Paraag 2: Even More Cultural Learnings from China for Make Benefit Glorious Village of Hoboken

Folks – so sorry for the delay. But I’ve been living it up here in Asia. But I’ll not bore you any longer with superfluous prologue. To the journal! Sunday, May 20, 2007 We woke up this morning to the fresh smog of Xi’an permeating everything. Deborah fell a bit ill over the night and opted to catch a few more hours of sleep, so Liang and I headed out for a local breakfast and then walked around the Drum Tower and Bell Tower. We learned that the Bell Tower is sounded every morning, and signifies that the city gates would be opened. In the evening, the Drum Tower is drummed and the city gates are closed until the following morning. So we watched the 9am morning ceremony, whereby a group of 10-15 traditionally dressed Chinese bellsounder-types paraded around the circumference of the Bell Tower until coming to the bell to sound it. That’s really about it. Traffic continued around the Bell Tower as if nothing special were happening, so I suppose it’s just a show for us tourists. From there, Liang and I went to visit the Muslim temple. The streets leading to the entrance of the temple were these small alleyways festooned with shopping booths with owners calling out to us to buy this piece of crap or that piece of crap as we walked by. It felt like that one scene in Jesus Christ Superstar where Jesus gets upset that there are a bunch of shops at the temple – “…but you have made iiiiiiiiiit a den of thieves. Get ouuuuuuuut, get out.” Thank you, thank you very much. Next show in a half an hour. At 10am, we went back to the hotel to get Deborah and check out of the hotel. Liang’s uncle’s cousin’s brother’s ex-roommate’s grandmother’s postman’s teacher’s cousin-in-law was the hotel manager of the place we were staying at, and offered to have his personal driver take us around today and then drop us off at the airport in the evening. We also had no clue what to expect as far as cost for the hotel room, but it appears as though we got something close to a 70% discount from the normal room rate. Folks – we were experiencing the magic of guanxi before our very eyes (re-read last week’s if you don’t remember what guanxi is). See? It’s always handy to have your own private Chinese friend-turned-tour guide handy. Everyone say “Thanks, Liang.” No really, say it. Out loud. The first stop this morning was at the City Walls, where we spent a few hours in the scorching heat riding rented bikes atop the Walls around the periphery of the old city. It was mighty exhilarating to get some fresh smog in the lungs. Ahhhhhhhhhh… But, what I don’t understand is that if the Chinese people were going to go through the trouble of building such a massive wall to keep intruders out, why wouldn’t they go one step further and build some shade? I don’t understand these people. For all the pollution in Xi’an, the government has made some effort towards energy use reduction. For example, most of the buildings in the area had thermal water heaters on the rooftops – apparently, these things will heat the water to 90C during the day. Also, all taxis and buses run on compressed natural gas or something (we learned later in the week that it is a biofuel, made from wastes of some sort). In the taxi ride to the hotel on Friday, After the city walls, we went to a local restaurant to get the best steamed dumplings ever known to mankind. This is where having our own local personal driver came in extremely handy. He knew where all the good places were that the tourists didn’t know about. After lunch, Deborah wanted to see the Muslim temple so we went back to that area. However, we were a bit sidetracked by the shopping. I’m not sure if I mentioned it yet, but in China, almost all shopping is by negotiation. The vendor usually starts with a price that is about 5-10x too high. You counter with an obscenely low number, which they then tell you is way too low and accuse you of stealing from them. Then they ask for your “maximum price” and your “best price” numerous times, even after you’ve theoretically already given this price. Frustration abound for folks not seasoned in this. By the end of the week, what worked best for me was saying a price, maybe coming up a tad, stand there until they come down, begin walking away, which elicits a price lowering, and then repeat as necessary. If they don’t chase you as you leave, that might be a good indication that you are toooo low. Each vendor has an absolute minimum price, and they know exactly what it is. Typically, it matches up precisely with others’ minimum price. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if they are all colluding together to begin with, or even if they all work for the same parent company. So, after much negotiation, Deborah ended up with a red 3 piece Samsonite luggage set and I ended up with a Swiss Army computer bag for about $125 USD. At the time, we were very happy with this purchase. The bags appear to be VERY sturdy with good material, stitching, and zippers. Yes, zippers. A quick indicator of a cheaply made bag is how the zippers look and feel. These were good zippers. Later in the trip, I realized that we probably overpaid a good 30%, but this was our first set of negotiations and I at least felt like we got a decent deal upon leaving the store. Essentially, we had talked them down to about 30% of the original price. Sounds decent. Next was sunglass shopping for me. I figured I’d use my immediate access to a female perspective (Deborah) and a metro perspective (Liang) to find me some fly shades (yes – I said “fly”, this will be repeated so get used to it). Initially, they were both steering me towards these designer-like shades that were completely not me at all – way too fancy and preppy and cool-looking. After trying on about 20 pairs, I found some Oakley-knockoffs that fit my fat head pretty well. Deborah gave the thumbs up, so I bought two pairs in different colors. I figure that once you find something that works, stick with it, right? Deborah liked them so much on me that we kept saying “Super-fly!” whenever I wore them for the remainder of the week. Good times. Yes, I know I stole this phrase from legendary wrestler Jimmy “the Superfly” Snooka, who by the way never really seemed to be all that super-fly. I was really putting the “super” in “Super-fly”! You’d better recognize. Fo-shizzle. The last stop of the day before going back to the airport was to the Forest of Stone Tablets. When I heard about this place, I guess I kind of imagined a big tree-ey forest with some large stone tablets sticking out of the ground from time to time. I was wrong. These stone tablets were from the olden days, and were essentially the grave monuments for old dead Chinese people. Each monument had script manually engraved into it and so basically we got to spend an hour or so walking around looking at this stuff. But when you can’t read Chinese, every tablet looks the same after you’ve seen about five of them. So I figured that maybe I should ask my friendly neighborhood Chinese interpreter to do his job (you know, since I pay Liang good money for this) and start telling me what it all means. Unfortunately, it’s all written in old Chinese (which is kinda like Olde English, without the completely unnecessary ‘e’), so he couldn’t really do much for me. After a couple hour delay and a quick flight back to Beijing, we finally arrived at the hotel. Immediately I felt a difference in air quality (we went from ludicrous-smog down to ridiculous-smog). Also of note, the good people at our Unisplendour hotel finally caught on and activated the second elevator – we had a huge improvement in elevator wait times from this point forward. Monday, May 21, 2007 Last night, I think I had the perfect sleep. I took ½ a sleeping pill. So, to recap on my sleeping pill experimentation, it goes like this: ½ sleeping pill = good; 2 sleeping pills = very, very bad (with Seinfeldesque finger wag). This morning, we had a class on something or other. I don’t actually know what the title was, but it was by a Chinese guy who used to work in the US and now works in China, who similar to previous presenters refused to follow his own slides. He was sharing with us his experiences between the two work cultures, and he was fairly direct from his observations. While I’m always more than happy that someone shares with us the truth (regardless of whether or not we can handle the truth), this fellow could have afforded a little bit of discretion on how to share certain things. I am by no means Super-PC Boy (geek squad computer repairman by day, and enforcer of political correctness by night in bright red tights, furry unibrow, and Rollie Fingers mustache). But this fellow could clearly use some help on how to get his point across. He was basically telling us that business gets done by old Chinese men at the spa where they engage with prostitutes. When someone asked about women, the presenter said that women will join for dinner but basically don’t go to the spa with the men. Liang was not happy about this, since he made it sound as though ALL business is done this way in China. I’m sure it happens in the US as well, and I’m sure the frequency is probably higher in China, but certainly not all business is done this way. I was bored and tired of listening to this guy, so I played hangman with my neighbor. Good use of tuition funds indeed. In the afternoon, we went to another corporate visit at CNC, which is a Chinese telecom that is one of the primary sponsors for the Olympics. We were entertained by two young fellows with extremely broken English (I don’t remember their names, so I’ll call them Darryl and Darryl), who basically read from a script and acted out scenes to demonstrate how communications will be revolutionized at the Olympics for visitors and support personnel. Riveting stuff. On the bus, our trip admin quickly acknowledged that all of the corporate tours were nowhere close to what they were expecting either, and asked that we write our frustrations out on the feedback form. On the way back to the hotel, the bus stopped on the side of the road at the Olympic Stadium, called the Bird’s Nest because it resembles a bird’s nest (duh). It was a comical scene to see 60 random people wandering around the side of a road taking pictures. Some of the local construction workers were so surprised that they started snapping pictures of us with their cell phone cameras. A number