oh, China.

Thou art equally full of surprises and disappointments.

Also, I can conceive of no actual reason to have Oh, Canada stuck in my head. But I do. I didn't even realize I knew Oh, Canada. Yeah, I dunno.

yellow and black has a deceptively cool theme song

so a not-to-be-named wire money transfer service claimed it would get me my money in minutes, and in a manner of speaking, that is technically true. It managed to get me my money in 5,763 minutes. They will give you love, by which they mean money, but only if you come back 4 consecutive days and finally pitch a tearful fit and insist that you aren't leaving until they fix it.

Nice work, folks, nice work.

At least I have finally now paid my rent.

things I have learned about China so far

China has a passive aggressive sense of humor. The whole country.

The best way to get what you want is to throw a fit.

China does not have the infrastructure to support the enforcing of deadlines. That doesn't stop them from trying though.

There is no such thing as efficiency, problem solving, or communication.

Lying is okay, especially when it means you don't have to take responsibility for something.

People everywhere like laughing at foreigners.

Also, I maintain that electric bikes, though remarkably dangerous, are still very, very awesome.

Le sigh.

my face is asleep.

It must be really bored with the rest of me.

whew.

You know what's a great feeling? Knowing that you're exactly where you're supposed to be.

I think no longer being homeless probably helps. But today is a good day.

character flaws

Apparently, I am now so predictable that people can guess my business. This cannot be good.

there are no cabs in america

I mean China. There are no cabs in china. At least, not enough cabs to get me to work on time. Especially when I'm running late.

small town feeling

So, Beijing is enormous. Lots and lots of frickin' people. And yet, somehow the expat community is itty bitty. I have been here a single month, and attended a trivia event this week with a small group of people, only to see four other people I already know. Seriously? I don't know anybody And yet...

An unexpected drawback to this welcoming community is the cliquishness and gossip that accompanies any self-respecting small town. As it turns out, it doesn't take long for so and so to find out that whatshisface knows the same person as that guy, and oh did you hear about the time when a friend of a friend of a coworker ... and gossip ensues.

A new friend recently said "Everyone who moves to Beijing is running away from something." While denial is tempting, it hardly seems worth the effort for me in this case. It is unfortunate that Beijing doesn't seem to offer the long term anonymity for which I had hoped, but perhaps there is an alternate lesson. Though not easy to swallow in a gel-caps sort of way, it seems as though perhaps escape is always temporary. And that even once your slate is clean and on a new continent, you still can't always control who writes on it with thick black sharpies.

a followup to an earlier grammatically questionable post:

can an opinion be trustworthy?

not all that interesting

to anyone but me, perhaps, but China is the first place where I have distinctly noticed the taste of dill in dill pickles. In fact, slices of pickle are often accompanied here by actual pieces of dill. Somehow, I think I was previously missing a taste-linguistic connection in there somewhere. Thank you, China, for this enlightening experience.

just for this moment

I didn't even remember that I knew the song, but "I like it here" played in my head in the taxi on the way to work this morning.

I am so very predictable. le sigh.

a drive by what?

in the states, that would be some sort of illegal I'm sure.

While I was walking home from the bar last night (er, this morning), two guys sped by me on a bike. This would not have been out of the ordinary except for the fact that as they passed me, they managed to grab both my ass and my left breast.
Sadly, even if I had been wearing my glasses when it happened, the odds of my being able to pick these guys out of a line up is slim to none. There are many possible reasons for this, and all of them are probably true.

While I would like to have chased them down and kicked their asses off the back of that bike, I must admit I'm impressed with the speed, agility, and aim necessary to pull off this feat.

And though I currently insist on being amused by this event, it contributes to my overall feeling of being violated by this city, however unusual an occurrence in Beijing it may be. It even has me leaving dangling participles in blog posts which I mercifully caught and edited just now. whew.

a voyage of self-discovery

Things I have thus far learned about myself in China:

1) I am not lopsided*
2) If I were a beer, I'd have my own special glass.
3) I really don't like having nothing to do. especially at work.

