First day in town

The first day, after my run, I met up with Yili, who is a coworker who came out from Redmond to work on the same project. She's been out here about 2 weeks longer than me, and is a native Chinese speaker, so invaluable to have around. She's staying in the same apartment building we're in. She showed me where to find an ATM, helped me buy a subway card, etc. Then she took me to the supermarket, which was surreal. The sheer volume of people, the tons of workers there pushing one product over another, the hawkers with their microphones. Non-stop noise. I bought a few things, like air freshener for the bathroom - we've noticed that the bathroom occasionally has a smell coming up from the drains. The staff says it happens more on cloudy days (huh?), and they're trying to figure it out. So, until then, some air freshener. Also a bunch of staples for cooking - some oil, salt, noodles, some veggies, some water (Yili insists we can't drink the tap water - I should investigate this), some paper towels.

Yili told me she typically takes a cab in the morning, then takes the subway home at night. This is because everyone has to be in the office at 9AM for meetings with people in Redmond, due to the time difference, and the subway is really crowded in the morning.

We decided to go to the electronics area of town, to find some stuff we needed for laptops. This is a series of office buildings, which instead of housing offices, house stalls (think of a flea market) of people selling every part/cable/chip of a computer you can think of. We wanted to get cables to let our laptops display things on the teevees in the room, and an audio cable to route the headphones from the laptop through the speakers of the teevee as well. The problem is, we were close enough to Chinese New Year, that everyone was out of town, so many stalls were deserted. And we were there close to closing time, so even the people still in town were starting to pack up. We found one floor completely deserted (not even any stalls.) Yili asked a guard, and he told us to go to the office building across the street.In the second building, we (Yili) managed to negotiate the few cables we needed. This place was crazy - stocked full of the kind of stuff you find at Best Buy, but about a tenth the price, and all in plain plastic ziplock bags. It was pretty weird. (This would have been completely impossible without someone speaking Chinese, of course.)

This was also my first encounter with a common feature of big buildings - the heat curtain. Over doors where there's a lot of traffic, instead of traditional door that opens and closes, there's a curtain that hangs down, that you push your way through. Sometimes this is a clear plastic thing, that's divided top to bottom into many strips, but sometimes it's some sort of green quilted thing that reminds you a lot of an army blanket, only thicker (the military had to be involved in the production of these things somehow.) You push at one end or the other, and make your way through, keeping the heat inside. This is good, as it's pretty cold here. I had one day where I had ice in my beard after my run (it was 17F before the wind chill, and the wind knocked the satellite television for the hotel out.) I am waiting to see a collision through one of these things between two shopping carts at wall mart, since you are pretty blind going through.

(Beijing is on a flat plain, in a desert. It's very dry in normal times, and is now in the worst drought in 40 years. The wind blows pretty hard, and I've read that there are dust storms in the spring. There are mountains nearby, where the great wall runs (we'll see that one of these weekends - still in the planning stages.))

Then we went to a Taiwanese restaurant she had eaten at before with one of the MTC people (MTC is the acronym for the MS team here.) I found an appetizer and an entree to eat (Yili is a little amazed that we're willing to come here as vegetarians.) It was in a fun mall that looked expensive (there was a swatch store I'm sure Evelyn will enjoy, if I tell her about it.) At the end of the meal, for no reason I could discern, the staff gave us each a deck of cards. Decks of cards here are called "pokers". They sell them everywhere.

After getting back, we decided to explore the bar district that another co-worker (who did a rotation last summer) told us about (I think she's been wanting to go for awhile, and hasn't been willing to wander into a bar by herself.) We took a cab over to that, and the cab driver ripped us off a little by driving around a little, but the mimimum charge is 10 kuai, and he managed to run the meter up to 13. So, not really much of a ripoff. The minimum seems to take you quite a ways. We found the bars, and walked past them all, then to another shopping mall type thing, where we wandered around a bit, then back to the bars. The bars all have live music and touts out front. We had Tsing Tao beer, which was surprisingly good, at one place - very expensive. Bottles of beer run about 30 - 40 kuai (it's about 6.5 to the dollar.) The band was a cool rock-type with long hair and a hip t-shirt playing guitar, a conservatively dressed guy who did a lot of the singing and emcee-ing, and a woman in a dress doing some singing you could barely hear. Some older chinese guys came in and sat down and watched. For some reason, this creeped Yili out. During a break, for some unexplained reason, a belly-dancer came out and performed. Despite the belly dancer (which certainly fulfills my daily quota of weirdness), instead of having another there, we went to another bar (two or three doors down) for a second beer, where there was some boy-girl duo singing kind of syrupy songs, and the intervals were recorded BB King. We had another chinese beer (YanJing, the hometown brand - YanJing is an old name for Beijing), but we agreed it wasn't nearly as good. A pack of French guys came in, already several sheets to the wind, and went upstairs to the loft area, where they proceeded to discuss and yell a lot about something. Later we realized that they were probably negotiating over the price of beer - turns out you can do that here - you talk to the tout, and agree to only pay 25 kuai per bottle before you go in, or whatever. After that, we cabbed it home. An eventful first day.