Wednesday, November 07, 2007

Everybody Have Fun Tonight

The name of the complex I live in is called Phoenix City, a development of large apartment buildings around a central courtyard.  Since I now have an address, I need to learn how to say it in Chinese so that I can tell taxi drivers how to take me home.  The way the Chinese say English words is they break the words down into syllables, then choose the Chinese character which sounds most similar.  Thus Phoenix City in Chinese is “Feng Huang Cheng.”

That’s how you say it in pinyin, which is the official way of translating Chinese sounds into Roman characters.  “Feng Huang” represents “Phoenix,” and “cheng” is the word for “city.” You don’t pronounce the characters the way you do in English, though.  Phonetically speaking, the name of the building is “Fung Hwong Chung.”

To remember my address I just think “Fuck Wang Chung.”

Everybody Wang Chung tonight.

Bad Ruck

Many years ago I was in Seoul, Korea.  I noticed that all the elevators had no fourth floor.  Well, there would be no floor with the number “4” on it, there would be an “F.” So in the elevators the buttons would go 1, 2, 3, F, 5, 6, and so on.  I asked why, and was told that the number 4 is considered unlucky, because the word for “four” sounds very much like the word for “death.”

The Chinese have this same superstition.  There’s no number 4 in any of the buildings.  Unlike the Koreans they just skip the 4—1, 2, 3, 5, and so on.  I also noticed, though, that there are no floors numbered 14.  I asked why and was told that in the word for “fourteen” the word representing the number 1 sounds like the word for “want.” In other words, the number 14 sounds like “want death,” so it’s considered unlucky as well. 

Since there are many westerners who live in my complex, along with many westernized Asians (Japanese and Koreans, mostly), as well as members of China’s increasingly affluent middle class, all these ignorant superstitions are catered to.  Therefore there are no floors numbered 4, 13, 14, or 24.  So even though I live on the 25th floor, it’s actually the 21st.

Hard to believe it’s 2007, isn’t it?  Next week they’ll be installing the alarm system to protect us from goblin attack.

Bevery Hirrs Cop*

Guess what, folks?  The heat is on!  Our gracious communist overlords have determined that overnight lows of near or below freezing are reason enough to turn the heat on.  Tonight I won’t have to sleep with nine layers of clothes on!

*Title explanation here.

Mexico de China

A quick post:  Right now I’m writing this on my laptop via a WiFi network in a TexMex restaurant called Pete’s Texmex.  It’s right next door to the St. Regis hotel, in the embassy district.  I’m with a coworker who originally hails from El Paso.  I’m drinking a damn fine margarita, and I just ordered tacos al carbon. 

Ten minutes ago I was at a tailor getting measured for a jacket.  It’s being custom made, and will be ready in less than a week.  It’s Wednesday night here, the tailor told me to come in for a fitting any time on Sunday.  The jacket is being made of gray cashmere.  Guess how much?

$110.  For a tailor-made gray cashmere jacket.

Earlier tonight I went and bought DVDs.  I got all four seasons of Entourage, and about ten other movies, for less than $40.  When I get home I’ll detail everything, but for now my food is here.

Yummy!

Update: Okay, here’s the list.  I got all four seasons of Entourage; the first season of the CBS series Shark (starring James Woods—my mom turned me on to this show when I was recently in Texas), a PBS documentary series called China: A Century of Revolution; The Simpsons Movie; 3:10 to Yuma (an actual DVD copy, not a camcorder job), Live Free or Die Hard; Spiderman 3; A Mighty Heart; Pan’s Labyrinth; the documentary about Michael Moore Manufacturing Dissent; and the film Michael Moore Hates America, which I will be giving to Mike Wilson, the film’s director, as a gift. 

Not bad for $40, huh?  Not to mention a fucking tailor-made gray cashmere jacket for a c-note.  I mean, how can you not love this place?

Tuesday, November 06, 2007

Porice

Yesterday, now that I have a permanent non-hotel address, I had to go down to the Beijing police station and register my location with Big Brother.  This is only temporary, one necessary step towards getting my permanent visa.  This is only good for 30 days.  So, within the next 30 days, I will actually get my permanent visa.  Then I have to go back to the Orwell Squad and give them a photocopy of the visa for their records.