*this according to the very trustworthy opinion of a hot pink electric bike.

See, I knew this would be a valuable learning experience.

mmmhmm.

I just looked at a bottle of Aleve the same way I used to look at a steak dinner from the daily grill.

the only thing that stays the same

Dear disgruntled Jenny Lou's employee:

I am sorry that you hate your job and possibly your life, but it is not my responsibility to have exact change every time I purchase a soda from your store. Please stop bitching at me and slamming your cash drawer over having to count out 5 quai 2.

Regards,

Me

Remember that time I accidentally threw a chicken across the table at my boyfriend's mom?

I'd say I'm conversational in chopsticks.

babelkoi

I actually said this sentence out loud:

"tonight, we together eat modal participle."

hehe. China is funny.

ice weasels

So, I'm pretty sure I've actually met someone from hell. I think she probably moonlights in hell, doing the same thing she does during the day at the Beijing local clinic.

this post is becoming too disturbing to continue typing. but the thought is out there now. it's out there.

lack ...

Dear HR Department,

Please stop sucking at your jobs and then expecting me to fix it.

Sincerely,

Me.

that's what it's all about.

So, this place is either going to teach me to be more laid back, or it's going to destroy me, one inefficient process at a time. So, on the bright side, if it does kill me, it will happen very, very slowly.

the world according to facebook:

"this object cannot be liked."

I've said it before, and I'll say it again.

Seriously? Seriously??

US 1, CN 1: Electric bikes

Electric bikes = extreme commuting. This is a sport with which I was previously unfamiliar, but now quite appreciate. Especially since my friend Eryn has acquired a fabulous new electric pink electric bike, on which we traveled to HouHai on Saturday. Admittedly, it ran out of battery on the way home, but the exhilarating experience of darting through beijing crowds and cars on the back of a bike going (gasp!) 35 miles per hour made up for the inconvenience.

While I can't quite picture a world where electric pink bikes roll merrily down I95, it's a definite plus for China.

REVIEW OF THE PLAY
A followup to "school on weekends": after reviewing the play, it seems that the Chinese government may have issued the obnoxious school calendar change several months in advance, and it only reached our company by way of our incompetent HR department last week. So this diminishes my irritation at the agency somewhat, though a single notice by email of a major calendar change hardly justifies their insistence that this inconvenience rule be enforced. Therefore, the ruling on the field stands, and no score adjustment will be made.

Beyond colors and borders: an encounter with The Book Doctor.

Today, I met Alex, the Book Doctor. Alex supplies books for us for the libraries in our schools, and he orders them in bulk from international sources so that we don't have to pay excessive amounts to stock our libraries. He informed me that he is, in fact, "the Book Doctor," on sporadic occasions when he had just revealed random obscure facts about books and publishers. Quite personable for a Book Doctor, Alex gestured expressively as he spoke clear English with an accent I recognized as being Singaporean. Despite his articulate command of the language, he would occasionally feel the need to start over explaining some intricacy of our children's library order, and would emphatically wipe his hands back and forth through the air and across the empty table top as though cleaning away his previous descriptions.

While we were going through the list of subjects covered on our book list, Alex interrupted abruptly to inform us that we were not allowed to buy Geography books from him.

"Do you sell geography books?" we asked. "Of course I do" came the reply, "but you must not buy them from me." We all paused, not sure how to respond. "It's the maps." he explained. Apparently, sometimes maps in imported books will depict Taiwan and China in different colors, and this, he pauses for emphasis, is unacceptable to the government. He gestures to the table and places a napkin and a paper clip in the appropriate geographical places, "this is red and this is green. Or this is blue and this is pink!" he exclaims. He wipes the invisible context of the map from the air and places his hand diagonally across the napkin. "And sometimes" - another pause for emphasis - "they print the border for India HERE!" It is clear from his tone that the China/India border is definitely NOT Alex's hand.

