::Needs Title::

Saturday afternoon I booked my hotel in Beijing. I'm not sure if I mentioned it on here, but the MIDI Festival that I was looking forward to was postponed. My friends were unable to get train tickets anyway, so it will be a Ryry solo adventure in the capital of China.

Along with the hotel I booked a tour of the Great Wall at the Simatai section. I knew absolutely nothing about which section of the GW is the "best", but Tim said it's one of the less tourist-y sections, so that's good. It's also one of the sections that isn't fully restored, which again is a good thing. The section is ~3.3 miles long and the tour info page said we'd cover it in like 3 - 4 hours. Awesome.

The Great Wall --- I mean, c'mon. I am getting really psyched for this trip. One great thing about China is that it has millenia of history which the US doesn't have, at least not in its current state. In Hangzhou I ate lunch at Louwailou, a restaurant that is 150 years old. That means that when the restaurant first opened, the pencil-with-attached-eraser was just being invented. Sort of puts things in perspective for you. Okay bad example of ancient history -- but you know what I mean :-)

The rest of the must-sees in Beijing -- The Temple of Heaven, the Summer Palace, the Forbidden City, Tiananmen Square, etc. -- I'll do on my own after purchasing a TimeOut guide for the city. I feel confident enough in my reading of Pinyin, and usage of maps and knowledge of taking subway systems, and maybe asking people for help, to navigate. And my co-workers are still just a cell phone call away :-)

I should have Internet access so expect timely pics. I'm staying at the Days Inn Forbidden City. How Forbidden can a city be if there's a Days Inn (and, formerly, a Starbucks) there? I think it's best to not assume that any of this stuff is at all, well, "authentic." I mean it is, to be sure, but I'll just be disappointed if I expect to get the "authentic" experience from any of these places, you know? They're tourist attractions now and the number of people there will demonstrate that (especially since I'm going during the May holiday). I will go to have fun and see things and learn and that should be plenty :-)

On Saturday, I also went to see the first China Baseball League (CBL) game of my life. The Beijing Tigers beat the Shanghai Eagles 1-0. Nobody scored a run after the first inning, and not many people had hits either. Shanghai never threatened except in the bottom of the 9th, when there were runners on second and third with none out. But then we got three outs in a row to end it. I have some pretty good pictures up on flickr.









Of course I had to ask their mascot to take a picture with me:

(Qing gei he wo pai zhao is what I said - "Please take a picture with me.")



I dunno why I'm giving the thumbs-up like some doofus American tourist, but for some reason I did that :-)

There were maybe 100 people at the game, mostly from a nearby school. When they all got up and left at the end of the 6th inning, the place felt deserted. Too bad, really. But it was fun. Super-nice weather, warm sunshine, no clouds, and hanging out with Tim, his wife, and their friend who was visiting.

Today I did some shopping, first for gifts and then for clothes. My first stop was buying a set of chopsticks for Kevin. For this I braved the Xiangyang Market, located near my place at the Shanghai S&T Museum subway stop.

Have you ever seen Minority Report? Do you remember that scene where Tom Cruise is on the lam and he's running through a shopping mall? As he walks by store windows, eye scanners pick up his image and start blaring their ads at him. That's what it's like for me walking through the Xiangyang Market here. I walk by, there are shops on both sides with barkers standing out front, like three or four per shop, and my passage triggers a chorus of "Hello watch! Hello bag! DVD! Video game! Want buy shirt? Nice shoes! Cheap! Sale! BEST QUALITY!!!!!!"

I'm not joking - that actually happened, like five girls shouting simultaneously at me as I moved through the market's corridors. I stared straight ahead and ignored them, although the ridiculousness of the situation was too much, so I smiled and said Ni men hen hao wan ("You all are very funny.").

If that weren't enough, the place is literally a maze, and after I did manage to buy some chopsticks, it took me 20 minutes to find my way out again. Finally I asked a security guard (Yay for being able to speak Chinese a little bit) who pointed me in the right direction.

Being shouted at like this, not to mention having to negotiate for a sale, is really stressful for me. Which is why, as I walked down Dingxiang Rd towards the market earlier, I thought of Obi Wan Kenobi's famous description of Mos Eisley. Which is probably an overstatement in this case, but still, I did feel like I had to prepare for battle, haha.