I will say one thing, though.  Yes, this does seem strange and Orwellian to us—I know it does to me.  But part of it is for the safety of foreigners.  There is very little crime in Beijing.  You can walk drunk down a dark alley at 3am with 3000 RMB in your wallet and have virtual certainty that nothing will happen to you, but it does happen occasionally.  So if one day a foreign body happens to be discovered, the massive paper trail I have been creating will make it far easier to identify who I am, since the government knows where I live, what I look like, who I work for, and so on.  As one Chinese guy put it to me yesterday, “If a Chinese gets killed it’s no big deal, there’s 1.6 billion of them.  But a foreigner being killed, that would be a HUGE deal.”

So they keep track of their foreigners, but this also enables them to keep tabs on their foreigners.  Which harkens back to Ben Franklin’s line about security and liberty, doesn’t it?

Monday, November 05, 2007

Blue Velvet

In China, like much of the third world, nobody drinks tap water.  Not even the locals drink it.  Last night I went to Carrafours, which is sort of a French Wal-Mart, to buy some groceries.  You are not going to fucking believe the brand of bottled water I found.

All I could hear was Dennis Hopper’s voice saying, “Heineken?  Fuck that shit!  Pabst Blue Ribbon!” So I bought four huge bottles.  One of America’s worst beers is also one of China’s cheapest brands of bottled water.

This Is A Man’s World

As I was in the taxi coming home tonight I had a thought?  Why is it acceptable to call someone from England an Englishman, or someone from Ireland an Irishman, but it’s racist to call someone from China a Chinaman?

Who the hell comes up with these stupid societal conventions anyway?

Seamus Rodriguez

So I didn’t make it to the punk club the other night, unfortunately.  The guys I was going with are primarily British of one variety or another, and there was a really important football match (i.e. soccer game) on that night, Arsenal vs. Manchester United.  (In the type of thrilling conclusion we’ve all come to expect from soccer, it was a 2-2 draw.  Imagine the Cowboys/Patriots game from a few weeks ago ending in a tie.)

We watched the match at an Irish pub which opened recently.  The place was creatively named “Paddy O’Shea’s.” (I can imagine the five seconds of thought expended in coming up with that name.) The funny thing came when we decided to order some food.  We’re sitting there in your typical faux Irish pub, the place is full of Brits yelling and screaming at the screens, and when we asked for the menu it was all Mexican food.  They had jalapeno poppers, quesadillas, the whole bit.  (Or, you might say, the whole enchilada.) Apparently until a week ago the place had been a Mexican restaurant and they hadn’t gotten around to getting Irish food in the kitchen.  Which, of course, led us to the inevitable question—what the hell would you put on an Irish menu?  It would be like Monty Python skit.

“Well, what’ve you got?”

“Well, there’s potatoes and Guinness; potatoes, potatoes and Guinness; Guinness and potatoes; sausages, Guinness, and potatoes; Guinness, potatoes, Guinness, potatoes, sausages, potatoes, and Guinness.”

“Have you got anything without potatoes?”

“Well, there’s Guinness, potatoes, Guinness, Guinness, sausages, and Guinness.  That’s not got much potatoes in it.”

Sunday, November 04, 2007

Do You Speaka My Language?

I just had a thought that makes me feel quite old.  I opened a Tsingtao beer from the minibar, a brief restorative after a day of unpacking, and it dawned on me:  just about anyone under the age of 20 in the US has probably never opened a ring-pull can before.

I tell you, it’s odd how much Chinese is coming back to me.  Especially telling taxi drivers where to go. I always meet my buddy Richard at the north gate of Worker’s Stadium (the big Olympic Stadium, of course named in true commie fashion), and I can say this pretty well now in Beijing-accented Chinese.  Yesterday I walked outside to go out and there happened to be a cab right in front of the hotel.  I got in and said “Gong Tee Bay Murrrrr,” which he understood perfectly and repeated in the affirmative.  Then as he pulled started to pull out he said something, and I realized from his expression he was saying “How the hell do I get out of this parking lot?” So I told himin Chinese to drive straight, then turn right up ahead.  It surprised me not because it’s difficult to do, but with the natural ease that it came to me. 

I was thinking today about how weird it is to be “the immigrant.” There’s so much talk of immigrants in the US these days, especially as an electoral issue.  I can understand all too well how difficult it must be to come to America as an immigrant, not knowing the language or being able to read street signs.  For example, as many places to eat as there are in Beijing, unless I’m with someone who speaks the language, I have to be very selective where I eat, because I don’t know how to order things in Chinese yet.  Of course, I have it easier in the sense that there are plenty of restaurants here who have menus written in Chinese and (usually bad) English.  Imagine being a refugee from Burma or Somalia and coming to America, and not being able to ask someone on the street where you were, or how to order food, or to ask what time it is, that sort of thing.  I have enough wealth to work around these limitations, whereas some poor refugee would rely on the kindness of others in his ethnic community.

