Dinner with friends at a Japanese restaurant called "Kiss Kiss".

Syllables Syllables everywhere and not a word to speak.

One of the guys from the office was nice enough to spend his lunch break one day helping us get cell phones. He took a cab with us to a crazy part of town (not far from our hotel) where they sell all high tech appliances. He was saying that this four block area of Beijing sells more than 1/4 of all the I.T. products sold in all of China. It was madness. Big IT malls as well as little shops everywhere, all packed with laptops, cameras, computer accessories, and cell phones. If it takes batteries, they sell it there.
We went into a little cell phone shop to get me a phone (Heather's office supplied hers.) Buying a phone is very different here than in the states. It's much like it is in India or Thailand. Rather than go to a Cingular store to buy a phone and get roped into a ridiculously expensive 2 year contract, here you go and buy your phone for a pittance from any number of retailers. Then you go to the service provider's store and buy your SIM card to activate the phone.

There was a Samsung phone I wanted back home that would cost me $80 if I signed up for 2 more years on my Cingular contract. It was a very basic phone without any bells or whistles. Should I have the gall to buy this phone without signing up for the contract the very same phone would cost $300. In Asia only the most outlandishly expensive and fancy phones cost $300. And there are no contracts. (come to think of it, when we were in South Africa we had a really tough time explaining the idea of a cell phone contract to someone) Almost everyone just buys pay-as-you-go SIM cards. Anyway I got an LG phone for $50.


So far, the single most fascinating thing I've encountered here are the Taxis. I have yet to get into a cab and have the driver have ANY idea where I want to go. At first I thought it was just the language barrier. But we get the front desk people to write down the addresses of wherever we are going in Chinese and the drivers still just stare at the address and then tell us they don't know where it is. We've tried using maps, but that just seems to make the situation worse. They scowl and squint as they pore over the map and then just toss the map aside in frustration. It is as though each and every taxi driver is not only driving a cab for the first time, but they are driving in a city they've never seen before.

What makes the situation tolerable is the same thing that makes it so frustrating: The hotel is located in the middle of a huge shopping district and we are at most 2 miles from Heather's office which is in a huge business park. So while the fact that these drivers can't find these two destinations that you can practically shout between is baffling, the distance is short enough that we can usually coax them into just driving as we tell them where to take the lefts and rights. (I shit you not 3 rights and 2 lefts door to door)

I can say a few words in Mandarin, ("left" and "right" among them) but I am not anywhere close to being able to understand the rapid fire, multi-tonal, barrage of sounds that the locals use to communicate.

I read that Mandarin has 405 basic syllables which are pronounced in different tones to produce about 1,300 building blocks for the language. By comparison English only has 44 basic sounds, but they combine in so many ways they make up over 3,000 syllables. This was encouraging to me at first. It gave me hope that learning Chinese wouldn't be too hard. But then I got to the chapter on "measure words". Any sort of arguments you may hear about the difficulty of the English language can easily be countered by the absurdity of Chinese measure words.
In Chinese one cannot simply say "That is one bottle." or "There are 2 cigarettes." There are dozens of quantifying words that you must use, but the rub is that these quantifiers seem to follow absolutely no logical patterns whatsoever. For example: "One book." is said "Yi ben shu." "Yi" meaning "one", "shu" meaning book, and "ben" is used to quantify things that are bound such as books or magazines. Seems straight forward enough until you read on and find out that "bu" is used to quantify novels or films (but I thought a novel was a book) and "ce" is for volumes of books (and sometimes just for books) and "qi" is for periodicals (yes this includes magazines which I was under the impression were bound and so fell under "ben".)

??????

"Chuang" is for quilts blankets or sheets. "Gen" is for long thin objects, but you might run into some gray area here because "zhi" is for stick like objects.
There are 3 different ways to say "fu" and depending on which you use you will be quantifying 1: paintings, works of calligraphy, or maps. 2. doses of Chinese medicine. or 3. things that come in pairs or sets.
(Unless you're talking about pairs of people; that's "dui"; or if these pairs or sets of things are set in rows, that's "pai".)
And the list goes on, and on, and on...