After that I headed out to read at Garden Books and do some clothes shopping on Changle Lu. On the subway I tried to make conversation with a tall Chinese guy by asking which one of us was the most tall, but he wasn't having any of it. Either that or my Chinese sucks -- I think it's a combination of the two, actually, haha.

That's why I'm nervous about taking pictures of people, or doing things like this -- because I fear I can't speak well enough, and also, I don't want people to feel like I'm on some safari hunt for Chinese people. You know? I think maybe he felt that way. His girlfriend managed a bit of English though, which she said "You're a little bit taller." But still, it was weird.

The saving grace was seeing a teenage boy on the train reading A Catcher in the Rye. Very very cool. Makes me wish I hadn't left my copy in Austin. I couldn't see if he was reading it in English or if he'd obtained a Chinese translation. But just the fact that he was reading it made me very happy :-)

I didn't really like any of the stores on Changle Lu, specifically, not the one I set out to patronize, which is eno. Along the road I ran into Jeremy and Amy, and they told me about a sale that Uniqlo (which is basically, the clothes section of Target) was having. There's a location at the Super Brand Mall near my apartment, so I hopped back on the train and went there. I didn't find anything there; however I did find some worthwhile things at the H&M. So it's true, I can buy jeans in China :-) They just have to be European, haha.

That's all, pretty much. I leave for Beijing at noon on Wednesday. I'll try and post an update when I land :-)

Blockin' and Fakin'

One interesting dilemma about being in zhong guo (hah, don't I sound pretentious) is the GFOC. Yes, it exists, and no, it's not a joke. What's neat is that people here perceive is as normal. Like "oh yeah, couldn't get to your flickr page, it was blocked yesterday." No biggie, no sweat, just a part of life. But the funny part is that some of the blockades come and go. Like over the weekend, flickr was all good. Then on Monday during the day, it was getting blocked intermittently, before being shut down for good on Monday night. Now it's back up again. Oh well, c'est la vie. I can't be too concerned, since my main audience is ya'll lao wai anyway :-)

What's weird is that individual web sites, like Slashdot, might not be blocked, but their RSS feeds are. In fact I think the entire feedburner.com domain is blocked, which is trouble because most sites I check use feedburner to track subscriptions to their RSS feed. Also this morning, blogspot (my gracious host) suddenly became unblocked, when it's been blocked since I've been here. But strangely enough, when I was here in November, it wasn't blocked. Somebody must have just gotten arrested. You can see how confusing this is on any given day :-)

My theory is that some censor in Beijing, let's call him Xian, is maybe having a bad day. Maybe his wife leaves him, he wakes up and sees an eviction notice on his apartment door, and then he gets chewed out at work for being late. Then he accidentally spills coffee on his new shoes. Now he's in a terrible mood, like a walking thundercloud, and he's like "Lousy wife/landlord/boss!! Always pushing me around. I'm gonna block flickr! Yeah, that'll make me feel better." He sits down at his desk, cracks his knuckles, and double-clicks an icon on his desktop. Bam, no more flickr for the entire country. It's like releasing a pressure valve. Then a week later, he meets a new girl, he's able to pay his rent so his landlord gets off his back, and he gets a promotion at work. Oh, and he gets some new shoes. Congratulations everybody -- flickr is now back online!!

That's my theory anyway.

It's freezing here. No -- literally, freezing. So I bought a jacket today. Like a bigass thick heavy jacket. In a metro station. Yes, many metro stations have underground shopping plazas in them. The goods in there are probably of dubious quality. For example, as I was shmying (there; I just added Yiddish to the list of languages in this blog) and chatting with a store owner who spoke pretty decent English, I noticed the label on one jacket read French Concotion. I couldn't help but laugh. Not only that, but I pointed out the misspelling to the girl and offered to proofread her labels in the future. She pretended to study the label as if it were somehow just defective, but to her credit, she wasn't all offended and defensive as if I'd insulted her store's merchandise, haha.

So with that in mind, when I saw the Ralph Lauren Polo label on a jacket in a different store that I actually wanted, no one could have convinced me that it was actually Polo. But I bought it anyway. Here's how:

The store keeper and I chatted for a little bit, I pretended to be interested in some sweaters and different shirts, and then when I landed on the jacket and said "how much?" she started me off at 1250 RMB -- $172. But then she said "special price" and knocked it down to 850. Really??!?! A special price just for li'l ol' me??? (She said it was because I spoke such good Chinese. Ah, she knows the way to a man's heart.) Blue Light Special.

