So we had originally been planning to take all our stuff with us on this move back. When we first made the move over some year and a half ago, we managed to fit into 8 suitcases, including carry-ons. We had a little trouble with getting one of our carry-ons to count as a carry-on due to size constraints, but since we were all coming to the same city we left whatever suitcases we couldn’t bring with my father to bring over for us like a week or so later when he went to China as well. Now he offerred to do the same, but since we’re going to NYC it wouldn’t have worked out quite as conveniently. And obviously, given the length of time, we’ve acquired some new things. So as I said, we had been planning to take all of our stuff with us on this move back, as in on the plane, and just pay the 150USD per luggage fee to check in more than 2 pieces per person. Well, little did we know how much stuff we actually had it turns out we have 10 pieces of luggage, NOT including carry-ons. At 6 pieces over that’s 900USD, plus 60USD because one of them was over-weight also (the one with the books). Pricey.

So began the entire process of figuring out how to ship everything, as slowly and cheaply as possible. We did some research online, and there were some forum posts about how to do this, but I found them to be rather uninformative actually, though they did provide the basic framework necessary for us to figure out the rest as we did. I will post everything we now know about shipping boxes from China to the US to save you all the research in the future.

1. The company you use is China’s normal Postal Service, called like China Post EMS or something like that. You see locations for them all over the place. Their hours seem to be pretty normal, no break in the middle of the day for lunch, and I think open 7 days a week. Don’t bother trying to call their telephone number unless you speak very good Chinese or have someone to translate for you (I’m not even bothering to put the number here as it was useless for us, I got a translator; it’s a massive phone tree that I couldn’t navigate to save my life).
2. You do NOT need to go to any special location (it was hinted at in the other forums that you need to go to the fancy international one out in the East part of town but we just picked the closest one to us right next to the Drum and Bell Towers).
3. There is no pick up service for your boxes, gotta get them to the post office yourself. There are also no dollies at the post office to use. We managed everything in 2 cabs with 3 people riding as well, so figure 4 large boxes per cab.
4. You DO need to use their special shipping boxes. They come in 3 sizes, but we just got the largest, which cost 12RMB each. The box construction is good if excessive (all the flaps overlap instead of fitting together), but it felt very sturdy and strong. They’re oddly shaped though, kind of thin and tall, but overall probably as big as the large sized UPS boxes in the states. You can buy them before hand so you can pack at home but you CANNOT seal them as they need to be inspected, however cursorily, by the post office staff.
5. The cost to ship is about 5RMB for a shipping label (more on that later), about 85RMB for the first Kg, then 20RMB per Kg up to a MAX of 30KG. Most of our boxes fell within the 10 to 20Kg range, though the box of books was actually 30Kg. This meant our cheapest box was just about 200RMB and our most expensive was just over 600RMB.
6. The shipping label they make you use is in septuplicate, if that’s even a word, meaning there are 7 CARBON COPIES. I suggest you write down AS HARD AS POSSIBLE so you make it through (we didn’t, and had to retrace all of them). They want the shipper’s address (return address) in Chinese and the shipping address in English, though it’ll need the words 美国 (US, “MeiGuo,” in Chinese) written as well.
7. You also need to have written on the box the Chinese shipper’s address and English shipping address with the Chinese for US. For those of you who are like me, you’d want to make this as clear as possible and probably even print them from the computer. DO NOT TAPE THEM ON BEFORE HAND, as these labels need to be on the side where they put 3 Chinese seals and it seems to be random which side of the box that will be. Plus, they do the fancy thing where they wrap the boxes in that thick plastic band in a criss-cross pattern that makes it really strong, but if you label your box first, these might cover up vital points. We didn’t know this, and ended up writing on the box where we could the relevant addresses in ball point pen. This on top of the re-traced 7 carbon copied shipping label means our addresses are probably not as clear as they can be, but ya do what ya can…
8. They don’t really examine the contents, just kind of quickly glance over everything. The shipping label (the 7 carbon copy one) also needs you to do a customs declaration on it of items in the boxes. Feel free to generalize (the post office staff wrote “clothes” and “books” for all of ours, and either “30″ or “20″ for the quantities of each).
9. Once everything’s labeled and sealed and wrapped and ready, you pay at the counter, they hand you a copy of the receipt, seal the rest of the label onto the box, put them in large cloth bags for the mail carriers to handle, and you’re done!
10. In total we paid just under 3100RMB, which amounts to just over 50USD. We’re still over one piece of luggage because we just wanted that much stuff with us (we shipped non-important things that we both don’t need immediately or will mind too much if we lose permanently), so add in 150USD we’re still only at 650USD as compared to the 960USD we’d have had to pay if we wanted it all with us, plus the added hassel of having 10 pieces of luggage to get to and from the airport and cart around (remember you need to claim everything when you land in the States if you have a connection, then re-check for the connection). In short, well worth it, and if you can ship everything, meaning minus the extra luggage like we have, even more worth it.
11. Apparently you can track these by box label number online (there’s a barcode on the receipt), but I haven’t tried that yet. That will be next and I’ll update this post accordingly. Also, it will take just about 2 months the guy said. I will also update then when we receive everything (I hope).

