I almost forgot: we saw two oddly costumed people outside a flower shop apparently using halloween as an excuse for using a sheer lace bunny suit and a pink wig with cockles as a method to get people to buy flowers. We couldn’t quite ascertain this flamboyant person’s gender for certain.
Fellow Americans: please proclaim Halloween an American heritage, not to be stolen by foreign countries. You’d do a lot of us a favor.
It’s already almost routine: catch the 9:42 to Zürich airport, check in for the 13:00 flight LX 168, sit around and wait. This time I sat around in the lounge and was disappointed by whoever is responsible for not allowing free internet for the business lounge. I read, instead.
I thought I was a little late when I left the lounge and sure enough, the screens said to go to the gate for my flight. A group of about fifteen conspicuously beautiful and fashionable young girls - all looking about the same age and same height and same girth - boarded the same train out to terminal E. Their boss got into the business line at security and I overheard them saying something about not earning anything unlike him, so I assume they were trying out for modeling jobs or something like that. It’s odd how a lot of them struck me as so conforming to an unspoken set of standard looks that their beauty lost in character. They looked like ideas, concepts on legs - very beautiful, all of them, but also lifeless.
When I got through security I found out my flight was to leave 45 minutes late, due to late incoming connecting flights. I went to the terminal E lounge and again found that internet wasn’t free there, either. At least I got plenty to drink.
Two Japanese ladies also entered the lounge, and after about twenty minutes one of the clerks at the entrance came over and told them the plane was ready earlier than expected and to get to the gate as soon as possible. She told me nothing, but I guessed we were on the same flight and sure enough, when I got to the gate the line was all gone. The lady at the gate took my boarding pass, tore it up, and gave me a new one: 6G, she said. Business, whoo hoo!
I sat down and noticed immediately the headrest was too low - and refused to budge. A flight attendant came and tried, then a male flight attendant, and finally a mechanic who by brute force wiggled and jiggled the headrest into an ergonomically tolerable position. Then a flight attendant came to ask me if I had ordered a children’s menu. I confirmed that, and she asked if I really wanted it. Again I confirmed, but added that it didn’t really matter that much, and asked her to do whatever was easiest for them. A few minutes later she returned and told me I’d have to have the children’s menu because they now had a children’s menu in economy but no child to eat it, and weren’t able to order anything else because that would further delay the plane. Now I wasn’t going to delay the plane over my food, so again I told her to do what worked best for them. This led to me getting the regular fancy business meal hors d’oeuvre together with a packet of gummy bears and later a fancy wine with a microwaved cheeseburger and cardboard fries - and no extra chocolate like on Austrian! I did, however, get a Swiss International Air Lines shoulder bag, kiddy size, but that’s not enough compensation for the flaccid burger. Parents, if you’re flying Swiss, listen to what the flight attendant told me: “I wouldn’t want my kids eating that.” She also explained that all the flight attendants thought it super cute for me to order a children’s menu, and that she’d never experienced that in 20 years of work, so if you want to make an indelible impression on flight attendants, perhaps this is one approach. She continued to say that I’d do the flight attendants a great favor by alerting them when I board that weird as it might seem I did indeed order a children’s menu, because otherwise they’ll walk up and down the aisles looking for an inexistent kid. I’d add that the kid’s there alright, just well camouflaged in adult appearance.
I got through the Japanese immigration in record time and didn’t have to wait long for luggage either, so despite being a bit late on arrival I made good time getting out. It didn’t do me much good, because I was to wait for Ola, whose flight was scheduled to arrive over two hours later. I worked a bit and then read until he showed, a bit earlier thanks to an early arrival. For once, schedule fluctuations worked in my favor.
We made it to our partners’ office smoothly, where one of our partners booked us to another hotel when he found out the one I’d booked only allowed check-in after four o’clock. This other hotel’s nicer, but its internet more capricious. It’ll take several attempts to connect and I can’t figure out the problem. Once it’s up and running, it seems ok.
I shaved with the triple blade implement for the first time, which did feel smoother than the double blade system, but will take some getting used to due to the different shape and size of the shaving area. After freshening up, Ola and I headed back to our partners’ office for some business discussion. After the discussion we went to a nearby restaurant that specialises in soby (buckwheat) noodles and other soba dishes. We also ordered shishamo, a small fried fish to be eaten whole, but although he had the courage to eat the head and the tail Ola didn’t like the fish and eating fish became a running joke. It was alright - nothing special in taste. The karaage was excellent, though, and even more so the soba ice cream in a mochi-like skin. We also had kamonamban, western-style duck, which I misunderstood as kamonampa. “Kamo,” besides meaning “duck,” also means “easy target,” and with “nampa” meaning “pulling” or “picking up,” that made for a couple chuckles.
