Because Golze Called Me Out...

Since Golze called me out, I have decided to create a new post. As there is not much going on in my life right now other than trying to get some trabajo. I have not had much to write about, so I decided to create a movie with pictures from my new apartment. An apartment that has been a constant pain in the tuckus.

I am trying out some new system to try to email blog post to the blog because the Chinese government is blocking almost everything google right now. I can't even get to my google photos, stupid hackers. Anyway, enjoy the movie if you can see it. I am skeptical of this emailing method.

slow times

actually it's anything but, but i've just moved and have no internet set up in my new place, so sorry posting has been a bit scarce. also apologies to several people who have sent some e-mails recently that i have yet to respond to. hopefully this weekend i'll get things up and running and back up to speed.

 

durrell, however, has no such excuses. i suggest everybody e-mail him demanding more posts.

Nothing Feels More Satisfying Than A Good Caulk

(post from durrell)

Warning! The content of this blog post is only suitable for immature high schoolers.

Recently, I have moved into a new apartment (pictures to come) and I have discovered that the base of my toilet was leaking. There seemed to be small holes at the base, where the original caulk was not filling them. Having no personal experience with caulk, I had my MCIA friend help me with the caulk job. Apparently, in the past he liked to put caulk in the mouth of mice (I guess in Mongolia that is how you create bouncy balls). After going to our local market to buy a caulk shaft and a gun, we did some prep work before caulking up the holes. Before inserting our caulk in to the holes, I had to give the tip of the caulk shaft a quick bris, once that was done we were ready. As you can see from the picture, it gotta little messy, caulk got every. It seems putting caulk on a toilet is not the same as putting caulk in a mouse's mouth. All in all, I think for my first caulk experience, I did a good job. Also in the bonus picture, I put caulk on a pipe for my washing machine.

On a slightly less immature note, I noticed two things while shopping for stuff recently. The amount of Chinese words I know for stuff has diminished by a good 20%, for example, I had no idea how to say caulk or use words to describe it. I am really going to have start improving my Chinese again just to do ordinary task. The second thing I noticed is that Chinese people when shopping for groceries at the local supermarket tend to not load up huge shopping carts like in the states. If they were shopping in the states everyone of them could hit the express line. I don't know if this is an example of the United States over consumption mentality or Chinese frugality or both.

And another thing I have noticed since being here is that I do not know how to cross the street anymore. I swear that I have been almost hit by a car at least 7 times sense the two weeks I have been back. I keep forgetting just because cars have a red light and I have a green walking mean, that doesn't mean they are going to stop to let you cross. There is a population problem here and pedestrians will be the first to go.

clearing snow, beijing style

shovels into front loader into garbage truck. this is a fairly advanced operation for beijing. elsewhere snow is shoveled into flatbed trucks and then dumped into open manhole covers. sometimes it is just swept with brooms into large piles.

Happy Anniversary and Welcome back Me

(the following is posted on behalf of durrell, through my proxy at work. all spelling mistakes have been left intact. -b)

After about five months away from China, I have decide to come back. Mainly because there was no trabajo for me in the US (I didn't actually look for work but fthe US media assured me there were no more jobs and I trust whatever they have to say), thus, I decided I would go to the place where people are stealing all the American jobs and contribute to the economic shift of China and supposed decline of the United States. So far I still have no trabajo, so if someone who reads this blog wants to give me a trabajo just leave a comment (will work for dumplings). The other reason I decided to return is because I wanted to celebrate five years of being in China....on the internet. It has been five years to the day that HSCCWRT has been on the information gatherer. So for this honorary blog post, I have decided to tell you in exciting bullet point form the top ten things that I have noticed have changed since we first got here (and yes it is in order, and by order, I mean the order I thought them up just now):

- We are no longer students living in China, now we are beer brewing experts.

- Clark is no longer with us (He has been dead to this blog for a while now) and has been replaced by his brother.

- Beijing doesn't look like a giant Chinatown anymore, it looks like any other city in the world with more people.

- There probably are twice as many skyscrapers than when we first arrived.

- Golze hates any New York Times fluff piece about working and/or living in China (Maybe that hasn't changed).

- My Chinese is worse than when I first arrived. Golze's is somehow better.

- According to Golze there are more cars and its cleaner, the latter of which is debatable as I am fairly certain I have the black lung from being here.

- The price of Chinese food is crazy high, it cost like 10kuai for a meal when it used to cost about 8kuai. Inflation sucks.

- The amount of places where you can get 盖饭 seems to be diminishing, but that could be because we live in the eastern part of the city.