Suddenly I'm in one of those situations the travel guides tell me about. She is typing these prices on a calculator and then she hands it to me. I falter for a minute and then type in 750 and hand it back to her. Oh man, the look on her face, you would have thought that I'd shot her pet dog. Oooh, just gets me right here in the heartstrings, man. Right here.

She comes back with 830. That's still tai gui, which I repeat to her. The great thing about a phrase like tai gui is, both words use the fourth (falling) tone, so it's really easy to sound disappointed when you say it, like:

"I'm shocked and appalled at your greed, you cur. You have impugned my honor! It's pistols at high noon."

At this point I'm like well, I'm here in this underground mall, I'm not super desperate for a jacket, and it's not like textiles are in short supply around here. So I start in with "Oh, you know, I'm gonna just walk around some more, bu yao, bu yao xiexie, zai jian." I was being honest, but I'm sure all of you reading this know what happened next: she offered to cut the price even more, even more. I kept refusing, and she kept asking, and it's funny because she is saying "How much would this cost you in mei guo?? Is cold in mei guo!!" And I'm laughing and saying "Yeah but we're in zhong guo! Zhong guo!" Oh, the hilarity. I should buy her a book on Aristotelian logic.

At this point I'm moving out the door and back into the plaza, and she follows me, tugs on my jacket and says "Five hundred! Five Hundred! Final price!" Now, even though this isn't a Ralph Lauren Polo or anything, it certainly isn't a piece-of-shit jacket. It definitely is warm and thick and, what's more, it fits my tall ass rather nicely. I've no idea what it might run for in the States, not that it matters, and it doesn't even matter what price she started at -- now she's pricing it at $68. That's too much (or too little) for me -- I give in. She's got me now.

She follows me to the ATM across the way, stands like 50 feet behind me while I withdraw my money, and bam, I've got a new jacket. She even throws in a cheap bag (which I promptly discard outside the subway station, it's so useless). She completes the sale by saying, essentially "I only give you this price because is last sale of day. You come back tomorrow, price not be so good."

Uh huh. Sure.

So there you go. Robert tells me that everyone gets screwed on their first couple haggling gigs but that you get better at it. I'm not sure if I got screwed -- I have no perspective just yet. I'm sure she still made a tidy profit off me, but that's all well and good, because I got a decent jacket at (what I think is) a good price. And boy is it ever warm. I just hope that, y'know, it doesn't start falling apart in a week. Or that there's not a family of mealworms living in the armpits. (Yum! Special direct import from Malaysia.)

Outside in the plaza, I was waiting in line for a taxi, and this guy struck up a conversation with me about how cold it was. He said he was from Singapore via the US, and I said "where in the US?" you know, just being friendly. And he goes "Austin, Texas." No fucking way! What are the odds of that? Turns out he works for Freescale. So yeah, now I have another expat buddy from Austin, not even from work.

I took a cab to the Thumb and walked around, kind of feeling out my new jacket and making sure it is as warm as I thought it was when I was buying it. (It is.) I ended up at -- damn, can't remember the name of the place, but I had the fried lotus root and some kind of spicy chicken dish. Oh, muy delicioso. And it cost -- well, I don't really want to get into money too much, because I think talking about it makes me sound cheap. But just trust me, shit here is cheap. Hahaha.

Framing Babies

I was so intent on setting up Flickr last night that I forgot to describe what I actually did during the day :-)

I woke up and did laundry. Exciting! I won't bore you or embarrass myself with the horrible details of what occurred. Let me just say that my hands were freezing and my floor was wet. The wash itself went well though, and I'm relatively certain that my clothes are actually clean. The hanging-out-to-dry thing is very new and unfamiliar, but I checked this morning and it seems most of my clothes (except my jeans) are actually dry. I need to invest in an iron though. And, let's just say, a laundry basket.

In setting the wash and looking at the washing machine, I recognized the Chinese character for "middle" or "normal" which I think is 中. You would pronounce that as zhong. For you Westerners out there, that's "jong" but with the tip of your tongue closer to the roof of your mouth your teeth. That, and the g is soft. And it's not the typical "o" sound like in "long" -- it's more, hmm, it's softer than that. Oh, and it's first tone, which means you raise the pitch of your voice and keep it steady, like you were an opera singer holding a high note. Come to think of it, it's tough to think about how to describe it by just using English. But anyway, when you put that together with the character for "guo" (country), you get "middle country" or "China".

