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934 12-19-2010

This is a long time coming.  My father mentioned to me that my family missed my blog while we were chowing down on some bagels this morning and I realized I should probably wrap this sucker up.  I know you’re wondering, raisin and cinnamon bagel with peanut butter and grape jelly, delicious.

I guess it’s only logical to wrap up my time in China before I continue into my semester at Hendrix (in some ways my “China” experience followed me there).

After Tiananmen Square my dad and I went to the Great Wall where little to our surprise it was crowded and smoggy.  Luckily we were smart-ish and decided to hike away from the crowds and actually found ourselves in a slightly less popular part of the wall.  By the way, I don’t use that term “hike” likely, there was a nice 40-55 degree incline on that sucker.  I kept having images of Chinese soldiers in full armor seeing someone climb on top of the wall at one of the higher portions and just thinking to themselves, “fuck it, I’m not running up there.”  Jog up this sucker and your thunder thighs are going to be sputtering sparks by the time you’re done.  Kudos to my dad by the way, with his ankle I’m surprised he got past the stairs, not to mention hike up a portion of it.

That pretty much wrapped up my experience in Beijing.  Honestly I think it was the city I liked the least.  But some of the people were pretty cool I will admit.  Anya for example is supposed to have sent me a Christmas card a few days ago.  And Hongmin (the girl from the hostel) and I still keep in touch.

…BACK TO SHANGHAI.

Despite his ailing health, the time I spent with my father in Shanghai was probably one of my more enjoyable experiences in China.  We did some basic shopping like getting him some shirts made, I got my coat repaired, etc.  But we also spent a lot of time just wondering around, but because of his ankle we were never really in a rush to go anywhere and spent a lot of time just sitting and looking at things.  In fact one of the best things we did was we found a cigar bar in the middle of Shanghai, we sat outside and enjoyed the weather which was a nice 70 degrees, and they served and excellent mojito (MS Word does not recognize this as an actual word, strange) which combined with a Cuban cigar is quite an enjoyable experience.

I think he was quite impressed with the architecture of the city and really enjoyed the Bund and Nanjing Lu at night.  While we were on the Bund we ran into a French family that was enjoying the sights and I told them that actually a lot of my friends here are French and they were very nice.  Their response, “…nice?  Are you sure they’re French?”  I laughed.

Oh, oh, before I forget.  So I had to go get some cash at the station and so my dad hung out in the room while I made the trek to the station.  So I’m just looking down while I’m walking listening to music and suddenly I look up and I am SURROUNDED by police officers.  Not 3 or 4 of these suckers, at least 30.  It wasn’t till I looked around I realized it was because they were in the process of shutting down this restraint/cafeteria place that had literally been rented, put together, and opened while I stayed here.  Sadly I never was able to find out why they were shutting it down, but it was a sight.

So… that’s pretty much it for China.  Made my way back to America, which was much more pleasant then the first time.  Sat next to a Korean family heading to LA on the way back, they were very sweet, and I switched places with their 8 year-old girl so she could see out the window.  You could see the visible relief wash over the dad’s face now that his little girl had something to occupy her time.

Being home though was weird.  I felt… like I was an insider, which after months of being a clear foreigner, was underwhelming.  Getting back into the swing of things at school was even harder, more on a social level then an academic one.   With the absence of a girlfriend my social group was no longer very clearly defined and so a lot of the friends I had before were now in this weird gray zone.  But it actually has worked out fine.  In fact I’m actually closer to some of the people I hung out with before China then I ever was before then, especially Brett, Jack and Grace (Jack’s girlfriend).  I even met some new friends like Rachel, who was my auditing buddy for the semester and introduced me to a number of her slacker friends who I hang out with on occasion.  One guy is called BJ but his intro line is “Hi my name is BJ, but my friends call me Fallacio,” we get along great.

