"WTF?!" Moments

I’ve had a lot of ideas today for blog entries. This culture and place provide much more material for expression. I’ve had some pretty mind altering experiences here already and yet things continue to baffle me sometimes not day by day, or even hour by hour, but minute by minute.

As I’ve already said, things are massively inconvenient here. But I didn’t even realize the full extent of that statement until I just had the most confounding, unusual and probably unnecessarily long shopping experience that I have ever experienced. It must have taken me at least three hours to visit a store which is one stop away from the subway stop that I live right next to. Let me just break it down for you so we’re on the same page here. Let’s start with my mind state:

I started teaching a week ago at my new job as a preschool classroom teacher. HOLY SHIT. You can fill in the blanks on that one. I’m on my feet all day and these kids are fuckin’ wild. Wild fucking animals.  I think there are probably lots of preschool teachers who could sympathize with that

They’re crazy, but they occasionally do incredibly cute things like one day, at the lunch table, a little girl from another class was sent to our table because she couldn’t behave. She arrived and looked distraught. Noticing this, a four year old boy in my class turned and said “I love you, you so beautiful girl!” That surprised all of us.

 But on the whole, if I had to categorize them, I would say that preschool children are probably the most maximally annoying creatures on the planet. I mean, they are engineered to be as annoying as humanly possible…honestly.

Anyway, I come home after a long ass Friday of that and my feet are killing me. So I decide to go to Carrefore, which is like Costco because I want to get some good imported cheese and beer. This place is dishing out a beating to me and the creature comforts are highly desirable right now. Good beer and cheese are sometimes hard to find in Asia, especially when you’re new to a place. I know I can get it there, so I endeavor to go.  

I went down the subway and back up one station later. The subways here require a lot of walking…a lot more than Taipei at any rate. The subways in Hong Kong are a similar pain in the ass. I had an interesting musical experience while walking down there. There was an ancient and dirty looking Chinese fellow playing this thing near the entrance of the mall. 

He was ratty and so was his instrument. The instrument sounded dry…no resonance. To be honest, the tone quality was pretty terrible. But this guy was just going at it. And musically speaking, the ideas were actually interesting. I had to stop and do a reality for a check for a moment. Cause that guy was there the last time I came from that station.

I went back to have a closer look. It wasn’t clear if his eyes were squinted nearly all the way shut or if he was blind. He had wild white bushes of hair coming from his eyebrows and chin. White hair also emanated from the mole on his face, a style which in Chinese culture is supposed to mean that you are erudite.  The man is either squatting with no seat or on some kind of stool that was no higher than a shoe box. His skin was rough and red. His hands, fingers, and instrument were powdered with the rosin used on his bow. It then occurred to me that this guy sits here all day, every day and plays in that position. That’s pretty amazing. If ever there was a Zen master, it’s that guy.  I gave him 5 RMB and continued on my way.

Now every distance in Beijing, no matter how short, always seems to take wayyy longer than it should to traverse. It takes several causeways and several escalators and stairs until I am at ground level. Then I round the long ass corner and try to cross the street to where Carrefore is.

They have these barriers along the sidewalk and the scooter lane made of white metal loops. It makes it so you really can’t cross the street unless it’s at the intersections. So I had to walk all the way back down the white fence thing to the corner to cross. China doesn’t give people a chance to break its rules and laws.

             For example, the white barriers were also set up at a bus stop, where you had to line up in the little metal frame that was to coincide with the opening bus doors. I personally find that a little bit creepy, but then when you look at the retarded way that Beijingers attempt to board a bus when those barriers are not present, it begins to make more sense. Every day, on my bus to work, the driver has to stand up and yell at morons trying to board the bus in retarded ways to line up and stop shoving and all other kinds of nonsense.

Adding to the inconvinience is the sheer chaos and commotion of walking in public in a city of 25 million people. People are walking in every direction as I dodge rollerbladers in the stone park. There are artists performing outside the subway and in the subway. These people like their music here, and they’re always singing! I was in a restaurant and an employee was showing me to the restroom when suddenly her male coworker breaks out into some Chinese love song that, to her surprise, he sings directly to her face! It was really funny! And he was really singing too…like diaphragm support and everything.

