Word Verification is on

Since we now have comments from spammers on the blog... (if I ever find one of them!), I have added word verification to the comments. I'm sorry for the trouble this may cause some people but I think everyone can pass. The word verification means that a morphed picture of a word will need to be identified before your comment can be added to the blog. The assumption is that the automatic spammers can't read the morphed word. I am now off to try and remove the offending comments from the blog!

Cash Handling Skills

My personal financial life in the United States has generally been made up of credit cards, Paypal and the stray $20 bill that might be in my wallet. I've been using credit cards for about 15 years and I stopped using cash about the same time that Paypal showed up among my friends in Austin (maybe 6-7 years ago?).
The impact of all of this is that I have completely lost all of my cash handling skills (maybe I never had any to begin with). With my cigarette case wallet, I don't even have the physical space to handle the large number of bills that living in a big city requires. MS has told me that apparently NYC is also a cash-based city. This cash phenomenon seems to more of a big-city thing rather than a China thing.
I started out trying to stuff all of the cash into the little wallet (100s, 50s, 20s, 10s, 5s, 2s, 1s, .5s, .1s, .05s and .01s). Of course, this didn't last very long. GW came up with a better option. All 100s stay in the wallet. You pay for things using the 100s and everything else ends up in your _other_ pocket; never to be seen again until you get home. This has the benefit of reducing the amount of time you spend sorting your smaller bills, keeping them stacked and straight and you don't lose any pulling them out of our pocket in a big wad.
I've followed this advice in the meantime with the only change being that the 50s have now been upgraded to wallet life instead of having to mingle with the more common bills. Additionally, I've had to start managing these other bills (sorting, stacking, folding, etc.) because I decided I don't like the dirty looks I get from vendors when I keep handing the the yuppie food stamps (50s and 100s).
It seems that I am getting some of my money handling skills back but I think a few more weeks should make me more comfortable with hole process. I am still convinced that money is a dirty thing, however. I mean, this was an issue when I would get only a few bills a week passing through my hands but now that I go through tens of bills a day... all I can think about is how many hands it has passed through and how much dirt and grime is on it. I hope this doesn't develop into a phobia because I could really be in trouble!

Welcome to the Big City

Well, I lost my cell phone on Thursday. Actually, I'm being very generous to myself by using the word lost. I generally consider myself to have some awareness of what it takes to live in the big city but I obviously am missing a few automatic behaviors. Now, here's a list of possibilities for what happened to my phone:

• I left the phone on my desk at the office and cleaning staff got it (improbable)
• I dropped it somewhere when putting it back in my office (unlikely)
• I got pick-pocketed (requires completely plausible dumb-ass behavior on my part)

I guess I should consider myself lucky that I only lost my phone (instead of my wallet). I've started the process of getting a new phone. Since I had recently bought a post-paid (contract) cell phone account, I will at least be able to keep my phone number and have it transferred to a new SIM card. So... I don't have to switch to a third local phone number in as many weeks!

The Currency

Before I pass on too much information, I guess I'd better let you all know about the money system here. I've thrown a lot of numbers and RMB and yuan around already and I can't imagine everyone knows the information:

1 US Dollar = 8.11 Yuan
1 Yuan = 1 RMB = 1 Kuai
10 Jiao = 1 Yuan (= 10 Mao)
10 Fen = 1 Jiao
5 Yuan = 1 McDonald's Burger

Up until a few weeks ago, the exchange was 8.28 but in celebration of our arrival, the Chinese government revalued the Yuan to 8.11. This effectively cut our income by 2% on the eve of our arrival. All in all, I think we're lucky because if the Chinese government were serious about re-evaluating the Yuan, they probably would have done 20% or more. I think we'd better get some money into our local bank account as soon as possible.
The bank notes in China are multi-colored and multi-sized. There are a few coins for the Fen and Jiao but noone seems to like using coins for anything. It is interesting to note that the Jiao are also called Mao but the pictures of Mao are all on the Yuan (go figure).
The actual exchange rate is then 8.11. From what I can tell, the purchasing power exchange rate is 5:1. So, this means that people spend a 5 RMB note in about the same way that people spend a dollar bill in the US. However, it seems that 5 RMB still gets you a lot more than $1 would in the US. The 100 Yuan note is most obviously the yuppie food stamp ($20 bill) of China (still maintaining the 5:1 ratio). It's seems that every customer is trying to break a 100 Yuan note and every vendor is forever cursing the customers that hand over 100 Yuan notes.