The next day we ate breakfast at the oddly named “salon et restaurant femmenette” belonging to the hotel. We spent all day in discussion, with the exception of a brief lunch of Wendy’s standing in the nearby park at the closed peak season ticket counter. Ola again experienced a first after the fish head of the previous night: he had never eaten at Wendy’s. He seemed to prefer it over the fish. It seemed to console him that the Japanese didn’t seem able to conceive how moose meat might be tasty.
For dinner we went to a traditional Japanese restaurant specialising in seasonal fare, where besides karaage and sashimi and baigai (a small, barnacle-encrusted sea snail) we also had a mushroom hot pot, which contained 20 different mushroom types. I’m hoping they’re all edible - but I know they tasted great. We tried two different sake types, both rather sweet, and both Ola and I preferred the unfiltered Rumiko no shu, apparently named after an animated character from a TV show.
When we were leaving I asked one of the waitresses if she was Rumiko from the Rumiko no shu (which had a picture on it), and she replied: “No, I’m Yumi.” Immediately I got accused of “kamonampa.”
I’m at the Vienna International Airport lounge, which unlike the lounge at the Beijing Capital Airport offers free internet access. The flight itself was a nine-hour transfer from smog to fog. I sat next to an Austrian retiree who knows Chinese friends from his former job with the Austrian railways and had a hard time stopping once he got going about the delights of Chinese cuisine. Even so, I managed three films: Spiderman 3 (I identified, except for the constant attacks, scripted romance and not having gossamer shooting out my wrists), Georgia Rules (I thought it interesting to have a Mormon setting but doubt the simplistic portrayal does them justice), and Hot Fuzz (yes, I’d seen it on the flight from Korea to Singapore, but I still laughed just as hard - it’s not for all tastes, but it yanks my chain well). We landed with a bump and a bounce that set the plane atwitter with commentary, and it was indeed eerie to fly through clouds for half an hour and in the space of a few seconds see the runway appear, notice the elevated vertical speed, bump, bounce, go through that moment of “uhhh” and then, softly, thud back onto the runway. It reminds a traveler of the constant grace accompanying me, and of the absurdity of hurling a big metal construction at a long slab of concrete at high speeds and expecting neither to suffer damage.
I was going to close the China reports with another toilet humor sing-along, this time the best-known title of the musical Chess, but that piece has more lyrics than Waterloo and I couldn’t finish it. Maybe later. Maybe never.
Today comprised two customer visits, one at the Institute of Physics and the other at Tsinghua University, both renowned institutes, so I was looking forward to visiting. Mrs. Li again picked me up, and this time I finally got my act together and was ready to roll when the phone rang. With my timing I’d make a horrible James Bond. Fortunately, I’m also a middling marksman, a poor runner, a lousy seducer, sensitive to pain, and can’t hold my breath for very long, so nobody will ever want to recruit me.
We walked to the taxi and Mrs. Li remarked that it was raining, a rare thing in October. It was barely a drizzle, but it picked up a wee bit that morning until it became a bonafide drizzle, still without any chance of really wetting anything. Paul got in our taxi at the office and we were off to the Institute of Physics. He changed the flavor of the ride just by chatting with the driver. I’d already noticed the driver’s keychain with two kids on it; Paul asked him about it and found out that the girl was his and the boy his nephew.
During the visit I again ran into both language barriers and personal prejudices. When the guy asked me to explain the principle of an electronic device, I immediately leapt to the conclusion that what he really wanted to do was copy the thing and find out how it works from us who make and sell it. I’m still not sure if I was completely unjustified, because there was a stated intent to perhaps try themselves because it would be cheaper, but apparently the question was aiming at how to hook up the device to other devices. I know too little about this one device anyway to give away too much knowledge, so I shouldn’t have worried. After all, I don’t even know how to hook it up without a diagram, let alone without a diagram, a device, and an idea of what they want to hook it up to. The Chinese seem to really like swimming on dry land. I can understand a good part of their concerns because they wouldn’t likely have the same budget as their European counterparts (though I’ve never met a researcher who was happy with his budget).
On the ride back to the office we had a female cabbie, the first for me in Beijing. Paul only had to speak a word or two to this one to get a stream of animated monologue. At the office I checked e-mails and found out that the government denies access to blogspot.com as well as to wikipedia and vox.com. According to Joe, though, Chinese blog sites are popular and accessible, and porn is gaining ground: the government seems more interested in safeguarding the political status quo than decency. Article 15 of the Chinese Internet Regulations includes it all. Even the hotel internet guide is less than firm, less than clear: “Please don’t browse or download any content from those websites violating relevant regulations of P.R.C.”