of us hailed cabs from the side of the road and went down to the Silk Market, which is a multi-level mall filled to the brim with these shopping kiosks pawning fake goods. Think Chinatown on steroids. I ran into a group of my classmates who were going back and forth between two tailors attempting to get the rock bottom lowest prices, and using quantity as a leveraging tool. Eventually, we got one shop to come down to 80 yuan (about $10) for a button-down shirt and 300 yuan (about $40) for pants. With some help from Ken, I picked out fabrics, got measured, and paid a deposit on 4 shirts and 2 pants. When we were done, there were nine of us about to hail taxis, when a lady runs up to Ken and starts negotiating for a single flat rate to take us all back to the hotel in a van. We finally get a rate we like and hop in the van. Suddenly, out of nowhere, she pulls out a bag of Polo shirts and Beijing 2008 T-shirts to try and sell us. I ended up getting 2 Polos for 30 Yuan each ($4). Ken bought her entire stash of 12 T-shirts for 200 Yuan – not because he needed the T-shirts, but more because he wanted to see how low he could get her to sell them for. After we unloaded at the hotel, we headed over to a local bar for a happy hour with MBA an IMBA students from Tsinghua. The nice thing was that our tour admins were handing out free drink tickets. They didn’t have any wine, so I was sticking to my Jack and Ginger. After an hour or two, one of our classmates walks in with about 15 kids from Swannee State in eastern Tennessee – he bumped into them at McDonalds and convinced them to join us. I was happy – these were seemingly my people. So I tried talking to one of them and explained that I was from nearby Eastern Kentucky. She wasn’t amused. Then I realized that here’s this 18 year old who is traveling in China with 20 of her closest drunk friends and is being talked to by a random brown guy who must be twice her age. Sure, I would have appreciated some discussion of the coincidence, but I decided to let it slide. At some point in the evening, one of the guys gets us to pitch in for a bottle of Absinthe – this stuff is apparently illegal in the states. I’m not sure why, but I can say that I blame them. It tasted like Yaeger, only more Yaegerish. The music at the club was real old school stuff, so I was pretty happy. Somewhere along the line, the Absinthe kicked in and I started seeing the little fluorescent green fairies. And miraculously, thanks to Nate, I made it home in one piece somewhere around 2am. Thanks Nate. Tuesday, May 22, 2007 Somehow I managed to get up early today and thought about going for a run, but it was very rainy. It’s probably for the best that I couldn’t go, even though I had very recently sworn off alcohol. Two full bottles of water were consumed in rapid fashion. Today, we didn’t have classes. Instead we were taking a trip to the overhyped Ba-Da-Ling section of the Great Wall. With the rainy weather, we knew that we had clearly lost to the gods of chance. The first stop on the way was to the Ming Tombs. As we neared the tombs, we got stuck in a pretty heavy amount of traffic. Owing to the two bottles of aforementioned water, I really really had to go. So our bus admin Gabriela discreetly mentioned it to tour guide Tony, who then exclaimed “W.C.?” and told me to go on the side of the road. I opted not to and instead Tony dwarfed me as he escorted me under his umbrella to a side street. One of the folks there told Tony that I could use the side of his building. Very kind indeed. You know, when you really gotta go – the relief from actually getting to go has got to be one of the greatest sensations ever. Try it sometime. I think you’ll be forced to agree. After my escapade, we finally made it to the Ming Tombs, which is where a bunch of people from the Ming Dynasty were entombed. I’m completely guessing here, since I couldn’t hear anything during the underground tour. The vast spaces seemed to make it very difficult for a voice to carry at all. Basically, this section of the tour was quite useless. The great thing about it is that each of us had shelled out an additional 200 Yuan so that the whole group could go. About the only good thing that came out of going to the Ming Tombs is that the bathroom arrived sooner than it would have otherwise. Lunch was at a roadside place catering to tourists that, surprise surprise, had ample floor space dedicated to selling us stuff that we didn’t need. So I escaped directly to the tour bus after lunch and took a nap. In a few hours, we finally made it to the Great Wall. Since the weather had turned sour on us, a very large subsection of the group was looking for warmth. Warmth reared its ugly head in the form of “I Climbed the Great Wall” sweatshirts, which a number of classmates bought for between 115 and 25 Yuan, depending on bargaining skill. Undoubtedly, the Chinese folk among the group scored the cheapest prices. The wall itself was quite magnificent – as far as we could tell at least. The weather was so bad that we could barely see 50 feet in front of us, so we weren’t able to see the Wall as a huge never-ending structure as the guidebooks made it out to be. We were forced to use our imagination instead and recreate the