So anyhoo, I chose the "middle" setting on my washer, and it seems to have worked out pretty well. If my clothes aren't actually clean, they at least smell nice, which has to count for something.

After that I was getting ready to go to Garden Books when Tim called. He had to run some errands around that area and wanted to know if I wanted to tag along. I said sure thing, and in 30 minutes met him and his wife Laurel outside my complex. We walked to the subway station, got on, transferred to Line 1, and ended up at the South Shanxi Road (Shanxi Nan Lu) station. We were all hungry so we had lunch at Di Shui Dong, which serves Hunanese food. Among other things, I had the ziran paigu (cumin ribs) which, wow, were amazing. Chairman Mao would have approved - he was from Hunan province. But the highlight of the meal was when I successfully ordered my first bottle of water :-D Laurel graciously took a picture of me with the bottle, and I put it up on flickr, but the site's down now so I can't link to it. Just look in the Shanghai - January 12, 2008 set.

Tim and Laurel are avid photographers and travelers - they've been in Shanghai for over two years now - and they were going to get some of Tim's pictures framed. If you check out his blog you can see his skills. We headed to a framing store that his friend had recommended, but that was swarmed by expats. But we checked around and there are no fewer than five framing stores all along that same street (Maoming Lu) within three blocks of one another. We'd unwittingly stumbled onto the Framing District in Shanghai :-)

While Tim and Laurel haggled with the owners of one of the stores, I said I'd meet them later at Garden Books, since we were so close. I walked down Maoming and turned right on Changle to end up at the store, where I ordered a coffee (woohoo!) and just rested my legs, which were tired from so much walking.

Garden Books isn't large, but it's the largest English-language bookstore in Shanghai. So it was swarmed with expats. Again, not what I'm looking for right now :-) But I looked around at the book selection. There were of course a lot of books about Shanghai and China. There's even a German-language section, where I saw the German editions of two familiar books. That was kind of neat.

After a little bit I decided to go for a walk down Changle, so I did. For the next hour I wandered around the Changle Lu / Shanxi Nan Lu area, which is pretty interesting. There's a bunch of neat little stores that sell knicknacks, interesting styles of clothing, furniture, and generally just what you'd expect to find in the South Congress area of Austin. One tidbit: I noticed that a lot of stores had maternity clothes on display. I wondered as to the origins of this phenomenon until I passed the window of one building and saw a nurse swaddling a baby while a happy mother looked on. It turns out that I was passing the Shanghai Center for Health of Mother and Baby, or something like that. Suddenly all the maternity stores made sense ;-) I even saw a clothing store that advertised its clothing as being resistant to electromagnetic waves, or something. (I wish I had taken a picture of this ad.) I snickered to myself until Tim told me, later on, that electromagnetic-resistant clothing is a common concern among pregnant women in China. Hm.

So in one day I found the Framing District and Maternity District of Shanghai :-) Here's where, if my family and co-workers were not reading this blog, I would joke about putting both of these districts to good use during my stay here. Oops -- guess I just made the joke anyway ...

After that I met back up with Tim and Laurel at Garden Books, where we ran into a friend of theirs. This friend actually is the senior editor of Newsweek's Chinese-language edition, which sounds pretty cool. She's American but has been in China for six years (or maybe eight, I can't remember exactly). We ate and drank some more in the cafe, and then they invited me to dinner, which turned out to be at a new restaurant called Effigie just down the block. Tonight was the "media preview" which meant that the owner, a friend of Laurel's friend, had invited a bunch of magazine writers to eat at the restaurant like 2 weeks before it actually opened. It was close by, so we got there quickly. For the next four hours, I drank good wine, ate amazing food, and had awesome conversations with some really cool people. It was neat being around a bunch of magazine writers, because I'm a writer myself but in a completely different capacity.

I talked with a guy who sells programmable milling machines that make jet engine turbines. This gave me the perfect chance to geek out about NI and start talking about virtual instrumentation and modular hardware in a casual dinner setting :-) And what's more, he understood me because he was an engineer. We even discussed hardware-in-the-loop simulation. Nuts. I should have gotten his business card or something and passed it along to our sales department ;-)

Unfortunately I also had two cups of coffee, which meant that when I got home around 11, I stayed up until like 2:30. But that turned out to be good, because it gave me the opportunity to set up Flickr because Picasa seems to be blocked.