We took the company driver to a hotel in a new area in the northwest of Beijing. It looked like we’d entered a different city: shiny steel and glass in the freeform style characteristic of the Atopie Indifférente Moderne School. I could tell the restaurant was fancier because more girls and prettier girls waited at the door. We rode up the elevator one floor and when it turned out no table was free in the main dining area we got a séparée. This room had a lounge part with a coffee table and couches, a TV opposite the table, and a washroom adjacent to the dining area. I found the decor devoid of character, decor for the common denominator, an attempt to make cost-effectiveness look opulent, but I was there to eat, and the food and service well outdid the interior design. We had fried squirrel fish with a sweet sauce, ox tail, fried lotus root (the Chinese word for lotus root sounds like an over-inflected “oh?!”), mushroom in a spicy sauce, and nibbles that included duck neck and cashews rolled in what tasted like Tang powder - the drink, not the dynasty - surprisingly good.
The drizzle had stopped before lunch already, and on the way back everything was dry again. I again noticed the restaurant in the office building of our partners and I am near certain that somebody picked a lowercase “h” instead of a capital “L” for the cursive lettering atop their entrance that ought to spell “Late Autumn.” It’s similar to the Mistral font that Word for Windows provides.
We took another taxi to Tsinghua University, this time an angry uncle that vociferated all the way and I think had a misunderstanding about directions with Paul. I nodded off occasionally, but during one of my waking periods I glimpsed the famous canals and bridges of the old part of Tsinghua University that I remember visiting five years ago on my first visit to Beijing.
The professor we met spoke German. I’ll say that again: the professor we met spoke German - a Chinese who’d done research in Germany for a decade. So the discussion about our instrument ran in three languages, depending on who was talking to whom. It was interesting that the professor’s first reaction to our system was surprise at its small size and the question whether it was capable of research. In other words: if all the other systems are so big, what’s missing on yours? I tried the cell phone analogy, but I don’t know for sure it worked.
The air had been bad since lunch, but on the drive back it really started to wear on me. My throat stung and the city smelled like it was smoldering somewhere. The sun stood large and red in the sky without being close to setting, buildings two blocks away looked blurred, and beyond two kilometers you couldn’t make anything out. Later, on the taxi ride home, I noticed the moon’s reddish tinge, which came neither from an eclipse or fulfilled prophecy. I was glad to get inside the hotel.
For dinner I decided to go to KFC. I figured I’d get something familiar to both taste buds and stomach. While I was changing out of my monkey suit into something more comfortable, a slip of paper appeared through the crack above the door handle that requested me to contact the front desk. I walked down there and was informed that the 3800 RMB deposit wasn’t enough, and would I please make another deposit of 400 RMB with another credit card. I wasn’t happy about that idea because the whole point of my having a company credit card is to simplify accounting matters for me. Using my own card would complicate them unnecessarily. I tried to ask if it wouldn’t just be enough for me to pay the whole deal tomorrow, but apparently that wouldn’t work. We added it up: I’d spent 3584 RMB so far, and with another night and internet the total would come to 4022 RMB, about 5% more than my deposit. The idea that I couldn’t be trusted to pay that remainder annoyed me and put me in stubborn mode. To their suggestion to just charge a night to my credit card now and pay the rest tomorrow I told them I didn’t want to be billed twice on my credit card bill and wanted another solution. In the end I handed them two 50-franc bills, the equivalent of about 600 RMB, and got a receipt complete with the numbers of the bills. I’ll get them back tomorrow when I clear the accounts. I hope I get to keep the receipt as a reminder of my wonderful ability to tie up three employees for five to ten minutes over a pittance.
KFC tasted like KFC. I asked for a receipt there and got two, one an extra special one with the possibility to win some cash reward. It looks much too cool to rub away the silver stuff. The fried chicken sandwich and large pepsi cost all of 18 RMB.
I came across a couple Chinese guys in the hallway dressed in warrior costumes, but I think the rowdy folks I occasionally heard on the corridor were speaking a European language. They seemed to have quieted down, which gives me hope that I may be able to sleep tonight. With the ruckus they were making, I wasn’t at all sure.
Final note: Hyundai is winning the battle for Beijing taxis. Five years ago, they were almost exclusively VW.
It wasn’t a bad day as such. We had a bit of a business discussion in the morning and went for lunch at a Chinese restaurant across the street. On the way there we passed a liquor and tobacco shop with glass doors and an English translation underneath the Chinese warning: Mend the Glass. The Chinese are far less trigger-happy than the Japanese about using English, so cute signs like that are few and far between. Most of their English use goes toward “Bank of Beijing” and such signs.
