Last I wrote we were still in China. We had just finished packing up and shipping 8 boxes to Maria’s parents house in Ohio. Not all too much happened after that. We finished packing into suitcases, cleaned the apartment up as best as we could, left a whole bunch of empty suitcases, chocolates, posters, and maps for my father to deal with, closed our Chinese cell phone and internet and apartment telephone accounts, gave my cousin free reign to root through our pantry and kitchen for any leftover non-perishables we had left like flats of coke and sprite and diet coke left over from the party, and were hauled by said cousin also in the middle of the night in his Nissan versa hatch back that luckily fit all our luggage because we ended up being one piece over anyways to the Beijing Capital airport for our flight back to our home, the good old US of A, quite possibly in the end, the best place to live in the world. And this is sort of a rant here but I’ve been reading many articles online touting the possibilities and progressiveness of countries in Africa and Asia and how they’re the next frontier for science and technology because they don’t have the vestiges of old industry and commerce in place already so it’s easier and quicker for them to innovate and it’ll be better for all of us if the States would just be more like them but you know, those columnist tools don’t have a clue what they’re talking about and it’s so obvious they’ve never lived or even set foot in these countries that they speak of so fondly and that if they had spent any decent amount of time in these countries they’d know that well, it’s just not true, and the States is just, for all its faults and there are many, better. Let’s leave it at that.

The flight was painless, despite the blizzards that were happening across the Northeast, and after a relaxing layover after much careful scrutiny of my computer parts and electronics filled carry on by the TSA we landed very much on time indeed in Toledo, barely minutes before Maria’s parents arrived to pick us up in the van we will soon, and have as I write, inherit. And I realized that I’m not entirely in control of who reads this blog and all and that some of these faceless masses out there may actually include my parents perish the thought, but though I had the option I didn’t want to go back to LA and spend the holidays there. It was so nice being in Ohio. In no particular order, here is what we did:

• Visited my Emily in Cleveland and had lunch at a Irish pub, went to the Cleveland Museum of Art, and had coffee at one of the local hippie chain coffeeshops.
• Ate at Wilson’s (the Findlay burger joint that all the local politicians go to for photo ops), ate at Olive Garden with Maria’s Sarah, ate at Cracker Barrel with Maria’s Sarah and family (still my favorite country restaurant that’s distressingly absent from both the Eastern and Pacific timezones), ate at Mendoza’s (a wonderful hole-in-the-wall Mexican restaurant that’s apparently been there since Maria was in high school though she never knew about it), ate at Marie’s (a breakfast and lunch only place with wonderful skillets), ate at Dietz’s (I think I spelled that right but they have marshmallow topping for their ice cream), ate fancy pizza with Maria’s Sarah again to ring in the New Year, ate at Oller’s (and survived!).
• Walked around town.
• Had a lovely Christmas meal with Maria’s family after picking her grandmother up from Ada (think ONU)
• Decided seriously whether or not it was worth buying an entire, historic building in downtown Findlay (the Finder’s Records building) for 650K negotiable. In the flood zone, yes, empty since the 1960s, yes, in need of extensive renovation, yes, probably flood damaged from 2007, yes, but it’s HUGE and (in my mind) CHEAP! I’m thinking PBL headquarters come 2012 or 2014.
• Visited Maria’s Sarah at the library and decided I need to get a library card one of these days.
• Received lemon bars by mail.
• Saw Tron: Legacy as a matinee at the Carmike.
• And probably many more things that I now forget.

As I mentioned, we spent New Years with Maria’s Sarah, watched the whole TV thing, sent my Emily a text message. It was, in short, a lovely week.

We drove to NYC on January 2, 2011, officially starting this new, probably wonderful, chapter of our lives, and I think I have it in me to finish off and bring everything, in writing, up to date.