Anyway so back to the stone park, then across the street, to the entrance of carrefore. I ride down one of those slanted conveyer belts which are designed for magnetic cart wheels. This is thing is quite long and I’m standing there for a few minutes. Then, before you can enter Carrefore, you have to go through this little plaza with other shops first. Except one, it’s not a plaza, it’s a mall. And two, it’s not small, it’s huge. It’s like a big ass mall that you have to walk through before you can even enter the place that you came to go to. So I walk through this big ass mall and FINALLY I’m in Carrefore. Let me tell you, this place is panic inducing. 

            Remember how I told you the subways are poorly labeled? So is Carrefore. And even the things that are labeled are in Chiense. So I’m in this massive, two story warehouse amidst an ocean of products and the ebb and flow of the masses. There is just a stupid amount of traffic going through this place. So I’m ducking and dodging, trying to get an idea of what the hell is going on and where stuff is. I go to buy a kitchen knife but I can’t find any.

The only knifes are located in a glass display case under lock and key. I ask an employee  to open the case at which point he says some shit to me in Chinese that I don’t understand. An inconvenient place really is a killer when you don’t understand the language. Usually, in Taiwan, if I don’t understand something, an employee or citizen will step in and translate. In China, everyone just mean mugs you as they impatiently wait for there turn to go.

Anwyay, we use our smart phones to translate and as it turns out, if you want to buy any type of knife in Beijing, you need to register with the police. WTF!? So he asks for my passport and he pages through all the wrong visas first apparently looking for my passport number. He writes it down and I sign some stuff and finally! I am the proud owner of a tiny little kitchen knife! Watch the fuck out China, I’m armed now! But wait! I can’t have the knife till I pay first. Every goddamn thing here is just a pain in the ass!

So he points me to the cash register but it’s located in an area which appears to be closed since all the lights are off. But the counter lights are on and there’s a girl behind the cell phone counter at the register. I’m kind of thinking “WTF?” at this time, “why am I paying for a knife at the cell phone counter?” So I’m not really sure if I’m in the right place or not.

 She takes the slip then says the price again, which I don’t know why but I just didn’t think she was going to say the price at that time so I didn’t understand her. So she had to repeat herself as people are lining up behind me and looking pissed off that they have to wait for this whitey who can’t really speak Chinese. So I go “oh!” and hand her a 100 dollar bill which is all I have at the moment. It’s like paying for a 4 dollar item with a “20” so I guess it’s not the most convenient to change. But this woman is just giving me the “stone face stupid” routine that seems to be a special little Chinese delicacy in these parts.

I think she asked me if I had smaller change. But I don’t understand what she said. So I just say, in Chinese, “what’s the problem?” Then I look around at people to see if they’ll help me out. Crickets… Then she asks me for a credit card, which I know won’t work since Judy tried it last time with a foreign credit card and failed. So I can’t pay her smaller bills or with credit card. So what does she do? She just fucking LOOKS AT ME me like “what do you want me to do about it?”. WTF!!?? I was dumbfounded. So I pulled together what Chinese I know and said, “This is a very large business, and you don’t have money?!” That got a laugh out of her and sort of diffused the situation and for whatever reason it made her dumb ass do something about the problem and ask her manager for some bills or whatever. Jesus~!

So then I go upstairs to the food section. I do my shopping without much ado and begin to make my way out. As I approach the cash registers, every single line is filled with people out into the isles. Fuck me!This place is at full capacity right now and here’s the real gem about this whole situation: In each lane, they have potentially four cash registers that can take people. Of course, there is only one goddamn cash register open in each line. ONE! And everyone got carts just brimming with shit cause it’s wholesale! Fucking ‘A’! So I wait for at least 20 minutes in that line where at least two people tried to straight up cut in front of me without shame like I wouldn’t fucking notice or something.

 

I finally make it to the cash register and there’s no conveyor belt. There is only this little counter, which is obviously inadequate for the needs of the store. So she’s scanning items and takes one of mine out which apparently nobody had put a price tag on. She takes the item and just says “no tag!” and throws it off to the side. WTF!!?? That shit put me over the edge. I lost my temper a little bit. I don’t know if my Chinese made any sense or not. It was inadequate to express the ridiculousness of the situation.

 Essentially I said, “Really? That’s not MY problem, it’s YOUR problem. I only BUY things, I don’t SELL them!” She didn’t really seem to give much of a shit. So I asked if the boss was around. Then she told me there was no boss to which I said “pee lah!” which literally means “fart” but translates to “bullshit”. Then I said “I don’t believe you!” and called her a liar...since she was most certainly full of shit. Bitch! Anyway, I had to just suck it up and let it go.

