Highfalutin Prostitutin

Interest piqued by that suggestive title? Well, it is my brilliant translation of the bubble tea flavor "贵妃" (literally meaning imperial concubine). Faced with the insurmountable task of ever topping this linguistic delight, I hereby retire from the world of translation with a perfect 100% flawless translation record.

If you are a faithful follower of my blatherings then you definitely remember my love affair with bubble tea last summer. With Emily here this time keeping an eye on me, though, we've had to cool things down a little bit, but we still see each other once or twice a week. Perhaps the real reason I don't go as often is related to my coworker telling me he doesn't touch the fake bubble tea stuff because nothing in it is real. All you are getting is a cocktail of flavor-modifiers and various other stuff that doesn't do your body good. I'm not sure I totally believe it, but apparently I'm wary enough to cut back on my consumption.

Now it is time for my serious, thought-provoking paragraph. In case you don't read the news, China has serious food quality issues. The most publicized examples are probably the "recycled" (read: fished out of the sewer) oil some restaurants use to cut costs, and the poisoned baby food scandal from a couple years ago. I asked my coworkers, and they said food safety is a top public concern, but the government still doesn't do much to improve things. They explained that the government is basically only interested in keeping the peace and growing the economy. Insignificant social complaints are not their concern (especially when they control all news outlets). I wonder how long the government can maintain this attitude and still keep the peace?

Novel Novels

Lately I've been reading a lot. It's not what you think though -- it's way awesomer! I read about a genre of Chinese novels a while ago on one of my internet haunts, and soon thereafter bought one of the so-called Kung Fu novels. I picked one of most famous ones by the easier of the two most famous authors. (By "easy" I mean the author doesn't employ as many historical allusions and other hard-to-understand techniques that make the more difficult author harder for foreigners to fully understand.) Back then I was still in the US, so it took the full 8 weeks to receive the book. I meant to start reading it, but, you know, I didn't.

Not until after we came to Beijing, that is. I cracked it open, and man, was it fun. It's like Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon but with way more cool Kung Fu and intrigue. The genre also embodies some of the enjoyable elements from "Kung Fu Hustle", like never being sure who the real Kung Fu master is. It was slow going at the start, but once I got used to the writing and the Kung Fu lexicon, I powered through the book at a pretty good clip. Now I am on my third novel by this author, and I ordered online the complete set of books by the other, more difficult author. Everyone seems to agree the harder author's books are much better, so I'm excited to give them a try.

Beyond improving my Chinese and being enjoyable, these books serve a third purpose. I now have something to talk about with just about every Chinese male I encounter! You see, these books are kind of like their Star Wars or Lord of the Rings - most guys read/loved/watched them as a kid. I also hear that you occasionally runs into references to these books in modern Chinese culture. Won't that be fun to finally "get" something without having to look it up!

A Jaunt to Xi'An

Seeing as this week is a national holiday we decided we should take a trip somewhere. The only problem is that all 1.3 billion other people in China had the same idea. We were planning an epic train journey spanning multiple cities but we anticlimactically weren't able to get any train tickets, so we settled for plane tickets to what would have been our first stop: Xi'An.

The trip over was smooth - a little too smooth. I had packed my medicated shampoo and sunscreen in my backpack because we thought we could carry them on. It turns out the rules are the same as the US. I surrendered my sun screen, but obviously didn't want to part with my special shampoo. After a little bit of explaining, they put my shampoo in some little scanny machine, gave it back to me and let me go on my way. I was happy, but on the other hand it was a little unsettling (but not surprising) to see that rules aren't strictly enforced, even at the airport.

Our hotel in Xi'An (Kempinski) was a little ways outside the city center. We figured it wouldn't matter much because we were only staying for 2 days and were only planning to go into the city once. Unfortunately it did end up mattering. We caught a taxi to the city, and after sampling the famous local Muslim dish 羊肉泡馍 and strolling around for a bit, we were ready to head back to the hotel. Unfortunately, empty taxis were nowhere to be found, and even if we did happen upon one they refused to take us to our hotel (too far away). I won't go into the shady details, but suffice to say we eventually made it back. Emily was not happy.

The next day we chartered a taxi to take us to and from the Terra-cotta Warriors. It was interesting to see that basically an entire city had sprung up surrounding the dig sites. There were countless restaurants and shops and vendors... and people. Once we made our way to the actual exhibit, we quickly felt how the area was simply teeming with history. So historical, in fact, that there was even a museum about the museum. That's right, inside the museum part of the area there was a wing dedicated to the history of the exhibition itself. Apart from the museum building there were 3 pits you could tour. They were large dig sites enclosed in big warehouse-like structures. This is where you actually get to see the terra-cotta army. We didn't dilly-daddle too long (mainly because it just isn't comfortable being around that many people), leaving as soon as  we had laid eyes on all the dig sites.