As we drove, and it’s a drive I’ve done many times in the past as well though we were thankful that my old GPS Daniel still worked like a charm (but I should update his maps), we listened to Maria’s MCLE, which is a lawyer thing having to do with the requirement that she keep up to date on new changes and issues in the law. Honestly, interesting, surprisingly. We made good time and met with France’s brother Jamey at our current home on East 75th St., lugged everything upstairs into our albeit small but currently exceptionally comfortable studio apartment, then drove the car down to our parking garage located on East 40th St. We got a good deal. Since then, and in no particular order, we’ve:

• Walked the blocks between 40th and 75th St. and 2nd and Madison Ave. countless times as we’ve explored, met with recruiters, took interviews, wandered, etc.
• Signed me up with 2 recruiting agencies who as it turns out are owned by the same parent company so lo and behold was I surprised when I could login to both sites after having only created one account with them but that’s a long paragraph for later, oh and took many interviews with them as well.
• Toured the Harvard Club, which we are eager to join.
• Went to the Costco up at the Stew Leonard in my old stomping grounds to pick up some non-perishable essentials (like Gatorade) and get Maria an eye exam and glasses/contacts prescriptions, got some stuff for my Emily, then did our laundry at good old Greystone Ave. (yeah our current complex doesn’t have a laundry facility).
• Switched us over to a non-contract family plan with T-Mobile and bought Maria a G2 cell phone, and since we don’t have internet you will not believe how much data we’ve been chugging through on the tether, I’m talking gigs…but it’s good to be on proper phone plans again, this whole pay-as-you-go thing is way overrated.
• Bought Maria a new laptop! A giant, 17+ inch Dell (yes, we’re switching back to PC from Mac, and Maria is loving it), and spent much time geting everything installed and copied over and put into place and customized so that it’s usable, and we’re not done yet, still have her iTunes and iPhoto libraries to copy over.
• Scoped out the neighborhood and went on delivery/takeout menu hunts with much success.
• Watched TV (on the computer)
• I’ve been on 5 job interviews with 3 more planned for the next couple of days, and more, and Maria’s been very successful at getting feedback on contract/temporary lawyer work in NYC.
• Maria’s been loving her runs here and is getting back in shape and into her normal running routine, and we even have a half marathon planned in the next 2 weeks! The NYC Half Marathon!
• Given our penchant for walking, we managed to go an entire week without buying a metrocard! At one point I walked over 100 blocks getting from interview to interview before I finally gave in and we’ve ridden it only twice so far. I guess we may not need to get monthly passes just yet.
• And like before, I’m equally sure many more things probably that I’ve just forgotten but there are so many more things in the works like visiting Maria’s Emily up in Boston this weekend and mini golfing. Oh, and can’t wait until Frances is back ’cause we’re gonna do a little house warming party. It’s gonna rock this world.

Things to do though include getting involved in music again, ultimately finding a job and the right apartment for the job (hopefully one with either a balcony, patio, garden, or all of the above so that I can have a fire pit), the continued administration of our business, purchasing a NAS, really getting settled and back in the groove of seeing friends especially and I’m serious when I say I want this to stick.

And this is just a mental note to me so that I don’t forget about it all, but man, these recruiters, these companies, these non-contract jobs, whoo what a riot they are! (hint hint)

Oh and I want to implement a new design for the blog. A new design for the new year. A new design for the new city that we are living in. Expect it soon. And that’s a wrap!

First, we’re moving back to the States! NYC to be specific. That’s what the countdown is for. We leave early morning Christmas Eve for our new but temporary home in the Upper East Side at 75th and 3rd. We have many exciting and grand plans regarding getting jobs that actually pay when and what they say they will yet aren’t that overbearing on the rest of our lives so that we’d have time to maintain an active non-work life in the evenings and on weekends and take vacations throughout the year. I have grand plans for a balcony where we can grow fancy vegetables and set up a fire pit on which I intend to cook hearty soups with my cast iron pot, skewer vegetables and meats, grill different kinds of fish in one of those neat looking fish-grilling-baskets, and roast marshmallows, all under the glow of any and all seasonally appropriate skies. I’m going to be more revealing here than anywhere else public on the inter-webs, but you know, I’m feeling excited about these new prospects so any unforeseen consequences of my openness be damned. We’re also going to be stopping off first at Maria’s parents place in Ohio, and though it’s seeing her side of the family again in a relatively short amount of time, we feel its appropriate as it’s quite close to NYC and we intend to take possession of her parents old minivan. Yes, I will be driving a minivan, feel free to start the ribbing on that one. But I’d just like to point out the obvious benefits of one:

1. we can carry STUFF! (Costco, free stuff from Craigslist, people, moving)
2. we can go on ROAD TRIPS (which I love, and if necessary even sleep in the van)
3. it’s obviously free (they have more cars than drivers right now)
4. it’ll be reminiscent and nostalgic of those days when I owned a pickup truck, but minus the tiny little seats in the cab that faced each other whenever I tried to haul more than 2 people

We’re in the gigantically messy process of packing up our entire lives, once again, like we did a year and a half ago for our move to China. Feels kind of full circle in a way. We were lucky, having never settled that well, which was actually a problem in and of itself but at least it’s come to benefit us now in that though we’ve acquired some more things than before, we still don’t have that much stuff. We used to fit in 8 suit cases, we now fit in 10, and we still don’t have furniture. That means our temporary apartment in NYC is actually furnished (thanks to you know who!), and we’ve tentatively given ourselves 2 months to figure it all out, permanent jobs, permanent apartments, permanent routines, etc. This does also mean that we may have to remove our blog from the expat blog listings, but I’ll comfort myself by creating new NYC centric categories and tags. I will most likely still be working within the web programming field, and Maria’s thinking of re-entering law or perhaps finance. We will both of course still work with our fancy little Enterprise Consulting company in whatever fashion that “work with” may mean.

The explanation for the lateness of this entry is that we’ve been kind of sub-consciously messing up our sleeping schedules, I think so that we’ll have an easier time when we get to the States adjusting to US time again (civilized time?), but it’s not been easy these past 3 weeks actually, ever since we got back the last time to China after Thanksgiving. Immediately after landing we found ourselves smack in the middle of final negotiations to close our JV VC deal, a process that involved many Chinese lawyers and lots of legalese and staying up to the middle of the night every night hammering through all the details involved and trying to explain it all to our partners who aren’t native English speakers and were giving themselves headaches just trying to parse the individual sentences. I discovered I have quite a knack for this stuff actually, an innate ability to understand those massively long and complex legal sentences, and if nothing else I provided good translation services because wouldn’t you know it, though the JV is international and the governing documents are in English (and even governed by NY law), Maria and I were the only people with any thorough command of the English language and the negotiations even happened in Chinese, something brand new I’ve never experienced before in my life. Lots of fun, though insanely tiring, and happening all at the same time as my IFC concert. When it rains and all that. We did close, on time even, or basically, terms and conditions met and documents signed and all, and I had my concert, which I mentioned in an earlier post was a success, then I had another concert in Shanghai of all places which I also mentioned, and we go to see our new Enterprise Consulting company’s facilities at that incubator (which I also mentioned?), and well, the sum of it all was that in the span of 3 weeks, we’ve managed to:

1. negotiate and close a JV VC deal
2. sing Handel’s Messiah twice in Beijing with the IFC
3. sing Handel’s Messiah twice in Shanghai with the IFC
4. inspect our company’s holdings in Shanghai (at least some)
5. end Maria’s MBA program (I won’t say more than just this stated fact, though there’s obviously SO much more details that can be had here, but suffice it to say we’re obviously not continuing with the program if we’re leaving the country)
6. pack and finalize moving details
7. sing at the British Ambassador’s residence (did I mention that? We sang carols. It was good)
8. move all the furniture in the apartment back the way it was (we had optimized it, but now we need to un-optimize it since we’ve not going to be using it)
9. have a tiny little family oriented engagement party (yes, that’s the other thing, we got engaged! I don’t want to dwell too much on this point either as I’m kind of running out of blogging steam, but it’s self explanatory isn’t it? We’ve been together for almost 3 years now! This upcoming February! And we look forward to the infinitely better water pressure and hot water temperature that the States has to offer)
10. have a massive Beijing friends oriented engagement/going away party in which we either drank through or gave away all of our remaining booze, of which there were, and somehow still are, lots
11. actually get my work visa and residence permit (yes, I realize the irony involved in 3 days before leaving a country finally getting the necessary paperwork and documents in place to stay in said country easily and indefinitely really. Let’s chalk it up to “well now I can come and go as I please”)

