I've sent messages to several blogger help places, left messages on chat boards, everything, but nobody else in the world seems to have this problem. I even seem to remember this problem going away for a short time and being happy that I could upload vids again. But now it's returned. But this is just the start of my technology problems. I am typing away here only because I have a VPN. For those who don't know, that's a way to give your computer a false IP address from another country. Because of China's REAL great wall, its FIREwall, I can't use any Google sites, Facebook or this blog without a VPN. So I pay 10 bucks a month for that service. You need to find a country and contact a server in it, then you will get a fake IP address and you're off to the races. Some countries never work at all, and some are usually good. I find Saudi, Azerbaijan, Finland, Norway, sometimes Australia, NZ or the U.S. to be good. But I'd been in the Beijing hostel for so long and the wifi there was such crap that I figured the VPN wasn't the problem. I just had a trickle of wifi so that's why most countries didn't work. And when the above countries DID work, the service would only last 30 seconds at a time before I'd be searching for another country. It was a real pain in the arse! One of many I had in Beijing.
But now I'm in Taiyuan. I bought my own high speed internet, got a powerful, brand new 450 megabyte router hooked up and now I'm blazing right along! Right? Well... no. I still go to facebook and watch the page load pixel by pixel. I can't stream. Downloads take forever. I try to watch sports highlights but 1 second of vid followed by 10-20 seconds of waiting for the next second of vid gets pretty hard to watch. I usually don't make it through the highlights. Same goes for vids people upload to facebook. The VPN doesn't time out every 30 seconds but usually I get the minimum mbps. A thin flat line across the bottom of the graph. I check my wifi and it says either "good" or "excellent" strength. There are almost always three full bars on the little wifi strength meter. Yet I try to play the one game I play, Simpsons Tapped Out, and it takes about 20 minutes to load. When I finally get going it's not long before I lose the connection and have to try to regain it again. I find things to do while I'm waiting. I'll turn on the hot water for a shower, turn on my Kindle and select the Simpsons game, then that'll give me time to have some breakfast while I wait. If the game hasn't turned on before I'm finished breakfast, I take my shower. Then hopefully after the shower I'll be able to play until I get booted. Who knows how long that'll be? Yes the days of good internet in Korea may have spoiled me, but I KNOW the shit internet I have here is not normal.
Here's the thing: it WAS better when I first got here. It was better when I first got to the hostel in Beijing too. It deteriorates. Almost like Big Chinese Brother is watching me and limiting my bandwidth.
But, at least it's usable. I'm getting stuff from my ESL websites again and I can keep in touch with folks on Facebook. Those are the main things. The new place is pretty good. It was a dusty, dirty mess when I moved into it but I saw potential. Yeah, ALL the places I looked at were dusty, dirty messes. That's how the landlords here sell them. And expect a year's rent up front! When you have a huge market, I guess you get away with crap like that. Not like the new flooring and wall paper you normally expect in Korean apartments. Although, if you'll go back several posts, the last two places I was at in Korea were dusty, dirty, (and moldy), messes. So I guess the landlords are keeping up with the hagwon owners and expecting more while giving less. The glory days are over. Here at least I have a better contract than I can get in Korea. But I'm starting to really worry about this apartment.