Where's the Rice?

Eating out in China has been great but there are surprises that go beyond just what types of food are available on the table. At lunch, we've had a hell of a time getting rice during the meal. All of the westerners expect to have steamed rice served at the same time as the main course (because that's how it's always done at Chinese restaurants all over the world). This expectation has surprised some of our Chinese co-workers and completely befuddles the wait staff at the restaurant. No matter how hard we try, the steamed rice almost always shows up near the end of the meal.
So... this mystery has been solved. In Chinese culture, the normal state of the peasantry for the last couple hundred years has been a lack of non-rice items for food. There has historically been a shortage of vegetables, meat, beans, etc. When a Chinese family sits down for a meal, the non-rice items are served first in family-style. This way, everyone gets a chance to eat and the non-rice items are the first things you try to fill your stomach with. You eat as much of the vegetables, meats and beans that are available for that meal.
When these items are gone, then rice is distributed in individual bowls for people to actually fill themselves. In times when starvation/food shortages were rampant, the initial portion of the meal was relatively light and everyone would then just eat enough rice to fill themselves. In modern China where food production now keeps pace with the demand, the rice portion of the meal often doesn't happen at all. Most of the Chinese locals haven't eaten any rice at lunch.
Many (maybe most) cultures have some sort of "filler" food to augment a meal. Northern India has grain-based flat breads, southern India has rice, Europe (and the US) have pastas, potatoes and leavened breads while China has rice. It's interesting that the Chinese eating habits automatically delete this "filler" portion if enough other foods exist. For those of you who are Atkins believers, the Chinese eating style fits right into the low-carb culture.
It's possible that DH has mentioned this fact before because it seems tantalizingly familiar but I just can't remember.

Language Observations (1)

Our colleague, GW, made a very interesting observation about the Chinese language the other day. In most indo-european languages that are non-tonal, musical singers can add their own embellishments and emphasis to the pronounciation of the words in the lyrics. This makes it fun to listen to a song even if it has simple lyrics because a lot of emotion and passion can be conveyed.
The question is: how can you sing like this in Chinese? Any small change in tone will result in a completely different word that would easily garble the lyrics. You can't add rising/lowering tones to the vowels nor can you stretch out sounds without affecting the word you are trying to say. Any ideas on the matter would be great appreciated.
On a related note, how do you whisper in Chinese?

Utility Madness - Water

Okay, water is a utility that also has a single card but there are three meters for this card. I'm not sure I understand yet how it works. Luckily, this card can be recharged with cash down at our apartment office.
When I went down to pay, I took 500 RMB so that I wouldn't have to worry about the water for some time. I handed over the 500 RMB and I was told that I needed to choose how much to apply to water and how much for A/C. (?) What? It's the _water_ card but it is somehow connected to the A/C system? Okay, for the time being, I chose to put 200 RMB into the water and 300 RMB on the A/C system. Whatever...
Now, this single card smart card (after being charged up) was inserted into three different meters near our apartment! One was an A/C unit right outside our apartment and the other two were hidden in compartments in our walls that allowed access to the plumbing and water metering devices. I'm thinking that one is hot water and one is cold water but I don't know how the two different meters communicate with each other. Maybe each one took half of the 200 RMB water money but then...
So, the most interesting piece of information is that I think our heating and air-conditioning are both water driven. Maybe the A/C and heating are powered by a heat-exchange unit that produces the hot and cold air while electricity drives the fans that blow the air into the apartment. At least this explains why our A/C went out twice in the first few days (once due to electricity and once due to water). It also explains why our electricity bills are so low even though we were running the A/C full blast for the first week we were here.
What are the rates? Here's some information that supports the heat-exchange theory:
Hot Water : 13.3 RMB/cubic meter
Cold Water: 3.7 RMB/cubic meter
There's also some cooling and heating charge on the water card based on kwh but I can't understand what that's all about. The card was never inserted into any meter connected to a power line. Okay, this ends our utility saga but you can see that we had to spend a number of days gathering information that really could have been easily spelled out for us. I think that the apartment staff needs to be reminded that things really _are_ different from the US. Even basic concepts like pre-paid utilities, smart cards and metering devices have to be explained to us as if we were idiots.