As I finish this blog entry, it’s now the day after. I’m in my tiny little apartment just happy to not be doing anything. Man this place is exhausting. We had a really bad pollution day this week as well, 450 AQI, during which you literally could not see the sun in sunny weather. It really makes your day a lot crappier when that stuff is going on. And I had to explain to the people at the school that indoor exercise is pointless if you keep letting the doors wide open for all the pollution to come in. I raised hell about it again on the polluted day and the found a bunch of filters for the exercise room. Why do I have to explain these things to people!

It just doesn’t make sense why people aren’t aware of this shit. But yet, one day, my kids were taking too long for snack time. So I was trying to suggest that they might not need to drink a full cup of milk at that time to which I was met with resistance from “the doctor”. The same “doctor” who says nothing when the children are sitting in a room with fucking awful air quality but won’t budge on the one cup of milk. Fucking A! I can’t believe it took me bitching to get air filters in that room. Mind blowing. Anyway, we’ll bear up and deal with it. It’s not all bad.

I still feel like it’s a good thing that I get to have the experience in life of living in China. Chinese culture is very rich and ancient. The food, the music…it’s much different than Taiwan. There’s far more history here. Beijingers are notoriously ignorant and uneducated though and I am beginning to see why. That’s enough for now. I’m coming back to the states in a few weeks to get my visa so it will be nice to be able to breathe for a while. See some of you then!

First I ever saw Pabst black. And in CHINA!

The Beginning of the Beijinging

Back when I first moved to Taiwan, things were pretty rough in the beginning. After a year or so, however, I hit my groove and things became easy. I knew the places to go to get what I wanted, I could communicate with the locals, I had a scooter, an apartment, friends, musical outlets, and even a flag football team.  Now that I’m in Beijing, I’m reminded of how difficult things were at the beginning. Except that Beijing is not nearly as convenient as Taipei. Judy and me are riding out the storm now, but it is trying both of our patience.

            We just found an apartment here in Beijing last week. The apartment hunting process is just exhausting. You call and set an appointment up because you saw a picture ad of an apartment. They then proceed to first show you apartments that nobody else wants. There are some real shit holes here, let me tell you. And when I say shit hole, I literally mean that because in a lot of these places there are only squatters for toilets.

            Then they will tell you that the landlord for the apartment that you wanted to see is not in town and so they can’t show you that one. Then, they will show you a bunch of apartments that are way over your price range. As I said, exhausting. They are also in the habit of only giving you only the answers to the questions that they wish you had asked. For example, if I say I want an apartment “that way”. They will say, “no, it’s over there” and point the opposite direction. At first I thought there was some translation error. But no, they knew perfectly well what I was saying but just only wanted to give me one answer. We’ve now settled down but are still trying to figure out basics like Internet. I’m on my phone internet now. Things are just so hard to get done here. Part of it is just that people don’t know what the hell is going on and part of it is just because the procedures for doing things here is incredibly inefficient.

            Take my work visa, for example. First, we have to apply for permission to apply for a work visa in Beijing. Then after we get that, I have to fly back to America to get it from the Chinese embassy in America, even though I am currently already in China. It makes no sense…it’s just China. Also, all the transactions here are still done by paper and pencil. They don’t have modern cash registers. Everything is done on these old school purple ink printing registers. They don’t even display the price. They all have these big ass calculators that they use to manually add up your tab and show you how much to pay. We had to fill out like 3 forms to return something at Carrefore. It just makes everything take that much longer.

In addition to that, I am beginning to think that every service job in the city is staffed by prepubescent brains on sticks who tend to give Bevis and Butthead style answers to simple questions. Man they are uneducated!  Like today, I wanted to buy some goggles from my gym. I asked him “how much are they?” and he said 8 or 900. You know…it’s just as a customer, you don’t expect these things. The merchant ought to at least know the price of the things he’s selling. Then he called this other guy over (because the three at the front desk didn’t know) and asked him.  The guy said “900” and I had to ask “are you sure”? Becauase just now, you and everyone around you didn’t know how much those were. You’re not exactly inspiring my confidence right now. Especially cause there’s no price listed and you guys could just be trying to jack me.