All in all not the worst process I’ve ever been through, they were all very helpful, but it took a couple of hours mostly because we had so much that couldn’t be done until you got to the post office. And not that we’ll hopefully ever need to ship things by mail anymore, but at least I’m now pretty well versed in how. The big hope is that everything gets there, but I’ll update this post accordingly when I know more.

As the rest of the post says though, we only have 2 days left, and my sleeping schedule is completely whacked. Yesterday was spent taking care of all this shipping stuff, and the day before was packing it all and the rest of our suitcases. We are actually basically completely ready to go, just some very minor small stuff to put into carry-ons left. We’re going to the Great Wall in just over an hour (yes, I should maybe sleep?). We’ve managed to delay going until now, but well, we’re leaving, so I guess we should. We’re going with a tour group leaving out of one of the local hostels. Tonight when we get back we’re going to take care of some last minute purchases, then tomorrow, on our last day, we can hopefully hit up the 798 Arts District, some place I’ve really wanted to go, then it’s Adios China! We’ve been trying to also get in the last of the Chinese food we’d want to eat. Last night was Indian food :P

So this redesign had a couple of initial inspirations.

1) I like text based layouts. I always have, and I probably always will. I never quite understood what all the fuss about pictures were and images and graphics and all that crap. It probably comes from the fact that I was a writer first and foremost, and an artist in other senses of the word later. Obviously then, this redesign is heavily text based, read entirely text based.

2) I have a couple of Flash mp3 players on my site for music I’ve written in the past and music I’ve recorded for my Maria. As some of you may know, the problem with Flash mp3 players is that as soon as the page gets refreshed, the playing stops, and you have to start over again. Some solutions other sites have used, and even myself at one point or another in the past, is to have the player show up in a little pop up window so that even if the main page gets refreshed, it can sit there happily and play away. I never liked that idea anyways, so the only other solution would be for all the other elements on a page to be loaded and reloaded via AJAX so that there are no actual page refreshes. I suppose another option would be to have the refreshing elements of a page loaded through an iframe, but I don’t really count that as a solution, not that I’m trying to be an iframe hater here.

3) I wanted to create a decently fancy javascript based animation. I’ve known for a long time that with the development of HTML 5 and all the new javascript libraries out there, the necessity for Flash to animate elements on a site is being phased out (though Flash still seems necessary to create a decent multi-track mp3 player for some reason…). Most page effects, menus, even some animations, can be handled by javascript now. So I wanted to give it a try and create one of those animated logos that fancy companies have. And so I did. I also just wanted in general to have a seamless user interface, but that’s another point. Since I wanted the animation, I obviously only wanted it to show the once because it’ll be a pain in the ass to keep seeing the same animation on every page load, hence even more reason for the entirely AJAX based layout.

4) I wanted there to be a seamless user interface and experience. I didn’t want there to be page refreshes, I wanted everything to be fluid, I wanted everything to be accessible. I actually had in mind a much fancier menu system for the posts/tags/categories browsing, but that went by the way side mostly because I lost interest and like it this way anyways. Obviously though to achieve such a kind of site you have to heavily rely on javascript and AJAX.

5) I just wanted to keep my skills up. I’m kind of only partially employed at the moment, moving from tiny little projects to tiny little projects, getting paid only some of the time, so I wanted to make sure that my programming abilities didn’t dull. That’s one of my biggest fears actually, that one day I will be 30 all of a sudden and without a single marketable and useful skill. I really want to avoid that. Not that this project was the world’s most challenging, I didn’t have to create any classes of my own or any large PHP files, but it took clever thinking to do, I think at least, to get around what needed to be gotten around and come up ultimately with the feature set wanted.

