Friendship

The other day at the train station, having just arrived in Beijing, I thought I was seeing one of what must only be a very few displays of gay pride in the country when I saw two girls (probably 25 years old) holding hands. Since then, I have seen literally countless girls paired off, holding hands, for absolutely no reason. I guess holding hands is in fact a statement of True Friendship, you know, the kind that only middle school girls could truly understand. I just can't wait to see too wrinkled old ladies walking around giggling and holding hands, preferably carrying Lisa Frank Justin Timberlake folders.

Q94.5 FM

Every time an intern's phone rings and they don't have it on them, I am treated to a Chinese pop music lesson, as they all have a pop song that plays in its entirety for ringtones. It sounds like our pop music, except in Chinese. I think I just heard the Chinese Usher.

(In China, that's pronounced "Chuh" 94.5 FM)

work

Now that I'm finishing my first week at work, I feel a little bit like sharing what it's like here at MSRA (Microsoft Research Asia...don't think I ever explicitly mentioned that).  It's been really easy to get work done, because all of you are asleep while I'm at work, except for a few hours in the morning, when you're not asleep but you're not chained to your desk and checking email every 5 minutes either.  There's about 300 other interns here (my mom would want a count of the women; my best guess is that it's 20% female) and we're all in one of a few areas scattered about the office.  Intern factory.  Pretty much all Chinese, except for a guy I met from Luxembourg and then two Koreans.  It's always really quiet in here, testament to the fact that they don't really chat with each other.  They use MSN for online chatting, but I don't think they do too much of that either.  Maybe a little, but not that much.  Everybody stays really late (like, 10 PM...); I definitely don't think anyone has any other activities besides work and things you can do in the break room (ping pong....unfortunately I've yet to see someone hold the paddle Chinese style..., pool, foosball, massage chairs...).  So anyway, yeah, you're gonna get a lot more done if you never have any reason to leave.  Ever.  So yes, they work pretty hard here....the stereotype is true....

 

I did hear that people sometimes plug in an Xbox to the conference room plasmas.  I think I remember some people doing that at UCSB or Princeton....engineers, some things never change.  Such as the nerd factor.

 

On another random note: I considered pulling my "I don't understand" card again last night (a la Apple Store in Tianjin) when the hotel told me they were changing my room and I was going to have to move and get a roommate.  I was just going to ignore the phone call and act like I didn't know what they were talking about.  I thought that would only work for a day though, so I ended up going down, putting on a sad face, and they let me keep my room.  Score.

Mid-Autumn Festival

Yesterday was the Chinese Mid-Autumn Festival, which by design roughly coincides with the Autumn Equinox and a full moon.  There's a mythological story that goes along with it, too, of course, that goes something like this: one day there are 12 suns in the sky, and they're burning everything on earth.  This guy has to shoot them down with his bow and arrow (I guess nunchucks hadn't been invented), and in return he is given some special pill, put he's not supposed to take it for a year.  His wife finds it and takes it (hmm? Eve? Pandora?), and it makes her float to the moon where she has to stay for all eternity (hence they have a woman on the moon, not a man in the moon).  There's something about a rabbit on the moon, too.  Anyway, on the day of the Mid-Autumn Festival, the man can go visit his wife on the moon.  Hooray!  Naturally, this exciting fact is celebrated every year with food that is bad for you, namely, moon cakes.  Moon cakes are round, individual-size, dense, rich treats.  On the top there's a Chinese design that indicates what's inside of them, as there are a few different kinds.  The basic kind has a whole egg yolk in the middle of the dense cake, which is supposed to symbolize the moon.  They're good, except for the egg yolk, which is bad, and which also smells funny.

 

We had moon cakes at work, and the pseudo-English-speaker at the tea house gave me a moon cake, with a note that let's just say indicated he took his English lessons at the Hallmark store.

do they even know what that is?

Moments I have thought that they just don't quite get it:

 

1) In the train station, saw a mother holding her 4ish-year-old son's hand wearing a tight black t-shirt with "TOO DRUNK" emblazoned across the chest in 5-inch bold gold-colored glitter letters.  Do you think she has any idea what that means?  Or are they just characters to her that look cool, the way any Chinese character a t-shirt looks to us even if we don't know what it means?  I wonder if there's an American mom out there somewhere wearing a shirt that says "TOO DRUNK" in Chinese.