My Chinese co-worked nods while my boss and I are visibly taken aback by this newly acquired knowledge. "So they stop all of the atlases and geography books at the border to read them." Alex nods and sighs, the sigh of someone who long ago resigned to bear the burden of this kind of extensive knowledge of books. "Well. Yes." He says, wiping the air again. "I am the Book Doctor."

US 1, CN 0: School on weekends.

a point to the US for NOT having federal control of all schools everywhere and their calendars.

Our company, which runs 8 schools in China, has been informed today, two weeks into the school year, by email that the government is mandating changes to the school calendar in the following ways:
Because some holidays fall mid-week, the schools are required to give additional days off so that people can travel, meaning a one-day holiday on a Wednesday means no school Monday and Tuesday as well. Okay, sure, that's nice. People like to take advantage of holidays. But you what they've decided is required to happen to make up for those days? SCHOOL ON SATURDAY AND SUNDAY. ... I'm sorry, WHAT?

Not only have people already made travel plans based on the GOVERNMENT's holiday schedule, but teachers and administrators (and everyone in corporate) are now required by law to work on a weekend, meaning 7 consecutive days of work, because their holiday falls on a Wednesday. This is perhaps the first time in my life I appreciate Evanston, IL's completely shameless moving of holidays to accommodate their schedules. In Evanston, for example, October 31st may be a Wednesday, but Halloween is officially November 2nd (from 4-6pm). Previously, I thought that was obnoxious. and sort of cheating.

However, I now feel that this method is far superior to forcing a 7 day work week so people can travel on a wednesday.

Grrr. Argh.

CN 0, US 1.

Rules for living in China

So far, I only have two:
1) don't get arrested. even for something ridiculous. even if it would make a really funny story later.
2) don't die.

this second one has proven itself to be particularly challenging based on the number of pedestrian-eating electric bikes that are native to Beijing.

CN v US

So, I feel it is my responsibility as an expat to make petty comparisons between my homeland and my new home. Therefore, in the grand educational tradition of unfailingly accurate subjective assessments, I will begin constructing a rubric which will be used to determine, once and for all, which country is better, according to a scale of my own devising. This standardized test of sorts will become the primary measure for a country's success, and undoubtedly determine their intelligence and college admission potential.

NOTE: There is lots of sarcasm in this statement, which may or may not translate properly to Mandarin. Here's hoping the government doesn't arrest me for my sarcasm. That does sound like something that would happen to me.

Pre-VPN entries

Insert here observations from earlier in the trip, pre VPN.

Pre-VPN

So, in the US, my life was absolutely full of acronyms. HGSE. AATE. L&T. ABC. TIE. TO. AEP. etc. and so on and so forth.

When I first arrived in China, I learned the importance of a new abbreviation, without which I could neither reach facebook nor my precious google docs. In fact, I could not even start this blog (thanks, google, for partnering with and thus prohibiting Chinese use of, blogger). At any rate, this means that there are several blog-intended entries that existed pre-VPN. I will paste these below once I get around to it.

!@#$%^!

AUG 23rd:

So far, I’ve been trying to imagine every interaction I have with amusing subtitles, with a laugh track each time I call a book a tree, or spit and sputter especially challenging chinese phrases like “14 snakes.” Hopefully, I will never actually have a practical need to give someone an accurate account of how many snakes there are in any language. And if I somehow manage to end up in a situation that requires it, I will probably resign myself to whatever fate results from the inability to pronounce it properly.

At any rate, so begin my adventures in China – at least as far as the internet is concerned.

sub(TITLES) + life - 26 letters + 5000 characters = ???

So, originally, I planned to name my travel blog "Life without subtitles" a less than original account of moving abroad to a place where I neither speak, nor read, nor understand the language. Or even the letters, for that matter.

And as it turns out, not only is the idea unoriginal, but so is the title of the blog. There are apparently several blogs with clever and not so clever references to the absence of subtitles. So, in the the grand tradition of being rebellious because it's the thing to do, I bring you in its place a title representing the ubiquitous presence of subtitles, but in the rather convoluted language of metaphors.

Oy. That was complicated. As far as moving to Asia goes, that pretty much sums it up.