And so, without much more talking about all that, I present the new layout and its features:

1) Entirely text based
2) Entirely javascript and AJAX based for all post navigation, browsing, etc.
3) Widgets enabled, with widgets floating and draggable within the site.
4) Built in support for Flash MP3 Player, Flash XSPF MP3 Player, and Flash JW Video Player
5) Custom photo gallery support using jQuery
6) Although everything is loaded via AJAX, a direct link is generated to bring you back to any part of the site

And now a couple of interesting challenged:

1) I had to create a plugin to be the receiving end of all the AJAX requests, plus I’m operating entire outside of the WordPress Loop.

2) Given that jQuery more specifically operates on DOM elements generated when a page reaches its onready state, the newly generated HTML elements from the AJAX requests aren’t accessible, so the javascript code is a mish-mash of actual jQuery code intermixed with normal javascript code that have also been then intermixed with some jQuery code as well. Kind of messy, but straightforward enough for even the everyday javascript developer. Again, one of those do what you can, what you must kind if things.

3) Getting comments to work was a pain! At one point I had miswrote “_id” and “_ip” instead of “_ID” and “_IP” so my comments were going into the void, showing up in the WordPress Dashboard as existing (a number), but then not visible in anyway. I had to track it down through phpMyAdmin before I realized the key value associating a comment with a post”_ID” was missing…Also the fact that I had to reset the timezone based on the WordPress value, not something one would normally think about.

4) I think I’m going to make this post Sticky, at least for this particular theme. I installed a new plugin that allows me to test drive themes, so it only needs a querystring variable of “&theme=text” for anyone to see the new layout.

Other thoughts:

I think this theme will never exist formally for use. I’m thinking of stripping away its respective parts and coding a normal WordPress them with them, so the text based layout without any of the AJAX. I’ve already got it all pretty much sorted out and that process I’m hoping will be relatively painless. It’s just, I’m not sure if this AJAX only version should actually be used in any major way…

Since this post will be Sticky in the AJAX only version of the theme, I’ll probably keep updating it as I go along with specifics of what had to be done to get everything working.

Some To Do’s still:

1) Since I’m running 2 themes using 1 set of widgets, it’s a little messed up in the new theme because there are 6 widgets crammed into 4 clots.
2) The new theme still doesn’t recognize when a user is logged in. Mostly relevant for things like commenting and “Edit” links.
3) I don’t have a posts tags yet…something you’d think would be easy huh? But apparently outside of the Loop, it’s NOT!

i would like to comment a bit on the odd day to day expenses that occur in th is country. now it is very cheap, unreasonably so even, to eat out, buy groceries, cook, find entertainment, see friends, etc., so that in general, one does not actually need to make a lot to live very well. we buy massive bags worth of fresh produce for less than 30rmb, all the groceries we could want for less than 50rmb, plus fruit and freshly prepared cold chinese salads and we’re looking at no more than the equivalent of 20 dollars and we’re set for at least a week. by some estimate, one only needs a quarter of that to live very comfortably in this country. but then, there’s rent.

now maybe i’m unreasonable, but i have a certain standard that i find hard to give up, especially when it concerns the place that i call home, the bathroom that i do my business in, and the kitchen that i prepare meals for the ones i care about in. you can rent a place very cheaply, no more than 30 dollars a month, but it will be underground, is a literal room, have a shared bathroom with no gauranteed hot water, no gaurantee of windows, and definitely okitchen htough you can bring your own electric stove and many people do. that’s the bottom of the pole.

and then there’s the chinese style apartments which are, for most intents and purposes alright, but shoddy, feeling like they’re falling apart, and they are, with no regard for the common spaces of the buildings meaning you can be on the highest floor and all the lights will be out in the hallways so you’ll feel like you’re living in a cave. and the bathrooms, lord save me from the bathrooms. so that’s like, the middle, wh ich, unfortunately, from a standards point of view, i find difficult to accept.

now i realize this might make me seem like a snob or something, but for the same reason that i never understood why people don’t care about the quality of their hotel rooms while on vacation based on the flimsy pretense that they don’t plan to stay in that that often didn’t and doesn’t make sense to me i mean, you need a place to stay right, some place comfortable because what happens if you’re sick or too drunk you don’t want to passout in a trash heap i can’t come to terms with an apartment that i dread the thougt of taking a shower in, which is most chinese apartments. but that makes up the middle tier as far as quality goes.

then there are those places meant for foreigners to stay in, built from the ground up for them, and are of decent quality. noe i say decent only because even they could use a good bit of work. one common complaint is the abundance of mold on the walls of even the most expensive, and i do mean most expensive as these places can run for close to western prices, of places just still feel like they are falling apart, and they are. but, you can find places that will satisfy my standards, but again, they’re expensive.