Right now it's about 11 AM, and I'm gonna take a shower, go eat some breakfast, and recharge my transportation card. Don't know yet where I'll end up today, but I promise I'll bring my camera along :-)

CANIGETAREWEINDSELEKTA?!?!!

Hullo out there in blogland, I am not dead, it's time for my semiregular update :-)

First off, the title of this post is a reference to what I'll be doing this Friday night, which is listening to some nasty drum & bass at Bonbon, courtesy of DJ Marky. I. Can't. Wait.

These posts have been so long, and I've been pretty tired after work, so I haven't had the time or inclination to commit two hours of my evening to blogging. I'm sure as life here settles down and becomes more normal, my posts will become shorter (and perhaps have more pictures) and I will be doing smaller updates. But for now it's all so new and zany that I've just gotta post about everything, heh.

Let's rewind the time machine back to Sunday, where we last left off ...

Sunday morning I woke up and had nothing to do, so I decided to go on an adventure. Those are not hard to come by in this city, especially not when you don't speak the language :-) Because I couldn't think of a better place to get coffee, I walked down to the Thumb Plaza and had a coffee + chocolate muffin at (shudder) Starbucks. I read a little bit of That's Shanghai, which is where I discovered the aforementioned DJ Marky event. I also saw that Sven Vath is playing there in two weeks. After being in Austin for the past couple of years, with its good-but-not-great electronic music scene (like the majority of US cities), I am thrilled to be in a city where techno/house/drum & bass actually are regular things for people to listen to :-) w00t :-)

Anyhoo after chilling at Starbucks for awhile, I decided to take the metro, on my own, for the first time. I live off Line 2, and I didn't want to mess with changing lines just yet, so I got on the train and headed to People's Square. I exited the subway stop and came out from underground, and for some reason I looked behind me. There was People's Square framed by massive skyscrapers in every direction. It was pretty awe-inspiring. I'll have to go back this weekend and take some pictures.

So that vista was behind me. Ahead of me, though, was the Shanghai No. 1 Department Store. I'd heard about this, and even though shopping doesn't interest me as a pastime, I thought it would be neat to see what it's like inside. So I crossed the street (no mean feat given that I didn't immediately see a crosswalk) and went inside.

Wow. The building is 11 floors of shopping insanity. Whole floors are devoted to a single type of product, like menswear, sporting goods, electronics, etc. And each floor is pretty extensive. Like the electronics and fabrics markets on Saturday, each floor is segmented into, well, let's call them vestibules, but that's not proper since they can be pretty large. Each "brand-specific sales area" is devoted to a certain brand. So on the meanswear floor you have your Ralph Lauren, Tommy Hilfiger, Dockers, etc. vestibules. There's also a ton of European (I think) and Chinese (I guess) brands, of course. On the sporting goods floor you have your Nike, Adidas, New Balance, Puma, etc. vestibules. And so on. It's insane. And it was really crowded on a Sunday afternoon, which made it even more insane :-)

I must have spent two hours wandering around just looking at things. Here and there I would pick up an item to see the price, and they all seemed pretty expensive, even though I am only barely capable of determining what passes for expensive here because I'm not used to thinking in terms of renminbi. And my instant-division skills are lacking. I use the rule of thumb to dividing by 8 to get a rough estimate even though it's really more like 7.2 yuan to the dollar (damn currency appreciation). But I'm sure I stood there like a moron for a couple seconds trying to divide 560 by 8 (quick! The answer is 70). And only later did I realize that I have a calculator, and more importantly a currency converter, in my cell phone :-)

After all that window shopping I headed out on the ground floor, only I got turned around and instead of being back at People's Square, I was in some sort of shopping plaza (go figure). I looked around for a place that looked like it sold food, and saw a Subway and a Pizza Hut. Because I was hungry, I headed for the Subway. En route, I saw another smaller restaurant that was Chinese, so I opted for that instead. I ordered food all by myself (yay!), a process that was helped by a quasi-English-speaking waitress. At any rate there were a couple other white dudes in there, so I could have prevailed upon them for help if I needed anything. In fact, at Carrefour that morning (oops -- forgot to mention that I went sundry shopping all by myself -- that's where I got the slippers), I asked a couple of white people if they knew where the trash cans were. Turns out they were German, but they were able to also use some pidgin English to communicate with me. Actually it was mainly just pointing :-)

Not much to tell after that. I had dessert at some coffee shop and took the metro back home, where I promptly bummed around the apartment for a couple hours. I called Rob and we went to Thumb for dinner. There are like a billion restaurants there. In fact I've eaten there every day except for Saturday and Monday, and I'm planning on going there after I finish this post and catch up on my emails :-) Mostly because it's so close to my apartment . . .