The food at the restaurant ranged from cold and vinegary to hot and spicy. The spicy chicken bits with peanuts and hot peppers contained a flowery-sweet note which came from small pepper corns. When toward the end of the meal we asked for rice, the informed us they were out of rice and would we like noodles? I’d just explained to Joe my rule of not having noodles in Asia before dinnertime, so we opted for dumplings instead.
Despite boasting upscale furnishings the toilets only boasted squat pots, and it didn’t impress me much more than rocket scientists apparently impress Shania that up the same staircase that led down to the toilet came a guy with a platter of hot dishes. Oh well, I’ve got King Creosote to back me up.
After lunch Paul and I hailed a cab and took a ride through Beijing’s sto-pan-d’go traffic back to the hotel to pick up my demonstration microscope for some training. I enjoyed that, even though it took us all afternoon just to cover basics and get everyone to change a tip. (I’d link to the wikipedia page for atomic force microscopes here, but the Chinese government has apparently decided that wikipedia is a dangerous site that needs to be blocked.) I’m still not sure they can carry out a good measurement…
The day ended with yesterday’s customer demanding that we demonstrate another measurement mode before they sign the acceptance form and pay the remainder. I feel like the car dealer whose customer pays 80% cash for his SUV and then says: “Now you demonstrate to me that my car can do what the ad promised and I’ll pay the rest.” What is it that makes Europeans and Americans alike purchase and accept our instruments without such testing? Apparently, Chinese researchers will purchase ovens they intend to use for temperatures around 100 °C but insist on seeing the oven reach the specified maximum of 240 °C before accepting it.
So, in honor of this day, here’s an ABBA sing-along:
My my, at Waterloo Napoleon did surrender
Oh yeah, and I have met my infamy in quite a similar way
The Sears catalogue on the shelf
Is singing this ditty itself
Squatterloo - I am defeated, you won the war
Squatterloo - promise to use you (can’t wait no more)
Squatterloo - couldn’t escape if I wanted to
Squatterloo - no other place for a man to poo
Squatterloo - finally straddling my squatterloo
My my, I tried another tack but that took longer
Oh yeah, and now it seems my only chance is giving up the fight
And how could I ever refuse
I feel like my bowels are loose
Squatterloo - I am defeated, you won the war
Squatterloo - promise to use you (can’t wait no more)
Squatterloo - couldn’t escape if I wanted to
Squatterloo - no other place for a man to poo
And how could I ever refuse
I feel like my bowels are loose
Squatterloo - I am defeated, you won the war
Squatterloo - promise to use you (can’t wait no more)
Squatterloo - couldn’t escape if I wanted to
Squatterloo - no other place for a man to poo
Squatterloo - finally straddling my squatterloo
It comes out tomorrow: will the customer sign the acceptance note? I visited the customer today to show that yes, the system could do what we said it could. It took a day, and I was able to show most things, with even a phase contrast image right under the wire despite awful drift from the system first standing in direct sunlight and then the evening cold coming in the open windows.
It shouldn’t take this long; I shouldn’t be doing basic calibration checks. But at least I got a nice lunch out of it: lovely tender Peking duck among other things. In the morning I mostly worked with a student from Hainan (who seemed a bit surprised when I said I knew Hainan from the incident with the US plane in the early Bush days) who spoke more English than the others and even some French. In the afternoon another student took over, who knew less English but was equally pleasant to work with. I liked the students because they were knowledgeable and reasonable in their demands. The professor who bought it surprised me by shaking hands in the morning and then retreating. I hope the students give him a good report, because he’s the one who signs in the end…
Ah, yes: the poison I swallowed yesterday is still doing its job. I took a third of the recommended daily dose for adults, which is more than I ever have, and it’s practically pulling an imodium on me. Imagine the full dose - and some people think herbal medicine is gentle stuff! After flipping through those tox sheets yesterday I for one will be looking at herbal medicine through new eyes.
I tried to check how much the beer from the mini bar was, but the hotel guide folder only has two pages worth of how much it is to damage items in the room. The thermos comes pretty cheap at 40 RMB; the mattresses at 400 RMB practically invite a person to try and wedge them out the window just to see a mattress fall from the fourth floor to the dusty Beijing ground.
However, all the articles we provide in your room are for use only, if you want to take it away, please contact with the Duty Manager in the Lobby. Too bad, I wouldn’t have minded a safe box for 750 RMB. (I checked: the safe box is fixed to the floor anyway.)
I’m not writing about the Scottish band, in case you were wondering, though they do sound good, as far as I can tell. I’ll get back to creosote later in an attempt to be chronological.