postcard pictures in our head from the cloudy grayness surrounding us. The Wall itself is actually not the original wall – it’s a restoration of what used to be there, so there is definitely a bit of a lack of authenticity. However, they did keep some of the unnecessarily steep climbs and the abnormal step sizes for added effect. There’s got to be a ridiculous number of poor souls each year who tumble to their doom trying to get back down. In the end, the Great Wall was unable to live up to its stated amazingness. Instead, this was perhaps the Merely Acceptable Wall or the Bologna Sandwich Wall ($10 fake bucks to first person who correctly identifies that reference). I think I’ll need to make another trip back to China if only to go far away from the crowds and see the real Great Wall. In fact, Quoc did this exact thing on this very day – he skipped our tour and took a bus several hours away, then a 70 km taxi ride and a 2 km hike to get to a deserted section of the wall. Had I known that he was planning to do this, I would have certainly joined him. Wednesday, May 23, 2007 I don’t know what the class this morning was specifically on – it was kind of devoid of learning. I actually missed the first half of it owing to a bit of stomach queasiness. But I heard that a battle had ensued during the missed portion between a few of the students and the teacher. This afternoon’s class was much better – it was given by a fellow who is the China Representative for The Economist. To me, at least, this title gave him instant credibility, and he lived up to my lofty expectations. I don’t really remember what he talked about but what I do know is that is was extremely interesting. I would look up my notes for a refresher, but that would mean that I need to continue typing, and I want to finish up this update and send it out. After all, I’m on frickin’ vacation. At 5pm, we hopped on the bus to go to an acrobat show that was at 7:30pm. We ended up getting there a full hour or so early, but tour guide Tony had told us that “we will surely suffer” if we leave after 5pm because of the bad traffic. This use of unnecessarily dramatic verbage resulted in countless jokes and laughs from the rest of us. The acrobat show was downright awesome. Think Cirque du Soleil without all the crazy music and lighting effects. And with all Chinese people. We saw crazy Chinese leapers leap through rings. We saw two sets of two people in Chinese dragon gear balance opposite each other on a huge bouncy ball and roll it up and down a seesaw – no one was directly on top of the ball, both dragons were to the side, offsetting the weight of the other to manipulate the turning of the ball. We saw a crazy contortionist lady balance something like 18 little ornamental trees on her body (feet, knees, hands, elbows, face, neck, etc.) while twisting and turning around. We saw 15 Chinese ladies ride a single bike around the stage in extended-cheerleader-pyramid formation. We saw these crazy strong dudes go up and down a staircase while doing a one-hand handstand. It was bongos. Since I had partied hardy the first week, I figured that I’d give my tired old body a break the rest of this week and not go and be social all night long with my other classmates. So I headed home after the acrobat show. Back on the first day we arrived, Liang and I had gone shopping for some necessities at a local department store. Among those necessities? Beer. I couldn’t resist. They were selling a 40 oz. of Chinese beer for about 60 cents. And how could you turn down the prospect of drinking a 40 in China? Well, both of those bottles had remained in our fridge. Until tonight – I drank one. Thursday, May 24, 2007 I got up this morning to go for a run. That makes three bouts of real exercise in two weeks. It only goes downhill from here, unfortunately. The class this morning was on the financial systems in China, and was taught by the professor who served as the overall coordinator for this DBI course. A couple of interesting points that he shared are: 1) corporate debt is not widely used in China because it requires special approval and the money is restricted in use; as a result, corporate debt levels in China are ~8% while they are ~35% in the US; 2) the Chinese SEC (CSRC) was set up as a response to the “8.10 Incident”, which occurred on October 10, 1992, when a very desired stock was about to be offered up as an IPO – buyers waited in line for more than 3 days only to be told on the morning of the sale that the bank had already allocated all of shares (mostly to themselves); the result was rioting in the streets; 3) the Chinese stock market is split into A shares and B shares; A shares are in Chinese denomination and are only available to Chinese investors; B shares are denominated in USD and are only available to foreign investors; the result is that the two shares are completely identical but the share prices are completely independent because they trade in separate markets (no arbitrage is possible); 4) because Chinese people have a very high savings rate and they don’t have too many options in which to invest their money, the A-share stock market is very over-inflated and appears to be a bubble that is about to burst – most investors are very