I have spent my first month here cleaning, scrubbing, demolding, dusting, washing, organizing and figuring things out in the apartment and it's feeling pretty comfortable. I'm in the smaller bedroom now because I don't have a mattress for the big bed in the big bedroom yet. But that's on order. I'm cooking meals every day here and that's a HUGE step up from the hostel where I ate mostly sandwiches. Wasn't allowed to cook there. I also didn't have a fridge. The one I have here also needed to be demolded and cleaned but it's working and I can now have a COLD glass of juice or water or, (THANK GOD), beer. Like everything in China, I have to settle. The beer is not very good here. In fact it sucks. The taste is fine but I don't want to get bloated on 10 beer before I feel a buzz, know what I'm saying? So I usually buy the German dark beers, which, even here, are expensive and STILL not the kind of beer I like. The food I am eating is much better than the sandwiches but again I have to settle a lot. The other day I had some Russian spaghetti noodles that were absolutely gross! How do you fuck up spaghetti, Russia? Yuptvoyu mat! And I ordered some cardboardy parmesan cheese online here. Again, very expensive. Bread is not the best and meat is a challenge. Some things are surprisingly scarce here like tea, normal tea, I have to hunt for. Soy sauce! They have a million kinds but I just want the regular soy sauce and still haven't found which brand that is. Cheese is a luxury and butter is not common. My kingdom for some basil! And I'll tell you what, the Chinese food ain't so hot here. It's nothing like the Chinese food I have grown to love in Canada. I used to wonder at my students in Korea when I asked if they liked Chinese food. They would often answer that it's too oily. Of course there are still those in Korea who think the Chinese eat three things, but I digress. I am actually on their side now. Chinese Chinese food IS too oily! If you get fried rice or chow mien, eat it ALL while it's hot. When it cools off you notice how disgustingly oily it is.
There was a little restaurant a few doors down from the hostel where Allan and I used to eat once in a while. Convenient. It was just a hole in a cement wall with plastic stools and I think 5 tables if that. VERY rustic. Well one time Allan and I were eating there and the security, I think it was the MPS, Ministry of Public Security, pulled a pick-up truck up to the doors and stormed in. One guy barked at the restaurant owner and cook while about half a dozen others started removing furniture and fixtures and throwing them into the back of the truck. We just kept eating. Awkwardly. The owner didn't seem too worried. He never said a thing to either of us on our many visits but this time he smiled and sort of communicated for us not to be worried. I guess he hadn't paid his "taxes," or whatever they're called. But he remained casual the whole time. UNTIL somebody grabbed his big wok and his giant can of oil. Then he put up some resistance. Without the oil the restaurant wasn't a restaurant.
I have found some things that are good. Milk, luckily, I have found but at a price. More than 3 bucks for a litre. I know that's normal price but this is China here. Most of the bread is cake but you can find some good bread if you look hard enough. I have farm fresh eggs, fruit and veggies just across the street from me. And the lady who runs the place seems like someone I'd like to talk to. Her hands are obviously those of a farmer. And you can't beat her prices. I can get everything I need for stirfries except the meat. And I can get the meat, bread and butter at another place close by. I have my staples, it's just a few things I will miss. But as I get more familiar with the local cuisine, I'll need the staples less. I found a place in Burnaby when I lived there where they made chicken chow mien that is making my mouth water just thinking of it now. Hopefully I'll find something like that here.
I found some Raisin Bran the other day. A tiny box was 5 bucks. With the expensive milk on it I feel like I'm dining at the Ritz! I went to the only pizza place I have found so far besides Pizza Hut, which is expensive and not good. I say not good because all the pizzas they have are abnormal, Asian types with stupid toppings like squid, mustard, spam and such. This place I went was called "Margrita's" so I reckoned I could get a Margherita pizza there at least. Then I saw the website, "maglita@..." and wondered. Sure enough there wasn't a normal pizza on the menu. I asked several of my students if they know what pepperoni is and they don't. So I selected a Brazilian Barbecue pizza because I thought it might be close to normal. It was crap. The crust was a soft cookie, the sauce was spicy ketchup and the toppings were unidentifiable. Except for the corn! There's gotta be corn! I think I'll just settle for an expensive Pizza Hut pizza next time.