It’s a strange feeling.  If you go to Europe, for example, damn near everyone speaks English.  Here, almost nobody does, unless they’re in an industry (hotel, etc.) which caters to foreigners.  They speak English at the management office in my apartment complex, for example, because there are a ton of expats living there.  They speak it in the health club, and in most of the restaurants in the area, all because of the expats. But a few blocks away, unless you can speak and read Chinese, you’re screwed.

Saturday, November 03, 2007

Your Future Flushing

Oh, I forgot to mention, I prepaid my gas bill today.  Now, every one of you tell me, how many cubic liters of gas did you use last month?  Because that’s what I was asked—how many cubic liters of gas I would like to purchase.  I didn’t have a fucking clue, so I just bought 150 RMB worth, which is probably a shitload more than I need. 

You also pay your hot water, cold water, and toilet water bills the same way, by cubic liter.  So, tell me, how many cubic liters of water do you think it will take in the next month to flush your bodily waste down the toilet?  Because I actually had to make that estimation.

Electricity is the same, but measured in kilowatt hours.  How many kWh of electricity will you use next month?

Christ almighty, just send me a fucking bill.

Erectronics

Another interesting day.  My landlord, as part of the lease, had agreed to buy for the apartment a sofa bed, a desk, and a desk lamp.  He told me that we could get the sofa bed at IKEA, and he’d let me pick it out. 

Holy fucking shit.  You have never seen an IKEA with more people in it.  It was fucking packed, wall to wall.  I want you to imagine your local IKEA with the usual amount of people in it.  Now multiply that number of people by ten, that’s what it was like.  If IKEA was having a sale where they were selling everything for $1, you’d have a rough estimation of the experience.  Insane.  But I got a nice sofa bed, and it matches the furniture in the living room.

Here’s the best thing.  Just like in the US, you can pay IKEA to deliver it for you.  They’re delivering then assembling the couch tomorrow afternoon.  The price for this service?  60 RMB, which is roughly $8.  That’s right folks, two guys are going to hump this couch up to my apartment, then put it together, for the princely sum of $8.

Next we went to a nicer furniture place, and bought the desk.  You could compare this store to like an Ethan Allen or some place like that.  The desk is part of the same collection as the living room furniture, so it looks exactly the same.

Even though I got the premium cable TV hookup, the vast majority of the stations aren’t in English, obviously.  Pirate DVDs are as easy to find here as legal DVDs are in the US, so all the expats amass huge collections of pirate discs.  They cost roughly a buck each, and they’re exact digital duplicates of the legal DVDs you buy in the US.  At any rate, I needed a DVD player.  I also needed a phone, so the landlord suggested we go to this electronics place where we could get a good price on stuff.

They were having a special on a 2.4 GHz Panasonic cordless phone, which had buttons and text in English, so I got it.  When it came to the DVD player, I had been advised by many people to buy a Chinese model.  Unlike brand name players, these are designed to play crappy pirate DVDs.  There was a tiny little white thing, not much bigger than a standard DVD case, that was recommended to me.  The salesman had a little case full of discs that were scratched, mutilated, and generally looked like they’d been drug behind a car, then stuck up someone’s ass.  Every one of them played.  Then, while the unit was playing, he picked it up, threw it about a foot in the air, and let it smash down on the countertop.  It didn’t miss a beat.  He then took the tray loader and bent it up and down repeatedly, but it didn’t break.  I figured this was probably exactly what I was looking for.

The grand total?  $75.  For both of them.

Tomorrow I’m going DVD shopping.  After my shipment is delivered, of course.  And the furniture.

One problem— the internet won’t be turned on until Monday morning, so I’m contemplating staying in the hotel one more night.  This is my only connection to my family and friends back home, I can’t sit in the apartment all night and not be connected, I’d spaz the fuck out.

Well, anyway, I’m off to a punk club.  Beijing, believe it or not, has a thriving punk music scene.  (Why punk?  Beats the shit out of me.) So I’m gonna go get my drink on and see if the Chinese know how to get in the pit.

