In LA

Due to the vagaries of the China tourist visa, I have to leave the country every 2 months. So I’m off to Hong Kong for a week. Hopefully I’ll be able to get a longer term visa there, this site makes it sound possible, even easy, to get a 6-month multiple-entry visa for China in Hong Kong.

I don’t think my China cell phone will work there, but my old US number has now been ported to the internet. So if anyone calls my old US number and leaves a message, it’ll be sent to me via email. Pretty cool that.

I just made reservations for dinner at a restaurant here in Beijing. This would be impressive on its own, as it’s probably been years since I last made a reservation at any restaurant. But the real reason this reservation is notable is that it was made in Mandarin Chinese. I managed to tell them the number of people, the time, my name, and my phone number. All in Mandarin. Hooray for small victories.

I remember hearing stories of how in Soviet Russia people had to wait in very long lines to receive common household items such as sugar or flour. I’m happy to report that here in supposedly communist Beijing, to buy sugar requires only a few minutes at the supermarket. But not everything is so easy.

Apparently we were running out of electricity. Lisa deduced this because a red light was blinking on our power meter. In order to buy more units of power, I had to go to the local bank with our electricity card and pay to add some units to it. The bank was all modern and shiny, with a lobby full of seats. There was no visible line, but instead I pressed a button on a touchscreen, was issued a piece of paper with a number, and I went and sat down. An electronic voice would periodically call out a number and direct the person with that number to a numbered bulletproof window behind which sat a teller. There were about 40 people waiting to be called. I sat and waited.

An hour passed. It was very cold in the unheated bank, and I began to shiver despite my wool coat. Another hour passed. The number of open teller windows dropped from 4 to 1, maybe the other tellers had gone to lunch? Lisa brought over some food (and my passport just in case, it looked like many customers had to show theirs to the teller) and we ate while waiting, then she left to let the gas company’s repairman into the apartment — the lack of gas in the apartment was an unrelated issue to the electricity, but one that made cooking and showering nearly impossible. After one customer was at the teller window for 15 minutes, a few women in the waiting area started yelling at the row of tellers. Technically I couldn’t understand what they were saying, but it felt like they were complaining about the long wait and wanted to know why only one teller was operating. Finally, after 2-and-a-half hours of waiting, it was my turn at the window. It took all of 30 seconds for the teller to take my money, swipe my card, and send me on my way.

I got home, slid the card into the electricity meter, and the meter showed 364 units and the red light stopped blinking. Then the red light started blinking again — maybe that isn’t an indication of low power after all? In any case, we now have plenty of prepaid electricity.

The gas is now working as well. The gas company replaced the electronics in our gas meter for the third time, and now it actually lets us use our allotment of gas. When asked why the gas meter broke in the same way for the 2nd time, the repairman explained that “this is not America, many Chinese products are poor quality”. So we now have gas and electricity, and I already paid for water last week. Hooray for utilities.

An evening that involves a local brew, fried peas, fish flavored potato chips, and Chinese character flashcards, is an evening well spent.

The potato chips (tasted for the most part like bbq flavored chips in the US, with a hit of fish) and the beer (weak but refreshing) are not items I regularly consume, but I’ve been adding another 6-7 flashcards a night. Perhaps by the end of the year I’ll reach some level of useful Chinese literacy.

And there’s nothing wrong with fried peas!

We have no gas. This is not because we haven’t paid for gas –I went down to the office in the basement, paid to recharge our gas card, and then slid the card into our gas meter so that it now shows that we have 50 units of gas (whatever that unit is). But the meter is broken and won’t turn the gas on. And this meter is the replacement for the previous meter, that was also broken. Today the gas company sent some people over to fix it, but they say they got to the building, rang the apartment, got no answer, and left. I was sitting by the phone waiting for them the whole time, so either they arrived at the wrong building or our intercom/phone device is not working.

Tomorrow they will try again. In the meantime, I can’t cook, nor is there any hot water here. I’m going to go take a shower at the local gym.

Is this a mall? A train station?

There is a ton of construction going on in Beijing. Right outside my window workers are welding rebar and cranes are hoisting sections of wall. They work every day, and often late into the night. A few years ago this area was probably farmland. It still has a flat look to it, but changes are coming fast. I started my first Mandarin class here on Friday, and hopefully I will soon known enough Chinese to be able to ask the workers on the projects visible from my window what it is that they are building. I think that right now I can see office and residential buildings going up, as well as this large project that could be a mall or another train station.