 

2) In the grocery store to top all grocery stores (complete with inclined moving sidewalks to take you and your shopping cart through the multiple levels and enough samples for Richard not only to live off of but have a well-balanced diet to boot), Christmas music was blaring through the speakers.  And to think, everywhere else in the world the baby appeared in the manger in December.

 

3) Hangin in there with the chopsticks...  You know they've heard of the fork.  You're not moving a bunch of hay with two pool cues.  --Jerry Seinfeld

 

4) This Sat/Sun are work days because the National holiday is next week?  Is it actually a holiday if you make the time up?

 

5) No drinks at meals?  How about water?  Nothing?  Ok.  Can you at least give me a spoon to eat my noodle soup?  No? Chopsticks again?  Ok.

 

6) My bathroom floor doesn't even slope towards the drain.  So I shower, the entire floor under the sink, toilet, everything, floods.  Sanitary.  Good thing I don't find anything gross.  This pushes my limits though.

 

7) A language where the pronunciation of every word has to be memorized.  Does make it look much cooler though.  Which leaves me wondering if the visual aesthetics of Chinese poetry are a big part of the beauty of the poem.  Seriously, anyone know?

 

Things they do, however, "get":

 

1) The electricity in my hotel room shuts off if my key isn't in the holder by the door.  Why waste electricity if no one's in the room?  Good thinking.

 

2) Fruit at the 3 o'clock afternoon break (by the way, the shortest corporate break you've ever seen:  show up, eat/pick up something, leave.  you're done in 45 seconds.  astounding.)

 

3) The spices they've used on my street eggs and street meat are stupendous.  Definitely going to have to figure that one out.

 

4) That my blog is subverting their people and should be blocked.

 

5) The beauty of neon lights and karaoke.

Women's World Cup

So Ian's girlfriend Nicole, who's involved in sports event planning, pointed out to me that the Women's World Cup was going to be in China while I was here (it was originally going to be here in 2003, but had to be moved to the US due to the SARS epidemic). I was almost embarrassed that I hadn't thought about that already when she told me in August, because I used to follow soccer pretty avidly, knew all of the players, profiles, number of dependents, etc. I went to the WWC back in 1999 I guess it was, and also saw men's and women's soccer at the Olympics in 1996 and in the men's World Cup in 1994. (Am I getting these years right?) Anyway, I went and looked up the schedule and as luck would have it the day after I arrived there was a game in the neighborhood of Beijing that the U.S. would likely be playing in, if they won their bracket. So I noted that and followed through on it yesterday; I saw it as a sort of reasonable challenge to get me a little more acclimated to China, public transportation, etc.

There were definitely a few problems. The hotel sent me on the non-express bus to the wrong train station (I'll exhaustively bitch about the staff another time), and the train stations (both of them) were pretty miserable. The woman at the first train station sold me a ticket for a train I couldn't make, as the bus ride to the other station took longer than she gave me. I got another lesson in Chinese line etiquette when trying to get switched to a later train (the first was at LAX, the second at the Beijing airport taxi queue where I a man from Malaysia pointed out that I was giving too much space and was being cut, and asked "May I help you in any way?"....). At the train station this grandmother that should have been behind me, kept pulling up even with me, and then when the line moved, she would move in front of me. Then a few seconds later she would put her hand on my back and forcefully push me forward until I was again even with her. It was as if she really wanted to cut me, would do it, and then feel guilty and give me my spot back, but not so guilty that she wouldn't leave the opportunity for herself to do it again.

