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

Which lately hasn’t been all that great. Lots have happened actually, and I can’t believe it’s been twenty days since I last posted anything, since anybody last posted anything here. I wonder if it’s possible to get my membership with expat blog revoked? It’s not like I’ve been doing anything horribly expat-y lately, though we did buy a water cooler, and that was an adventure in and of itself.

So Maria had been feeling dehydrated, and so have I frankly, and the water in China is a little dodgy and though you can boil it and clean it of whatever bacteria might be in it, we couldn’t help the film of sediment that formed on our water kettle nor the layer of detritus on the bottom of our water bottle into which we poured our boiled water. This meant we didn’t have much faith in it actually, and have substituted water when thirsty with perhaps not too healthy, sugary others. So we had talked about it a while ago, but the solution was to purchase a water bottle, one of those big ones that you see on the backs of trucks being delivered in the States. I had fond memories of using one the last time I was in China because it provided instant hot water and was a perfect means of re-constituting instant noodles. I only just recently realized, since it’s gotten to be summer and the weather is hot and humid in Beijing, that you can also get instant cold water and so have a nice refreshing beverage whenever called upon. But this was some time ago, the discussion I mean, about getting a big water bottle, so we revisited it recently and decided to actually go forward with it.

So in China, it’s a pretty easy thing to do. Just down our little alley there’s this guy that sells these big jugs of water. They weren’t open that day actually, so it was their loss, but we found another guy selling the exact same thing serendipitously actually on our way to the supermarket. Apparently they’re just everywhere, and they all do basically the same thing, and they all have a guy driving around a three wheeled bicycle that takes these things and delivers them to you. So we go into this little hole in the wall store, filled with big bottles of water, and the guy is very nice in that salesmen-sy kind of way and he lets us sample the water and he explains how it’s the best kind of water there is and he says they’re having a special where if you buy ten bottles they’ll give you two more for free. Whatever. The point though was that it was easy. He had the machines there that provided the instant hot and cold, he had the bottles of water, he had the guy to deliver and install it all, and a quick exchange of money later and we were on our way to fresh water heaven. We’ve a phone number to call whenever we need a new bottle and he’ll send the guy on his way, and he’ll maintain our water machine thingy for a year. Obviously the point’s a little moot since we’re hoping to move by the end of June, but apparently it’s a universal machine, capable of housing and carrying any and all kinds of big water bottles, so we’re good. It’s humming away happily as I write actually, and it breathes; every now and then you’ll hear it gurgling pleasantly. In short, everyone go get a water cooler! Huh…I just remembered that those things are called water coolers…

So that’s the bit of China that’s kind of non-bloggy and kind of expat-y and I hope it justifies my existence in the expat blog directory listing.

Since I last wrote we’ve also attended a friend’s wedding up in San Francisco. We needed to get out of the country anyways to enter on our next visa entry and Maria was running her first marathon in the States, which turned out very well. Fully expect to see some more milestone updates later on but at the moment I’m a little fuzzy on all the dates. But the wedding was nice, I got to see some of my family and Maria got to see an extensive bit of hers. We were apart for two weeks, and it killed me. That was when I was doing the whole nocturnal living thing as evidenced by my previous posts about biking in Beijing in the middle of the night. Not exactly the pinnacle of healthy living here. I’m hoping though for things to regain a semblance of sanity and normalcy soon.

The restaurant is also fast out of my hands, hopefully, I pray. Skipping over all the pertinent details because they’re not mine to disclose, but the headache and stress of having to deal with being in the food service industry may soon be behind me. That does mean I’m still out of a job, and have been for a while, and haven’t been paid by anybody for a really long while, and the whole process has still nevertheless sucked this transitioning out of my hands and will probably suck long after the actual transition takes place, but um, it’s still a load off, and will be even more so of one when I have my high paying power job that lets me live the life of luxury in this town, no sarcasm intended, obviously.