What else happened? I think that about sums it all up. The plan for these remaining days is to finish our packing, close some necessary accounts (telephone, internet, cell phone), actually ship everything we want, then do some last minute tourist stuff like see the Great Wall and the 798 Arts District. It takes something like moving out of the country to really motivate you to do those little touristy stuff that you never had a chance or the motivation to, though that’s mostly me. Maria’s been wanting to do these things for ages, but I guess we had planned to be here for a lot longer so there was almost always more time. Ah well, we’ll take care of it. I also plan to, once we’ve finished getting everything shipped, have a proper blog entry on the details regarding said process as at the moment the inter-web’s information regarding how best to cheaply but slowly ship your material from this country to the States is limited. I will rectify this missing bit of much needed information. Oh, and in the process of packing, I managed to kill one of my computer’s hard drives, but it’s ok, it was the system drive which for some stupid (but in the end alright) reason also housed the backup of the system drive. Chalk it up to me forgetting which partition sat on which physical disk, but it means I actually didn’t lose any DATA, of which I had a lot, and would have been very sad were I to have lost it. My RAID drives are fine, my one off data drive is fine, I only lost my system and the backup of said system. I couldn’t have actually planned it any better if I were trying, otherwise I could have lost my one off data partition…I hate data loss, and considering I was very careful with the drive even and can’t imagine why or how I managed to mess it up so much, it really just points out and highlights once again the necessity to own a massively large NAS. I’m shooting for the 8-bay QNAP NAS with 2TB drives. Haven’t decided what RAID level I want though, maybe just Mirroring, maybe 5 + hot spare, maybe 6 + hot spare. At minimum, with Mirroring, I’ll still have 8TB of storage versus my piddling little 1.5TB now, and it will be wonderful. Today was the first time I realized but Maria pointed out how there’s a sort of religious aspect to technology. It’s “thank God” I didn’t lose my data, and the appropriate feeling of “relief” and “fulfillment” from having a really good plan and system to handle it all. It’s like “fate” or “destiny” that I messed up where my system backups were stored, otherwise I would have lost data. So once again I thank whatever technology God(s) there may be.

Oh, and I fully intend to keep up my QQ accounts. Gotta grow and steal those vegetables, those “farm” animals, and now maintain my little vegetarian restaurant.

1) I repaired my bike today. I hadn’t ridden it for close to a month, and it’s been raining, then hot, then humid, so it was in very, very poor condition. I had to get one of the tires replaced, the inner-tube-y thingie replaced, and the chain replaced. This ran another 80RMB. So far, on top of all the other repairs done to the bike, I’m at 320RMB so far invested in this bike. You know what’s interesting though, it’s really much easier to ride now that I’ve had it fixed up a bit! I had noticed the last couple of times I’d ridden in it a month or so ago that it was exceedingly difficult to ride, get up to speed, or keep speed up. It’ll just grind. It’s so easy now though!

2) Once repaired, I rode it around, quite exhilarating actually because the weather’s gotten a little better. I overheard some people talking who said it felt like Fall all of a sudden, and I’d have to agree. It’s still hot out, but far less humid, to the point where it’s actually reasonable to be out despite the heat! I guess it really is because of humidity that it’s so miserable in this country. I knew it had something to do with it because I’d never minded the weather in the States when it would get just as if not hotter in LA, but it was always a dry heat, a good kind of bearable heat, not like this crappy humid heat where you work up a sweat just walking down the block. Bah!

3) Ah I also biked by BICD where Connections is to pick up some mail. There weren’t any, my father had picked it up apparently. The point though…the restaurant’s open again!? I spent a long time thinking to myself as I stood in line buying a chicken roll “I don’t know how I feel about it.” But then I realized, I feel bad about it, angry, betrayed. I can’t believe they opened the restaurant again!? These people are insane, and I think I really don’t like them. They cheated us, out of money, out of time, out of effort. They shouldn’t have re-opened the restaurant without telling us, and if they were going to, I’d like to think we’d have some say in them. They owe us money! Hmmmmmm…

4) That’s all that’s really going on now, though I bought upgrades for my laptop HD and RAM, and Starcraft II should be coming soon! :) I also had a REALLY good talk with Maria and that made me REALLY happy!