Once I finally had the ticket, I had a lot of trouble finding the platform, because there were no signs for the platform. Actually, I'm sure there were, they were just in Chinese characters. I just kept seeing the number 2 next to my train on the board, and assumed that meant go to the first place marked "2" I saw, which was acutally just a waiting area. I figured that out, then went and had somebody point me to the tracks by handing them my ticket and shrugging, and then pointing in random locations until they got excited, but naturally my train ended up not being on the 2 track. I still don't know what the 2 was on the 40' by 15' display board, nor what was supposed to point me to the 5 track, but I found my train by following somebody that I saw in the "Tianjin" line that I aggressively compared tickets with and found was on the same train. (By the way, I now know three chinese characters. The ones for "Tianjin," "internet cafe," and "women.") There were seat predicaments as well, but I digress.

Eventually I made it to Tianjin, which while only an hour away on the train is really far away when you consider the trains/buses on either end that take forever. I grabbed the 8 bus because a website had said to take that to the end of the line to get to the stadium. I hope the Internet never lies to me about something of this sort, because while I try to verify the information once on board by asking or looking at a map, it's generally pretty difficult. I ended up getting off halfway there because I saw a dumpling restaurant I'd heard about and wanted to check it out. I went in and asked for what I had been told was their specialty, a sort of stuffed steamed roll. They laughed and then got their token English speaker to explain that they had "many kinds of baozi" or whatever the word was. I think I asked for a pizza at pizza hut, or comparable. Anyway, it was pretty tasty. I looked up the words for "very good!" and said that as I was leaving, but evidently I'm not pronouncing it right because I've used it several times since and just get blank stares and awkward laughs.

Later I went over to the stadium after checking out what must be the mecca of all grocery stores (Chinese grocery stores are amazing...) that happened to be in a shopping mall. I got my ticket for the U.S.-England match and was going to go check out the stadium even though it was relatively early, but the security guard gave me what I can only describe as a hang loose hand gesture. I figured he was telling me it was too early, and since I didn't really care I went off exploring. I found an apple store, as well as a "Trader Zhou's" which, disappointingly, only sells wine. I abused the apple store for their internet but prominently placed down my ipod next to me on the counter so they knew I liked their products (one of the only advantages of not speaking the language is being able to be rude like I was in this circumstance and getting away with it because they have a hard time telling me to stop since I don't speak their language).

I went over to this little park area where they were selling street meat (delicious, and it all worked out fine, Brent!) and watching the other quarterfinal game (Germany v. South Korea) on a big screen. I made an American Friend At First Sight, a middle-aged guy that has been on a lot of business trips to China and right now is halfway through a 1-year assignment in Shanghai (by the way, in Beijing not counting the train station, I have seen one other Caucasian...I'm definitely not in the tourist district...and I'm told soon I will be getting asked for pictures). He gave me lots of tips on bargaining and shopping with the Chinese shopkeepers that Jen and I will be taking full advantage of in November. He also told me that the "hang loose" gesture meant 6, as in, 6 PM. He taught me the one-hand Chinese gesture for 7-10 as well.

Eventually went to the game, which was pretty awesome to see. I don't know all the players anymore, but I know a fair number that have held over from the days I followed it. There were more English fans it seemed, or probably just louder and better organized. U.S. won 3-0, and I made another AFAFS in the stadium, sitting next to a guy that had been there for decades with his wife after they had decided to adopt 5 kids from the orphanage in Tianjin. I think this American Chinese enjoyed the distraction I provided him during the game; his current company was only asking questions like where is the goodyear blimp, where do they get the balls, why is only one ball allowed on the field, where did people get the horns, why does the sun shine, etc.

Trip back took forever (trains and buses don't run late here, even on major routes like Beijing-Tianjin, so I had to take 3 taxis), but it was all totally worth it. Took me back to some of my earlier days. :)

quintessentially chinese

So right now I am sitting in a Chinese tea house, where I ordered from a picture menu and with the help of the only person within a square mile that speaks a lick of English.  He works at the internet cafe down the hall, but I prefer the tea house because of the wireless.  The "tea," mind you, is some sort of red bean paste frozen thing.  I like red bean paste :).  The whole staff is staring at me.  And the guy that helped me comes and reads my email over my shoulder every 10 minutes or so.  Evidently that's acceptable around here.  Oh, and I'm posting this via e-mail rather than the site because the CCP (the Chinese Communist party) has blocked my site.  I thought that was really interesting.  My 10 yuan also got me (unlimited?) Chinese salty snacks like dry-roasted edamame and 2 other kinds of dried seeds I haven't identified yet.  Internet is dangerously hard to find around here.  The CCP used a fire in an Internet cafe a few years ago as an excuse to shut down most of the internet cafes.  It's amazing to me to ask people "Internet?" and not have them immediately know what I'm talking about, much less a place nearby where I can use my computer.  This place is a 20-minute walk from my hotel (!!).  I'm headed to Microsoft to check in and do some paperwork in a bit, and I'm hoping they can help me with this Internet situation.