short-term looking to make a quick buck, as a result, annual share turnover is 500% (each share is sold on average 5 times per year), whereas the US average is about 100%. The class this afternoon was focused on overall economic mega-trends and China’s place in the global economy. It was taught by Professor David Li, who had some extremely interesting conclusions. He was probably one of our best professors during the course, and immediately engaged us – this explains why almost everyone in the class sat still while he went nearly an hour over his time limit. The professor explained that his family was “educated by peasants” during the Cultural Revolution when Mao Zedong sent everyone in the cities back to the farms, then he was in the first class at Tsinghua when the Reform Era began and the schools started back up, and then he went to the US to get his Ph.D. and worked in the States and internationally for a number of years before returning to Tsinghua as a professor. It was just really cool to hear first hand how someone’s life was dramatically shaped by the history of the country. You know, if any of us had gone through something similar, we would have told the story extremely differently with some clear resentment and bitterness – but this man talked about it openly with grace and with a smile, and described his experience with gratitude for having the opportunities that he had. Now I can see why he has the outlook that he does – he’s an optimist and he knows that others around him didn’t have the opportunities that he did. Even so, I couldn’t help but have an absolute tremendous amount of respect for him. Back to the class, a couple of noteworthy points: 1) China’s share of world GDP was 20-30% in the 1700s and 1800s and dipped to 5% during the Cultural Revolution and is now in the high teens and on an upward trend – so there’s nothing to fear about the economic growth in China, instead think about it as China returning to its rightful place in the world economy; 2) compared to the volatility of the economic boom of the US during the Industrial Revolution (late 1800s, early 1900s) and in Japan during the same period, China’s economic boom has been extremely steady – the professor attributes this to an actively managed monetary/fiscal policy in China today; 3) the Chinese government’s debt is expected to get to about 120% of their GDP in 10 years (US debt ~60% US GDP), this is not of major concern because the Chinese government still owns 60%+ of many strategic companies, which is valued at between 125-150% of Chinese GDP; 4) the regional disparity in income levels is about 2x in the US and between 4-6x in China because of incomplete market reform in China – only certain areas have been permitted to participate in capital investment and many people in China are required to live in the region they grew up (their huko). Okay – everyone except the business school graduates are probably bored out of their mind right now, so I’ll move on. We went back to the Silk Market this afternoon to pick up our tailored clothes. I had left one of my favorite shirts behind for them to copy the collar and cuffs from – unfortunately, they did a complete copy of this shirt instead. While this was still okay for me, I still don’t understand why they took measurements. The pants puzzled me even more – the waist was about 2 inches too wide and the length was about a ½ inch too long. Okay – the length I can understand, but the waist? I also took this opportunity to buy some other staples. Earlier in the day, I had dropped off some laundry at the hotel to get cleaned. When I took a look at the price list, I drastically reduced my laundry load. It seemed to me that I could probably buy new clothes at the Silk Market for a little more than what it would cost to wash them. My suspicions were confirmed: Price to wash 11 pair underwear + 11 pair socks = 132 Price for new 11 pair underwear + 11 pair socks = 150 I continued my shopping spree by buying 6 white shirts and a pink Polo. I had tried to buy a pink Polo from the van lady on Tuesday, but Andrew grabbed it before I could. Normally, I’m not the type to buy pink, but every female in the van thought that the color looked good with my skin tone. So dammit, stop calling me a pansy. This evening, I stayed in again because I needed to work on our final presentation for the class. More on this in tomorrow’s blurb. Oh yeah, remember the 40 oz. story from the night before? Well, I drank the other one. So fret not, fair maiden – no beer was wasted in the writing of this story. Friday, May 25, 2007 Today was all class presentations. Each group of 4 had to give a presentation on a company that should enter China, and discuss how it should do so – preferably using the material that we had learned earlier in the course. Our group chose Dunkin Donuts, mostly because we couldn’t understand how Starbucks could possibly be so successful charging their outlandish rates. Essentially, it seems that most US fast food companies have come into the country charging the same price as they do back at home. I understand that they can certainly charge a premium, but Starbucks’ price is already outlandish in the US, let alone after conversion into Chinese yuan. The presentation