- And finally the last thing I can think up for ten is....there are a lot more foreigners or what Golze calls white people taking potential job opportunities away from me.

Hopefully, in another five years we will be making this list for you all again, but probably from America and getting all our information from the US media. I hope this has been a enjoyable five years for you loyal readers. Happy New Year to you all.

more snow in beijing

it dumped on beijing all this weekend, especially hard today, adding about another foot of snow to some 6-8 inches from saturday. in the afternoon turner and i headed out and trekked over to jingshan park, behind the forbidden city. there were lots of people there as you could see the forbidden city covered in snow, but the streets were nice and quiet. here is a picture across the moat to the northeast corner of the forbidden city.

interestingly, i was going to post about how, starting on 1 january, everybody's favourite free proxy software stopped working, which would have meant it would once again be quite difficult to post to the blog. but all of a sudden tonight i can access the blog without any sort of reach-around software. even youtube is accessible. no idea how long it will last, but hopefully for a while. fingers crossed.

when dreams come true

i took this friday off to use up the last of my use-it-or-lose-it vacation days before the end of the year, and so charley, who has every day off, and i went out to happy valley, an actually pretty legit if small amusement park in beijing. the idea was that there would be no lines on a weekday in december, and we turned out to be right, especially since on friday the high was something like -3 degrees celsius. unfortunately, unlike many places in china the park is not run by idiots, so about half the rides were closed for the seemingly quite slow winter season. fortunately, however, the best ride in the park, and actually one of the best rides i've ever been on anywhere, was open.

because the english in the above link is less than clear, let me break the ride down for you. basically you sit on the outside of this big wheel, which starts to swing like a pendulum, eventually at the peak of the ride breaking the 180 degree plane with the fulcrum and swinging back and forth pretty damn fast. but the best part is that at the same time the wheel itself spins around in a circle. the whole thing lasts for about a minute i think. it's hard to focus while on the ride.

however, after taking this ride several times in a row, we made an important discovery: waiting in line might actually be a good thing. i'm not normally one to be bothered by roller coasters and the like but going on something like this over and over without stopping makes you sick pretty fast. after only three hours we basically stumbled out of the park and collapsed back at home. still, i'd say we definitely got our money's worth.

second hand love

getting my own car here in china has long been something i've kinda wanted to do. there are lots of places in the mountains around the city that are nearly impossible to get to by public transit that are nice to visit, have good hiking, etc. also taking a road trip across China is something that every expat toys with but none actually do. however, one of the reasons that i have not bought a car despite having my license is that a second hand market for cars is nearly non-existent. there are apparently two large second hand markets in the city, but there are no guarantees against getting a lemon, and prices are still quite expensive. along those same lines, i can't be sure that i'll be able to sell the car for a reasonable price once i decide to move on.

i present the below as evidence on the lack of a real second hand market for cars in beijing. it's actually been parking outside my office for a while but i haven't taken a picture of it to avoid making it look like i in any way endorse this sort of ridiculousness. i can just see them trying to trade this thing in in five years' time. "what do you mean nobody wants to buy a two-door honda with garfield professionally airbrushed all over four sides?"

at least it beats a hand painted tribute to the tv show "prison break" that takes up the entire side of the car. and yes, that is something that i have actually seen.

91.9% of the population can't be wrong

tonight in the little corner store one of the ladies from the neighborhood said that i look like marx and engles, due to the winter beard that i've kept since my trip to taiwan. the beard initially brought on a fair amount of ribbing from people at work (i like to believe because they're all jealous that they can't grow one), but they've since gotten used to it. though at least i was never called a terrorist at work, which is what one cabbie alluded to when asked to guess where i was from (definitely not the states, cause people from there don't have beards, according to him).

along the same lines, we got the e-mail invitation to our annual chinese new year party this week, which continues to tread on the border of stuff that could get you sued in the states. one would think that a year in which race riots killed hundreds in xinjiang would not be a good time to have the theme of the party be "china's minorities," but then again our hr department is not exactly known for it's cultural sensitivity. (this is the same group that, at our annual retreat, organised the self-appointed "hot girls" in the office to do a "fashion show," which basically consisted of them walking a cat-walk in incredibly scanty outfits. i remember turning to my filipino friend and saying "i'm never going to see anything like this again in my life." she agreed.) the costume theme at the party this year is "international style" or something, which basically means dress up like the stereotype of some ethnic group. the invitation literally has these two pictures as part of the design.