And there is, well was, a girl.  Her name is Fei, from Harbin, China, and we were a cute little item (ok maybe she was just cute, I just kind of stand there being goofy) for awhile.  Sadly she just had to go back home a couple of days ago.  I miss her.  :-/

Fei is on the right

Hendrix Culinary Club is going strong, we’ve gotten a lot of work this semester and are back to being financially stable.  Annie did an awesome job, and Olivia (our new president) will kick just as much butt I’m sure.

Oh I also got cut up pretty badly.  Somewhere along the lines my appendix decided to become a ticking time bomb and nearly exploded so they performed an appendectomy to get that sucker out of there.  Still a little bit on the mend, but I’m almost at a 100%.  Problem is that it messed up my finals schedule, so I have one final I’m working on at home and I get to study for the other two and take’m when I get back to Hendrix.  I’m thrilled.

As far as jobs go I’m still looking, I supposedly have an internship with Zinch.com this coming semester which should turn into a job, but I’m still waiting on the details so we’ll see.  Hopefully it’ll turn out ok.  I might write one more blog post just to let you know where I go, but honestly if you just click on “my website” it’ll show you my LinkedIn.com page which will adequately inform you.

And… that’s it.

Forbidden Palace and Tiananmen Square

1731 7-24-10 (but for the 22^nd)

Well Thursday we woke up at the crack of dawn to see the Tiananmen Square flag rising ceremony only to be told that even waking up at 5 was too late for it actually started at 5:04 (yes it actually is that specific, it is increased by one minute everyday).  But since Dad and I were already up we decided what the hell and headed out there anyways, we also said goodbye to Anna who was talking off for Tibet.  I'm glad we did because we ended up getting into the Forbidden Palace's gardens before anyone else was really there (there might have been only 200 or so people in the entire park that we saw).  So that meant we got to stroll around and just look at various things without having to navigate the crowds.  We spent a lot of this time hanging out by one of the rivers and talking about China, America, and the future.

Once we had our fill of the gardens we headed out to Tiananmen Square.  On the Square it is made very obvious just how smoggy Beijing is.  I though Shanghai was bad but Beijing is so smoggy it's hard to make out the buildings clearly at the end of the square.

By this time the crowds had also started to pick up, for instance the line to see Mao's body was about 150-200 yards long.  My father and I didn't feel any need to go see a dead guy.  But walking around the square let us see a lot of the big government buildings and such, plus it was cool to just be at this extremely historical site.  Getting back required us to go through about 5 underground tunnels in order to actually reach the subway stop, what a pain. 

Once back in our hotel though we relaxed for a little bit before meeting with Booz for lunch.  Lunch was in fact pretty good, consisting of some stuff that at this point I can't remember.  We then went and hung out at his dorm for a little bit, just sitting around listening to music, swapping stories, and watching short videos.  But pretty soon Booz had to go and leave for Xi'an so we said our goodbyes and went back to the hostel again.

For the most part we hung out there for the rest of the day, just talking to all of the international visitors.  By this point a French family and a family from Norway was staying at the hostel.  They were all super nice, and the Norwegian father, Henry and my dad hit it off real well.  That night everyone in the hostel gathered up and made sweet dumplings made with rice flour, water, and red bean paste (which is a natural sweetener for a lot of Asian desserts, in Japanese we call it taro) boiled in brown sugar water.  Tons of fun and they were quite good.

With our stomachs full we were off to bed.

The Summer Palace and Anya

2011 7-24-10 (for 21^st)

Up at the crack of dawn (which I have a feeling will begin to be a common affair with father around), which was mostly spent just relaxing and talking with some of the people in the hostel.  So far we've met an older couple from Belgium, one of them is an art history teacher (and kind of an art "activist") the other runs the most successful sitcoms in Northern Belgium which has ran for about 20 years!  Then there are about three people from Norway, two of whom were on the last leg of their Trans-Siberian adventure.  We of course also have the three or four Chinese who are running the hostel, they're super friendly.