I know that the locals will probably forgive me if I screw up trying to use the quantifiers, but I think this bizarre syntax points to a method of logic that helps explain why it is so difficult for someone to figure out how to get from point A to point B when driving a cab.

Shopping

Needless to say I get a lot of stares here but strangely, when I am in a supermarket, people stare at the things in my basket way more than they stare at me.

Falling On My Head Like a Memory -Eurythmics

The rains have come again tonight. They started this weekend with a spectacular thunderstorm on Friday night.

It rains very hard, but not for very long. But since the city is so flat you can see the lightning and hear the thunder from miles away. On Friday we sat by the window with it open and took in the show. Sometimes the lightning looked like it was going to come right in the widow. The thunder was so loud we could hear every last crackle. It was like an explosion preceded by a crisp, series of crescendoing pops and cracks. It was as if the sky were made of thick ice and someone was trying to smash their way through it from the other side, driving huge fissures down through the clouds.

We are on the 18^th floor giving us a good vantage point being able to look out across a big section of the city skyline.

We live in a “serviced residence hotel” meaning we are in a hotel, but we have a kitchenette and living room. The people here are incredibly nice and the facilities are much more than I expected. There’s a pool and a gym and a restaurant (which is only open for breakfast.) Whenever I’m working out, any of the staff who walks by the glass gym doors stops to smile and wave to me, even though I’ve never even seen most of them.

Just as I was misled to believe that some people here would speak some English, I was also mistaken in thinking that I would be a giant in a land of short people. I am only a little taller than the average person in the street here. Saturday night one of the guys in the party we went to dinner with was at least two inches taller than me.

The way I understand it, people from the North tend to be historically taller, and people in the south shorter. Like most countries where populations stayed in the same place geographically, the different environments made certain physical traits dominant. The south tends to be more mountainous and forested, and the north is more open with deserts and plains.

I start Mandarin classes on Wednesday, and I am REALLY looking forward to it. I am getting tired of Heather and I being the only people who don’t speak the language.

I'm Back, Bitches!

I have finally found a way onto blogger here. More accurately someone at Heather's office showed me how.

So... China...

We left S.F. on a Monday afternoon and arrived in China on a Wednesday morning, so Tuesday disappeared somewhere over the Pacific. That particular Tuesday happened to be my birthday, so I guess I'm not really 34.



The people at the front desk speak passable English, but so far, they are the only people I've run into who speak any English at all. I haven't started Mandarin classes yet, but I found a school I'm interested in and it looks like there is a class starting the week after next.

There is a shopping mall nearby and across the street from that, there's a grocery store. The malls and grocery are pretty much just like the ones at home, except for some of the horrific smells in the supermarket.
I'm not sure if any of you have ever had a jackfruit. I'm not sure what it's called here, but in Singapore and in India it was called jackfruit. It's a huge fruit that grows on trees. It's about the size of a watermelon. The rind is covered in small dull spikes and the flesh inside is somewhere between a pineapple and an orange only sweeter than both. But the most pronounced feature of the jackfruit is that is smells like absolute and utter shit when it is in season. And it happens to be in season right now. As soon as you walk into the store you can smell what I can only describe as rotting flesh boiled in sugar. It is a rancid smell, but at the same time a very, very sweet smell. You don't have to be anywhere near the produce section to smell it though. It's everywhere. And the locals here seem to go apeshit for it. Scads of people are packed around the jackfruit display, some getting it cut up into sections (which just releases more of the smell) and some taking the whole thing.


As I said before the supermarket is very similar to a Safeway or something back home. It's huge with fluorescent lighting, and dirty tile floors. They have everything from cosmetics to booze. At the ends of some aisles there are girls with little megaphones hawking the latest yogurts or fruit juices. I think the main difference between this market and one in the U.S. would be the butcher. Walking into an area of the store filled with raw meat here is not for the faint of heart. Much like back home the butchers stand behind counters of pre-cut meat. Unlike back home, most of the meat is uncovered, so it is pretty pungent. Behind each counter there are entire animals hung on racks.

Nobody buys the pre-cut stuff. They just ask the butcher for whatever cut they want and he cuts it off one of the carcasses.