And speaking of jobs, I had the world’s worst interview today, ever. Not only was it for a job that I applied to a very long time ago and so now have absolutely no recollection whatsoever of what it was about, but they had layered themselves in so many different company names an recruiters and go betweens that I had no idea who I was even applying for a job with. It was an hour away by subway, out in the bums of nowhere, though it was really pretty, kind of tropical looking on the ride out due to it raining today, and when I get there I knew immediately it wasn’t going to work but had to still sit through it all, much to my general embarrassment. See, I knew at once that it was a Chinese company, without even a hint of foreign-ness to it. There were no English signs, there were no foreign employees, and you could just feel that tinge of Chinese laziness in the air where they hire a bunch of people with credentials on paper who all they do is the least necessary, if that. I’ll come out and say it now: the majority of Chinese employees try to get away with doing as little as possible. Maria just read somewhere recently that Chinese greed is only outweighed by Chinese laziness, and it’s true. There’s a whole floor of people sitting in cubicles, everyone looking at their own computer screens, all messing on the internet in one way or another, without so much as a word being spoken to anyone, without that sort of collaborative creativity and productivity one feels in US offices. Just with that, I knew I wouldn’t want the job, but apparently they didn’t want me either. Ah the other thing was the actual applications I had to fill out. First, there was a questionnaire and one of the questions was in Chinese; obviously a test of my literacy which I obviously failed. Second, all the boxes to fill in information like “name” or “relation” or “previous employer’s name” where too small; you couldn’t write the English in there even if you wanted to. Obviously meant to accept Chinese characters only, and obviously another count on which I failed. Then there were the questions about HTTP protocol and DNS lookups which I actually just don’t know, so obviously I’m not qualified for the job either but I don’t actually remember because it’s been ages since I first applied and these people put so many buffers between the actual job and me I went in completely blind. So there wasn’t even a real interview. Some guy came out, said thanks for coming out, said I probably wasn’t qualified, asked if I had any questions, and that was it. Hours of my life wasted in what is probably the biggest job interview fail of my life. I’ve been failing a lot really, and it’s kinda putting a crimp in my self esteem.

But the pluses do also exist. I’m doing some freelance programming work which allows me to flex some of my programming muscles. I’m doing some music work for pay as well and that’s always a good thing. There are a few social events on my calendar coming up with people whose company I enjoy, and I at least am very excited by my father’s and Maria’s business opportunities coming right over the horizon. I’m hoping for lots of good things from them.

A bigger short of it though is that I’m not entirely sure I’m happy, but I’m hoping to find what I need to fix that so that I can be, so that this opportunity which has been afforded me and which I have undertaken with Maria, my partner in all of this, will have ultimately been beneficial. Um…so that’s the meaning behind the title, actually. I’d like to enter a process of discovery and more specifically, rediscovery, of all the things in life that I love so that I can share them with the person I love.

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…..

I know, the original point was for convenience, same with the cell phone (I have to text “YE” to some number to check the balance, then call some other number to refill it using a card I buy from a newspaper stand…?…), but I’m finding it to all just actually be a complete pain! Why can’t I give them my bank account, and they’ll just bill me, like it is in EVERY other civilized country that I’ve been in? I don’t want to have to go out and make sure I fill my cards, of which I’m going to have many, and make sure to swipe it in front of the electric meter or I’ll have my power turned off. Just take my stupid money, please!

So that was the rant against prepaid stuff. Just as a point then, in case anybody is reading this…

Gas and electric utilities are prepaid, you’ll see a meter that indicates how many “units” you have left at the meter. If you’re low, below 200 for electric, I don’t know what for gas, you can swipe your card at it and it’ll refill it. You get this card from I don’t know where, and you refill it at a bank. It was much easier in the States when they just took money out of my checking account.

Cell phones you can buy from any China Mobile store, and you can pick the type of plan you want. There are two kinds of prepaid, plus one that’s more traditional and akin to the contract plans in the states. You refill your prepaid phones using cards you buy from newspaper stands and the likes. There’s a scratch off spot that’ll have a special password code that you enter when you call some number from your phone and this’ll add the balance.

Only locals, meaning people with ID cards, can sign up for telephone and DSL service. There’s a form in triplicate that needs to be filled in, all in Chinese, then you take it to a guy behind a teller and they give you what you want. Since it’s DSL, and DSL only, you’re bandwidth is limited by the type of line that’s in place, and since my current apartment, great though it is, is in a very old part of town, my available speeds are limited by the old lines. Of course, I can shell out to replace the ENTIRE block’s lines, but that’s a whole other can of beans… The real problem with this method of signing up for phone and DSL service is that if you want to make any changes to it, you need to bring along the original person that registered it for you. So when we first got to the apartment, the service had lapsed for some reason because somebody wasn’t paying it for some reason and I had no idea who it was so when I went to the telephone bureau or whatever it was called with my cousin to try to sort it out and get our service reinstated, they couldn’t do anything because we needed the original person who registered it there with us, and of course, we have no idea who that is! Apparently, if we were unlucky, they wouldn’t have been able to set up service without this “person” there. So I spent a harrowing afternoon and much time on the phone trying to track down who the original person was, and if they’d be able to come with me to the telephone bureau to sort things out. Obviously, we were lucky, and that particular branch of bureaucracy decided to ignore the original person. But still, it’s pretty annoying.