Utility Madness - Electricity

No smart card here. Just gotta pay for electricity in a special ATM-style kiosk outside the apartment office. I was forced to do this quickly when our electricity went out the second day and the fans for the air-conditioning went out.

We quickly found out that despite the ATM kiosk interface, you had to use a bank card from the Bank of China in order to pay for the electricity. There was no other way to pay! This was Saturday and I wouldn't be able to get a bank account until Monday morning when I went to work (more on that in another post). Luckily, the D. family came to the rescue by letting us use their bank card (Thanks!). I didn't know how much electricity was needed so I got 75 yuan in order to be sure we could get through the weekend and any other delays that might happen. There was NO OTHER WAY to pay for electricity.

Electricity is .48 RMB/kwh. This means about 6 cents/kwh which is approximately the same rate as the US. Again, this means it must be quite an expense on a local salary. I still can't believe that given my possession of a credit card and cash, I was unable to pay for my electricity.

Luckily, it seems our electricity usage is quite low since the air-conditioning only uses it for the fans to blow air. We use just a few kwh/day (appliances, TV, computers, etc.) so I hopefully don't have to recharge it that often. It is interesting to note that since electricity is a pre-paid service, you can pre-pay quite a bit. Apparently, you can pre-pay up to 80000 RMB (what the hell?)! I'm not sure how long it would take to use up $10000 worth of electricity or even how to do it from an apartment but maybe someone is running a server farm

Utility Madness - Gas

Gas is controlled by a blue-colored smart card with a picture of a rising rocket on it. You can pay for gas at the apartment office using a credit card so this was the easiest to charge up on our first day. In our apartment there is an exposed gas pipe in the laundry room that has a metering device on it.
Since it's on the gas pipe, it is unfortunately a battery-powered metering device. I spent a day trying to figure out why it wouldn't turn on or accept the gas card. The apartment office finally sent someone up to put batteries in and transfer the units from the card into the metering device. Hooray, now I can cook using the gas stove! The stove itself still needs a workmen to come out and fix one of the burners but I'll take what I can get.
So, all in all, pretty easy. Gas here is 1.9 RMB/cubic meter. Is that a lot? I have no idea. It's about 24 cents/cubic meter. I think prices in the US are $10/1000 cubic feet. Err... that means...$1/100 cubic feet... there are approximately 3 cubic meters/100 cubic feet so... 33 cents/cubic meter. Since it's approximately the same price as the US, that means that it is incredibly expensive for your average Chinese consumer.

Utility Madness

Okay, moving to any new location requires you to go through a little work to set up your utilities in your new location. Some pain an delay is to be expected, but when you through Beijing into the mix, the results can be just befuddling.
We moved into our apartment with gaurantees that all the utilities would be hooked up when we arrived. Our landlord met us and our realtor to hand over a bunch of information. He told us that he had paid for at least 3-5 days of electricity and water and a month of gas. Additionally, he handed over a bunch of smart cards that we would use to buy more time. He told us that we could recharge the cards and buy electricity at the management office on the first floor.
So... what's different? Apparently, utilities in our apartment complex (and across Beijing) operate on a pre-paid system. You buy some number of units of a utility that are either credited to an account or placed on your smart card that you then use to recharge your apartment meter.
We thought everything would be easy until we realized that no cold air was coming from the vents (even though the AC was on). The next day (after recharging our AC), our electricity went out and the AC stopped working again! What's going on? The next few posts contain our experience for each of our utilities.