went very very well. I had a few people come up and tell me later on that ours was the best prepared. However, since the class is Pass/Fail, this basically confirmed my earlier suspicion that we should have cut the time spent on creating the presentation in half, and go bowling Thursday night with the rest of the folks instead. Believe it or not, I was actually the one in our group advocating for having fun instead of working on the presentation – I don’t think I learned anything by creating the presentation, it’s all stuff we’ve done before in other classes. And even so, we were so pressed for time that we had to skip about half of what we had prepared during the actual presentation so much of it was for naught. After lunch, I headed back to the Silk Market to pick up my re-tailored pants. While I was there, I went ahead and picked up a large Tumi suitcase for 300 yuan, a nailclipper set for 35 yuan, and some iPod headphones for 30 yuan. I probably could have gotten all of those for even cheaper, but I didn’t want to go through the hassle of the additional bargaining. It just wasn’t worth the price difference anymore. We had our Farewell Dinner this evening at the Beijing version of Tavern on the Green. The meal was extraordinary and each plate was decorated for added effect. We even had an appetizer of rose petals – it was pretty good. After the dinner, most people were headed to an expat bar or to a suite in a fancy hotel that one of the other students had booked for the evening. A few of us wanted to actually experience a piece of Beijing in our last evening there together. So, Chris, Chris, Quoc and I hopped in a taxi and headed a little Korea area about 15 minutes from our hotel. Our plan was to barhop and see where the evening took us. The first bar was a Korean place where we paid 10 yuan for a 40 oz of Yinjang. That’s dirt cheap. The second bar was not really a bar at all – it was a group of plastic tables and chairs on the sidewalk that was getting service from some street stalls. The area was packed, so Quoc befriended another group of tourists so that we could crash their table. We met these four people from Africa (one from each Central African Republic, Kenya, the Gabon, and Seychelles) – they were in Beijing attending a seminar on forestry at the Beijing Forestry University. Actual quote from Quoc or one of the Chris’ – “I have no idea if I’ll ever be in the Central African Republic, but if I ever do, I’m glad I know this dude”. Here, we got 8 fairly large mugs of beer for 32 yuan ($4). On the street, we ran into some random people that we had met at the Tsinghua happy hour on Monday night. Charles (an Tsinghua IMBA student from Montreal) sent us a few blocks away to Peppers, where we each had Tsingtao beer and a Patron tequila shot. The bartender there wasn’t paying any attention to us at all, even though we comprised 4 of the total 7 people sitting at the bar, and the bottle of Patron was literally right in front of us on the bar. So every time Quoc turned to his left to talk to me, Chris refilled his shot glass. I think he may have had 3-4 additional shots. Serves Peppers right – that place was expensive. We kept walking down that street from Peppers and onto a street that was all torn up, presumably to be repaved. The street stank like a squatter, so we ducked into a random bar when we saw a foozball table in it. We played a few pretty-evenly matched games of foozball, despite the lack of a second level defender on one of the rods (I don’t know what this is called, but one of the two defenders on the second to last row were missing, giving that team a severe handicap). And, of course, we had another 40 oz of Tsinghua. Chris wanted a massage before he got on the plane tomorrow, so we walked and then taxi’ed over to an area that Charles told us would have a good massage parlour. We couldn’t find anything, so we went into this big glitzy building that said “spa” on it. From first glance, it was clearly pricier than we had planned, but this was no deterrent to complete the night of total randomness. Somehow, we ended up getting stark naked with a bunch of old Chinese men for an unnecessary long time - first was a shower followed by a rest in a hot tub (still naked). Then Quoc spotted another small pool and jumped into it. Turns out, this pool had little fishees in it – once you were in it for a little while, these little fishees would start nibbling on you – a really strange sensation. And since we were still stark naked, all parts of us were being nibble. Someone mentioned that they think the fishees eat the dead skin. I have no idea, but I do know that the water was really gross with fish feces. After 10-15 minutes of feeding the fish, I took another shower. Then we had a guy come up to us barked orders and pointing to a price list. We presumed that this was for the massage, so we pointed to something that looked like a 1 hour massage. After an hour, our massages were done and we met in the lobby to get back home. Quoc didn’t look too good – later he would share with us that the combination of the multiple tequila shots and the relaxation of the massage resulted in him yakking on his poor massage therapist. When we went to pay, we quickly learned that we