And now the phone doesn’t work for some reason even though I’m sure it was working when the people came to install my service and I had originally thought that since there was a slot for batteries and no batteries that getting batteries would fix it but it didn’t and now I have no idea what’s wrong with it and I just want a landline phone because I’m paying for it damnit and it’s free to receive phone calls so it’s cheaper than my cell phone to use if someone’s calling me and now my father thinks it’s the new DSL line that killed it and if that’s the case, then I have no idea what to do…

So the word of the day is…CONVOLUTED!

But as the title says, EVERYTHING’S GOOD!

Everything is actually so very good, it’s absolutely great. It’s been three weeks, and even longer soon and we’ll be celebrating our one month anniversary of moving to China. Impressive how quickly the time has flown.

Perhaps our greatest triumph of recent note is acquisition of cheap produce. And I mean CHEAP. For the equivalent of $1.50, we purchased 3 lbs of bok choy, a bulb of garlic, a huge thing of ginger, one whole leek, 1.5 lbs of spinach, 5 tomatoes, and 1 head of napa cabbage. For the equivalent of 20 cents, we bought a block of fresh tofu. We also got 6 eggs, and two apples, spending in totality less than 3 dollars. And everything’s fresh. We had originally be stymied when it came to purchasing produce because, I suspect, we live so close to the center of town, where it’s very much a tourist part of town, so the usual on the street vendors of vegetables are lacking. So I did some exploration, clued in by some sightings of produce that Maria had this morning on her run, found that what she saw was actually people selling non-edible plants, wandered around randomly some, and came upon this trove of edible greenery, tucked away in some completely out of the way alley.

So that’s part of the everything’s good.

Another part of what’s good, though this may be more neutral in its respects, are all the “businesses” we’re involved in, and the quotes are there to indicate some vacillating on my part in declaring these are viable, things that I want to be involved with businesses, or “head in the clouds” type things that may be best touched with a ten feet stick.

But, to count, we are, I am, Maria may be or is (I’m lumping things together):

1) Becoming part owners of a Western style restaurant, of which I will be the general manager of. This restaurant will need to be renovated and retrofitted from its original inception into an “All Day Breakfast” and “Burgers and Pies” place, with alcohol. I have a plan to make this a 2 million yuan a year business (that’s 300K US) and to have it be self sustaining within a year so that I can move on to more important things, like expanding the restaurant onto the GORGEOUS roof that we have open to us.

2) Creating a online gallery and silent bidding system for the world at large to purchase “Young, Urban, Beijing” original art created by the born in the post 1980s crowd.

3) A good bit of fund raising, apparently…

4) Something to do with Swiss helicopters…?

5) Something to do with proteins…

6) Editing essays and/or teaching Legal English.

Obviously, some of these have more well formulated actual ideas than others. It’s all a lot of fun, but quite busy heh.

Um, but everything is good, and it’s late, and I can’t sleep, but I really should, and my schedule’s all messed up but I intend to fix it, if I have to stay up all night I will fix it. The idea being, I will get up tomorrow, if I sleep, and stay up all day, and I’ll be right as rain again.

Speaking of rain, the weather’s been lovely here! Perfect Fall, actually, something I realize I’ve not seen in a while.

One of our primary concerns especially this early on, though we’ve been here for just about ten days now already, is to find an apartment. We would like to be in the North part of town, in the district called Haidian, which is where Maria’s possible MBA schools are. It’s actually where all the universities are, so it makes for a nice pseudo-collegiate atmosphere. Plus, Maria’s friend B., more on him at a later point I’m sure, lives there and would be nice to have friends around.

Our search has taken us onto all the usual internet sites, places like Craigslist, and lesser known expat sites like Beijinger, CityWeekend, etc. (look, I’m using links!) My step mother has been gracious and kind enough to help us with making the all important phone call to follow up on the ads we’ve found.

So the other day, we did a bunch of research online, got a bunch of phone numbers written down, made the necessary calls, then headed out. We ended up seeing four different places that day.