Things have definitely been much harder than I expected so far.  There's really no pinyin anywhere, just Chinese characters, which makes things downright impossible.  Additionally, Chinese characters of course can be printed in different "fonts" just the way our characters are, so even if I sit and compare at a particular character sometimes I can't tell if the differences are significant or not.  Is that trapezoid with the imperfect corner and and overextended side the same as the box at the bottom of this character I'm looking at on the map?  I don't know.  Additionally, my map from MSR was made using Paint edition 3rd grade, is not to scale, and landmarks only the hardest things to find.  I think things will be much better come Monday though when I have a building full on engineers to help out.

I'm eating all of these dried snacks whole, but I'm pretty sure there's at least a part of it that I'm supposed to be removing...

i made it

Flight was uneventful and gradually introduced me to the culture I was entering, starting as early as check-in at LAX; nobody speaks English here; I have a tiny room to myself that does not distinguish shower area of the bathroom from the toilet area in any fashion; internet is horrendous. The last of these clearly needs to be rectified.

By the way, get skype. I'm moxley777. It's free, ya fools!

travel reading

As I leave in a mere hour for my flight to Beijing, which takes 26 hours in total including the bus down to LAX and a stop in Tokyo, I want to share some of the books that are going to be keeping me company. By the way, while in Guatemala, I got an AMAZING amount of reading done...I can read in cars, boats, "touristic" minibuses, you name it, so there's never a dull moment. While there I read:

1. This Side of Paradise (3 out of 5 - I was a little disappointed because I had heard it was so many people's favorite book. I think I read it a little too late or something; it just didn't seem that amazing to me. I also couldn't figure out how somebody could like it with all of its Princeton references if they didn't go there. However, Nada pointed out that that may have been a distraction for me, and been why I didn't like it as much as most to begin with...)

2. Fahrenheit 451 (4 out of 5 - I somehow escaped reading this one in high school, and found it in a used book shop for $1.875. Pretty good!)

3. River Town (4 out of 5 - This book I found in my amazing hotel in Atitlan. It was absolutely perfect for me now...It's about a person in the Peace Corps that goes to rural China to teach for 2 years. It's a loosely strung together collection of anecdotes, commentary and analysis of China and the Chinese. It got me really excited for my internship and was easy to pick up and put down while travelling on the trip. I even made Nada pick up the Mandarin Lesson CDs I had abandoned at school after the first 2 minutes as it made me want to pick up a little Chinese, but the book inspired me to think I might want to try, at least a little bit. It also made me very, very afraid of pollution there.)

4. The Rule of Four (3 out of 5 - Entertaining, quick read, but the message/theme was a little blatant and unoriginal. Made me miss campus and a lot of you terribly though...)

and I'm taking the following with me to Beijing:

1. Mating (one of Anand's favorites)
2. White Swans (one of Laura's favorites. read this one before and loved it; it's about the Cultural Revolution and I want to remind myself of a lot of that history.)
3. Lord of the Flies (escaped High School without reading this one, too...guess I was too busy SOHCAHTOAing)
4. Crying of Lot 49 (I keep hearing it's good, and it's short....)
5. Chinese Phrases for Dummies. Though I'm already regretting not getting a phrasebook....not that at this point I could read them even if they were in the Romanized pinyin...

Alright, time to go shower and head towards the bus for my flight out of LA.

thoughts on Belize

So Brent and I had a whirlwind tour of Belize.  Yesterday involved four buses that landed us at Placencia, per Jen's recommendation.