We headed back to Beijing the next morning. Interestingly, the first class tickets were only 50RMB (less than $10) more than economy, so of course we sprang. The VIP lounge at the airport was about what you would expect in China. It looked okay, but we quickly found the coffee machine, wireless internet, and flight status displays all didn't work. That didn't leave many amenities left for us VIPs. Our flight was delayed a little, but soon enough we were en route to Beijing in style.

The foreigner has arrived

Whew, first week done! A lot has happened, but thankfully most of it has been good and/or expected, so no disasters yet.

Our trip over was very smooth. After we arrived I thought about it, I realized you never notice when traveling goes smooth, only when it goes disastrously. The flight was long, but we had books and crosswords and sudokus and iPads and iPods and in-flight movies, and each other. I sat next to a nice Chinese man and we chatted for the first 30 minutes or so, but who can maintain boring chit-chat for longer than half an hour? We basically didn't speak again for the next 11 hours, only breaking the silence again to wish one another farewell.

At the airport we cruised through customs and made it onto the airport express train that connects with the main city subway system. China doesn't seem very good at keeping escalators in working order, so there was a lot of suitcase lugging as we deftly hopped between lines, working our way to the hotel. After an hour or so of transit we were checking into the old HuiHuang International (just across the street from the office in Beijing).

I think we managed to stay up until 7pm that evening, but we couldn't sleep much past 3am. That morning (Saturday) Jackie met us at the hotel to show us some apartments in the area we had chosen to live in. The WuDaoKou area is sort of student central for all of Beijing. It has many universities in/around it, so apartments and nightlife options abound, but you can end up paying through the nose. Jackie worked for a rental agency recommended by Aruba's HR in Beijing, but WuDaoKou was out of her area of expertise so it turns our she had worked out a commission-sharing deal with an agent at a local rental agency. The two of them showed us various apartments in HuaQingJiaYuan, the biggest, most well-known apartment complex in WuDdaoKou. The apartments were all pretty crappy by American standards, and the prices were roof-shattering. Admittedly this was a bad time to look for apartments (students coming in for school), but 8,000RMB a month for an unimpressive 2BR!? Keep in mind the buying power of 1 RMB is about the same as 1 dollar, so 8,000RMB a month isn't far off from $8000 a month in relative terms. You may be shocked to learn that we did not end up choosing a place that day. We were, however, desperate to get out of the expensive hotel and establish our home-base, so by no means were we going to rest on our laurels and wait for Jackie to waste some more of our time (she had had said it would take 1 week to close an apartment after we found one we liked!).

On Sunday we contacted a different agent in the area and he was able to show us some places in another complex directly behind HuaQingJiaYuan. This new complex, called DongShengYuan, is essentially located just as conveniently as HuaQingJiaYuan (close to subway station and main WuDaoKou strip), but with significantly cheaper prices. By a stroke of luck we saw a decent apartment that had just gone on the market (despite the insane prices apartments move really fast, so you have hours or less usually to think it over before pulling the trigger - certainly not an advantageous position for the renter). The owner was still inside it cleaning up. She was a middle-aged well-to-do Chinese woman. This was the first time she had rented the apartment out, which reassured us a little bit that the living conditions would be comfortable. Another group of potential renters were hot on our tails into the apartment and wanted to take it right then and there. Our agent told us if we wanted it we had to say so right then, so we mumbled a few words of indecisive English to each other and then decided "what the heck? Let's go for it!".

The agent led us out immediately to avoid a confrontation, but on the way to the rental agency he, erm, had a few words with someone on the phone about our dibs on the apartment. He sealed the deal for us, though, with a little fib that he had already accepted money from us. Thankfully that morning I had talked Wells Fargo into raising my daily ATM withdrawal limit to $3000, so we were able to withdraw all the money we needed (which is a lot - 5 months rent) to finish the deal that day. The apartment wasn't quite ready by the time the paperwork was done, but we came back later that evening and moved in! We sort of screwed Jackie over in the end, but in our estimation she had done a horrible job overall, so we didn't feel too bad. I won't talk about the apartment because most of you should have seen Emily's video tour.

My first week of work went pretty well. I spent most of my time getting the team's development infrastructure up to snuff and assisting them on their development tasks. The office has been newly renovated since last time I was there so it is much nicer than before. They are also renovating a neighboring floor in the building the serve as the lab area (which will be very nice considering their current lab is a total piece of shit).

This weekend we played tourist a little bit. On Saturday we went to the Forbidden City and TianAnMen Square, stopped by the Silk Market, and then picked up some stuff at Walmart on the way home (there is a Walmart 1 subway stop from us - yay!). Today we had a walkabout through the QingHua and BeiDa campuses (the MIT and Harvard of China, respectively). We also scoped out the closest ATMs of the Chinese bank we are planning to open an account at.

So, like I said, all-in-all things are going pretty well. One major complaint is that there's a lot of smokers here, but we'll just have to suck-it-up on that front, so to speak.