Screw-ups, Setbacks and Snafus

A Spectularly Bad Day

After two weeks of negotiating and mistake-proofing, the lease was finally signed on Thursday and we were scheduled to move into our apartment on Friday afternoon. I was ready. Despite superb service and ammenities at the hotel in this complex - fresh fruit on the coffee table every day, little bookmarks on the bedside tables with the turn-down service, a corkscrew on the dry bar - after two weeks in one room, I don't care how nice it is, one starts to get a little cabin-feverish.

Another thing that "happens" after two weeks - two suitcases filled with dirty socks and underwear, shirts and pants. First thing on the agenda was a load or three of laundry.

Our apartment is very nice, even by US standards. Fully furnished, linen service, housekeeping three times a week. Even a water service is included. (There is no potable tap water in China.) Every nook and cranny had been well-cleaned since the last tenant. Evidence of wear were impressively rare. Not new, but nearly new, was the impression.

R. left the apartment early Saturday morning for a meeting. It did feel good to spread out a little and think about personalizing the place a bit - a couple of small rugs, a souvenier or two to display, and the place could begin to feel more homey. And of course, there was a kitchen, where a full set of dishes and glassware, which had been set out on the counter for the inventory walk-through, needed to be put away.

Our kitchen window looks down onto a nice garden a couple of storeys below. It was a beautiful day - clear and cool and blue. I cracked the window open to get the air circulating a bit, and went to check email and Skype before everyone I knew in North America went to bed.

A couple of hours later I came back into the kitchen and started putting away the dishes. A big hairy piece of lint and string blew through the open window and skittered across the sill. I checked the dishes a little more carefully - there was something like soot on the plates, in the bowls, in the glasses. The counter felt gritty. I closed the window. Oh well. Perfect time to try out the dishwasher.

The diswasher, like everything else in the apartment (until I opened the window) was spotless. I pulled out the top rack and CRASH - it came right off the track on one side. Closer inspection revealed that the stop at the end of the track was missing, allowing the wheels to come right out. No worries. It was easily enough maneuvered around.

I loaded up the dishwasher and realized: no dishwashing detergent. I needed laundry detergent anyway, so a trip to the grocery store was in order. There's a smallish shop in the basement of this complex (for those of you in the southeast US, think Harris Teeter Express).

Dishwashing powder was no problem: there was a green box clearly marked in English: Dishwashing Detergent, for about half the price of a box of Cascade. The laundry detergent was trickier: a very small box of Tide powder was about $10 US - I couldn't bring myself to pay that much. Anyway, liquid detergent seemed smarter - the tiny front-loading washer was surely energy efficient and it's easy to over-do the sudsy powder. I took a chance and bought a bottle of what was surely liquid detergent: It was an English brand, there was a basket of laundry on the front, though there was no English anywhere other than on the Queen's seal.

Back upstairs, the diswasher was no problem: I put the powder in the familiar recepticle in the door, closed it up and pressed a likely-looking button. As for the laudry liquid, I decided to check the brand out online, just to be sure. I was feeling pretty good about myself for taking this precautionary measure and sure enough, it was not detergent, but some kind of additive. Ok, laundry could wait till we went to the larger grocery store closer to the subway stop, where I was meeting R.

The larger store offered no comprehensible liquid detergent options, but the Tide was cheaper ($8 instead of $10). Home again we trotted with a can of Hunts tomato sauce ($2) - there were no diced tomatos, only stewed and flavored - a package of fresh mushrooms (30 cents), 2 small green bell peppers (20 cents), six heads of garlic ($1), a package of Italian egg noodles ($5), a bottle of Australian Shiraz ($9).

Back at home, I loaded up the washing machine with whites, reasoning that if I screwed up undershirts and sports socks, R. wouldn't really care - he was wearing them under street clothes anyway. I used a half-portion of Tide. The dials were all in Chinese, but I studied the English portion of the manual, though a key fold-out quick start guide was missing. I turned the machine on. Nothing happened.

Thinking maybe it was warming up, I left it alone for a bit - after 15 minutes or so, no change. Something wasn't right. Back I went to the manual: a side note mentioned that a safety feature prevented the machine from running if the door wasn't closed all the way. It looked closed, but I gave it a bump with my knee anyway. It immediately started spinning. Victory! But wait. . . where was the water?

