Well? What word did you expect I'd start my first bloggage in half a year with? In fact I reckoned I'd throw a trifecta of wells at you. A veritable bouquet of wells for my dear readers, both as a "what is going on in this crazy world here?!" as well as Joe Walsh "Hi there how are ya? It's been a long time..."
Since going to the fourth world, I've just been unable to blog. I call China the fourth world because it has the second largest economy in the world, so it's not third world, but so much of what I see there, even in the capital, is stuff that makes me feel like Dr. David Livingstone discovering an unknown, prehistoric tribe that has remained hitherto untouched by civilization! The internet, for example, is a constant challenge in China. Now, I went over there knowing it would be, but China, at every turn, has proven to be about three times as complicated as expected. So I go over there expecting a lot of blocked sites, like anything to do with Google. I got a new Outlook email because my Gmail account doesn't work in China. I KNEW that was going to happen. I expected that. What you don't expect is the general wifi drought that has left every internet stream as no more than a trickle at the best of times. Combine that with cafes, hostels, restaurants and places people go to use internet assuring you that they have internet. Then when you try it you find out, yes, there IS internet, only it doesn't work. Ubiquitous throughout Beijing, these places!
So even if I were to get a VPN to give myself a false IP address to enable sites blocked by the Great Firewall of China to work again, I have to try to download it and navigate it using the pitifully slow internet in China, when I can GET internet at all. I managed to hook up to a VPN with the help of a guy who is a bit more tech savvy than myself. He tried several times to download the VPN but the internet cut out after 45 minutes or so and he had to restart the download. This took the better part of a day. A whole day to download something that should take minutes!!! But he got it and then gave it to me. I paid and now use it every time I log onto the internet. So why no bloggage? Because even WITH the VPN, I get an internet stream that is too anemic to do anything and even at that it cuts out on average every minute or two. What I've typed here so far, for example, would have taken me about a day and a half realistically speaking, had I the patience to try for that long from my hostel room in Beijing. I would have flashed up the VPN, then chosen a country. Korea is usually my first choice. The IP address would have been established and I would have gone to Blogger and probably written the three wells before Korea gave up on my weak wifi signaling ass. So back to the VPN. Let's see, how about Azerbaijan? They're usually good. Again, thirty seconds or so till critical mass. Next we'll try Saudi. Okay seems like a decent strength. Now to Blogger. "This page unavailable."
With the amount of work I have to do, I just didn't have time for that nonsense. So, this blog has missed out! No Christmas or New Year's stuff. No updates on the tremendously eventful five months in China, and the insanity at the place where I have been working, nothing about the Korean Queen getting ousted, and, holy moly, nothing about the self-aggrandizing man child who's going to be like Jack lusting after the blood of Ralph and Piggy. Every POTUS has his signature quote and I'm predicting Trump's to be, "I know you are, but what am I?"
So what brings me to the computer today? I have a steady internet stream and some free time. I am off for a month and visiting Heather, Mike and the whole Peet/Spiwak family right now. I got to Korea on the 4th of January. So I've been here for a week. What have I done so far? Nothing! There's a reason for that but I can't tell it to you without recording for posterity another of my infamous tragic travel tales. Are you ready for another tragic travel tale, kiddies? Okay then, just sit back and we'll continue VPN free and wifi uninterrupted! God I love Korea! After I've been in China for five months...
So it all started back on the 2nd of January. I was taking a plane to Taeyuan in China to meet some people at an international school there. I've got to continually look for other employment options given the temporary and tenuous nature of the work I am doing right now. So I booked a flight for the evening of the 2nd. I had spent most of the day packing up all of my belongings so I could store them. The hostel where I live, in a tiny shoebox of a room with no fridge, no stove, no cooking allowed, and the woeful wifi, (for $1200/month), had agreed to store my stuff below the stairs for 60 RMB a day. That's about 12 bucks Canadian. Not terrible I guess... Better than paying for the room.
I hadn't been able to book a hotel in advance for my overnight stay but didn't think it would be tough to find one. My liaison there would be a girl named Faith. She had sent me a map of the area where the school is and I figured I'd just look around for a hotel nearby once I arrived. Show a taxi driver the map, tell him to take me to whatever hotel, badabing, badaboom. But that wouldn't make for any kind of tragic travel tale now would it?