Friday, November 02, 2007

The 25th Floor

I officially signed the paperwork on my apartment today.  The landlord had, as promised, bought a brand new washer/dryer, refrigerator, and a Sony HDTV.  Tomorrow the cable and internet are being turned on.  The landlord is taking me to lunch, after which we’re going to go to the furniture store and he’ll let me pick out the desk and sofa couch of my choice. Then, on Sunday, my shipment will arrive, and I’ll move out of the hotel and actually spend the night in the place.

I got to see the view at night for the first time.  It’s amazing.  Seriously, it looks like Blade Runner, huge buildings on the skyline with neon Asian characters blinking all over the place.  It’s fucking spectacular.  I’ll post pictures on Sunday.

Okay, here’s something really weird, and it exemplifies just how bizarre a place this country can be sometimes.  You have to prepay your electricity, hot water, cold water, and toilet water.  Yes, the three types of water are all treated separately, and have different prices.  In other words, you pay more for the water you shower in than you do for the water that flushes your turds.  But wait, it gets even more strange.  Each one of these accounts has a little plastic credit card, which you have to charge up just like you would a prepaid phone card in the US, so I have four little credit card-type things for my utilities. 

You make these payments in the management office at the complex.  You can buy any of them any time you like EXCEPT hot water, which for some reason you can only pay for on Monday mornings.  So over the weekend I’m going to have to go to the management office, give them money for my hot water and have them hold it until Monday morning.

I’m still not 100% clear on how the hell I’m supposed to know how much money I have in these accounts.  I don’t think there’s a website or anything where you can check your balance, so to speak.  It’s just fucking weird.

This brings me to another point—the people who come here for the Olympics are going to be fucked, because they’re all going to be expecting to pay for things with credit cards.  Apart from maybe some of the better hotels, NOBODY takes credit cards here.  Everything is done with cash.  When you go out to eat, you carry cash with you.  I have to pay my utilities with cash, it’s not like I can give them a credit card and just have them automatically recharge the accounts whenever they get low.  I think a lot of people are going to be in for a shock because, for safety reasons, people in the west generally don’t walk around with wads of cash.  Here, though, there’s no street crime.  You can walk down the street drunk at 3am with a wallet full of money and not have to worry about being mugged.

Fucking China, I swear to God.

Thursday, November 01, 2007

Someone Call Cory Hart

I noticed something this morning in the taxi on the way to work.  I don’t think I’ve seen one person here wearing sunglasses.  It’s a bright day today (and nowhere NEAR as cold as it was supposed to be, thank God) and I put on my sunglasses out of habit. Then I realized that nobody else had them on.

I’ll have to ask about that, I wonder why it is.  Maybe people who wear sunglasses are considered assholes or something cultural like that.  Beats the shit out of me.

Old and Busted

Wow, what a great night out with my new buddy Richard.  We started out at this fantastic restaurant, some of the best Chinese food I’ve ever had.  The duck was spectacular.  We also had spare ribs that were in a sesame garlic seasoning, as well as some sliced pork, garlic beans, and other treats, like Mandarin Fish, sort of a fish turned inside out and covered in a sweet & sour sauce—you just picked chunks of meat right off the bone.  (Wanna know how fresh this was?  On the way in to the restaurant you walk past the tanks where they keep the fish.  When you order one the chef brings it out to your table in a bag so you can inspect it.  After your approval he takes it back to the kitchen, beats the fish to death with a mallet, and turns one of God’s creatures into a delicious feast for both the eyes and palate.)

The total cost was 437 RMB.  This was a full, multiple-course meal for three (Richard’s girlfriend was with us), where we drank green beer made from seaweed.  It tasted more or less like regular beer, so we had two or three of them.  Three people, five star restaurant, delicious meal of many delicacies, multiple drinks:  $58.  FUCK I love this country.  Seriously, this identical meal in Los Angeles would have been approaching three bills without breaking a sweat.

After the meal Richard’s girlfriend departed, and the two lads set off on their own to a bar, right next to the Beijing Hooters, where we began drinking and discussing various and sundry topics.  It was mostly packed full of expats with a few Chinese broads, they had TVs showing a 9-ball pool tournament on EPSN.  Then we went to Maggie’s.

Ah, Maggie’s.  Beijing’s most famous Mongolian hooker bar.