which brings us to the point that i find myself in an odd employment state. you see, i’m no longer. the foreigner who’s willing to relocate and work in beijing, i’m the foreigner who’s already here and is looking for a job, with the major difference being that while the former has an allure of self sacrifice, and thus the appropriate compensation to go along with what ever jobs may fall under that category, the latter does not, and will pay close to absolutely nothing for work that in any other country will earn me a decent living. bottom line, i can’t make more than 700 dollars a month doing full time programming work in this god forsaken country. now that isn’t actually bad by chinese standards, and were my only goal to pay for our day to day expenses, i’m golden, but i need to pay for rent, and i need a place that i am comfortable taking a shower in, and that’s where the conflict comes into play, namely i for the moment just, can’t.

and the irony of it all, my father just got a new place in beijing and it meets our standards, and is cheaper by far than anything else out there we’ve found, but is in the wrong part of town, and i think that makes all the difference.

but the plan is to continue searching, both for a job and an apartment, and i think we’re going to venture way the far out of town to a place that’s still subway accessible, and easilly accessible might i add, but hopefully very inexpensive by virtue of it being far away, and we might be lucky out there.

let’s see, other problems that plague the sean. he needs to leave again out of the country by july 15 to get on his last entry into the country. and this will be the last one as his visa expires at the end of august, as in proper expires and he will need to go back to the united states to get a new one, which he really does not want to. for reasons beyond his countrol and knowledge and patience to sort through his working visa still hasn’t come through, and neither had maria’s, but she no longer needs to worry because a) she’s going back to the states anyways and b) she will get a student visa through tsinghua. the sean’s plan though is to get on his last entry, as cheaply as possible, then at the last mi nute switch while in country to a 90 day single entry visa, which he knows he can, so he cwn stay in the country until the end of november by which time hopefully some other, better solution would have presented itself. at the moment he doesn’t care which: his father comes throug, he gets employed elsewhere, or he pays somebody 1000 dollars and they give him the visa in that shady, underhanded, sort of grey area kind of way. it really doesn’t matter.

back to i here, i think. i had also planned on joining maria in the states and nyc for her internship this summer, but the feasibility of it is minimal. the expenses unfortunatly just far outweigh the gain, and if i go, i have to plan on staying, which is a decision i’m not yet ready to make. i definitely want to be here when maria starts her school so if i head back to the states it will be after that so no point making the expense now. startup expenses in general back in the states is also just in general prohibitive so even if i wanted to, maybe the best i can do is go back to los angeles which actually doesn’t sound that appealing. i’m kinda holding out that china will still work out in a bit way and we’ll all make our personal fortunes here and change the world for the better.

which at least there’s still a chance of, and having lost most of my steam for blogging, i will end here by saying that no matter what, the sean is trying to be optimistic, and hey, he hadn’t thought of this but maybe he and maria can get married; that’ll solve his visa problems.

oh and the restaurant is a complete bust incidentally. to summarize in the quickest way possible, there’s been management issues from the get go, the owners no longer like each other, for some reason one half viewed my desire to no longer be their full time employee as a sign that they should exit the business as well so they gave my dad some time to find someone to buy them out, and since it obviously didn’t happen fast enough they’ve been threatening to close down the business and then wanted to buy us out which, well, hey, seemed like quite a good deal actually because we were done with the stupid thing anyway and didn’t want to have anything to do with it and if you’ll listen to my father about it, he’s convinced the entire thing was a conspiracy to get the entire business by the other half owners at a greatly depreciated value by driving me out, driving the restaurant down, then lording over us the fact that they have more money to convince us to sell out to them, but things really came to a head when, afraid that they might steal our business licenses my father put up fake copies on the walls and, lo and behold, the next day they were stolen from us, and then when maria and i went to go check our mail because we’re using the restaurant as our mailing address because it’s convenient we find that they had changed the locks on us and were no longer able to get in, and that they had fired all the staff and closed the restaurant without telling us! what is wrong with these people? they were just in the middle of negotiating how to buy our half our when all of a sudden, chaos. so now maria and i have no place to get our mail which is a) a shame and b) just inconvenient as far as timing goes because we’re expecting her all important actual enrollment confirmation packet from tsinghua which should also have the confirmation that the chinese government is going to pay for all her tuition and housing and give her a monthly stipend to live on in. that was sarcastic by the way, though it’ll be cool if it happened that way, but we are actually waiting for this packet and it’s being sent to the restaurant and we’re not sure how to get it anymore because these people are insane!

…

so here’s to hoping it all comes together, heh, and that those we’ve wronged or disappointed in the past may forgive and move forward with us towards a brighter and better future.