i'm not really sure how to feel about this kind of stuff. i mean, i'm not personally offended by any of these choices or images, nor am i particularly a fan of obsessive political correctness. but i think it just makes me mad that there is clearly no effort to even consider how these things might be disrespectful. i'm not sure if diversity is a prerequisite to change these kinds of attitudes, but if it is i'm not really hopeful for any sort of progression on this front in china.

in other news, i'm just about finished with an excellent book on china, "400 million customers" by carl crow. written by an american in the late 1930s, probably the only book about business in china worth reading, though i recommend you pick up the 2008 version published by the china economic review. not unlike durrell's blog posts, the 2003 version is riddled with typos.

the "s" is silent

just got back from a great 10-day trip to laos with the 'rents. beautiful, warm, relaxing. no turkey for thanksgiving, even though we saw a bunch running around (introduced by USAID, now mostly feral). don't really have time to write it up now, but might do so in the future. no promises though, seeing as how spotty i've been at posting lately. in the meantime, here's a taste:

full album can be found here.

asian baseball tour 2009: taiwan!

so back to my promised posts about taiwan. one of my main goals for my trip was to see a baseball game, something which i did on my third night but had almost forgotten about when i left. by the end of the trip, when people asked what i did on the west coast, i had to think pretty hard for something besides walk around night markets and drink milk tea.

but yes! i saw the uni-president 7-11 lions (hereafter 7-11) take on the sinon bulls of the chinese professional baseball league in taichung. like in korea, major corporations own the baseball teams, but unlike in korea, they have no home stadiums. instead the four teams travel all over the island playing games. the taichung stadium was pretty decent, much smaller than the one in korea but substantially larger and well-kept than the tianjin stadium. it probably compares to an older AAA stadium in the states.

the crowd was fairly small, probably because it was a tuesday night and there was a light drizzle for the first part of the game. nevertheless they seemed really into it, pumped up by what appeared to be professional cheering teams (you can see the 7-11 side below). it's unclear actually how much of the crowd was actual crowd, and how much was the cheer squad. nevertheless, things felt fairly professional. they even played a series of american classic rock covers throughout the game, with words changed (in chinese) to relate to baseball. for example, the eponymous chorus of highway to hell was replaced with "aishang bangqiu," which basically means "to fall in love with baseball" or kinda "to be crazy about baseball (in a loving way)." the first translation is easier.

anyway, i actually left the game at the top of the 9th because i was getting really hungry (no concessions in the cheap seats), but by that point sinon was crushing 7-11 12-1, so i don't think i missed much in the last inning.

snow in beijing!

tis quite beautiful outside. only problem is now it's ball-freezing cold and they don't turn the heat on for another two weeks.

another life-changing post about my plant

excuse my brief diversion from taiwan pictures, but i know how popular posts about my plant are. i just wanted everyone to know that the thing is blooming like crazy, not only is it only the second time it's bloomed in nine months, but there are more flowers than i've ever seen on it. there are so many flowers they're falling to the floor! it's like springtime for hitler in here!

but seriously, despite being very small these guys are super fragrant. it's actually a little suffocating close to the plant. but nice to know i can actually nurture life out of something.

how to succeed in free, democratic, progressive china

the typhoon ended up being quite disappointing, though to be fair, i guess when it finally "hit" taiwan, it was only a tropical storm. what we got out of it was two days of solid rain, which in itself is impressive. i've never seen it rain so hard for so long. nevertheless, for something that royally screwed up many of my plans for the trip, i was a little let down. i didn't even get to say "batten down the hatches!"

though i guess it did have its upside. by the time it was clear when the storm was going to hit the island, i was already ensconced in an excellent hostel in hualien, a city on the scenic east coast of taiwan. because pretty much everybody had been canceling trips due to the storm, i was one of three people in the place, and during the day the owner would just lock up, put up the equivalent of a "gone fishin'" sign, and drive us around, showing us the sights. we went to a swimming hole in a river, saw a beautiful restored japanese military building, slept in book stores and had an amazing sashimi lunch at the local fish market.

one of the most striking differences between taiwan and china is how good the food is, no matter where you get it. the sashimi we had was, while not quite as good as the sushi at tsukiji, definitely the second best i've had in my life. (and at three dollars for the whole meal, easily tops on a value basis.) while taiwanese cuisine itself isn't too interesting, the food everywhere was fresh, lite and delicious. i pretty much drowned myself in fruit juice and milk tea, my favorite of the latter being the lately discovered (by me) roast japanese tea flavor.