Monday was my first day at the office, and it went well. At lunch with my team, I managed to successfully order a bottle of water, only they didn't have bottles, so the waitress stared at me and everyone laughed :-) During the day I'd made plans to meet up with Kenneth Tan from Shanghaiist. He lives and hangs out mostly in Puxi, so we agreed to meet at The Arch for dinner. Getting to the Arch involves switching metro lines. I guess that Sunday's experience convinced me I could do it on my own, so I did. Before I left work, I looked at the map on SmartShanghai. After work, I took Line 2 to People's Square and changed over to Line 1. I got off at the Hengshu Lu station and exited onto the street. Took a right on Gaonan Lu, then a left on Huaihai Lu. The Arch is at the corner of Huaihai and Wukang, but the walk on Huaihai Lu was taking awhile, so I stopped in a ritzy-looking hotel to ask someone if I was going in the right direction. All I was able to say was "Wukang Lu" with a questioning look on my face and a shrug of the shoulders, but the bellhop pointed in the direction I was walking. Sweet :-) After another 3 minutes I found the place and set up shop inside to wait for Kenneth. While I was waiting I had some french fries, and they were pretty good. When Kenneth got there I ordered a chocolate cake and some ice cream. What a great dinner -- for a five-year-old ;-)

While I was there, my dad called and we talked for a bit. It was neat to talk to him on my cell phone and to realize just how strange that was, given the time zone difference :-) And, as I started to walk back to the Changshu Lu metro station (as advised by Kenneth) my mom called, completely independently. (Everybody say "Awwww" ...) So that was pretty cool, walking down Huaihai Lu at 9 at night while talking with my parents. Neat.

As I exited the Shanghai Science & Tech Museum metro station, I thought I'd push my luck with navigation and language skills, so I hailed a cab. I stuck out my left arm and said "Changliu Lu", then I stuck out my right arm perpendicular to my left one, touched my fingertips together, and said "Dingxiang Lu". Then I took my right hand and pointed to the spot where my hands had just been crossed.

This almost worked, and it was my fault that it didn't. I recognized we were on Dingxiang Lu, and then the driver said something, which I interpreted as "Here?" No idea why I thought that. So I nodded and said "Hao" ("good"), indicating I wanted to stop here. I got out and paid the fare, then realized I was one block over from where I wanted to be. Oh well. Again, my fault for not recognizing where I was. But at least he knew the general direction and area I wanted to go :-)

That's all I can really think of. I'm sure I'll have more to tell on the weekend, so if I don't post before then, don't worry :-)

Oh yeah, and I would love to reply to the comments I'm getting here, but due to Internet blockades from inside the country, I can't actually view this blog page to reply. Actually that's not true -- I can view the page but I can't log in as myself to reply to any comments. Which is strange, because I can post to it just fine, but that's because I post from blogger.com while the actual blog address is blogspot.com. Again, strange. But keep sending the comments, and if you want to talk to me, just Skype or email me or use whatever other way you know how to get in touch :-) I'm planning on posting some pictures of my apartment, complex, and neighborhood on Saturday morning.

Icebox - The First 12 Hours

The flight and touchdown went fine. I ate the first meal on the plane, some sort of chicken-and-rice dish, and it sadly upset my stomach for the rest of the ride. But the day was saved thanks to the iPod I'd bought a couple weeks previously, because I was able to watch like 10 episodes of South Park, and listen to tons of music, during the flight. No need for in-flight entertainment when you've brought your own :-)

I made it through customs and baggage claim just fine, even though I had five total bags (three suitcases, a carry-on, and my laptop bag) to manhandle. It was really helpful that I'd done this before in November, so I wasn't worried about anything. I knew exactly what to expect.