Then in comes this bushy ball of energy overloaded with two backpacks and plenty of gear.  Apparently she had walked past the hostel four or five times before she actually turned down the right alley to our hostel.  Well after unpacking herself in her room we invited her over to talk.  Her name is Anya Rudycheva, from Moscow, majoring in Celtic languages, but is conversational to fluent in Russian, English, Spanish, "Celtic", and a little bit of Italian.  She makes money doing translations for various websites and such which she says pays for her traveling but not much else.

Anyways she was just in Beijing for the day with no real plans so we quickly absorbed her into our group and headed out to meet Booz for lunch.  Lunch was a tasty affair at one of Booz's local restaurants; we had some delicious eggplant, fried rice, and sweet and sour chicken.

Once our more basic needs were taken care of we got into a cab and were whisked off to the Summer Palace.  The place was pretty well packed; apparently this time of year is a major one for Chinese tourism.  But it was rather pretty and there were plenty of cool buildings to see as well as an awesomely big lake.  Booz and I decided that a giant Dragon Boat would be an excellent addition to White Rock Lake.  Sadly the experience was rather… "drowned out" by these stupid whistles people we're selling.  It seems like everywhere I go people are selling things.  But regardless it was fun, Anya, Booz, and I even did a little bit of hiking up to the top of the mountain where a huge Buddhist temple was.  And by hiking I mean we took then small dirt path up to the top, only to find out there was a much nicer and easier one that we had somehow missed.

As always coming back from there was a royal pain.  We couldn't find a taxi that wasn't full and we really didn't know where the subway was, so in the end we hired a couple of bicycle guys to take us to the subway.  Well Booz clearly negotiated a price of 20RMB, and that price was communicated to the other driver and so when I got out I paid 20RMB and I was done with it.  BUT Booz and Anya gave the original driver a 100RMB and suddenly the ride was 20RMB PERPERSON.  Needless to say we were pissed and after 10 mins of arguing we finally got it down to 30RMB for the ride and we were too continue.  This was the first time that this had happened to me who made it even worse.  Normally all of the Chinese people I've dealt with honor the deal that was made 100% we've even been ran down by a waiter because we didn't get our 3RMB worth of change.  So I was rather peeved but whatever I guess.

So we made our way back to the hostel and Anya retired to her room (she had been on a plane from Russia before this as well as the hiking to get to our hotel, so I imagine she was royally tired after all of this).  Father, Booz, and I ordered some dinner and just in general hung out for the rest of the night before Booz had to get back to school.

Flying in Beijing

1148 7-20-10

Since I'm waiting for our plane to come in (which has been delayed 40min) I figured I would try to write part of today's post while I had a second.

Dad and I got up around 6:30 or so, which was fine since we went to bed around 10.  I got o take a shower in the morning, which was amazing, I actually should have probably taken the time to take a bath but I just didn't think about it.  Not having to stand next to your toilet while showering is such a nice convenience.

After my shower we headed up to the executive lounge where we got a really nice breakfast… in fact besides the odd dried banana chips it's probably the only breakfast I've had in the last few months.  Sadly it wasn't till we were done that I noticed they had bread and Nutella.  Once breakfast was consumed we hoped on the train and after a bit of confusion with gates got onto our plane.

[cont. 2116 7-21-10]

The flight itself was rather uneventful, but once we got to Beijing our epic quest to find our hostel began.  First we got to take the express train and another subway line to our stop.  From there we walked for about 15 minutes down a main street turned into an apartment neighborhood which was very old and rather typical.  Our walk then brought us strolling by a large Chinese market place and then down this small back alley.  We finally ended up at a rather large red door.  At this point my father was beginning to question my judgment.  But the door actually opened up into a rather quaint courtyard with nice decorations and a fruit bearing tree in the middle!

The girl at the desk in the back (Sammy) was super nice, had decent English skills, and was rather helpful.  It wasn't her fault that the A/C broke, and then they turned out the power to fix it.  My father was so tired though that he even was able to ignore the "hard" (which were actually softer than the one in my dorm) mattress and heat and went straight to sleep.  I stayed outside in the courtyard and talked with some Norway people, who were quite lovely.  They were actually finishing up a trip that they took on the Siberian Train.