 

The night before we went to Belize, we made the following list of things we collectively knew about Belize:

1) Guatemala thinks it owns Belize

2) I used to think Belize was in Africa

3) It's tiny, so tiny Emily and Laura ran into each other while their families vacationed there last Christmas break.  Evidently there are only 2 major roads (E/W and N/S) so it was pretty certain even before they left that they'd run into each other.

 

We really enjoyed our brief time there.  Some surprises/things I learned:

1) They all speak English there.

2) It's a very Caribbean culture there.  I guess that makes sense, but I was expecting something more similar to what I had seen in other parts of Central America

3) I gather it's becoming a very trendy place.  Tommy Lee Jones, Leonardo DiCaprio, Francis Ford Coppola, and the restaurant owner that chatted with me own islands/keys there.  Also, classy families like the Browers and the Chiswick-Pattersons are vacationing there.  It's on the up.

 

We're back in Guatemala now, and head back to California tomorrow.  We decided to spend the night in the "dirty port city" of Puerto Barrios tonight rather than hide in a hostel in Guatemala City where we'd have to run by the window for fear of being shot every time we wanted to cross the room.  I'd get grouchy being crouched next to the ground for the next 24 hours.

Today....

I rode four buses.

The guy next to me on one of them had literally the grossest fingernails I have ever seen.   Usually when I say something is gross, I really mean, "most people would find this gross."  But this was seriously disgusting.  And he was eating chips with ketchup that got all under them and then would eat the ketchup from under his fingernails.  But there's a happy ending!  While we were on the bus, his girlfriend (I guess) cut his nails right there!  It was great to have closure to such a horrifying story.

Guatemalan Independence Day

So today is Guatemalan Independence Day, which I got to see celebrated last night by every kid in the country out on the street running the roads carrying a torch. Definitely one of those Halloween-like (Brent's reference) holidays that the kids just use to stay out late. Anyway, it made it so that it took 5.5 hours (should be 3.5) to get from Atitlan to Guatemala City where we were catching a bus for Flores. We nearly missed the bus and almost slept on the couch of an amazingly friendly couple in their honeymoon suite. Which we wouldnt have considered had they not seemed genuinely ok with it. Anyway, we did make it, and had a pretty horrendously bad overnight Latin American bus up to Flores. Flores is beautiful and we'll use it to hop off to Tikal as well as Belize tomorrow. Those with Belize experience, send word: my guidebook stops at the border.

Guatemala, Day 1

Brent and I decided to go hike Volcan Pacaya, which ended up being much like a Nintendo game, consisting of 5 levels.

 

Level 1

Challenge: Twenty five little kis trying to sell hiking sticks.  ES NECESITO!  NECESITO!

Difficulty: 3.5 of 5.

Weapon: Brent's Spanish and smart remarks ("My legs are strong, it is NOT necessary.  I'll come back when I'm 55.)

 

Level 2

Challenge: Hike up mountain portion, avoid as much horseshit as possible.

Difficulty: 4 of 5.

Weapon: Lagrange multipliers for optimization....Can't avoid it all, but the cost factor of hitting fresh horseshit is much greater than that for the old stuff.

 

Level 3

Challenge: Hop rocks on the actual volcano, avoid falling in lava which was literally below our feet.  There was also a dragon at the end that I killed by jumping on his head three times.

Difficulty: 2 of 5.

Weapon: Our Guatemalan guide, with man-purse.

 

Level 4

Challenge: Hike down mountain, in pitch dark, while pouring rain.

Difficulty: 4 of 5.

Weapon: Flashlights and umbrellas.  All that horseshit I avoided on the way up?  Tough to avoid it in the dark.

 

Level 5

Challenge: Cleaning up horseshit from pants and shoes.

Difficulty: 2 of 5.

Weapon:  Anitbacterial soap, leaking sink that was falling off the wall in our hostel, Brent's toothbrush that had been rendered useless as a toothbrush after deoderant melted all over it (melted?  really?).