I called R. in. He recommended we take the clothes out and just run a blank cycle, just to see, assuming we could get the thing to work. I took the clothes out and shut the door. Now, there was no activity at all. I kneed the door again, perhaps more aggressively than was strictly necessary. R. suggested that maybe the water valve, which was easily accessible, was turned off. We pushed it forward; no change. We pulled it back; still no change. And impossible to feel through the hose if the line was filling. We spun the dial on the machine back and forth. No change.

R. went downstairs to get the maintenance man they told us was on call 24/7. While he was out, he also went to the shop in the basement and got me some Haagen Daas ($9 US for a pint).

The engineer, who had no English, was accompanied by the concierge who had a little. The engineer turned the dial all the way around and like magic, the water started flowing.

Like an old car, it's all in knowing the quirks.

I let the machine run through it's cycle. 30 minutes in, on my way to the kitchen for some of the Haagen Daas, I passed the washing machine and immediately forgot all about the ice cream. White suds were escaping from around the loading door and the detergent drawer, running down it's face and onto the floor.

I ran in and turned it off. Ran down the hall and grabbed a bath towel and started mopping. Fortunately, there was a little threshold around the machine, and a drain in the floor back behind it, so clean-up was not awful.

But now what? I couldn't open the door, as the machine was still full of water. How to get it to drain? I could not discern a rinse cycle. Every time I moved the dial a little, it would agitate and the suds would start oozing out again. Finally I hit on the solution: I moved the dial to the very end of the cycle, and sure enough, the water drained out.

Leaving behind a drum still full of suds.

Too afraid to turn the machine back on, I grabbed a trashcan from the bathroom. I rolled up my sleeves, and into the trashcan I scooped suds from the drum. Then I rinsed the trashcan in the bathtub. It took three trips, but I got it all out. I slammed the door shut. Time to call it a day. I'd tackle the laundry again in the morning.

I was more than ready for a drink. I got out the wine, but there was no corkscrew to be found in the kitchen. R. went down once more to the little shop and brought one back, along with take-out. (Yes, it was Chinese take-out.)

As soon as the corkscrew was well and truly into the cork, the handle broke off.

The only hope for salvaging this day was to end it as soon as possible. Though it was only 7:30, I went to bed.

(Almost) Lost in Translation

Day 11.

I'm listening to NPR's Morning Edition through iTunes (even though it's Monday evening here). It's such a relief to be listeneing to American-accented English. I need a fix once a day. Four hours out is about the limit - that's as long as I can be patient with the stares, the anarchic traffic, the hawking and spitting, the overwhelming city smells and construction grit.

We're eating plenty of Chinese food, of course. But it can be pretty intimidating, especially since most Chinese restaurants don't have many English speakers. Also, we're told that some restaurants have higher prices on their English menus than on their Chinese menu - a kind of ignorance tax. I'm in the habit of vetting my Chinese restauarant choices with our Mandarin teacher (laoshi). And we try to experiement with as many western restaurants as Chinese ones. So far we've managed to avoid the familiar American chains: There's a Subway and a Papa John's in the small mall attached to this hotel; there are several TGI Friday's, an Outback Steakhouse and of course the ubiquitous KFCs and McDonalds.

We spent the weekend exploring our neighborhood, with a couple of missions: finding the bookstore, and finding a bathing suit. (The hotel here has a fabulous indoor pool, and I forgot mine.) We found both. The bathing suit, we found in a enormous sports store inside a big mall called Oriental Plaza. The Plaza, like most shopping centers, had a major hotel (this one the Grand Hyatt) and apartment highrise attached. The mall also housed two car showroom/dealerships: Volkswagon and Audi.

We made our transaction entirely without English and with a lot of sign language. I've found shopkeepers to be very patient with us dumb westerners. The actual purchase in these stores is not made with the sales staff, but rather at a central cashier; the sales person gives you a little slip with the item you wish to purchase and its cost, which you take to the cashier, who takes your money and stamps your slip. You take this back to the sales person, who then gives you your items. We speculate that the purpose is to minimize the number of people handling cash.

The bookstore was mobbed. Six un-adorned, linoleum-tiled stories of books divided by subject, with escalators running up the center of the building. English language books were on the third floor, and imported literature translated in Chinese on the fourth. This floor was by far the busiest, with people sitting and standing in all the ailses reading. The top floor housed musical instruments, calligraphy brushes and paper and gifts. Along either side of the escalators were counters behind which sales people hawked all manner of pens, key chains, tchotchkes, and digital gadgets (the purpose of which was mostly indecipherable). It was loud, jostling, crazy-making.