I met with two of my co-workers and a driver in the "receiving line" outside customs. The receiving line literally are these lanes that you walk through with metal rails on each side (kind of like the lines you go through to enter rides at theme parks) that wind this way and that. The railings are absolutely mobbed with people waiting for friends or acquaintances to exit customs. You see tons of people holding up signs with names on them, signs with tour group names, signs with hotel names, and so on. I quickly found my co-workers, and we were on our way.

After a quick 30-40 minute trip back into the city area, we arrived at my apartment. I live in a series of high rises off Dingxiang Lu, near the Thumb Plaza, which is where I ate Pizza Hut last time. I'm close enough to The Bund to see the World Financial Center from my window. I think I'm also near Shiji (Century) Park. Other expats from my company live here or near here, which helps me feel at ease. I'm on the 18th floor, which technically means I have a great view, but in reality it means I have a great view of the other skyscrapers next door ;-)

The driver left us, and my two co-workers and I went up to my apartment to meet my landlord, Qian. Very nice guy, super-helpful, and generally put me at ease. When I walked into the apartment, I was struck by how ultra-modern it looks. It's furnished quite nicely, at it's a lot nicer than where I was living in Austin, "nicer" in the sense of "looks like it came out of a Wired magazine showcase." Haha. It's two bedrooms, which is cool, and there are two actual beds here. Two balconies also, and each bedroom has a pretty huge windowbox -- or whatever you call those areas in front of windows that you can use for sitting down. There's a desk, a living room table with some chairs, and a bathroom including a washing machine. No dryer though - I'll have to investigate that :-) There's a nice living room with a TV and a DVD player. I'm glad that I am not used to watching TV for entertainment, because I think the only English station I can get is CCTV 9 and I don' think I could stand to watch that for more than 20 minutes straight :-) There's no oven but there is a microwave and a two-burner stove, plus a refrigerator and freezer.

Speaking of freezer ...

I was a little surprised to see there's no central heating. Obviously I've taken this for granted while living in America. Let me assure you, after one night here, I never will again ;-) The living room has a giant tower in the corner that acts as a heater, and the two bedrooms each have one smaller wall-mounted unit in them. To put it nicely, uh, the heat from each unit doesn't reach very far out into the room ;-) The living room unit heats the area directly in front of the TV, so if you're in the dining area or kitchen, you best put on some mittens. The unit in the main bedroom is on the wall opposite the bed, so let's just say I slept in some warm clothes last night :-) The unit in the second bedroom is just above the desk where I'm typing now, though, so at least I'm pretty warm as we speak. Also, to get hot water, you have to specifically turn on the water heater and wait for it to warm up. Whew.

There's probably some super-powerful mode that I haven't discovered because the buttons are all in Chinese. I'll have to ask someone to help me with that, but in the meantime, I might have to investigate getting a couple more space heaters ...

Okay, enough about that. After meeting with the landlord and getting the tour of the place, such as it is, the four of us went to the Thumb Plaza, just a 5-minute walk or so, to eat. Mmmmm. I'm not sure why Qian came with us. My coworkers said that it wasn't normal for the landlord to spend a couple hours with his new tenant. We were all confused why he wanted to hang out with us and go shopping, but hey, I wasn't complaining :-)

Since I wasn't that hungry, I deigned to eat at McDonald's. I figured I wanted to check it out at some point, and I didn't want to do it at a time when I had a big appetite. In line we actually ran into two NI expats that I met last month, and they teased me for eating at McD's on my first night in China :-)

The McD's is attached to a Carrefour, a store that's like a grocery store on the lower level with a Target or Sears on the upper level. I'd sketched up a small shopping list including things like alarm clock, pillows, shampoo, detergent, etc. So the four of us went shopping! Qian was super-helpful. He took my shopping list and ranged far in front of my coworkers and me, helpfully asking people where things were and pointing out things I might need. Again, I'm not sure why he was being so helpful, but I definitely appreciated it!