didn’t have enough cash. We tried charging it, but they didn’t take any American credit cards. So, Chris and Quoc were held hostage while the other Chris and I were escorted to an ATM to pull out more money. The first ATM didn’t work, which scared the living bejeesus out of us. I was worried that they would make us clean up the fish feces to pay off the debt. Instead, Chris and I were led to another ATM, which ended up working. Somewhere around 3am, we stumbled back home. Saturday, May 26, 2007 Getting up was difficult this morning. I’ve had a cough for the past week, and I often can’t fall asleep because I’m coughing too much – somehow, lying horizontally makes me need to cough more frequently. I’m sure there’s a physiological rationale for this, but Princeton Review didn’t cover it in the MCAT class I took a decade ago. After three hours of sleep, I went downstairs to get my free breakfast before they took the food away. Most everyone was leaving today to go home or some other location in Asia. In fact, I was supposed to head to Singapore this morning, but changed my flight to Sunday to see if I could get some additional Beijing sightseeing in – I had been hoping to figure out how to get back to the Great Wall, but that will have to wait until another trip. I sat down with Edouard for breakfast, and he convinced me to join him for a quick jaunt to the Emperor’s Summer Palace. I had been planning on doing this anyway, but had wanted more precious some sleep first. But Edouard was leaving this afternoon and had a sense of urgency. So I showered and changed in 5 minutes and off we went. The first thing that I can tell you about the Summer Palace is that it’s very hot there. Of course, this is probably more a function of the weather than the location, but even so. It’s hot there. Since past a certain point, heat and enjoyment have a negative relationship, I wasn’t enjoying myself very much. Edouard had befriended a English-speaking tour guide who promised to give him as much as he could possibly get in 30 minutes before he had to leave. I, on the other hand, wanted to get my money’s worth, but also wanted to get some shade. So I suppose I should tell you something else about the Summer Palace: it’s very very large. It’s not just a palace, but more like a massive palace grounds, almost the size of a city-state. Interestingly enough, there were a ton of local Chinese people just hanging out playing cards or eating lunch as if this were Central Park. I suppose if I lived in Beijing, I might do the same – the grounds are very beautiful with lots of trees and a man-made mountain that was built from dirt shoveled out for the man-made lake. In two hours of walking around with very little stoppage time, I probably only covered 1/3 of the place. In the blistering heat, it felt like I was walking around for 4 hours. I think I probably went through 4 bottles of water in that time. After a few hours, I caved in and escaped back to my hotel – complete with air conditioning and filtered air. You can tell that the air must be filtered as soon as you walk in. We had learned earlier this week that Beijing is China’s 28th worst polluted city, and it ain’t no Singapore. My guess is that Xi’an is much higher on the list. I still had not figured out my travel plans for my return from Singapore – I had no idea where I was going to go and how I was going to get there. After a few hours on the internet, it felt like every idea I could come up with awash with issues – flights not available, flight times mismatching, not enough layover time, you name it. My mind started drifting towards calling it quits – it was really hot, I was out of sleep, I kept coughing up my right lung from the smog, I didn’t know how or where to pick up airline tickets (not always e-tickets), I could barely communicate with anyone in this country, and on and on and on – I had 150 reasons to just try to find a way home after Singapore instead of venturing anywhere for a few days. I even played through a conversation with my mom in my head, who undoubtedly would commiserate with me and make me feel like less of a schlep for throwing in the towel. My thoughts went to one of my core beliefs: “things always have a way of working out”. Where was this belief now? Just as my faith was shattering, the solution dawned on me like a light from the heavens with the angelic voice background music. My faith was quickly re-established. I was making this whole thing way too complicated. I’ll just rebook my fully refundable fare from Singapore (P&G’s) and book what I need to book and pay the difference. Very simple. Of course now I need to figure out how to make a collect call from China… The only other thing I had to do today was to meet up with Quoc for one last Peking Duck dinner. He was also leaving tomorrow, but had opted to find a new hotel for a single night because he was tired of the same place. So, our plan was to meet at a particular subway stop at 7pm. Since I had never taken the subway alone and I wanted to walk around a bit (and the housekeeper was urging me to leave so that she could clean the room), I left really early and got to the pre-arranged subway stop at about 4:45 pm. On the map, I found the Drum and Bell Towers close by so