I got to the Beijing airport a few hours before my plane left. It was actually way too early for me to arrive since I wasn't going to need to go through immigration. I bummed around, had a meal, wasted time and then got on the plane. It was less than an hour in the air. Simple flight. So I got to the Taeyuan airport and immediately wanted to find a place to use the internet so I could find a hotel. I found a coffee shop. It didn't look like anything fancy. Kind of a bit downscale for an airport if you ask me. I went to the counter and asked the girl if they had wifi. She showed me a strong signal on her phone so I asked for a coffee. She showed me a menu. Oh great! Designer coffees. I just wanted something from a pot. Oh well, I chose the Americano without paying much attention to the price. What I got was a small cup of burnt liquid. It was harsh, thick and nasty. And as I got to my seat and organized my thoughts, I realized I had paid 78 quai for this cup of coffee. "quai" is a word used in China for Yuen or Renminbee that is like the word "buck" for dollars. 78 RMB is about 15 bucks Canadian! For a shitty cup of coffee! I've been shocked to see this sort of blatant rip off pricing here in China. I thought it was going to be cheap but since they have thrown common decency to the wind, Beijing has become an expensive city. Maybe the most expensive in the world. In a country that is supposed to be cheap! And the internet? They did indeed have internet! It was a strong signal too! Didn't work, but it was a stellar signal! So I went to the help desk near the coffee shop and this very nice girl named Catherine, whose English was pretty solid, helped me out. "Catherine," and "Faith" are not REAL names, just English nicknames, of course.
I approached the counter and said to Catherine, whose name I didn't know quite yet, "I am trying to find a hotel but the airport wifi doesn't work on my phone." She replied, "Yeah, I know. It doesn't work." Then she got out her phone and decided to use her own personal data minutes to help me. I thought this was a very nice gesture and wished there were some way I could help her in return. Ask and ye shall receive. Just then a cockroach scuttled across the marble counter in front of Catherine. She shied, so I swept it off the counter and onto the airport floor. I then stepped on it. I lifted my food and the cockroach casually walked away. Not fast. Just at a casual pace. I figured I should let that badass bug live. So I did. Anyway, back to Catherine. She found a hotel near the school using the map that Faith had given me. Then she wrote some directions in Chinese for the taxi driver. It was absolutely perfect! The hotel was a 5 minute walk from the school and the driver got me there in about 35 minutes. It cost 53 quai. CHEAPER THAN A COFFEE!!!
So I get the room paid for and get up to it. I was on the 6th floor. I open the door and I am not sure which sense kicked in first but the first sight was a big no smoking sign and the first smell was smoke. Not like someone was sitting in my room roasting weenies and marshmallows, I like that kind of smoke smell. No, it was like the smell of an airport smoking room, only stronger. Someone had obviously disregarded the sign. For a LOOONG time. The walls were sticky with it. I felt like I should put on my pollution mask.
Anyway, time to eat. I was hungry and I was pretty sure I had seen a brightly lit building up the street a block that might be a mall or department store or something like that. So I went out looking for some food. I got to the intersection just a block up the road from my hotel and sure enough there was a brightly lit mall called Sky Store or something to that effect. There was the matter of crossing about eight lanes to get to it, but not so bad a deal. I should be able to find some food in a mall.
Now, crossing eight lanes in China. Different than any other country. Oh you can make comparisons but I've lived in Jakarta and that's the worst traffic in the world. STILL not as bad as China when it comes to one simple little thing: when your pedestrian walk light turns green, you have to be on the balls of your feet and have all your wits about you. It's not possible or probable that someone will illegally turn and barge through pedestrians, it is GOING TO happen. And the walkers of China just let it. These jerk-offs who refuse to wait for their turn arrows or at least for the human beings to finish crossing the street, are the tribe untouched by civilization I referred to earlier. And I've had lots of Chinese students. At one point or another every one of them has bragged to me about their 5000-year-old culture. I can't tell you how often I think, as I live amongst them, "In 5000 years, nobody has figured THIS out?" Because it seems to me that if you are a culture that obviously can't control its sexual urges, has spent who knows how long trying to reduce its population to manageable levels, maybe somewhere along the line someone might have thought to teach the younger generation that selfishness is easy and using overpopulation as an excuse for being an asshole is easy. When you have so many people, it is all the more essential to think of your fellow man and at least act in a polite manner. Nobody? 5000 years? Nobody?
I was doing a class one day on people you admire. I extended it to creating your own superhero. I gave them a superhero example from my own fertile imagination named Tiananman. Tiananmen Square, where that unknown hero stood in front of the tank. You all remember the Tiananmen tank man, don't you? He's a hero in China even though nobody knows who he was. I contend that maybe he's not even Chinese. The way these people all get the hell out of the way of any jagoff in a motor vehicle, (or even a bicycle), who selfishly abuses the pedestrians' right of way is shameful. Just shameful! So a hero is needed. Someone who will stand in front of the cars, motorbikes, or even the worst offenders, the buses of China and force those jerks to obey the laws and honour the pedestrians' rights. Tiananman. I drew a quick cartoon of him on the board.
Now, here is exactly what I'm talking about. I have this cartoon on my Chinese phone. So I go downstairs, get my phone, plug it into this computer and, no surprise at all, "This device has malfunctioned and is not recognized by this computer." So I have to go back downstairs and get my Kindle. The Kindle camera is an absolute piece of shit that randomly focuses whenever it wants. So I spend about half an hour getting the best pic I can of it. This is what I got.