Beijing is a Great City

All,
Before I tarnish the image of Beijing, I wanted to make sure that everyone knows how I really feel about Beijing. It's a great city and has been a lot of fun from Day 1. You may have heard (and will hear) about the problems that we've had and the difficulties that we face. These are really just issues that are related to moving to a big city in a new country. They would probably be similar to what we would face in any big city anywhere in the world.
Beijing is far a fun city and provides us with plenty of options of things to do, things to eat (sometimes too many options!) and sites to see. Our apartment is wonderful, the people I work with are great and the other friends we have in the city are wonderfully supportive.
I guess I'm writing this because it will probably be a few more posts before you start hearing about all the wonderful aspects of the city. We've got a lot of stories/issues to tell everyone about and some of them sound negative because they are reflections of our initial difficulties not anger or disappointment. There are also plenty of stories about what's cool and interesting in Beijing.

Oh the fog/smog!

Hey all. Our first week in Beijing has been a lesson in just how thick fog (and smog) can get! For visual references, you can see some photos posted at: http://www.goelsgonewild.com/gallery/2005_China.
Now, people in Beijing are saying that they haven't seen weather like this for 10 or 15 years. What's it like? Well, last week, a typhoon (or hurricane) was traveling up the coast and just barely missed hitting Beijing. This, of course, led to torrential rains in Beijing. If you want to see how Beijing'ers handle th rain on bikes, Stacy got some great shots in the galler above.
Now, this torrential rain has led to horrendous humidity. The basic weather pattern the last few days has been the following:

• Morning - walk out of apartment at 7:15 am. It's already humid and hot. Break sweat walking to meet co-workers to get cab in the morning.
• Lunch - walk out of office for lunch at local restaurant at 11:30 am. It still humid and hot. Break sweat walking to/fro restaurant. Wonder if I should find some showers nearby for the safety of my cubible-mates?
• Early evening - break sweat while going to get cab at 5:30 pm to go home. It is still humid and hot.
• Late evening - run out for some errands (sometimes on rollerblades, sometimes on foot) at approximately 7-8 pm. Somehow, the air has always stopped moving and it's actually HOTTER and MORE HUMID than earlier in the day. Come back to apartment drenched in sweat. At this point, I usually rip my shirt off or at least pull it over my belly (henceforth known as "going native") while trying to cool down.

The native Beijingers all claim that this is not normal and that this type of weather won't last. I hope they're correct because the mixture of fog and smog in the morning is fun in the short run but could get a unnerving in the long run. Morning's in the apartment are generally spent getting ready for work and staring out the window at ... nothing. Just a bunch of fog/smog.

After time at work, I am astonished at how constant the smog is and how much it affects visibility. At work in Northwest Beijing, the visibility is at most two city blocks (and this after all of the fog has been burned off). What this means is that you look down the street and everything on the second block away from you disappears in haze and is gone by the end of the second block. (!)

The sun barely makes it through the haze (picture on this coming soon). You can look it straight at it and it's just a bright disk in the haze of what would otherwise be a clear/cloudless day. The notion of a blue sky will have to wait until we leave Beijing on some sort of trip out to the countryside.

That said, Beijing has had one or two clear days when we got some great views from our apartment and we hold out hope that a change in the weather will lessen the impact of the smog. More information on this to come.