So…we need:

Printer – I’d prefer a laser printer, black and white only as it’s more utilitarian than anything else.
S-Video cable – short length, maybe two feet at most.
Wireless keyboard/mouse – there’s gotta be a good bundle, though this is China…
Bigger computer case (ultimately) – everything does fit right now, but again, ultimately, I’d like a few more terabytes of data.
Speakers – um…obvious reasons.

The place to go for electronics and such in Beijing is ZhongGuanCun (should I adopt the Chinese practice of leaving out spaces…?). It’s in the Haidian district, you can take the newly opened line 4 subway to right in the center of it. It’s a large “square” for lack of a better term, of “shopping malls” filled with nothing but electronics. And I’m talking about 12 floors of electronics. The specific place to go to in this specific part of town is HiLon (as it is on the side of the building), or HaiLong (as I’m pretty sure it ACTUALLY is), NOT Hilton (as I thought it said when we were walking towards it).

We were wandering around, looking at Tsinghua and Beida, the two schools Maria wants to apply to for her MBA. They’re all in the same general area. As soon as we started approaching ZhongGuanCun, you realized you were walking into an electronics oriented district when the street vendors stopped selling food and socks and began selling computer parts! Literal pieces of torn apart computers, on display, with people rooting through motherboards and hard drives on the side of the street! Monitors strapped to the back of bicycles! People sitting inside cubicles made up of printer boxes on the sidewalks, saran wrapped together, hawking their wares (should I spell that with a “z?”)! Suffice it to say, we were feeling adventurous. I gotta tell ya, my adventurism took a nose dive as soon as we stepped inside that monstrosity of a shopping mall.

First thing that happened, we were accosted by four different people, all very outwardly friendly, asking me if I wanted to buy a laptop, or what I wanted to buy, or “why don’t we just go and chat about what it is you’re looking for.” They followed us to the escalators they were so persistent…And I’ll be the first to admit, my Chinese is not that great. It’s getting better, with time, but it’s been a while and this new vocabulary is absolutely beyond me at the moment, though I take pride in remember how to say “printer” in Chinese: da yin ji, or “machine that strikes ink.” Then we were accosted on the escalator, though before I threw up my hands in utter frustration, I noted this guy was wearing a HiLon vest which meant that unlike the other people, he was actually there to help me and not sell things to me. I asked him where the printers were, he said sixth floor.

Maria had the very practical suggestion that we find the little stuff first, like a mouse, cables, etc. So we picked the fourth floor that said “Peripherals” and began to wander. You have never seen so much electronics in your life! It makes you wonder just where the hell they got all this stuff! It’s like going into a Costco in the States, and seeing the pallets of alcohol, and you think, do they really need to sell alcohol in pallets? Well here’s pallets of printers, hard drives, mountains of cables just threw together. Completely incomprehensible in essence. We couldn’t find anything. And the sales agents, always asking me if I wanted this or that, or what I wanted, or “why can’t we just chat;” a real high pressure situation actually.

So we found a lady selling mice, found the cheapest one for 150 RMB. I said I’ll give her 100 RMB because that’s the price my cousin said I should expect to pay for a mouse. She went down in increments of 10 RMB before finally agreeing to my price as we were walking away. This, incidentally, is the standard price haggling strategy. I still didn’t want it though. I wanted to see more.

We found people selling printers, for exorbitant prices, way above US ones. We wandered around some more, found a Brother HL2410 laser printer, the same model I had in the States, selling for 1100 RMB. We found it selling for 800 RMB elsewhere. I got into a discussion with the guy about why it was more expensive than in the States. I said I could get it there for 560 RMB, which I think is actually accurate, about 80$. We got into a discussion about special “premiums” to insure that the product is genuine, that their storefront was the most “honest” in the entire HiLon complex. We talked about international trade even, if you can believe, and how his theory is that the US/Japan relationship is better than the Japan/China one so the premiums on printers is less. Whatever. First he asked me if I wanted a receipt.

Now to clarify, the receipt he’s talking about, “fa piao,” is not the actual receipt that you get with your every day purchases. This is a official government document that indicates that you spent such and such buying so and so. It’s for businesses who want to keep track of their expenses through the year and submit them for tax purposes and such, and it actually costs the party ISSUING them money. There’s even a rampant underground of people selling fraudulent “receipts,” not something I personally condone. But the point is, if you don’t need one or don’t want one, you can usually get a better price by indicating so.

