I think I might hit Wal-Mart this weekend if I have the time. If I do I’ll take pictures. I’ll bet they have a fishmonger section, where old women with bloody wooden mallets stand in front of tanks of fish and turtles. You pick out the one you want, they grab it, beat it to death, then wrap it up and sell it to you. But all for a low rollback price, of course. And IKEA isn’t too far from my new place. At work they told me that since so few people here have their own vehicles, and virtually nobody has a truck or van of any description, IKEA delivers your purchases and sets them up for you, usually the same day you buy them. And they don’t charge any extra for this, either. Pretty fucking cool!
Oh, and on an unrelated note, I have been informed that our Benevolent Communist Overlords have deemed YouTube an acceptable website for viewing. So, as requested, I posted the rave video there as well.
Not bad for two days in country. I loooooooooves to get my drink on and watch hot, sexy chicks in their 20s writhe in the glow of a strobe light.
And sweet goddamned miserable holy fuck is it cold here! The government still hasn’t turned the heat on, and won’t for a couple more weeks, so we all sit around at work in coats and jackets. Well, everyone else does, at least. I didn’t bring a jacket. Why?
You’re only allowed 70 lbs a bag when you fly internationally. (That’s business class, if you fly coach it’s 50.) I put a couple of jackets in my air shipment and my heavy winter coats in my sea shipment, because the air shipment was supposed to have been here waiting for me when I arrived. However, the movers fucked up some customs paperwork and the air shipment was delayed getting out. It’s here, though, and it’s cleared Chinese customs, waiting in a warehouse to be delivered. They offered to bring it to my hotel, but I told them I’d just gut it out for a couple more days until they could deliver it to my apartment.
This weekend I’ll be buying a space heater or two.
Well, it’s official, I got my apartment. The landlord went for the offer. I’ll be moving in probably this weekend, maybe early next week.
Okay, here’s the details. It’s never been lived in before. It’s in a gorgeous high-rise building on the 25th floor. Two bedrooms, two bathrooms, about 1,200 square feet. Hardwood floors through the apartment, with floor-to-ceiling windows in the bedrooms. Both the bedrooms are corners. There is a different view of the city from every room. At night the cityscape looks like Blade Runner. It’s fully furnished with brand new stuff. As part of the lease the landlord has agreed to buy a brand new HD television, as well as a washer and dryer. (Dryers are not common in China.) The rent also includes T1-speed internet access and satellite television. There’s a state of the art security system, so that when guests come to visit I have a little LCD monitor near the door, letting me see them before I tell the doorman to let them in the building. The complex features an olympic-length lap pool, and a full gym with professional trainers. It also has two restaurants, a day spa and massage salon, and a little convenience store-type shop. All of this is included in the cost of the lease.
As part of my employment contract I was given a housing stipend. All I have to do is pay anything over and above the stipend. Thus I get everything you see above for about $395 a month.
Beats the shit out of paying $1,100 and looking at a supermarket wall, huh? When I move in I’ll post pictures.
I don’t ever, ever want to hear another one of you complain about how cell phone plans in America are confusing. I had to get a new phone today, and it was the most goddamned confusing thing I’ve ever gone through in my life. I had one of the girls from the office there explaining everything to me while I was doing it, and I still don’t have a fucking clue what I was doing.
So, in the US you sign a contract for a few years, get a phone, and get a certain number of minutes. In China you buy the phone separate from the SIM card. So I bought a Motorola SLVR (for about half the price they cost in the US), then had to get the SIM. Since I want to be able to make international calls I had to buy a certain type of SIM. There’s some kind of monthly usage fee of 50 RMB (about $6), and then you have to go and buy a thing sort of like a phone card. You buy them from corner newsstands, places like that. But there’s a code on the card, and then you have to call and lock the code on the card to the SIM in your phone.
Seriously, I don’t have a goddamned clue what I paid for. I just got to the point where I said, “See? This is my wallet. It contains a lot of money. You tell me what to buy.”
Of course, now I have a cool new phone, and my ringtone is “Chocolate Salty Balls” from South Park, sung by Isaac “Chef” Hayes.
Say everybody have you seen my balls
They’re big and salty and brown.
If you ever need a quick pick me up
Just stick my balls in your mouth!
OOOH!!