By far, the most obvious cultural difference is the attitude toward public urniation. Toddlers don't wear diapers here; it is common to see them toodling around, their little bottoms peeking out through the slit in the back of their pants. In the park, we saw a little girl, maybe five years old, drop her pants and squat in the grass, right near the main entrance and in plain view of the main walkway. Mom stood idly by, reading some sign. Next to trees that line the big roads, you'll see fathers helping pull the pants up of their little ones who've just peed against the tree trunks. Our big question on seeing this sign outside our hotel: WHY IS IT IN ENGLISH?

Stay classy, Beijing

These appeared every night under the door at the hotel we stayed at for the first week. One of several reasons we are in a new hotel. Our whole bodies cared to be out of that place!

No clue as to what "Wale sexual funtion obstacle" might be. Help for limp old men?

First Day of Language Classes

Taking classes at the Bridge School (http://bridgeschoolchina.com/). Highly reputable, despite mispelling their name in the page title at the top of the browser window.)

Curriculum includes oral language, chinese characters and pinyin (roman letter equivalent of chinese words. Example: nǐ hǎo is pinyin for 你好, or "hello".

Classes meet three times a week, Tue and Thu 9:30-12:30 and Fri 1-4. Intensive, but fun. Nice group, almost all women, many expat wives. One young lady here for two months from Hong Kong just to learn Mandarin.

Classes actually started last week, so I have some catching up to do. On the agenda for tomorrow: finding an office supply store to get index cards to make up some flash cards for memorizing.

Mountains!

Woke up this morning and the dawn was so clear that I can see mountains out my hotel window. I didn't even know there were mountains in view of downtown.

Again, no pictures because the camera isn't charged, but I did find the charger this morning, so will try to post some pictures this afternoon.

Blue Skies Again

After a miserable start to the day - grey dense fog/smog, alone in Beijing. Uninspired breakfast, unsatisfying and grossly overpriced lunch, unsettled living arrangements.

I spent the morning on the phone with family and friends. Skype ROCKS. They deserve some kind of medal for making international voice communication free, user-friendly and high-quality.

At 3:30, I stepped outside the hotel lobby to meet our relocation specialist. A stiff wind was blowing. I looked up, through the yellow scafolding of the cranes - BLUE SKIES. It IS possible to see the sky in Beijing! I wanted to take a picture of the skyline to contrast with those I took on Saturday, but the charger for my camera is buried in the luggage somewhere. . .

We have an apartment. See the little room off the kitchen? The one with the bed in it? That's the laundry room. The bed is pictured to indicate that's where the maid ("ayi") sleeps. It's, like, so nineteeth century. (We won't have a maid, but we will have housekeeping twice a week. This apartment will be cleaner than my house ever was!)

Other mood enhancers: I found an electric toothbrush. (Yes, it really is the little things that keep you from going bonkers.) I used an ATM. (It is true that China Construction Bank does not charge a fee for using a Bank of America ATM card.) I had a fabulous meal in a little restaurant down a hutong (alley) for $2.50. All by myself. The nice Chinese lady sitting at the table next to me congralutated me on my dexerity with chopsticks.

We'll be moving in next week. In the meantime, I start chinese lessons tomorrow.

Beijing: First Impressions

Our flight attendant on the trip from San Fransisco to Beijing told us she didn't like to come to Beijing very often. "It's not healthy," she said. "You'll see."

Since our trip to Shanghai and Taiwan in August, I imagined using a bicycle to learn my way around. The roads are well designed for bicycles and foot traffic, despite near universal disregard for traffic laws by motorists, pedestrians and cyclists, there are wide bike lanes along all the major roads, separated from the car lanes by a low metal fence. Cross-walks are well marked and wide intersections have reliable lighted indicators to tell you it’s safe (as safe as it can be) to cross. My guide book says, if you get nervous, just get off and walk your bike across; plenty of locals do. (This is true.) So I was feeling pretty confident that this would be a good way to see and learn the city.

It turns out the impediment to cycling is not the dare-devil antics of the drivers, or the careless attitude of the pedestrians – it’s the air quality.

I found it difficult to take a deep breath coming out of the airport. This morning, walking around looking for a Starbucks (there are about 60 in the city), breathing was ok, but our eyes were burning by the time we got back to the hotel.

There is construction in every part of the city. Not a block goes by that doesn't have some new building going up. The clatter and movement is unceasing; crews work 24 hours a day, on three shifts. The first night we were here, wide awake at 2 am (it's 3:30 am as I write this), we looked down into the construction site next door to the hotel to see the blue flickering lights and orange sparks of a welding crew. Building crews live on site, either in pre-fab two- or three-storey trailer barracks, or, in the case of municipal projects like roads, in tents.