as for a quick rundown of my itinerary, i basically did a counter-clockwise circle, starting and ending in taipei. major stops were taichung (where i saw baseball and met up with andy), kenting (where i learned to surf), and hualien (where i was basically a bum for 6 days and went on several scooter rides). i had originally planned to hike one of the 3,000+ meter peaks in the center of the island, but the storm put the ol' kibosh on that idea. i did get to do a bit of hiking on my last full day there, climbing a 1,000 meter peak in a small national park north of taipei, but the weather was horrible, redeemed only by a soak in a free public hot spring i shared with 15 old naked taiwanese men.

by the end i found it very hard to leave taiwan. the place is beautiful (and we're talking haiwaii beautiful, combined with lots of really tall mountains, it's like sticking the sierra on kauai), the people are polite and friendly, and there are absolutely no hassles when traveling around. you aren't constantly worried about people trying to rip you off, like here in china, and even the subway bathrooms are nice and clean. with no language barrier either, it was honestly one of the most relaxing vacations i've ever had.

a detailed account of the trip will probably take too long, but i'll try over the next couple days to put up some pictures in individual posts, explaining parts of the trip.

taiwan post forthcoming

so i'm back from a great trip to taiwan. apologies but i won't get around to posting on the trip for a little bit as i'm somewhat occupied working through some issues locally, among them studying for the GRE. but never fear, posts are bubbling around in the back of my mind.

in the meantime, you can check out pictures here. explanations will be forthcoming.

weeeee!

i leave tomorrow to go to taiwan, the other china, for two weeks, so expect e-mail, etc to be spotty. and don't worry; posts on the trip will be forthcoming.

also good news: i got off my ass and downloaded hot spot shield, so i can post from home again. sorry for the dead time this summer. things will pick up again going forward.

tanks in beijing

1 october is national day in china, which celebrates the founding of the people's republic. this year is the 60th anniversary, and every ten years the communist party literally rolls out the big guns and parades them down the street in beijing. so we've been treated to another round of traffic restrictions and heavy police presence. on the actual day of the parade, most people seem to believe it's unlikely that any joe shmoe (or laobaixing as they're called here) will be allowed down to chang'an avenue, and i'll be in taiwan anyway (sticking it to the man), so i've had to get what little exposure i could to the military madness in the meantime.

the first real glimpse of the preparations was three weeks ago, when one night stumbling out of a bar i came across an endless line of enormous trucks covered in tarps driving at about 5 mph one of the main drags. these i assume were the structures of some of the floats in the parade, which are being stored in worker's stadium, near where i used to live.

the second, and more exciting, exposure to the preparations came this past friday night/saturday morning. pretty much everybody in the central part of the city was forced to go home early, as they were closing chang'an avenue and one of the subway lines in preparation for a full rehearsal, which took place at 3 am on saturday morning. so after an afternoon of lazing around and making t-shirts, emmy and i headed out to meet up with jeff at a notorious russian club called chocolate for his birthday. (yes, russian clubs. i am that much of a baller.) as soon as we got in a cab (this is around midnight), however, the driver told us he couldn't take us where we needed to go, because the entire second ring road and several other streets were shut to traffic. so after bailing from the cab and walking over to the second ring, we were treated to the tail end of a line of tanks, armored personnel carriers and missile batteries driving to the starting point for the parade.

i imagine on the actual day of the parade, the whole city will be a mess. they are shutting down all flights into and out of beijing (just announced) for the whole morning, which should also be fun (i'll be long gone at this point).

in other news, i have had many encounters recently with the huang shu lang, an odd ferret-type thing that lives in the hutong areas in beijing. i've seen them twice before, but just this weekend one appeared in our apartment complex (confirmed by emmy and clark). they are supposed to be good luck, unless they steal your chicken or soul, so i'm feeling as lucky as can be.

seoul baseball game videos

a title where "seoul" is cleverly substituted for "soul"

UPDATE: thanks to tip from conor, images should now link through to the full gallery.

leading the baller lifestyle that we do, a couple of weeks ago clark and i decided on a whim to jet over to seoul for the weekend to catch a baseball game. plus neither of us had ever been to korea, tickets were pretty cheap and the flight is short (2 hours).