Wednesday, October 17: I arrived, dazed after being woken by the flight attendant out of the deep sleep that always seems to overcome the discomfort just before we begin to approach our destination. I’d watched “Fracture” on the plane and learned from this movie that apparently lawyers are an achingly beautiful set. I also learned that ordering a children’s menu brings extra chocolate with your meal.
The drive from the airport consisted of the usual gnarly traffic, the manic mergers, honking, and short-term thinking that cripples Beijing transportation. As long as I don’t drive, I can enjoy the slowed down pace and take in the surroundings. I still hadn’t gotten my bearings: I find I need a map first. After two hours of rest at the hotel I was picked up and we walked to the exhibition and set up the booth. There were at least eight of us on a 3-by-6 meter booth, which meant we got a lot of waiting done. First we watched as one person hung posters, then one instrument after the other was unpacked and set on the trestle tables, with perhaps two or three guys lifting the instrument. At one point I just went ahead and set ours up, hooked it up, checked that it worked with my computer (failing to note that I had the wrong calibration file), packed my computer again, and waited, until I was told that the others were only waiting for another piece of equipment to come in and I could leave if I wanted to. I did, which led to my first dinner alone - which I’ve already chronicled. So I’ll jump ahead to
Thursday, October 18: Breakfast buffet Chinese style to start off the day. No bread items, except for their steamed variety, and the only item I really enjoyed was the corn and corn meal in a bowl with hot milk. The corn is some rolled and fried grain, perhaps corn, who knows, and the corn meal looks like rolled and crushed wheat grain, but I’m not certain. For my taste buds, breakfast isn’t Asia’s finest hour.
The show went reasonably well, although my expectation that toilet paper would be provided for the exhibition days was shattered. Good thing I always carry paper tissues. We had lunch at the “Fast Food,” which was a Chinese food cafeteria with a long line but fast food once you got there. We went as a group of four and one of us found a table and reserved it while the others stood in line. I know we do the same back in Switzerland, but I wonder at the efficiency of blocking four seats while other people are coming out of the line with full platters and nowhere to sit. In theory, it should be easier to find free seats if everybody just stood in line and looked for seats after getting their food. In practice, I suppose there would always be a few especially clever people who would exploit such a system and block a table of four while their compadres find food.
After lunch, the show died down a bit. I walked around, looking at other booths, and covered the whole exhibition by the end of the day. I just don’t get kicks out of stirrers and ovens and liquid chromatography systems. I do have to hand it to the company with the coolest name and to Dragon Med for promising the Ultimate Pipetting Experience. I’m waiting for the Ultimate Titration Thrill, and then for someone to say that quickly three times in a row.
When the exhibition closed at five, Mrs. Li and I boarded a bus that at 5:24 took us to the Shangri-La hotel for the reception dinner. While we were wondering if the buses would leave at five-thirty as the driver apparently told Mrs. Li, I looked at the back of the ticket and saw it said that the reception was to begin at seven. Mrs. Li didn’t seem bothered by it when I showed her. We arrived at the hotel and entered a nearly empty grand ballroom, where we sat and sipped red wine and coke until - yes, you guessed it - seven o’clock. I nodded off repeatedly - I’d already had apneoid spells at the booth and the wine wasn’t helping. A traditional Chinese orchestra played traditional Chinese tunes like Red River Valley and Edelweiss (and some that I think were probably genuine), pausing in between songs to allow airtime to some pop radio. At seven an elderly man with a comb-over got on the podium and introduced another man, beefier, with fuller hair, who gave a booming speech and turned out to be the Something Minister for the Department of Science and Something Else. The emcee then called the president of the JAIMA, who congratulated the BCEIA, and the organizer of Analytica China, who also congratulated the BCEIA and opined that with the communist party pledging to make environmental standards and protection a priority, manufacturers of analytical instruments should have halcyon days ahead. Then there was food, western style, with plenty of sweet desserts. At 8:30 I was so tired I suggested we leave this place of glamour, where not even Richard would be able to touch the top of the toilet stall doors (and where the toilets actually provided paper in the stalls), and Mrs. Li agreed. From what I understand she had another hour before she got home, so I think we both silently deplored the reception as mostly a waste of time. I got back to my hotel and for the first time read the welcome signs to some Scottish high school’s tour of China (which explained the pimpled bearer of shorts and loud manners at the breakfast table) and two seminars. The first was the Seminar of Ugandan Economic Management Officials (I think the keynote speech was by G. W. Bush of the National Institute for Applied Thrift). The second was the “seminaire de la gestion et de l’exploitation du tourisme pour les officiels africains,” or in English, the “seminar on how to snag Olympic games, buff your capital city to a sheen, and attract foreign officials to spend tourist dollars in your country.” Needless to say, after repeatedly falling asleep that day, I wasn’t going to write blog entries, but headed straight to bed, which brings us to
