials. Including Chinese toothpaste, still made by Proctor and Gamble under the Crest brand. It, however, was "Chinese flavor." And strangest of all, this flavor to me tasted like the tapioca pearls in pearl milk tea. I plan to buy new toothpaste soon because I don't like the taste much but haven't gotten around to it yet, so every morning I leave my studio tasting pearl milk tea.

4. Cell Phone Messages from Mao
I signed up for a cell phone plan the second day I arrived. It turns out to be a whopping $8/month (hear the sarcasm). Unfortunately, it also comes with CONSTANT spam. Every time I send a txt message, which turns out to be extremely common here as since there's no voicemail (a much better system than the US in my opinion), I get a piece of spam sent right back to my phone 10 seconds later. In Chinese.

I've occasionally asked those around me to translate and some of them are news announcements, scores about a popular sporting match, and other random bits of info. One time though, I showed my phone to my co-worker and he burst out laughing. Apparently I got a piece of spam that said, "Mao says you should live a long and healthy life." Or something like that. Yes, Mao is sending me txts from the grave.

That's all for now but I've setup e-mail posting to my blog so hopefully I'll get in a habit of putting more up.

Funny "Engrish" of the Day

Leaving for Beijing

I've always wanted to try living overseas for some period of time and got the opportunity recently with a job offer in Beijing. I'll be working for two months for a startup named Seravia with some fellow ex-Googler and Stanford alums.

A few people said I should blog while traveling so here goes the first entry. I want to try and balance it between a journal of what I'm up to and tidbits that are actually interesting to read.

My first mini story involves packing for the trip. It was somewhat difficult packing for two months. How do you decide what to bring and not to bring? It's longer than a vacation so you need more than just clothes, but it's not a permanent move either. I ended up filling two of my giant "storage" duffel bags. These things are huge: they're what I've used in the past when I've changed apartments to move all my clothes. I can fit everything in my closet and dresser into three of them and I decided to bring two on the trip.

I had been warned that oversize bags on United get charged $200 each (!) and so with a potential penalty of up to $400 on a roughly $1200 ticket I nervously approached the ticket counter. I had researched the dimensions online and even weighed my bags on my bathroom scale (with me holding it, subtracting my own weight ofcourse). The limits are measured in pounds and linear inches (the sum of all inches of the dimension of your bag). After checking the manufacturer website of my duffel bags I discovered that both I had planned to use were longer than the restrictions. Great. An additional 400 bucks.

After some research, I found that they're more particular about weight so I made sure I was well under and the bags were not fully packed. It was also suggested on FlyerTalk that you casually try to distract the ticketing agent with questions about the flight so they didn't look at the size of your bag as carefully.

I stepped up to the United desk and the agent began to eye my bags. I was traveling on a code share ticket via Air China and when the machine failed to bring up my reservation he pointed in the direction of the Air China desk. I corrected him saying I was supposed to check in with the operating carrier and he reluctantly took my documents. He told me to go ahead and put my bags on the scale "because for those we'll need to do a weight check."

My first bag weighed in a 30 lbs and the second was at 48.2! Whew - the limit is 50. Before he had a chance to remark on the size I snuck in a (genuine) compliment, "Wow, I'm impressed. These lines are pretty short. Last time I traveled international it was much longer." He chucked and checked my bags without issue.

I'm off to Beijing.

(turns out I mistakenly took a picture of the plane next to mine... whoops)