But I'm sure I'll work that stuff out. The BIG problem I think I'm going to have is one I'm plagued with year after year over here AND at home: mosquitos. It's still winter here. Below zero at night. I opened a few windows yesterday, with fully intact, sealed screens on all of them, and tonight I killed 6 mosquitos. Two of them woke me up at 3:30 and were full of my blood when I smacked them. It's February THIRD!!! I shudder to think what will happen in the summer! So yeah, it's 5:30 now and I've been up for a couple hours. What did I do in that time? Why, I decided to try to get a VPN for my Kindle. As I said, I already have a VPN. So it should be easy to just get the ap for the Kindle, flash 'er up and get going. But again, this is China. I go to the VPN site and log in. That works! I'm all happy because I thought the site would be blocked or my password wouldn't work. I've had the usual username and password woes with my VPN provider. Always! Always. So there's an ap for androids. I click download to get it and we go to the Google ap store. Everything Google is blocked in China. So I'm at the usual impasse. I need a VPN to download a VPN. And the help website is also blocked. However, I've learned through much trial and tribulation, that there is online help for my VPN in the homepage on a chat box. I open the chat box and ask for a way around the Great Firewall of China. I am given a link. I click it and get a warning that this program could damage my Kindle. I ignore that and keep going. The download starts. Should be a cinch with my speedy internet. Nope. It says, "Unknown time remaining on download," then stops at about 21%. I retry and it stops at 50 or something. I try a couple more times and finally after half an hour I got it! YAY!
So I start it up. It's different than the VPN I use for my desktop. Same company just different looking. But I go to the usual countries. Azerbaijan - waiting for server reply, Saudi Arabia - waiting for server reply, Norway - waiting for server reply, you get the idea. It doesn't work yet. So I will have to chat with the chatbox some more. I just don't want to. Instead, I decided to write this blog post and whine about it.
So there. No movie of my new place, no pics because the good camera I have is on my phone and that's where I have all my good pics. Unfortunately but certainly not unexpectedly, the phone is a device not recognized by my computer so I can't put them on it and then upload them to this blog. IF I could get the VPN to work on my phone, I could upload them from there, but same problem as the Kindle. So you'll have to imagine the place. Oh, and why can't I just take pics with the Kindle? Oddly enough, the movies are fine, but the pics are terrible. This is the clearest pic I could get of some of my interior decorations.
So there you have it. My new place. Pretty nice, eh? I'm goin' back to bed.
P.S. So I DID go back to bed and slept well. No more mozzies. When I awoke, I lived a very interesting addendum to this post. I got onto my VPN again, which is PURE VPN by the way and it's costing me 10 US dollars a month, and I told the new guy in the chat box, Jade, how I couldn't get it to work. I told him I was from China. He then asks what messages I was getting when I tried to connect. One was "connecting to server" again and again every country I tried, and then when I changed to the "TPC" setting I got "connecting TPC... reconnecting TPC... reconnecting TPC" ad infinitum no matter which country I tried. So I explained this to him and Jade says, "TPC won't work in China." Okay so I ask if I need to use the other setting and he replies, "No that won't work in China either." So I ask why the other person, who knew I was in China, would send me the link to this useless ap. He asks if the other guy knew I was in China. I said yes. Then he wrote something that was beautiful. I tried to copy it all down but he closed the conversation box before I could finish. Here's the beginning,
"Well it does not work in China however in some cases it might work. Honestly you can try different modes and server but OpenVPN might not work for if that..."
I could tell before this that English wasn't this guy's native tongue. He got the job with passable English skills and probably very good computer skills. At the end of all these conversations they ask the client to rate how helpful they were. I assume this makes a difference to their wages. I probably would have given Jade a thumbs up because, while he WAS trying to do the corporate thing in the end to try to get my thumbs up and maybe defend his colleague and company, he did a poor job of it. My guess is that he's from a country that hasn't yet fully committed to the screw-everybody-but-me corporate culture that dominates the countries we proudly, however euphemistically call "developed." The other people were trying to keep me wasting my time banging my head against the wall trying to get this useless program to work long enough to receive a payment or two more. Which I'm sure they have been trained to do. He also said that if I am using Microsoft I may have some success by opening up the new "Hotspot" function and selecting "Stealth" mode. In stealth mode, which is a bit more complicated because you need to sign in as an administrator, there are only a few countries available to get the fake IP address. I tried them all and none worked. At the hostel AND here with my flashy new internet hook-up. So that's just another wild goose chase.
Bottom line: don't use Pure VPN. They're crooks. And the service was terrible long before this. Every time I try to pay them I need to use support and they have to reset my password to what it always has been and never explain to me how the hell it got changed. I'm done with them. Who needs them? So if anyone has a decent VPN to suggest, please do so. Thank you for your support.
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