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.