I figured that I would take in another tourist site if I could. As luck would have it, I got there right as it was closing. So, I just walked around. The major streets in Beijing in this area are pretty far away from each other – in between are just back alleys. I probably spent about 45 minutes walking through back alleys, which was a far cry from the store-lined somewhat-sanitized existence on the sidewalks of the major streets. I’m glad I took this detour. In the last two days, suddenly my trip to China was very different from what it had been. I finally saw some of real life in Beijing, and I remembered why it is that I like traveling in developing countries to begin with – it has a profound ability to put things in perspective. All of a sudden, things that I thought were important weren’t quite that important: which movies and shows I haven’t seen, the discrepancy between my salary and the market salary for equivalent skills in NYC (we don’t get cost-of-living adjustments for being in NYC), trying to figure out how to get my Alfa repaired, wondering if my team is staying focused while I’m away, losing 0.50% interest on my savings account by not switching banks – suddenly, a lot goes into perspective. It’s not that these things should be ignored – it’s just that these things aren’t the crises that we have a tendency to make them into. Perspective is really a wonderful wonderful thing. I saw a little girl in one of the small alleyways skipping rope and a little boy tossing rocks – both of them lit up with a huge smile as I waved and said “Ni-hou” in my best feigned Chinese accent. Some of the adults that I passed by also wore big smiles and were very happy to see a complete stranger this deep in their neighborhood. Other adults passed without even a glance. You know, it’s an amazing thing to see someone who seemingly has nothing, living in the small of a back alley with foul odors about, sharing a latrine with 5000 of their closest neighbors – still somehow this person understands the power of a smile. That’s someone with perspective. At 7pm, I met up with Quoc and his so very cute friend Florence to go to a nearby restaurant. Apparently, I was distracted by Florence’s cuteness and neglected to mention my distaste for cooked fish. This neglection became quite apparent when a huge stir fry pot of little 5” fishees (that would be the complete fishee, not just merely meat of fishee) arrived at the table. Attempting to show some sort of bravery, I offered to share it if the little fishees didn’t taste too fishy, but was told that the fishees were indeed quite fishy. So I stuck with the Peking duck, some tofu, and the yummy the cucumber appetizer. Then I headed back to the hotel to pack up and finally get some sleep. My apologies if I got too sappy a few paragraphs back. Bite me. But no worries – there is one more week to go! So you can look forward to another note in the coming week. Rest assured that I’m actively working on increasing the number of stamps in my passport. Tidbits 1. The Chinese language is really hard for a foreigner to learn. A different intonation of a word will be a different word, so you can’t really attempt to try to communicate out of a guidebook. And the Chinese characters are unlike anything that you are familiar with (unless you’re Chinese, Japanese or Korean). It’s a total feeling of helplessness, especially when you didn’t even bring a guidebook to begin with. My pointer here is that when traveling in China, bring your friendly neighborhood translator (also known as Liang). 2. You know you’re addicted to the internet when you log in to your work e-mail, just because you can. Some would say that it’s that I’m addicted to work – I honestly don’t think this is it. After going 4 years without knowing how to hook up to work from afar (this was on purpose), I finally caved and placed the phone call to IT support to reset my password for my SecureID and have them walk me through VPN (external access). And now I can’t stop checking work e-mail whenever I’m online checking my personal e-mail. I think there’s a reason I don’t normally take my work laptop home or on vacation. 3. Inner Mongolia is a state/province in China that coincidentally borders Mongolia. Outer Mongolia is the actual Mongolia, or as Quoc puts it, the part of Mongolia that China hasn’t gotten off its ass yet to go over and conquer. 4. If you’re interested, Quoc maintains his own blog on the web. His is shorter, but it has pictures. You can read about his off-the beaten-path trip to the Great Wall, and get Friday night’s story again. Or you can be loyal and just read mine. J www.quoctran.us/blog 5. I’ve seen two female taxi drivers in China already. I can’t remember the last time, if ever, that I saw a female taxi driver. Someone told me that Mao had two positive things that he did for the country: 1) women are treated much more as equals than in other Asian countries, and 2) he standardized the Chinese script being used around the country so that different dialects could still communicate. India could have learned from this. 6. Buses and planes are “Asian-sized” here. Even my knees touch the seat in front of me, and you all know how short I am. I’m glad my brother-in-law Chris isn’t here.