            And this kind of thing happens all the time. Judy called and placed an order for delivery. They took the order and everything was good. Then they called us back to tell us that the delivery guy had already gone home (40 minutes before closing time) and there was no way they could deliver.

            Today, we had the apartment management come up to clear out a drain. Totally useless! He came in with what looked like a coat hanger and scraped the drain a few times. He then said there’s nothing he can do to fix it because “blah blah blah I’m too lazy.” Then we wanted him to replace the lights and he said that we would have to go buy new lights and then he’ll charge us to install them which is ridiculous because you just screw them in. Thanks for being absolutely no help at all buddy. Why do you have a job again?

            And oh my god, the cab drivers! Like 30% of cabs will just tell you to piss off because they don’t feel like going where you want to go. I’ve never seen anything like it!They just don’t feel like driving that direction so they refuse to take you. Furthermore, they don’t really know where things are. This is partly because Beijing is so big…but in Taipei, all the cab drivers have GPS devices. I haven’t seen one in Beijing so far. And it’s hard to get a cab in general anyway. Taipei is like the convenience capitol of the world. Cabs are just wherever you are at any time and they know how to get around the city. And if they don’t they’ll type it in the GPS!

            Another good example of inefficiency is my job. I suppose you could really say that it's a lack of professionalism and that it's rampant in Asia. They invited me to sign a contract and the woman who was going over the terms with me was someone who's spoken English is less than stellar and who actually can't read in English at all. I mean, it would be a different scenario if no problems had arisen with the signing, but, of course it's China. They didn't even indicate what my salary or working hours would be. I asked and then they gave me a few options to chose from on this convoluted schedule, in which nothing was properly or explicitly explained. We called the CEO in who had offered me the job and it turns out she didn't know the schedule either. So once again, it was like the goggles at the gym…nobody knows anything! I mean when the CEO tells you she doesn't know how much you're getting paid, that's a bit of a "WTF" moment! After all was said and done, it took a total of three meetings and almost five hours to sign the contact.

           Speaking of inconvenience, It really seems sometimes that this city is just built for inconvenience. The subways are very poorly labeled. So you might come out at one subway station and see signs for two exits but no signs for the other two. I think you’re just expected to walk in the direction where those exits are not. Then on the outside, you can only see the exit number if you are under the enclave of the entrance. It’s not posted so that you can see it from across the street or the intersection. As a result, nobody knows how to explain where to meet.  I am constantly getting disoriented with these things.

            All the shopping here is done in malls, of which there are many. But the layouts of the malls can be very confusing. There’s one that I went to try out a gym on the fifth floor. Problem is, once you get to the fourth floor, you have to take the elevator. To which I said “nonsense! Surely there must be some stairs!” Then I spent like 20 minutes looking at the staircases. The first 4 or so I checked only had stairs that went down. It seems that there is only one staircase that goes up to the 5fth floor and it is in the middle of the 4^th floor, not on the ends. But here’s the kicker. If you take the elevator from the first floor to the 5^th, you end up in an entirely different place with some conference room. To get to the right 5^th floor, you have to take this Willy Wonka glass elevator that’s only in the middle of the 4^th floor. WTF!?

            Speaking of stairs, the staircases always reek of smoke from employee smoke breaks. It’s fucking repulsive. People also smoke in the public restrooms. Even the nice ones. So every time I want to pee I have to inhale half a cigarette. Also, as a general rule, restaurants don’t have bathrooms inside. They all have these outdoor shared bathrooms that just get beat to hell and there is never any goddamn soap inside. Man, they are just some other kind of disgusting. I was eating dinner at some fast food place and I couldn’t find soap anywhere to wash up with. I asked the kitchen if they had some and they said “no” which left me wondering “how does the kitchen staff wash up before they cook my food?” As I said, “fucking repulsive. “

            Speaking of things that are fucking repulsive, parents are in the habit of letting their children SHIT IN THE SINK in the public restrooms. Just thought I’d throw that one in there for good measure. I also saw a guy in Beijing airport hawk a loogie onto the clean marble floor. It wasn’t even off to the side, it was like right in the middle of the goddamn airport. Blech!

Beijingers are very nice and friendly and easygoing. But on the flip side of that is the fact that they have no urgency about anything that they do. They take their sweet time doing anything and everything. This is most infuriating when you’re trying to actual get somewhere in public. People just are oblivious. I gather that New York City dwellers have similar things to complain about.