Suck on my chocolate salty balls,
Stick ‘em in your mouth and suck ‘em!
Suck on my chocolate salty balls,
They’re packed full of vitamins and good for you,
So suck on my balls!
I wonder if the Chinese have any idea what South Park is.
Greetings visitors from Conservative Grapevine! I’d like to thank John for the link, especially considering this is more of a dopey personal blog than a political one. But if you’re interested in what life is actually like behind the Red Wall, I’ll do what I can to fill you in.
Oh yeah, and the chicks here are SMOKIN’ hot, too. There’ll always be lots of talk about chicks. And once I get my head out of my ass I’ll post pictures of some of them.
I made an offer on an apartment today. The realtor thinks the landlord will go for it. When the ink is signed on the lease and you suckholes see what I’m getting for my money, every one of you is going to start looking in the Beijing want ads.
Just to prepare you: in Los Angeles I lived in a small one bedroom, maybe 750 square feet. I had one window. I never opened the blinds, because my view was of the wall of the supermarket next door, a wall about 5 feet from my window. It was in an area not exactly high crime but it wasn’t exactly Brentwood, either. There was the occasional gang shooting.
And for all this I paid $1,100 a month. Keep that in mind.
Chinese beer and soda cans still have the old ring-pull type tops on them. Why? What possible fucking reason could there be for doing so? Even if it was slightly more expensive to create the type of cans we have in the west, the economy of scale would make the difference in price somewhere around a thousandth of a cent, maybe even smaller. So why stick with the old sharp, litter-prone, finger-slicing ring-pulls that the civilized world got rid of, oh, 30 years ago?
But that satellite missile system is coming along great, as are their plans to create a communist party in space. When you have a culture that’s 5,000 years old, the Chinese tend to think of things a hell of a lot more long term than we do.
You know one of the best things about living in a country where labor is so cheap? I never have to wash or clean anything again. It’ll be like being married, without the nagging.
I swear to God, the heaviest thing I’m ever going to lift in this country is money.
I’ve received a request for pictures of the city. I haven’t really had much time to see a lot of it yet. Of course, since I got here I stood outside Worker’s Stadium in the rain, waiting for a Scot I’d never met in person, who was going to be dressed like a Hooter’s waitress, so I could go to a costume party with people I didn’t know, and ended up at a rave so drunk off my ass I could barely stand up, but I really haven’t had time to take a lot of pictures. But just to get the ball rolling, here’s a picture I took yesterday of the view from my hotel room.
I promise, in the coming days more pictures and video will be forthcoming. If I can take some pictures of my office I’ll do that too, though the confidentiality agreement I had to sign expressly forbade it. Maybe I can get them to make an exception just so I can take pictures of the building, not what we do in there.
The hotel I’m staying in, while not a world-class resort, is a pretty nice place. I’m quite comfortable, the service is great, and they have a revolving restaurant on the top floor of the hotel giving you a 360° view of the city. So this is not a dump by any means.
My first night here, when I was zonked out from jetlag and crashed in bed, I have a vague memory of the phone ringing and someone asking if I wanted a massage. I said no and went back to sleep. The next day I couldn’t remember if I had dreamed it or if it had actually happened.
Yesterday it happened again. I was working on the computer, the phone rang, and a guy’s voice said, “Hello, you want massage?” Once again I declined. It just happened a third time, except this time it was a woman’s voice.
Now, massages are not an official hotel feature. (I checked in the services guide.) So obviously someone here in the hotel is earning a little extra cash working as a pimp calling all the foreigners to see if they’d like to get a little yellow tail (and I’m not talking about sushi, either). What I don’t get is why anyone would pay for sex in this country. I mean, talk about your classic “coals to Newcastle” scenario. Just the fact that you’re a white male means that half the women in this country between 18 and 30 will sleep with you. Go to any club in town.
Finding sexually willing women in China is about as easy as finding passed-out skanks on Colin Farrell’s living room carpet.
Today in Beijing it was pretty damn cold. I had three layers of clothes on, but my hands were freezing. There was no heat on in the office. And I haven’t been able to get any heat in my hotel room, either. I have to sit around with layers of clothes on to keep warm. There’s a thermostat, but when I turn it on cold air comes out.