It was, on the whole, absolutely pathetic.  The bar was more or less full of two kinds of people.  First there were the hookers, every woman in there was a hooker, and looked the part—too much makeup, skimpy clothes, the whole nine yards.  Then there were the guys, mostly businessmen in suits who were in Beijing for a few days of meetings and decided to go get a little Chinese pussy while they were here.  The thing was how pathetic they were.  Here were a bunch of guys in their 40s and 50s who thought they were hot shit because they had a sexy 24 year old Chinese girl sitting with them, when the truth is that she probably fucked 20 different men last week.  They had this air of smug satisfaction about them, as if they were some kind of god because, in a country where the average income is about $10,000 a year, women found them attractive.  Or at least pretended to find them attractive because they had money and kept filling their glasses with champagne.

It was just sad.  I thought to myself, fuck, I’m 37.  Am I going to be some 48 year old suit-wearing douchebag picking up Mongolian hookers in a seedy Chinese bar?  What a sad commentary on someone’s life.  I mean, I can understand maybe being some guy who has been married for 30 years, and on a business trip he decides to go out and get a little strange poontang just for the hell of it.  But if you’re going to do that you have to understand that you’re paying a woman for sex, a woman who will fuck anyone who pays her.  It’s not any kind of accomplishment to have sex with a hooker, and that’s what you could clearly see in the faces of the guys in this bar, a smug sense of self satisfaction, as if the woman were interested in them for some reason other than they were going to pay her. 

If there were a word stronger than “pathetic” I’d use it, but I can’t think of one.

And we were solicited, too.  The girls would come up and use some lame-ass opening line about my height.  “How tall you, almost two meter?” We tried to get them to leave by first telling them that I was German and didn’t speak any English, but they kept at it. Then I told them that I was religious, and I was saving myself for marriage.  They were dumbfounded at this, that someone would give up vagina for religion, which I suppose isn’t so unexpected a response coming from a godless communist country.  We told them “God sees all,” and waved our hands mystically.  After a while they realized we weren’t buying what they were selling and they split.

See?  Religion does have a purpose—getting rid of irritating Mongolian hookers!

The tunes were good, though.  I haven’t heard “Rockin’ All Over the World” by Status Quo in about twenty years.  Maybe it’s a sign of maturity that I held the men in that bar in such contempt.  Maybe I’m just an egomaniacal prick, I don’t know.  But the rule is, if you’re going to pay a woman for sex, at least be honest enough with yourself to admit that she’s going to have sex with you because you’re paying her, and not because you’re some super duper double awesome megastud from the planet Hotness.

Sickness, Duck, and Winter

I forgot to write that a couple of days ago I had to go and get my official government medical exam.  Nothing major, they’re checking to see if you’re bringing in any infectious diseases.  (As if China is a bastion of public health.) At any rate, they took some blood, did a chest x-ray, and a quick EKG.  I was in and out in about 20 minutes.

I mention this because of the taxi ride I just had on the way home.  I swear, the driver had tuberculosis or something from the way he sounded.  The taxi ride was 10 RMB (about $1.25).  I handed him a 50, and I almost didn’t want to take the change.  I immediately ran upstairs and washed my hands, then ran disinfectant gel over them.

OH!  The fucking heat is on in the hotel finally!  It’s not government heat, the hotel has its own heating system, which until today has not been working.  So imagine my surprise when I opened the door a few minutes ago and it was like a goddamned oven in here.  The other day, when I was trying to get the thermostat to work, I cranked it all the way up to 30°C, which is like 80-something Fahrenheit.  Well, it’s been blasting at 80 all day, and after sitting in my refrigerator of an office all day it was a hell of a nice little treat.

Tonight I’m off to eat Peking Duck for the first time since I got here.  (I had this delicious pork noodle thing today for lunch, it was absolutely spectacular and cost a whopping $1.75.) I’m meeting my buddy down at the north gate of Worker’s Stadium again.  In Chinese it’s “Gong Tie Bei Men.” But I found out that in a Beijing accent anything that ends in -en is pronounced with an “-urrrr” sound.  So, phonetically speaking, it’s “Gong Tee Bay Murrrr.”

I was practicing today, and my Chinese crew thought it was fucking hilarious.  I also taught them what “mad skillz” meant.  Ah, the great cultural exchange.

Also, I expect to get the keys to my apartment tomorrow, so hopefully my shipment can get delivered ASAP, enabling me to go outside without my nutsack shrinking to the size of a peanut shell.