The drivers here are just from a different planet. I have never seen people drive so slowly in my life. I got a ride from a coworker and she literally would slow motion crawl around every turn from work to my place. I’m actually not exaggerating. Picture what comes to mind when I say “slow motion crawl” and that is the exact reality of the way she drove. She then proceeded to drive at about 15 to 20 miles an hour to the destination on a wide-open freeway with no traffic. Mind boggling.

They most annoying thing about drivers in Beijing is the constant honking. I could say that people here honk incessantly without a second thought, but that would imply that there is actually some rational thought involved in the action. People honk unthinkingly here. Now I understand why they have those crossed out bugle signs posted around town. Because Beijing drivers actually have to be told to not press their horns down and hold them because they feel like it in the middle of a residential neighborhood. That’s how mucht they love honking here.

And as I was describing, it’s not just little honks when necessary. It’s like mostly angry honks with some “enraged”  10 second long honks every minute or so. Then you’ve got your “morris code” honks where the driver just busts out a beat on his horn as he cruises through the intersection just to let people know he’s there. In my new apartment, which is blessed to have a main road downstairs, the honking begins around 7:30 AM and doesn’t stop till like 6 or 7 PM.

            Anyway, we’re learning the ropes here the hard way it seems. This is one big, complicated place and it’s going to take time to get things going here. This weekend was a much needed rest from our marathon of activity flying back at night from a wedding in Maylasia to our apartment where we didn’t yet even have pillows to sleep on and going to work early the next day to a brand new job. We are both exhausted and getting fed up with Beijing already. It won’t be a moment too soon when we finally figure out how to live here comfortably.

My new school

Grounds next to the school

More of my new school.

This is the entrance to this incredible ancient style Chinese restaurant/theme park. 

Walking Through a Winter Chemical Fog

At this point, I guess it's kind of cliche to write a post about the pollution in Beijing. It's the first thing everybody who I know told me to watch out for before I came here. The first night I arrived, it was crystal clear. The following day, it was sunny and beautiful. I was thinking, "this isn't so bad!" But sure enough, when it rains, it pours. Or in this case, when it smogs it umm… fogs. 

The pollution is measured in micrometers. For a while, Beijing was only publishing figures on PM 10 (micrometers), making the pollution seem not as bad as it is. The US embassy, however, with it's wee lil' twitter feed, upset the masses by posting info on PM 2.5, which is apparently just as if not even more dangerous than PM 10.

The scale goes from 0-500 micrograms (of pollution) per cubic meter of air. You can check out the scale here:   US Embassy Beijing AQI. It's color coded…Green and Yellow are ok. Anything above that and I feel like I need to wear a mask. Orange isn't so bad, but it's bad enough to irritate me because I have sensitive airways. We wear these souped up 3M masks here which are supposed to be good at filtering PM 2.5. I do believe they work, but you see these masks with extra filters attached to the outside. Those are the ones I want. They are supposed to even be able to block smells…which would be great because there are plenty of nasty smells to go around here.

The pollution was so bad one day (upwards around 700) that it was literally off the charts and the US Embassy had to come up with a new category which they dubbed "crazy bad". Haha. As a result, the US embassy really upset Beijing's citizens because they started demanding that the Chinese government start posting numbers as well on PM 2.5. So I thought that was pretty funny that just from their little itty bitty piece of land where the embassy lies, they upset the masses…the pen, as they say, is mightier than the sword.

Now since I've been here, we've had a few green days and a few yellow ones, but we've also had purple and brown ones a plenty. It seems like the average condition here is "Red", which is "very unhealthy". Right now it's 309 which is "Hazardous". (I downloaded an app for my phone where this little cat wears a mask at red and purple, then at brown his eyes are "x"'ed out. :)) And those green days may have been more of an anomaly than usual. Just recently there was a huge meeting of the "people's congress" in Beijing where all the big wigs were in attendance so I'm sure they shut the factories down for that.

 It is estimated that 300,000 people die prematurely each year in China from air pollution. Very few Beijing locals wear masks and you can see where those figures come from, because this stuff is not to be played with. I've been hearing stories of Beijinger's hacking up and spitting everywhere all the time… and they do. But now I know why. It's cause they're trying to clear all that grime out of their throats. It's actually really sad when you think about it. But they trudge on. My feeling from Beijing people is they are down to earth, very moral and easy to relate to on a human level. I hope things improve for their sake!