Friday, October 19: I added an unidentified fruit to my corn and corn meal porridge, that looked like a cross between a lychee and a blackberry but tasted and had a pit like a cherry. Not bad. The show was more of the same. We had a few interested visitors, but mostly I kept myself busy measuring ten-cent coins. One of the tech support guys came by and asked me how long it would take to finish the installation at a Beijing customer site. This installation was plagued by mysterious problems that baffled our own support guy mainly by the dearth of information that accompanied the questions. We’d get vague problem descriptions without measurement data and measurement data that seemed not to fit the problem description. I answered that I had no idea how long it would take. “Longer than one day?” he asked. “I have no idea,” I again replied - simply because nowhere else do we have these issues nor customers demanding this sort of installation/certification/discharge routine, particularly not with similarly odd requests, such as imaging on a silicon sample in a measurement mode that makes most sense on samples with at least two commingled materials. I can’t say I’m looking forward to Monday, but it should be interesting, or at least revealing. We’ve also reserved Tuesday in case it does take longer than a day. I hope to finish on Monday and see the Great Wall or go to the silk market on Tuesday, but I’ll take my Chinese medicine as it comes. After the exhibition Mrs. Li accompanied me to my hotel and I took her laptop to store there instead of her having to carry it back home. I was a bit surprised that I wasn’t invited out for dinner, but I don’t blame Mrs. Li for wanting to get back to her husband after already one late night. I’m amazed at how chipper she is considering the long commute and her having to look after me, too.
For dinner I went to the same Chinese restaurant on the hotel premises again, and again let myself be drawn into ordering way too much for a single person. I started out with only two dishes, pine nuts with spinach and something I thought would appeal to Samson on a mellow day, hand-ripped donkey meat. The trainee waitress pointed out that these dishes were both cold, clearly expecting me to order something warm. I don’t think she suggested something “delicious” like the waitress two nights before, which usually arouses my stubborn independence and leads to me ordering the item two rows down, but waited with her notepad until I chose a pork chop hot-pot. Then she asked if I wanted rice, and turned to the page with the staples, where (I’m so predictable it’s embarrassing) I chose hand-pulled flapjack. I think it may even have been two rows down from the rice. And of course, beer. I’d already ordered Yangjing beer two nights before and gotten a 350ml can for 5 RMB, so this time I thought I’d order “local beer” for 5 RMB, which turned out to be a 600ml bottle of the same Yangjing beer with a slightly lower alcohol content. I’m confused, but I still stick with liking Yangjing, as mentioned before. (”Before” refers to a post on my former VOX blog, which I’m unable to access right now.)
Hey, I’m writing a lot here. Humor me and write a comment. “A comment” - while hardly original - will do. “A comment - I’m hardly original” will make me chuckle.
Saturday, October 20: For once, I was on time and didn’t keep Mrs. Li waiting for me in the hotel lobby, but as though she had anticipated that, she brought me a bag with wife cakes and yoghurt as a gift. “Wife cake,” named for reasons that escape me, is a small pastry with a bean paste or sesame paste filling and butter-fried dough on the outside. The show once again was slow and I announced I’d leave at 1pm and return on Sunday in the early afternoon. At twelve o’clock Mrs. Li suggested we go eat, which I declined, saying that if I was going to leave at 1pm already I might as well eat lunch then. This delayed their departure for lunch until I caught on and realized they would never leave with me there and sure enough, when I returned from the toilet, all but one had left.
I’d visited a booth that morning of a guy that had shared our reception dinner table and who had returned from a long stay in the US to start his own company in Shanghai. We talked about technology a bit. At some point he remarked: “You’re very handsome.” I still haven’t gotten used to that; I just blinked said thank you. “You have a nice beard.” What does one answer to that? “You have nice hair?” “You’ve got a fine shave there?” “I love that refined Asian look you’re cultivating?”