I found out why today. One of the legacies of the communist era is that—I shit you not—the government controls the supply of heat in the winter, and they haven’t turned it on yet. So the radiators and stuff in the apartments and offices don’t work, and won’t for another week or so. The flip side to this is that, during the winter, you don’t have to pay for the heat since it’s provided by the government.
Well, today was my first day at work. Without going into specifics, let’s just say that taking this job was one of the best decisions I ever made. The facility is great, the money is great, the country is great, the people are great… it’s fucking wonderful.
Today five of us went out and ate a Beijing-style lunch called a hot pot. It’s sort of a huge pot of soup in the center of the table with a duck in it. Then you add in bits of lamb and beef and various veggies, and dip the meat into a sesame sauce which had sort of a peanut taste to it. Absolutely delicious. For all five of us it was about $14.
As requested in the comments, here’s a few seconds of the rave I was at last night. Crappy quality video, but it will give you an idea of what the event was like.
Funny thing about Google Video. You can upload videos from China, you just can’t view them. Here’s a screen capture of my browser window.
It ought to be honest and say: “Sorry, you can’t watch this video because Larry Page and Sergey Brin still have the tase of Chinese dick in their mouths.” So I can film stuff, I can upload stuff, I just can’t watch video that I created and have sitting on my desktop.
Well, so much for the Great Firewall of China. I’d been quite worried that my access to info was going to be restricted, but so far the only sites that have been blocked are Wikipedia and YouTube. Other than that, I can hit every newspaper, every blog, and every other site I read regularly. That’s great news.
So, tomorrow is my first day at work. I don’t think I’ll be doing much work, though. I have to have all kinds of medical exams and stuff in order to get my Z-class visa, and I still need to find a place to live. The apartments I looked at yesterday were amazing. I’m still trying to decide what part of town to live in. For about the same amount of money I was paying to live in that fucking dump in LA I’ll be able to get a top notch place here.
Apparently my air shipment has arrived and should clear Chinese customs in a few days. If I can get into an apartment next week, my life might begin to assume an air of normalcy relatively quickly.
Oh, and MAN, did I get fucking shitfaced at a Halloween rave last night. I took some video of it with my camera, but of course China won’t let you get to YouTube. It’s weird. In many ways this police state has far fewer rules than most western countries. It’s oddly libertarian in a way.
All I can say is, I can’t believe that in my younger days I used to do this shit every fucking night. As I slink mercilessly towards the big 4-0 I look back honestly don’t know how I did it.
It was a hell of a night. I spent all day looking at apartments, so I didn’t have a chance to eat all day. Literally, all I had to eat yesterday was a small pack of Pringles from the hotel minibar. After I got back from house hunting I grabbed a shower, threw on a shirt, and took off. I met up with the guys near Worker’s Stadium. When I arrived there were couples, ranging in ages from their 20s onwards, doing ballroom dancing on the sidewalk. It was the damnedest thing I ever saw. So while I waited I watched the dancing.
Then some really smoking hot Chinese girl came up to me and started saying something. I think she was probably a hooker, so I told her to fuck off. Of course, she didn’t understand a word I said, and she kept asking me something. For all I know it was, “I am an educated girl from a good family. I want to be your wife and bear your children.” Who the hell knows?
Then there was a raindrop. Then another. Then it started to fucking POUR, a torrential, blinding hurricane of water. And I had no jacket.
Once the guys showed up we went to a house party. Too many people packed into too small a space making way too much fucking noise drinking too much booze and smoking too many cigarettes. It was fucking awesome. Then we ended up going to a Halloween party at some techno club. That’s where I was until the wee hours.
So, about 4:00, I couldn’t take any more. I was exhausted, and that can of Pringles just wasn’t getting the job done, so I split. I went outside, grabbed a taxi, and handed him a piece of paper with the address of the hotel written in Chinese. This ignorant prick couldn’t find his ass with both hands and a map. We drove all over the place looking for the hotel, and eventually found it. (I was almost disappointed that the Chinese don’t tip, because I wanted to be able to not tip the guy to show how pissed off I was.)
So my drunk, wet, sweaty, smoky ass lumbered in to the room a 4:30, wrote the drunken drivel you see below, and passed the fuck out. And now it’s 11:00 am, I’m awake, and I feel fine.
How the hell I do this shit at 37 I have no idea. But let’s just say that I love, love this country.
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