We need not fear though because the government has a "war on pollution"! We're all quite familiar with policy "wars" in the US such as the "war on drugs" or the "war on poverty" and their efficacy. It doesn't take a genius to read between the lines on this one. This is one of the actual proposed solutions to the problem: send unmanned drones which spray a chemical into the atmosphere to literally freeze smog and let it fall to the ground. You can't make this stuff up.

Anyway, it's been a roller coaster here for me so far in Beijing. One hour I'm walking around in the smog and cursing Beijing and then the next, I'm chowing down on some exquisite Chinese cuisine in some fantastic restaurant and singing Beijing's praises. When the weather (pollution) is nice, Bejing is a great city! The next entry I'm going to write is going to be on the ubiquity of the police and "the party" here. It's really quite fascinating…unlike anything I've seen before. Xià cì jiàn! (See you next time).

The sun blotted out by pollution (300 on the scale).

View from the hotel.

Flags on a polluted day

Same flags on a clear day

Sloppy Arrives in Beijing!

Welcome to China comrade! Where everything has a cartoon mascot!
This one is from Judy's company (they make cell phones).

View from the 5th ring

Ghost Street

So I started applying for jobs in Beijing. Now Beijing is much more corrupt than Taiwan and there are many more scams. There’s a few different kinds of scams. One, is that they offer you a working visa, then never give you one because they can’t actually get one for you. And if the police come around, you’re in trouble. That brings me to that store about the Taiwanese agent I was telling you about. 
            There’s this company, “Best Learning”. I might as well just put the name down in case any foreigners are looking at that school. They claim to be able to get a Z visa (the only visa you can teach on). Now recently, Beijing has issued a new set of regulations for foreign employees and is cracking down on people working under the wrong visas. I hear tell that Best Learning lost upwards of about twenty foreign teachers in one day! All of them deported for being on the wrong visa. A foreign employee tells it, “there were Chinese police in the school screaming in the foreigners’ faces one day and on the next day, the administration of the school addressed the problem by sending an email out that said “don’t worry, be happy!” Not a word was said about it after that.”

 Now I think they did this not because they couldn’t get the visas, but because they didn’t want to front the cash to get the visa. Slimy. So the agent trying to sell me this job said nothing about this whatsoever. After I researched it and brought it up, he said “ I was really angry with them when they did that visa thing! And I’ve checked in with them now to make sure they are complying!” So of course he didn’t mention the potential downside that the company has a history of loosing its teachers to deportation because they play fast and loose with the visas. It’s not his ass if we get caught anyway. Recruiters…blech! Additionally, this same school offers an “interest free loan” as a salary advance for the first month. They get you to sign the loan paper (all in Chinese) , and then they extort you later with that paper, in which of course, you agreed to all kinds of things you never would if you knew what it said! Oye!

Then there is another scam where the school hires an “agent” with “guan xi” (relationships) to grease the right wheels and then they get you a visa under a different company’s name. The last school I was at in Taiwan actually did this as well but not to me. Of course, it’s at the same risk to the foreign teacher. The difference is, in Taiwan, the police leave you alone. In China, there are cops everywhere and they definitely do not leave you alone. They come around for their “Christmas Presents” every year. And they try to extort you after you’ve applied for your visa since they’ve got your passport. So if you’re really actually doing something illegal, they’ll have a field day with you. I’ve asked the school to provide the required licenses so I can see that they are able to apply for a visa. They give me the run around every time. So I have been advised against that.

One of the most common scams is just to pay you pennies compared to what is normally expected for teaching English in China. They aim that one at recent college graduates and probably do all kinds of other illegal things to them while they are there.

Now the trouble is, even if you do everything 100% legally, you can still get extorted by the immigration police. So I’ve been trying to figure out what is the best job to take. It looks like I’ll take the one who can get me the official visa, but mainly because she has been very honest and upfront about all the scams going on in China. So we’ll see how that goes!

How could this little guy ever do anything nasty?