At one o’clock, I packed and left for the hotel, where I ate wife cake and yoghurt, and then proceeded to dawdle on the internet and otherwise whiffle away time until about 4:30, when I headed to the lobby to ask for a taxi for Wangfujing. It took long enough for me to be able to spot a kite in the sky, try to ask the portier whether kites could be flown all year, and to finally learn from the reception lady that yes, they could, because there is always wind, for the porter to inform me that “for taxi, go to Kentucky.” That meant KFC at the end of the block, so I walked there and then walked toward the oncoming traffic until I spotted a free taxi and flagged it down. I showed the driver my address and he said something and waved his hand. I pointed at a mall on Wangfujing street and the same hand motions ensued. I suppose I could have left the taxi, but I didn’t, and he gave in, turned around, and drove east. Once he left the ring road we were almost immediately stuck in traffic and he got impatient. I thought perhaps it was the end of his shift and he didn’t want to drive me that far, but impatience seems to be a general characteristic of Beijing driving and after he dropped me off, he picked up someone else. We passed old men sitting on a construction site, a woman on the back of a tricycle chatting with another lady on a bike, a guy running out of an official building pursued by two uniformed officers, and plenty of buses and old buildings. When he let me off, he pointed in the direction in which I had to walk and I think the hand motions back in Kentucky were to inform me that Wangfujing was a pedestrian zone and he couldn’t go there. He brought me close enough, though.
I’d picked Wangfujing because of an article in the September edition of Beijing This Month that mentioned the Sheng Xi Fu hat company on Wangfujing. Once on Wangfujing, I couldn’t immediately figure out where the store was and decided a Tissot watch store would surely be a good place to find English-speaking personnel to point the way. Well, no. The young man spoke no English, just walked to the door and pointed right. I pointed right for confirmation but somehow the message didn’t get through right - maybe he thought I was asking for more information or not quite getting it. But before we got to writing things down a young Chinese woman came by, stopped, and, when he explained, took the map I had and motioned me to follow her. I was just a tad suspicious, but doing her injustice, as it turned out. It was indeed a straight shot, and she led me down the road for about 200 meters, then pointed to the store and bade be goodbye, handing back my map. I hope she understood my smile and my attempt at “Thank you” in Chinese.
In the shop I browsed through the silly, the cute, and the cool, and finally settled on a warm woolen hat for 98 RMB. The same hat would likely have cost 98 francs in Switzerland, so I was rather stoked, and if someone gets a nice meal for having sold a hat without bargaining about the price, then that’s no problem for me. I tried on a bunch of other hats on the second floor, from felt hats to fur, before leaving and shopping in a tea shop. After the tea shop I walked to the big apm shopping mall for the food court. I passed on Yoshinoya and entered a hot-pot restaurant, where once again I ordered way too much for a single person: mutton slices, tofu, dumplings, extremely yummy mushrooms [sic], wild oats, and a hot barley tea. Unfortunately, I ate it all, or at least almost all, and when I left the restaurant it was with a taut feeling to my belly and the beginnings of a rumble. After a longish stop at the men’s room (with toilet paper) I exited thirsty as a racehorse and thought to quench it with an Orange Julius around the corner, but forgot that Orange Julius is mostly sweet. I walked on out and down to the main road that leads to Tian’anmen square, in hopes of walking off the tautness. At Tian’anmen a couple from Qingdao accosted me and struck up a conversation that mostly centered around German cars and Qingdao beer. I get immediately leery when the answer to my being an engineer at an exhibition for scientific equipment elicits “That’s so cool” as a reaction. Yes, my job is pretty cool; yes, the microscopes we make are seriously cool; but no, unless you’re an incorrigible geek at heart you won’t erupt in little squeals of enthusiasm and jealousy. And then the inevitable: “You have a very interesting moustache.” When they invited me for a beer, I declined, citing the need to get up early the next day, and apologizing for having to decline. I didn’t want to tell them that right now, keeping my drawers clean was a primary concern, and beer wouldn’t help. I took the subway home and with the tautness not subsiding realized I had indeed contracted a case of Mao’s bowels. At the hotel I slaked my thirst with tap water, which may or may not have helped. At any rate, on
Sunday, October 21, Mao’s bowels were still with me, although it was a bearable experience. Dimitri and Cathy picked me up and took me to their church; we made such good time that we had time to stop for a tea beforehand. Their church is in Expatria to the northeast of the city, home also to several international schools. We talked about finding churches and expatriate life and common friends (Dimitri and Cathy used to attend Basel Christian Fellowship) and before long it was time to go to the service. The speaker used texts from Nehemiah as a springboard to explore the characteristics of a true revival. I took notes, as usual, but without a lot of gusto. After the service they invited me to an Italian restaurant, where the sign advertised the chef being from Italy. Whether that was true or not, I enjoyed my Gnocchi and the complementary tiramisu. They brought me back to the hotel by about 2:30 pm. It was a brief time together, but good to catch up and enjoy each other’s company.
I changed and walked to the exhibition site, only to find that all the booths were in the process of packing up. Apparently the show had ended at twelve, so after a brief discussion of our plans for tomorrow I took the microscope and other material and carried it back to the hotel. That was a gratifyingly short work day.