we went straight to the airport friday night after work, and arrived in korea just after midnight. no matter what anybody tells you, getting to seoul (over an hour away from the incheon airport) after midnight is not easy. also anyone that says the subway runs late into the night is a liar. there were only a couple of buses, leaving about every 40 minutes or so, and so finally after wandering around and consulting a map and the flight attendants from our flight, we decided to just get on the next bus and take a cab from wherever it ended up. the next bus happened to be going to a terminal in the southern seoul, while our hostel was up in the north. at one point a trying-to-be-helpful airport staff told us that we shouldn't take that bus, because the next one was going a lot closer to where we were staying. yes but the next one wasn't leaving for another 1.5 hours! we stayed on the bus we were on.

after about an hour our bus arrived and we hopped off and flagged down the next taxi. i tried to say where we were going in some mangled korean that i had studied for maybe 20 minutes. of course the driver didn't understand me so i handed him a map i had printed out. he kept squinting at it and pointing at things, and i kept shrugging, thinking he didn't understand the map. next thing we know he gets out of the car and goes and holds it to the headlight while he reads out. turns out he couldn't see it in the poorly lit car! not the best sign for a driver but we decided to roll with it. eventually he called up the hostel and they told him where to go and we made it safely.

so the next morning we were up and out, with plans to go to the baseball game that evening but nothing much in between. first stop was one of the large imperial palaces in the city, and on the recommendation of a guy on the bus we went to the one that wasn't like the forbidden city. it was actually quite nice, with architecture that was much more simple than china and also conformed more to the landscape. there was also a secret garden in the back with a secret snack bar that sold secret pocari sweat.

after that we wandered around the city for a while, through a small residential neighborhood then downtown, where we finally found an ATM that would take our chinese ATM cards. eventually we found a touristy market and a revitalised canal area that i had heard about previously. clark and i had a romantic walk down the canal and stopped to rest with all the old koreans with their feet in the water. the water was crystal clear, quite a difference from the chunky, frothy sludge that flows through beijing in places.

next up was the baseball game, which turned out to be an absolute blast. we hopped on the subway out there and popped up right beneath the main seoul stadium, which is on the olympic grounds. playing that night were the doosan bears (one of two seoul teams) and the hated samsung lions (source unknown). in korea, all the teams are owned by chaebols, massive korean corporations. so there is a kia team, a hyundai team, an LG team, among others. all have a home field but are named for the company. so of course after buying our tickets we picked up doosan rather than samsung thundersticks (necessary equipment) some snacks and giant korean beers and headed into the stadium. there is no bag check or anything, and the stadium is lined with convenience stores and fast food joints. both KFC and burger king had scantily clad women outside trying to attract customers. we opted for some korean sushi and dried squid.

the bears ended up crushing the hated lions 12-5, with one of many kims having a standout night. because seating in the upper of the two decks is general admission, the crowd separates itself behind the two teams, and we were right in the middle directly behind home plate. pretty much everybody has a pair of thundersticks and bangs them together in surprising unison (i'll try to remember to upload a video of this later). so far, except for the olympics, i have a good record of getting fairly toasted by the end of asian baseball games so we were getting pretty into things at the end of the game, even though our squid ran out.

after we picked up some doosan gear on the way out, we headed to a commercial area nearby to get some korean bbq (in korea, they just call it bbq), which was pretty delicious. afterwords we went to another nightlife area and had a drink on the roof of a pretty lame bar, then just went back and hit the sack. this time, i brought the card from the hostel and the driver punched it into his gps and took us right there. all i had to do was shout "ok!" when we arrived and all went fine.

the next morning we checked out of the hostel and headed downtown to check out a market and climb a scenic mountain that is right in the middle of town. (as an aside, before i left i was asking about stamps for some postcards, and a japanese guy who spoke little english and seemed to be a semi-permanent nocturnal fixture of the hostel offered to send them for me on monday. did anybody get one? i sent out a bunch.) the market was a little ho-hum, mostly everyday stuff and small by chinese standards. after a leisurely ascent of the mountain, which had some great views, we got some grub at a local place and caught our bus back to the airport.

all in all a very pleasant weekend. seoul is a nice city, very large and very clean, and quite pedestrian and public transportation friendly, but when it comes down to it there is not all that much to do. to a certain extent it reminded me of tokyo, but tokyo seems to be constantly teeming with life and activity while seoul (on the weekend granted) seemed quiet and dead at times. it strikes me as a pleasant place to live, but i think i'll stick with the dirty excitement of beijing for the time being.

quick pics

clark and i went to seoul this weekend, so expect a post on that soon. in the meantime, here are a couple snapshots i took with my phone recently that i found amusing:

vestiges of communist motivational techniques inside the friendship store

a climbing area that also proved a popular photo spot with soon-to-be-married couples, south of beijing