1) Everything’s expensive there, basically the same price as in the US, but in won, which makes everything looks horribly expensive because it’s just about 1,000 times more worthless than the dollar. So a can of pop will set you back 1,000 won…

2) Hotels, transportation, entrance fares, etc., i guess this means durable goods and services, cost the same as the US. Our hotel was 135,000 won a night and it wasn’t that good. Food’s thankfully cheaper, especially the good Korean food, with lots of yummy sides!

3) It is quite a short flight from China, so if you really need to sort out your tourist visa and get in on your next entry, it’s not a bad choice, though, as mentioned, expensive. It only takes like two hours, and there’s good public transportation from the Seoul airport. But it’s far! ICN, the new one, the only international one, is 75 km away from Seoul. It takes an hour and a half by public transportation bus, probably longer by subway (we didn’t want to try it), and supposedly an hour by taxi, but that’ll set you back 100,000 won, or 100 dollars.

4) Do take the subway to try to get around. The maps are convoluted, they actually try to draw the lines to scale and have every little turn show up, but they go everywhere, are quick, inexpensive, and relatively frequent, though not as frequent as Beijing’s. Seriously, the maps suck; they’re dense, they’re angular, and one map doesn’t look the same as the next so there’s no consistency and where a station was on one isn’t where it is on another. It’s just all wrong. And the colors all look the same to me…

Seoul Subway map v1 of infinity

Seoul Subway map v2 of infinity

Otherwise the subways are more than sufficient as a means of getting around; certainly better than LA’s ;)

5) They do all sort of speak English, sorta, kinda, not really. I’ve never been comfortable with the idea of going to an Asian country that I don’t speak the language in, this is why. It’s like, there’s lots of good looking street food, but I can’t ask if it’s vegetarian for Maria to eat. The good news is that the language is not tonal like Chinese, so you can read and pronounce it as it looks when written in English. The written language also looks pretty good; I think Maria and I had figured out some of the underlying patterns by the time we left.

6) We were able to get street food though, and very good ones: baked goods shaped like a fish with sweet red bean paste in it. The lady was making them on this huge, rotating waffle iron type machine with fish molds on it. We had been walking around for a while that night actually, looking for street food, unwilling and not ready to call it a night without more dessert.

7) In China, anyone staying the night has to register within 24 hours with the local police department; tell them you’re here, where you’re staying, give them a photo, etc. These usually last for as long as your visa allows you to stay in the country. So like good little foreigners, we had registered immediately when we first got there, and like good little foreigners, we had left the country before both our visa and police registration had expired. We assumed that this meant we had some leeway on the whole “24 hours, must be registered” thing, because technically our previous registration hadn’t expired. NOT TRUE! Apparently, it’s whenever you enter the country, you have 24 hours to present yourself to the local police department. Not that anyone gave us trouble with it since we were a full day late, but, well, I can see problems arising.

8) As far as personal updates go:

a) My IFC concert has been postponed due to difficulties in getting the required government approval to sing Handle’s Messiah
b) Renovations at my apartment may finally finish, next week; there’s light at the end of that tunnel
c) I’m not sure I want to work for my father anymore…but that’s a much more complicated matter that I’m not sure I want to touch upon here
d) My great uncle passed away Monday morning. He’s the first of my relatives to pass away for me, and the first funeral that I will be attending this coming Sunday morning
e) As great as this apartment is that I’m staying in, I’m not sure I want to any more either, considering that at some point my mother and her entire family will show up, and most likely for a lengthy period of time.
f) I am still sick. Blah.

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.

Weight:
Kilograms govern most weight measurements, and to get kilograms (kg) to pounds (lbs), just double the kg, basically.

“Jin,” otherwise known as a “Chinese pound,” is what foodstuff’s weight is measured in, and is basically the same as a “normal” pound.

Length:
Metric again…
1 meter basically equals 3 feet.
1 kilometer basically equals half a mile.
Otherwise there are actual “Chinese” units of measuring length, but I’d like to leave them out as it just confuses things, like the “Chinese foot”…….

Area:
This is easy, 1 square meter is basically 10 square feet.

Currency:
Yuan and RMB or sometimes “Kuai” mean the same thing, Chinese money, and last I checked, it’s about 6.8 Yuan/RMB/Kuai to one dollar. So just take whatever amount of money I’m telling you, and divide by 7.

1 Yuan = 1 RMB = 1 Kuai = 10 mao (the Chinese dime) = 100 fen (Chinese penny)

Nutrition:
Things are in kJ over here, kilojoules…divide by 4 to get normal US calories.

I think that about covers all the day to day…..