I decided to take my seirogan, the Japanese herbal medicine against an upset stomach, and remembered someone saying it contained creosote - hence the title of this blog. As a result of deciding on the title I went and looked up creosote. Uh-oh. Based on what I found the fact that the pills had passed their expiration date four years ago seemed irrelevant, and a Google search with the Japanese word for creosote, クレオソート, turned up a highly critical site citing articles to a medical weekly that ran in 1998 and 1999.
But I’m not sure I care. I’ve been clean since.
I am in Beijing, in the Exhibition Centre Hotel. It’s a convenient location, because starting tomorrow I’ll be in the exhibition for four days. Never mind that those four days include Saturday and Sunday. And Monday will be a fine day off: a customer visit to do support and training, which will take until the customer’s satisfied or my flight leaves on Thursday, whichever comes first.
For dinner I had the menu items with the squiggly characters and the lacking or incomprehensible translations. I know that the meat with coriander and cuminseed was lamb, because that’s a squiggly I recognize, even untranslated, but that the translated salad I got contained walnuts wasn’t clear to me. It’s a good thing that I’m not allergic to any food, otherwise I couldn’t just order at semi-random. I did avoid the sea cucumber. I’ll try it another day.
There were a lot of people setting up our booth - at least eight plus me. Half of us stood around without being able to help at all, and nobody seemed to be in control. I prefer being in charge of a booth myself or following clear instructions.
It seems like everyone in this hotel is a trainee: the receptionists, the foreign cash exchange guy, the café waitress where I had lunch (cookies, ice cream, and tea), the three waitresses who later served me dinner, the lady cleaning the elevator. I wonder why. Is that so that they can be given one step more to climb on the corporate ladder? I did note that (as far as I can tell) they are all Chinese. It made me think how even the most manual jobs are usually done by locals, not as in Switzerland by foreigners. Is that because we’re a richer country? Or is it because the Chinese have Confucianism ingrained in them? Granted, there are some people who are naturally inclined to enjoy boring, disrespected, and poorly paid jobs, but they’re a minority. Everyone else needs some explanation. “I’m scrubbing floors to give my kids a better future.” “I’m an indentured servant because that’s my station in life.” “I’m flipping burgers because I don’t have the language skills for a better job.” “I’m stacking shelves because that’s where you start with my skin color.” For Chinese in China, only the first two work, meaning that we’re looking at a country with large inequalities or a stoic metanarrative philosophy or both.
It does make me think that if we want to rid Switzerland of foreigners, as some do, we would at the same time have to abort any attempts at equality amongst inhabitants. The feudal system worked pretty well without foreigners.
I arrived in Beijing weary. I’d only slept three hours from Monday to Tuesday, when I needed to catch the 4:55 bus to the Basel airport. In Vienna I took the CAT downtown and did the tourist thing for a few hours, returning a bit early to the airport and catching perhaps 90 minutes of sleep in the lounge. I asked at least three different people if I’d be able to get in after the last disappointment in Tokyo.
In Vienna I first walked to the Danube. The sun was rising in a cloudless sky and beginning to warm the air, and I figured that a former royal city like Vienna would have a riverbank to sit on like Basel, except bigger, better, and more beautiful. Imagine my disappointment when I saw the Danube. It wasn’t even half the width of the Rhine in Basel and walled in by concrete. Yes, I could sit on a bench, but from there, instead of a nice view of the old town, I saw the subway tunnel and the 20th century houses beyond the road on the other side. I later found out that that was only a canal and that the “old” Danube flows quite a bit away from town.
The veal schnitzel in Viennese style in the Café Vienne did a lot to cheer me up about Vienna, as did the decor and comfort that made me wonder if Vienna needed Starbucks at all. I found one later, and promptly heard English spoken there, so apparently the standardized fare and non-smoking atmosphere still justify a chain coffee shop in the city that invented coffee shops. I walked up the tower of the Stephansdom, leaving the microscope in the clerk’s room, and glad to have done that because even with just a backpack crossing was difficult. It’s slightly disappointing that one can only climb halfway up that tower, but halfway up there means higher than in Basel by going all the way up. The roof of the nave was perhaps 15 degrees steeper than the roof in Basel. Vienna may have lost in terms of waterways, but its cathedral is twice as wide, twice as long, and twice as high as ours, and it has an organ that looks like a group of angels in flight. This building fit in better with the huge manors and parks I’d seen from the plane flying in - the kind of buildings that befit a city that once was capital to half the continent.
I sat on the square after that, looking at the cathedral, sipping a latte (it’s Vienna, I’ll make an exception) and eating a Sacher cake, soaking up the sun. I was tired, but life was good.