At one point we stopped to try on slippers, which was hilarious and involved the four of us and two store employees, plus a couple customers who were passing by. None of their merch looked big enough for my lao wei feet, and I was right -- even though I tried on and bought a pair of XL slippers (the biggest or second-biggest pair they had, I think) when I got them home they turned out to be too small to walk on. Anyway the Carrefour staff was making me laugh because they kept pulling pairs off the rack, or pointing to them, and speaking to Qian in Chinese, and he would translate in decent English. They spoke very excitedly and gestured a lot. I felt like I had a couple of manservants with me :-)

Buying bedding was also pretty fun. I was looking for sheets, pillowcases, and a comforter. Of course, comforter doesn't translate into Chinese, so I had to explain kind of what that was. And I think I got one. What I ended up with is something that is the size of my bed and has this weird plastic-y feel to the outer lining. It's pale yellow and looks like it belongs in a hospital. My co-worker said that I'm supposed to put a cover on it, but I'm confused by the idea of covering a blanket, and the one cover I got with my sheet set doesn't fit it. But hell, it's warm, so that's all I cared about last night :-)

Carrefour sells tons of package-style bedding, and we went back and forth for a couple minutes over which size and color I needed. Of course these discussions are all among Qian, my two co-workers, and anywhere from 2 - 3 store employees who happen to be helping us. I just stand there with a smile on my face, nod at the appropriate time, unable to understand anyone unless I ask them to translate for me, and laugh at the absurdity of what is taking place before me :-)

One small tidbit: I picked up an alarm clock for 77 kuai (colloquial term for yuan) and paid for it at a separate instore location with my debit card. Unbeknownst to me, my bank's fraud detectors went off (Uh oh! Purchased something in China! Identity theft! Identity theft!) But the purchase went through. This came back to bite me when I tried to check out at the front register with the rest of my purchases -- my card was denied!! Luckily I had another one and was able to use that.

(I'm pretty happy that Carrefour took Visa in the first place -- most places here don't. It'll be weird dealing with mainly cash again after so long of a plastic existence in the US.)

After that I picked up a couple bottles of water, because I don't feel like getting dysentery from my tap, and some snacks like green tea cookies, Pocky, and some variety pack including rice puffs and pea-flavored crackers. Mmmm.

We loaded my purchases into a cab and shuffled off back to the apartment. I said goodbye to everyone and they left. I set about unpacking not only my purchases but also my suitcases. I kind of failed at the latter, but I was tired :-)

As I was putting my sheets on my bed, the power went out all of a sudden. I panicked for a split second but then remembered that I'd packed my flashlight from home. Genius! I managed to find it and suddenly I had light. I wandered over to the phone (thankfully, my apartment comes with a land line) and called Qian, who said he'd call someone right away. About 10 minutes later I heard a knock at my door. It was a security guard for the complex, I think. He showed me how to turn the power back on -- basically, just outside my front door, there's a room with the 18th-floor circuit breakers in them. All he did was flip the switch and presto, the lights came back on. That made me happy :-)

I wonder what caused the outage in the first place. The door has a lock on it but seems to be unlocked. Maybe some punk kid got bored and came up to the hall and started flipping switches ;-) At any rate, this happened a second time in the night, but at least I know how to fix it now. I might talk to Qian about making sure that door is locked (and that I have the key to it), because that's really unsafe.

After those escapades, I finished setting up my purchases. It was only 8 oclock, so I tried to watch a DVD. I almost succeeded :-) The disc inserts and plays just fine, but the TV and DVD remotes are all in, of course, Chinese. I fired up The Matrix but noticed it had subtitles. So my first thought was: okay, let's turn off the subtitles. (They are distracting). But how? The answer: press buttons randomly and see what happens!

After about ten minutes I succeeded in getting to the DVD's main menu. From there I was able to turn off subtitles. But unfortunately, the picture started showing up in black and white. Curses!! I spent literally another thirty to forty minutes trying to fix the picture. It wasn't that way before, so I knew I must have pressed some button to cause the change. But alas, it was not to be. I did succeed in getting the DVD player to display its options in English. And I think I memorized where the important buttons (including, ironically enough, the Subtitle button) are on the remote. But alas the DVDs, they have no color! I checked the TV itself which was in color, so it's got to be something with the DVD player. I even put in another DVD to test it and it was still in black and white. So, again, I'm going to have to get someone to help me fix this :-)

By this point it was like 9 PM and I figured I'd stayed up late enough to deal with the jet lag appropriately. I got in bed and watched some CCTV (exciting!!!) before passing out.

I woke up around 7 AM this morning, so I got a decent night's sleep. I checked my email and found an alert, the one I talked about earlier, from my bank. Their instructions said to call them immediately. I was able to use my computer and Skype to call in and resolve the issue.

Today I'm supposed to call another co-worker (they're passing me around like a hot potato) and will attempt to purchase a cell phone. I'm supposed to meet up with another one of them (co-workers, that is -- not cell phones) for dinner.