So now I’ve arrived in Beijing. I had to fly into Hong Kong first to get a tourist visa. It cost me $300 US because I had to get it expedited so I could get over here and start making some money. I have just found out that I will have to do another visa run to Hong Kong to get my work visa. I had to stay overnight in the hotel which was actually very nice. I booked hotel and flight together and got a room at the grand riverside something or other hotel for 100 bucks which is a great price. Man this place was NICE and of course EXPENSIVE.  It’s not really that they were trying to jack you at the hotel (which they were to a normal extent), it’s just that Hong Kong is really super expensive. But damned if that food wasn’t top notch. I think they offered a pretty fair deal given the local economy. That was the first time I’d had Italian food like that in a long, long time. They had Italian, Japanese, American, Thai, Vietnamese. This place was awesome. They carried my bags for me on and off the shuttle and to my room which was great because I had a ton of stuff with me. When I go for my next run, though, I’m going to keep it as cheap as possible!

Anyway, I was back in the airport the next day and the visa thing went off without a hitch. I was on my flight to Beijing around 8 pm. This plane had no individual entertainment though, which was quite disappointing. However, at the duty free before the flight, they were giving out free samples of Jack Daniels, so I just got loaded there for like an hour before the flight and that made me not mind whatever it was they were playing on the shared TV screen. Now since I’ve been in Taiwan, people have been warning me about the behavior of mainlanders. There’s some crazy stuff that these people do (allegedly). Allegedly, they are rude, they push and shove, cut in line, constantly hack up loogies, hold their children over trash cans in restaurants to defecate, let their children pee on the floor of the subway, etc.

Damn, no trumpet playing! I'm in the wrong place!

            When I was on the plane, there were a few children being intolerably loud and the parent was doing nothing about it, at which point I had to say something. She shut her kid up afterwards, so that was nice. But she shoved her way out of the plane after that, which was not so nice. So it is true that they do shove…but it’s not so different from Taiwan. Taiwanese people are far more aggressive when walking and driving. They will cut you off just to cut you off. Just like it’s so routine for them to cut people off, that they just do it in every scenario. I’ve had cabs cut me off in a crosswalk, only to be stopped directly in front of me by a line of traffic. And this happened no less, at the hospital as I was limping in there for my ankle. It’s really infuriating. They have extremely poor driving and walking etiquette. So since I’ve been in Beijing, and granted, it’s only been three days, the drivers and walkers here are much more polite and laid back. More conscientious, if you will.

            They’re cute too. Pretty much every cab I’ve been in, the guy will just start singing some Chinese song while he’s driving. These people are just chillin’. So I can’t say anything bad about Chinese people so far (Beijingers at least) because they’ve been very helpful to me when I’ve been lost. They will go out of their way to help you. So give the mainlanders a break Taiwan! I’ll have to admit though, I was frustrated with some of the hotel employees, but that is more of a matter of adjustment for me I think. And don’t get me wrong, I’ve seen some really ignorant people since I arrived, but it’s more the exception than the rule.

            So Beijing is a massive city. They use simplified Chinese characters here instead of traditional…so I have a better shot at learning to read. The night I got here, the skies where clean and clear and the following day was nice and sunny. That was akin to beginners luck though I think, because for the last two days, the pollution has been at hazardous levels. I have to walk around in the chemical fog with a mask on. It is really bad. The government is beginning to improve this situation though I think. I think it will get much better in the next five years. Not soon enough for me anyhow.
            However backwards their environmental standards are, Beijing itself is on the cusp of new technologies. People drive around on and in electric scooters and cars. In the restaurants, they all have little smart phone coupon things, and the waiters use these wireless keypad things to place your order. They have every imaginable creature comfort here and the food is fantastic. They like things spicy and salty here so me and Beijing food get along just fine! The food is about on average with the cost of food in Taipei, pretty cheap generally speaking. Beijing is a mighty city, and I look forward to exploring it when the pollution clears up!

At this pumpkin themed restaurant, you order by putting food cards on the table.

Hot Pot (Shabu Shabu) cooked in a pumpkin with melon juices inside…that's Judy's coworker btw.

There's the waiter, putting orders in on the remote control pad.

Look closely, there is something quite unusual on the menu at this Mali Mali place.

Pork rice with onions and green peppers, $2.50 BAM!

Restaurant called "Grandma's Home"

They strobe light advertisements on the wall outside the moving train…pretty cool.

This is called Mali Mali, spicy, lots of garlic with a savory sauce. You just put whatever meat and veg you want in there and they steam it…fantastic!

The kids can jump on this…I almost did myself. This is in the mall with the indoor ice skating rink.