Buses, Subways and Trains

Here's Wednesday's silly thing I tried to do China! The setting? Well, it's Wednesday. I've been to the office for a little bit on Monday and a little bit on Tuesday. Wednesday morning I happen to have an early morning meeting at 8 am Beijing time (of course, that means 7 pm for the people in Austin we're meeting with).
Since I have such an important meeting, I decide that I'm going to test out the Beijing public transportation system to see if I can get there in time (I know, not the most sane decision but I was still a little jet-lagged). Having very limited information in the form of a subway map that takes up a half-page in a guidebook, I decide on the following course of action:

1. Walk out of my apartment and pick up a bus to go 5-6 kilometers west.
2. Get off bus and get into subway.
3. Take subway to appropriate stop, get off subway and go to light rail station.
4. Pick-up light rail and go to appropriate stop.
5. Walk the remaining distance to work.

For all of this, I estimated one-hour. What information did I have? Well, I had that half-page subway map and tourist map (no good because it gives street names in English and usually there are only chinese road signs). I also knew that I lived about 25 kilometers from work and work is northwest from the apartment. Oh, and I have a good impression that the bus would travel in the same direction of traffic.

Now, I woke up early, got ready and walked out of the apartment at exactly 7:00 am. I managed to keep to my original plan through half of step #1. I got onto the bus (#731), paid the 1 yuan fare and then just sort of hung out and looked around. Much to my horror, the bus took a right turn about 2 kilometers down the road and just kept on going. So, now all I had was a bus heading north and a subway map. I guess I really should have checked a bus route map but they seem so hard to find. So I kept looking out the window and hoping that we'd get to some place with english signs or one that I recognized.

Luckily, the bus ended up on the 3rd Ring Road around Beijing traveling counter-clockwise. This was still good since this would still take me in the North and West direction (very important). As the bus kept following the gentle curves in the turn from north to west, I realized that I needed to add a compass to my backpack so I could keep track of directions. I knew those orienteering skills would come in useful at some time (just not now). By this point, the bus had filled up and I ws desperately trying to catch glimpses of english exit signs. I was hoping to find a sign that matched one of the stations on the light-rail (the subway segment of the trip had long since turned to dust).

Now, it's interesting to note that I was the only foreigner on the bus this whole time and that I kept surreptitiously checking my subway map in my bag. I had the feeling that I was providing a lot of amusement to the rest of the riders.

I finally saw a familiar sign and hurried off the bus. It was now 7:35 and my chances for making the meeting rapidly diminishing. I walked along the freeway for a few hundred feet until I happened to see a light rail train (!) crossing the next bridge. A quick skip, jump and run put me at the light-rail station, ticket in hand (3 yuan) at 7:40.

Things were finally looking good. I caught the next train, went two stops up the line and hopped out. A quick glance at the skyline indicated which direction the office was and I started walking. Actually, I was really lucky that day because by the next morning, the smog had reduced visibility to about 2 city blocks and I wouldn't have seen our work buildings at all. While I was walking to work, I looked into the street and saw bus #731 pass right near my building...

So, after all this misdirection and misinformation (on my own part), I managed to walk into the office at exactly 8:00 am. (!). So... it worked... so there!

We are now connected!

Hey all,
Okay, we finally made it to Beijing, made it to our apartment and now have internet access at home! I think the first few posts on the blog will be incredibly disjointed because I've got so many things to post and haven't had a chance to post any of it. First things first, we miss everyone from the U.S. terribly. I often catch myself thinking about heading home after work and just falling into the old routine in Austin (doesn't matter that I'm in Beijing). You catch yourself expecting to see the same friends after work and that you can go out to the same places.
Today was Thursday and it was a great day to head off for some margaritas at The Ditch. To boot, the cab driver told us (in Chinese) that we should bring some beers with us to drink in the cab on the way home. I mentioned margaritas and he seemed to both know what that was and approve of my drink choice (presumably for drinking in the cab).
Anyway, as for the blog, I thought the name was was "Melrose Place" might translate into in Chinese. We live in a fairly upscale neighborhood that probably sees its fair share of drama and intrigue. Hopefully I'll run across it in the next few months. Don't worry, you will all get the gory details!