China!
Nice eh? A picture of a picture that's out of focus. The best I can do. Why? I don't know exactly. Maybe it has to do with the fact that the phone that wasn't recognized has once been rescued from a squat toilet full of shit. Yes, this is my "Poo Phone." THAT'S another good China story! Or maybe it's just the settings and tweaks that China puts on everything that makes everything there unique, or in global terms, incompatible with everything everywhere else. It reminds me of a few things I remember when I first came to Korea. Like baseball. Koreans decided to make the game more "theirs" by saying the strikes before the balls. So you would hear counts of "two and three." They've since stopped because it only adds confusion, not personalization. China may eventually change a few things too. Like most light switches in the country. Up is off and down is on. Like bank machines. Only country I've ever been in where the machine requires you to press another button to get your card back. Causes all kinds of problems and I'd guess thousands of eaten cards a day, but, it's the Chinese way. So it's better. I'd go into education here but it would take too long.
Back to the story. I took a deep breath, got my game face on and started across the road. The light gave me well over a minute to cross the 6 lanes. Should be enough. As I walked across I looked at the sparkling lights of Skymall or whatever it was. Then I saw a KFC out of the corner of my eye. I turned my head for a fraction of a fraction of a second to ascertain if it actually was a KFC. It was. What? Why am I feeling something in front of me? I quickly brought my eyes back to the street in front of me and there was a woman on a moped falling to the road and looking out her helmet at me in a sort of "I'm helplessly falling but still not going to blame myself for this problem I've gotten myself into," face. I reached out and grabbed her, then steadied myself. It was actually miraculous than I didn't get a foot run over and she didn't hit the pavement. I then turned into Dustin Hoffman and, I am not kidding, I said, "I'm walkin' here!" Then I continued across to the KFC.
I KNEW it would happen and had said to my co-worker, Allen, who lives just across the hall from me, that it was going to happen before I left China. Sure enough it did. I thought I was going to push someone off their moped, but instead stopped this selfish mopedist from falling. Will she give the pedestrian the right of way next time? Nope. But with more Tiananmen like me, someday China too might have some semblance of order in the streets. If police actually enforced traffic laws, and didn't break them themselves, maybe China wouldn't be such a chaotic and dangerous place to walk and drive. Common courtesy would fix it in a jiff. But it's easier to be selfish. Fuck everybody else. That's one of the upshots of the 5000 years evidently.
So anyhoo, got some KFC, got safely back across the street and back to the hotel. I watched some TV, Chinese league basketball, and ate some chicken. By golly it was time for a beverage. I went across the street to a 24 hours convenience store to get some water and a beer or two. Now, to be quite honest, I have found the taste of Chinese beer to be okay, but it's so weak it's frustrating sometimes. I've spent afternoons with Allen in the hotel bar having one after another and feeling nothing but the urge to take leaks. Many and frequent leaks. It's as if some sort of diuretic has been substituted for the alcohol in some Chinese beers. And even the best ones, you're gonna have just over 3% alcohol anyway. Some, I don't think even have 2%.
But I went to get one or two anyway. So I go to the beer fridge. It's not turned on. This is quite common. I don't know what the warm beverage attraction is in China, but sometimes a(n) Herculean effort is required to get a cold glass of water. I, being a resident of a fridgeless room, like a nice, cold beverage when I go out to get one. Even Pepsi! Warm cola! WTF? So I look in the ice-cream freezer and I find one frozen bottle of water. So, here again, China, I buy the frozen bottle of water, a warm bottle of water, two warm bottles of the strongest, (3.6%) beer they had, which was Budweiser, and go back to the hotel. I open the ice and chew as much off the top as I can. I start pouring tiny little bits of warm water into the ice to make a bigger and bigger reservoir in the ice. After only about an hour and a half, I am able to drink cold, though watered down, beer. But it's the struggle I face daily in the Middle Kingdom. Mein Chinese Kampf.
So I finally finish my beer, such as it was, and decide it's time to hit the hay. Got to meet up with Faith at 9 AM. It's almost midnight. So I turn out the lights and go to bed. NOW that 15-dollar coffee starts going to work. Between that and the smell of nicotine in the room I'm basically up all night. I was studying for an exam during university one time and a friend, who was also studying, gave me some caffeine pills. He also happened to be my roommate, Peter. We were awake all night long. We trashed about 30 records, I mean scratch shit outta them on the turntable, then threw them at the wall and broke them into thousands of little pieces! Then we had a pillow fight and left foam and feathers everywhere. I forget what else but we thoroughly trashed our apartment. Then we went to bed and spent the night telling each other how exhausted we were and how much we wished we could just fall asleep. It was one of the longest nights of my life. Hellish! Well, this night in China? Same deal. Only nobody to pillow fight with, listen to music with, or complain to. It was terrible!