I was completely unwilling to pay what he was suggesting. So I walked away. He countered by asking if I am buying that day (another point of negotiation: they can give you a better deal if you buy it “here and now”), and I said yes, so he gave me another 20 RMB off. So we’re at 780 RMB, still like, 200 RMB or 30$ more than I’m willing to pay. We weren’t desperate, so we left.

We wandered around some more, looked at some wireless keyboards. I kept scanning everything to get a sense of what the prices for things are, and you know, in general, they were either the same as US prices, or a tiny bit more expensive. You can save on the tax because there isn’t any, so that probably evens the prices out.

I was sweating then. And actually reasonably so because it is warm in the building, but I wanted out. I decided I’ll just tell my cousin what I’m looking for, give him a price range, and have him deal with it for me. Or at least, I’ll have him come along next time so I won’t have to navigate this maze on my own. Mind you, HiLon is just one of MANY such malls in the area. It’s just too much for one with limited Chinese vocabulary to navigate.

But that doesn’t change the fact that we still need to go electronics shopping. Hmmmmm. I wonder how long we can survive without it…I will revisit this topic later, upon our eventual success.

But this does mean that my girlfriend is no longer here, and though it was more poignant when I slept on a California King sized bed on my own, the point is nevertheless deftly tipped now that I’m on a Queen sized bed; I don’t like sleeping on my own. Not that I actually really noticed; I was too tired to. Maybe that’s like my own personal sort of subconscious defense against loneliness; I tired myself out so that I can sleep without noticing a thing.

We spoke on the phone a few times throughout the day. I requested that she let me know how her flights were going so that I’d know she made it there safely and on time. She did. She is now happily (hopefully) in Rhode Island, visiting her sister and twin nephews for the first time. The nephews, not the sister. She didn’t feel it would be very restful and/or fun the time she spends there; I hope she is mistaken. I head off to NYC this Thursday to join her in Ohio on Saturday.

I feel as if I’ve been losing a bit of focus as far as what this blog is all supposed to be about. There’s not much of China in these early posts. And though I call them early, if I were so good as to maintain a proper writing regiment, I’ll have just over five weeks of posts before we’re even in China. That’s a lot of context and background. I suppose that’s a good thing, but it makes me wonder about what the heck I’m writing. I suppose I should just accept the fact that up until some later point, this will just be a blog; a normal, every day, blog. And hope that in some unspecified amount of time later, hopefully five weeks and zero days today, it will become that much more interesting because I’m sure the day to day rambling of me doesn’t make for particularly good reading.

To the future. To the future r-expat(s).

As far as the whole original point behind this blog goes, everything’s still on schedule. She purchased her gap insurance; hopefully everything’s all good with that and she’ll only need it for a month and it’s only if she needs it, catastrophes and the likes. I’m thinking she won’t actually need it, but it’s responsible. We perused the local bookstore looking for good travel books for China and specifically Beijing because I’ve only recently realized that I’ve never been there on my own before, per se. What I mean is, every other time I’ve been there has been with family, friends, etc.; people I felt a responsibility for, or that I was looking out for. I never did any ‘exploring,’ any ‘adventuring’ on my own. I don’t even know what China/Beijing is like at night because I’ve never been there and was out at night. It’ll be like seeing it all again for the first time, as sappy as that sounds. But I really do think that’s true. China’s also changed so much over the past couple of years, I imagine it’ll look quite foreign to me.

Ah but the point was that we were looking for books, and failed to find any. The selections were limited, weak, and geared towards…richer folk. People looking to experience something, and not necessarily from an integrated “I’m living in it” kind of sense but more in that, “Let’s see what the most expensive and hip bar is.” Not really my scene, literally. So I think I’m going to look online, see the larger selections available at the online booksellers and hopefully find something more appropriate. In the end, I think it may just come down to going there and living there and meeting the locals. I mean, I’ve lots of cousins, and some of them are girls, and some of them are single and in their early to mid thirties. They gotta go out right? They must know what there is to do in China/Beijing at night.

Alright. Back to babysitting the computer.