The first one was the most expensive, 4500 RMB for a 2 bd./2 ba. It was on the campus of the Geosciences University, where incidentally B. had lived before and had told us horror stories about frozen winters. It was, “nice,” in a way; a 6th story walk up. It came “furnished,” read into that whatever you’d like, and I think from now on, whenever quotes are employed, feel free to read into them whatever you feel is appropriate. These “furniture,” especially the “bed,” made me realize that hard though my father’s be, there are worse, shudder though I at that realization. It was, otherwise, modest for what it was, and obviously expensive for what it was.

And Maria just read this and said it was in no way “nice,” which, as I pointed out after correcting it, was why it was in quotes.

The next place was a decent walk away, and was next to the Forestry University. It’s entrance can be best characterized as a dungeon, overhanging detritus and all. As a general description, all these places appeared “Soviet” to me, no offense intended. Sort of, winter and/or nuclear wasteland type. This was a 1 bd./ 1 ba. for 3300 RMB. The funniest thing about this one was that it had been occupied previously by English speaking students, and probably a young girl who liked K-Pop stars judging by the stickers on the dresser mirror. This also meant there was a neat little printout guide on “How-to” do this and that, like pay for the water bill, pay the electric bill, etc., with cute-sy type remarks like “Good boy, you just paid your electric bill!” I should point out that I actually liked NONE of these. They all had their flaws, the most specific of which is “I don’t like them.” They’re too, “Chinese,” for lack of a better term, and again, no offense intended.

The third one wasn’t bad. It was in a suburby feeling kind of area, three story tall buildings in rows with vegetation and actual vegetables growing between them, kind of like English row houses actually. It was tiny, but we could’ve gotten it for 1800 RMB. No kitchen, per se, but it had a space where we could set up an electric stove. The bedroom was also up some steep stairs in what I could only imagine was the attic with low enough hanging ceilings that you actually couldn’t use half the available space. But at least it was, clean, less “Chinese” in some ways, almost like a dorm room.

Moving on the fourth one was just bad. It was still a little further away, 1 bd./ 1 ba. for 2200 RMB, very “Chinese,” and so I don’t sound like a broken record, just not right, yet again.

Then we went and looked at guitars for me :) Then we went to my father’s restaurant, Connections Bar and Grill and I actually bought a guitar. This was a whole interesting evening in and of itself but that will have to wait until another post. Back to apartments.

I think what we learned is that our standards are higher than “Chinese.” We’ve said that we want to live here, but we don’t want to become “locals” or “natives” per se. Reading what I just wrote I think that makes me sound like a horrible person, but the facts are that I’ve gotten used to some standard of living in the US and I’m not entirely comfortable shedding it. It’s like the needs we’ve developed in the States; no reason to leave them behind, plus we shouldn’t.

But it was still good to see these because I think it’s given us perspective on what it is we do and do not want in an apartment. Going forward, we should be much better prepared to identify what it is we do or do not like. As it stands, I think I can sum it up a little:

1) It needs to be in a “complex,” one with a guard, for safety reasons.
2) It needs to be a “high rise,” meaning something build relatively recently, probably within the past ten years or so, at most.
3) It needs to be near you want to be, and sometimes that may mean not near any other forms of public transportation. It’s OK to commute and travel a little when you want to go out, but if you’re going to school, save the travel time as best as possible.
4) Do stick to your standards. Just because you’re living in another country, doesn’t mean you need to change who you are. You are neither in that dire of straits or that constrained of time to have to settle for anything less than you are comfortable with.
5) Get an agent, or at least have one show you around, and if you can, get a “seller’s” agent, one that you won’t have to pay a fee to. They know the area, what’s available, have all the required phone numbers, and can get you better deal. We had an agent, a lovely Chinese girl who accompanied us on bicycle.
6) The higher up you are, the less likely it is you’ll have bugs, and the more control you will have on your ambient temperature; during the winter, the heat accumulates up high so you can at least open your windows to regulate instead of freezing down below (Thanks B. for the tip! He lives in quite a nice place by the way, in BLCU).

Whew! I’m exhausted! We’ve had so many late nights, all of them fun, so I’m going to stop now. I think I’ll exercise some form of mental discipline and try to at least update this once a night going forward until we are caught up.

Some things to look forward to:

1) Our time spent with B.
2) National Day (Happy Birthday New China!)
3) Additional business schemes
4) Job hunting news