Then, next day, I didn't have to write an exam, I had to meet with prospective employers and try to remain engaged, engaging and awake. I actually did okay. But then we got to the end of the technical stuff and it was time for a bit of a tour. Faith knew I wasn't scheduled to leave until 8 PM so I had the entire day. I told her I was interested in seeing some of the town. Tourist attractions, housing, restaurants, malls, shopping areas, supermarkets, you know, the places I'd go if I took the job and lived there. So she offered to do that. I thought that was awfully nice of her! Even though it was an especially high pollution day. I have pics on my phone of the streets we walked down where the houses at the end of the streets look as though I took a Kindle picture of a picture of them. It was nasty! First we went out for some of the local specialty noodles. There are so very few tastes that I just can't stand but cilantro is one of those tastes. These noodles were covered in cilantro. But I eventually ate some noodles that were made from beans. Never tried anything like that before but they were good. Then she showed me the campus. Most things were either locked or in use so I didn't really see much. Then she decided to take me to an amusement park in town. When we got there, it was closed. This is holiday time in China and they pick that time to repair the rides at the amusement park. Oh well, let's go to a temple. I always enjoy temples and this one was pretty good. I have pics of it, but again, my camera is not recognized by this computer.
Faith explained that we had been in the old part of town this while time and I have to tell you, it wasn't knocking me out. It was dirty, dinghy and not looking like a place I'd want to live for a year. I'd read a bit about Taeyuan and have a friend who has lived there so I knew it was responsible for about half the coal in China. I was expecting dirty, but this went a bit beyond my expectations. However, we went to another park and walked along a river for a while. It was nice. I confided in Faith about my job and how it wasn't really a job and she admitted that the school really wanted me to work there. So it was a successful meeting. But it was only 2ish so Faith got us another cab and we went to an extraordinarily gigantic area of town where there were massive parking lots, fair grounds, just spots for shows and exhibitions. Then nearby there was a library and several kinds of museum. It was a LOT of walking getting from one place to another but I was impressed by the modern architecture and the stark modernity of the area in comparison to the old part of town. There was an art museum, a museum and a science museum. We decided on the museum museum. We walked there only to find it closed. But right next to it, that is, about a 20-minute walk away, was the science museum. We tried that too. Closed. I showed up in Taeyuan on a day when it was closed! Crazy!
Faith and I were actually having good conversation and getting a kick out of the bad luck we were having. I told her that this was par for my Chinese course. I told her a few of my banking stories and the poop phone story and she laughed. She was a really great gal! I'd show you a pic, but...
We ended up getting a coffee, (for 15 RMB or 3 bucks), that was WAAAY better than that 15-dollar shyte and then I just gave up and said I should go to the airport. So I did. I got to the airport in plenty of time to eat a Subway steak and cheese and catch my plane.
The flight back to Beijing was uneventful but as soon as I got back I had to pack everything down from my room and put if under the stairs. Since it was a late flight, this was all being done at around midnight. Then I paid for storage and rent upon my return late in January. That settled I went to bed. The next morning I got up early, went to the wrong terminal, almost didn't make my flight because of it, but caught the flight to Seoul. Only I couldn't take out cash from the Chinese bank machines before leaving. That was the plan because I don't trust Chinese banks at all. They suck. Nuff said. I just didn't have the time to stop at one and take out a pile of cash from it. I already had quite a pile of cash with me but I needed more. Anyway, no worries, I was told by a few people at work that our Union Pay ICBC bank cards would work at machines that accept Union Pay cards. I had looked it up online and read several things about that on several sites. It sounded safe. Korea has a huge number of Chinese tourists coming and going so they want to make sure they leave as much of their money here as they can. I thought it would be no problem. But, China.
I tried several bank machines here, was guaranteed by two people that my card would work, even went on base to use an American bank machine and none worked. If you read the literature on bank websites, a card like mine starting with a 6 will work. I doesn't. And I have to say, I'm not that surprised. My struggle.
My final bellyache, literally, is that the very day I got here, perhaps because of the sleepless night in Taeyuan, low immunity and walking around all day getting a little start on a case of black lung, I got some sort of wicked Chinese flu! I haven't been this sick for this long since I was a kid. I went more than two days without eating. Never before have I done that! I have lost about 20 pounds. I haven't had a beer in over a week. I was a mess! And me without a job to take sick days from! DAMMIT!
So I'm just now starting to be a partially functional human being again after a week of this flu. The job search goes on. The vacation goes on. I haven't, (thank God), passed my ague on to any of my hosts. I will be returning to my struggle on the 25th but just might blog again before then. Maybe the legend of the Poo Phone. It's a good one.
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