And the city is literally under construction: the city is enveloped in a perma-haze of smog; buildings less than a mile away are invisible in the haze. (Our guide told us that last year there were about 120 days of sunshine; this year, so far less than 20. "Who knows why," he said. "Maybe the construction?" he added, as if reluctant to speak negatively about his city.) Everything - the trees, the plants, the sidewalks, the people - are covered in a film of yellow dust, which mutes color and stunts growth. The sidewalks are kept well-swept of debris and trash, but the old whisk brooms (which look like props from the Wizard of Oz) are no match for the dust - the concrete looks more like swept earth.

It is impossible to picture athletes competing here, impossible to imagine runners taking deep lung-fuls of this acrid air. We're told that six months before the Olympics, all construction will cease and clean-up will begin. Though perhaps most of the venues are indoors. It happens that summer is also the rainy season.

Eight Airplanes in Six Days: A Whirlwind Preview Tour, Part II

Modified from an email sent Thursday, August 17, 2006

I'm sitting in the Cathay Pacific Business Lounge of the Taipei Airport. We're on Day 5 of 6, three of which we've spent on an airplane. Testament to the tense relations between Taiwan and China that there are no direct flights from anywhere in mainland China to Taiwan - you can only get through Hong Kong. So although a direct flight from Shanghai south to Taipei would be about 90 minutes, we had to fly 3 hours south to Hong Kong, to change planes and fly north 2 hours to Taipei.

Our Dragon Air flight from Shanghai to Hong Kong was delayed due to technical difficulties. Passengers were relatively calm after the first announcement, made in Chinese and heavily-accented English, of a 15 minute delay. But by the second announcement of another 15 minute delay, many Chinese passengers mobbed the podium, making a three-to-four passenger thick ring around it and four Dragon Air employees. One man, short, thirty-something, with glasses and heavy, forbidding eyebrows, stood in front and began shouting, shouting at the airline attendants. One attendant, young and pretty, kept smiling, obviously trying to reason with him. At one point he was so animated, he began banging his palm on the podium counter. We kept looking around - where was security?

They made another announcement of another 15 minute delay. The man kept shouting and banging. When he was quiet, talking in urgent tones to his assistant, another passenger - not obviously associated with the angry man, would take up the harrangue. A uniformed man eventually came up and spoke with several other attendents who were standing back from the mob at the counter. Then he just walked away. We couldn't believe it. At any airport in the US, they would have hauled the man away.

The differences between Taipei and Shanghai were stark. Whereas in Shanghai everything seems brand spanking new, Taipei is older and grittier (Think Pittsburgh.) Taipei is more western: there were many American chain restaurants and chains - TGI Friday's Tony Roma's, Macaroni Grill, 7-11 - and almost everyone has a smattering of English. (They speak Mandarin and Taiwanese, predominantly.) Shanghai still has relatively few western chains and not much English beyond those who work in the big hotels.

Although Shanghai's roads are all new, wide and well-marked, the drivers there don't obey traffic laws loosely, sporadically, when they obey them at all. In Taipei, people seem more accustomed to driving, they are more orderly, but there are thousands and thousands of scooters, which mostly young people drive with abandon, whipping in between stopped cars, weaving in and out of traffic. (At least they wear helmets.) Our guide explained this was because there was so little parking space in Taipei - indeed you would see scooters parked on the sidewalks outside the entrances to many buildings in rows two-and-three deep.

Here in Taipei, our guide took me to a seafood buffet that was like something off the Food Network: sushi, many layers of whole boiled shrimp arranged artfully in a bowl, albino squid arranged on a round flat serving dish, so that they looked like hard boiled eggs that had sprouted eyes and tentacles. They had eight flavors of ice cream, along with fresh sqeezed orange juice and grapefruit juice, pureed watermelon and kiwi, as well as an assortment of wine, beer and liquor - including sake - all included in the all-you-can-eat price. There were lots of things I recognized only in general - fish filets, fish steaks, fish heads, dim sum - and several things I didn't recognize at all. Along one wall they had big pottery urns of soup, with huge wooden ladels, rough hewn. I took a peak into one urn my guide said was "Chicken Soup" and gave it a stir. The chicken turned out to be chicken feet, black, like something out of a voodoo brew. I declined to taste.