Plans are for Ben Gibbard

So Brent and I have changed our plans around a little.  We got to Atitlan to a hotel that had been described by a woman from Chicago as "the most beautiful place she'd ever seen" and it lived up to the hype.  We stayed an extra day reading by the lake and taking a hike, and today have decided to make the trek up to Tikal in the north of Guatemala rather than over to Copan across the southern border in Honduras.  The travel agency woman tried to sell us tickets for $10 each to TIkal (when the going rate was $45) but we kindly reminded her that the exchange rate was in fact 8 to 1, not 2 to 1.  Additionally, we taught her that there was no way the bus that left at 4 PM got to Flores at 10 PM, since it was 4 hours to Guatemala City and then another 8 to 10 up from there to Flores.  I'm not sure what the difficulty was...  We'll hopefully spend some time up in Belize also before coming back the Guatemala City before we leave on Tuesday.

oatmeal

Well Brent and I made it to Guatemala!  We had a nice homecooked meal from his grandparents to send us off, and then the overnight flight.  Pretty ironic that the flights you would LIKE to be longer (red-eyes) are always too short.  The flight was about 4.5 hours so it was less than 4 hours of sleep, but it was practically empty so we got a whole row to lay down on.  Evidently Spirit Air didn't do a good enough job advertising their $48 flights.  We then bee-lined it for Antigua, where we're checking out the Guatemalan handicrafts and going on a hike on a volcano in a little bit.  By the way, all the handicrafts look so similar I think it's just luck which vendors actually get any business.  I had some mosh = oatmeal to eat this morning, and it was subpar.  Perhaps the Central American oatmeal in general is bad, and that's why they advertise the good stuff (Quaker) on every corner in Panama.

Guatemala Itinerary, v0.9

Tomorrow Brent and I head to Guatemala.  Here's the itinerary as of now, and since most of you have been to Guatemala I am hoping to get suggestions (hostels, food, sites, cheap guatemalan goods, everything).  I haven't had as much time to do my reading as I wanted so I'm going to need your advice!

TUESDAY SEPT 11
arrive, get to Antigua, Antigua
sleep:Antigua

WED SEPT 12
go to Atitlan
sleep: Atitlan (I heard San Pedro is cool)

THURSDAY SEPT 13
Atitlan, bus to Monterrico
sleep:Monterrico

FRIDAY SEPT 14
Monterrico, find our way to Chiquimila or somewhere over there near Copan Ruinas
sleep: hopefully Copan Ruinas

SATURDAY SEPT 15
Copan Ruinas, etc
sleep: Copan Ruinas

SUNDAY SEPT 16
get to Livingston
sleep: Livingston

MONDAY SEPT 17
beach, etc
sleep: Puerto Barrios

TUESDAY
bus back to Guatemala city (5 to 6 hours, 15 between 1 AM and 4PM)
flight 4:30 PM

"Tips for Your Stay" at MSR

I got a few documents from Microsoft Asia the other day, including a few tips and pointers for my stay. I was pretty impressed with their organized packet, which included information about my lodging (a hotel, complete with maid service, and a desk "on which sits 2 tea cups") as well as location of ATMs (Bank of China is evidently very convenient, though I "need" to pay the extra service fee...what if I decide I don't "need" to?) and the best place for wireless internet in the area (depends on whether I want coffee, they indicated... I wonder if my practice of claiming a chair in the chain coffee shop and mooching internet without buying something will be scorned there...) and what a few good weekend trips would be (a 5-hr hike on the great wall, that ends at a place where I could stay for 10RMB/night...=$1.25....I wonder if that's a typo? wow, just wow). Other highlights from the "Tips for Your Stay" included that I "better not leave valuables in the hotel room!" (umm...or I'll be sent to the corner?) and the fact that the hotel is equipped with "safe drinking water that is good for instant noodles which you can buy from the first floor of the hotel." Well thank god! They are also very excited about the new Wal-Mart in town. But all in all it was pretty impressive that they cared to share all this information, and certainly helped me out (especially the 6-step instructions of how to get a cab from the airport to the hotel). I tried to ask the sender a question about the hotel, but he evidently doesn't know his own email address, or at least has entered it incorrectly in the replyto address. Every email I send him bounces back. Which could have been a big problem given that he is also the contact for VISAs for all MSR interns....