Later, he took us to something called a Wet Market, which was like a big covered farmer's market, very similar to ones I've seen in Cleveland and Seattle (Pike Place). In addition to the meat stalls where they were butchering chicken and hog, they also had stalls of fresh fruit and vegetables, impressive in their size, color and quality. I was introduced to something called dragon fruit - which has the texture and flavoring of kiwi, slightly sweeter, and whose flesh is white with little black seeds distributed randomly throughout.

In Shanghai, we went to a western market attached to the Ritz Carlton and a high-rise apartment building where lots expats live. (I'm told this is where many US dignitaries stay when they visit Shanghai, and because of that the US Marines have a base on the 17th floor of the Ritz.) There were lots of familiar brands: Pringles, Orville Redenbacher, Duncan Hines. Expensive, though - a bag of flour cost about $4.50 USD. (Flour is not something Chinese use in cooking. Ovens are a special request item, in most short term housing.) On the flip side, we went to a place called the Fabric Mart. A three story mall that houses stalls and shops selling tailor-made clothes. Pick a place who's fabric you like, pick a design hanging along the stall walls - bring a picture, or a garmet you love - and they will measure you and make it for you in about a week. Our host told me he got three suites and five shirts for $350 USD.

Eight Airplanes in Six Days: A Whirlwind Preview Tour, Part I

Modified from email sent Monday, August 14, 2006
Shanghai Grand Hyatt

We got to the hotel by about six pm local time yesterday (Sunday, August 13). The plane landed at 3:30, but we were an hour getting through immigration. All the signs were in English and Chinese, but we were so far back in line that we couldn't see even how long the line was, much less what was waiting at the front. I thought for awhile that, being Sunday, perhaps Immigration was not fully staffed, but once we got closer we saw that there were 40 lanes - all of which were occupied. There just that many people trying to get into the country.

After that, Customs was a breeze - just handed our Nothing to Declare card as we passed through the Baggage Claim exit. On the other side, we had to snake through was a long, twisty, roped off corridor that lined on all sides with people meeting arrivals. There was all kinds of shoving behind the ropes, agents of various hotels and touring companies vying for position to make their signs visible to those of use coming through the corridor.

We saw the Grand Hyatt sign right away - he'd staked out a very favorable position - and the man said to meet him at the end of the corridor. I tried to memorize his face in the two seconds before he disappeared, having no idea how long the corridor was (pretty long, it turned out), and forgetting that we were probably easy to spot. Where the corridor opened out - where the ropes ended was closed off by a semi-circle of waiting people, but he pushed his way through and waved us forward. He then passed us off to another man, who took our bags, and without a word, led us up two escalators to the pick-up level. He waved to a car waiting, and put our bags in the trunk. Thank you, was all he said. Xie xie, we said back.

The driver didn't have much English, but did tell us the ride would take about 40 minutes. Then he handed us two small bottles of water from a little cooler in the passenger's seat, which we downed in about 30 seconds.

The roadside all along the highway from the airport into Shanghai (all thirty miles of it) is meticulously landscaped. Among the predictable palms, I was also surprised to see crepe myrtles and mimosa trees, as well as several other plants I recognize but cannot name. Through the infrequent gaps, you could see a desolate industrial landscape.

Sunday is not a "day off" for everyone. There were all sorts of crews - in their wide-brimmed chinese straw hats - working on the roads, watering, grooming and pruning. Once we got into the city, you could see crews working on the many, many skyscrapers under construction.

The Grand Hyatt occupies the top 30 stories or so of the Jin Mao Tower, the tallest building in China at 88 stories. (The tallest building in the world - at 101 stories - is located in Taipei. It's called 'The 101".) The rooms are arranged on the perimeter of the building, so every one of them has a view. And inside, they've left the interior open, so you are looking up and down thirty stories of interior space. R hugs the wall as we make our way from the elevator to our rooms.

We had a wonderful meal last night at one of the hotel's five restaurants, The Canton. It was expensive, but the food was worth it. I tried the hot and sour soup, just compare to what we get at Shun Li Palace. In place of tofu, it had some kind of fish in it. It wasn't bad, but not what my mouth was expecting, so I couldn't get used to it.

We learned something about the culture here - we waited and waited for the check - they came and cleared our table, but didn't bring the check until we asked. Then they stood there and waited until we paid. That happened at every restaurant we went to during our stay.

We were so beat, we went straight from dinner and got into bed, about nine pm. Not counting couple of hours of dozing on the plane, we'd been up for 26 hours. But then by two am, we were were wide awake, our bodies programed to think it was mid-afternoon. (China is 12 hours ahead of EST.) Actually, R was awake, so he got me up. We were able to fall back asleep between four and six, when R had to get up for work.