Once dad woke up from his nap we went, met Booz and got some dinner at a hotpot restaurant.  Then we headed up to this really big open market like area where we saw life scorpions on impaled on a stick!  They would then fry them for you so that you could eat them without worrying about that nasty stinger.  They were super tasty!!

Just kidding.  I did end up buying some fans though for my father.  They started out at 120RMB and ended up at 25.  Afterwards we wondered around, got some tea, someone wanted to practice their English with us, which of course is a royal scam, and in general just kind of moseyed along.

Getting back was a royal pain though.  First of all we thought we found some cabs but they immediately started trying to negotiate with us on a price, which is the biggest red flag in the book that they are not legit.  I have never before run into this problem in Shanghai, but apparently here it's a big deal.  If that wasn't bad enough it takes us another 20minutes to flag down another taxi (all the others either had people in them, or didn't want to stop for us, I'm not entirely sure why).  Once we got in we explained to him where we wanted to go, but he didn't want to because he would have to make a u-turn… yeah I'm serious.  Finally it took us an additional 20 minutes waiting at a hotel to finally find someone that was able to take us to the hostel.  This was after several taxi drivers said they didn't even know where our train stop was and it's a major one.  I was pretty peeved at this point.  I climb into a taxi at 3am and in my broke Chinese tell them to take me to ECUST and the street next to it and am immediately taken there with no problem, ever.  Here they can't even get us to a train station.  Shanghai 1 : Beijing 0

Needless to say when we got back I crashed pretty easily.

Dad Arrives

11:34 7-20-10 (for 19^th)

Well pappy arrived today.  I decided to check into the hotel early to make sure I could easily find it when dad arrived and also so I didn't have to carry my luggage all the way to Pudong.  The Hilton itself is pretty nice, not to mention the fact that we got a free upgrade up to an Executive Room.  Pretty damn spiffy if you ask me.

Anyways the train out to Pudong Airport actually took an extra 40 minutes then I had expected which ended up being a total travel time of an hour and half.  On top of that Dad's plane was 30min early.  Luckily I still had about 20min to kill before his plane touched down, and an additional 40min before he actually got out of customs.

Dad said the flight sucked because he couldn't sleep and his butt just couldn't handle the sitting for so long.  Other than that there weren't any complications.

He was tuckered out but that didn't stop us from heading down to the French concession and grabbing some Mexican food.  I figured I would ease him into the whole China thing with a comfy room and familiar food.  Right now I'm waiting to get on the plan for Beijing and once there it'll be a totally different experience.

After dinner, we took a little bit of time to walk around the French concession which was nice, and even popped into G+ which was oddly empty.  I guess at 21:30 on a Monday, the party hasn't really started.  After that we headed back to the Hilton where Dad pretty much immediately crashed, and I followed soon after.  The beds were extremely squishy which after lying on a board for five months meant I had a little trouble getting used to it… but not for long.

The Last Supper (and Class)

0010 7-19-10 (but talking about 17 & 18)

So yesterday we had a full day of classes which meant I really didn't have too much to talk about so… I didn't BUT one ironic thing did happen to me.  So I was sitting there in the class room eating my lunch playing on my laptop (thanks grandparents, I would have been in a real bind without one), when all of a sudden one of the Chinese girls came up to me and wanted to know if I was Christen.  Of course I politely informed her that my name was not Christen, it was indeed Kevin.  Now this seemed a little odd because I talk a lot in class and pretty much everyone knows my name.

But she looked rather puzzled and looked at me again and then back to another Chinese girl sitting behind me and repeated her question to her.  They talked for a moment or two and I happen to catch the other girl saying "Christian," and of course then it snapped.  So I explained to her that no I was not Christian yadda yadda yadda.  She then asked how I could tell if someone was Christian just by looking at them and I explained that you really couldn't, but if they were wearing a cross or a fish symbol there was a good chance that they were.

Then she further puzzled me by asking what denomination I thought she should be.  Well of course this launches me into an explanation about the fact that there are many different denominations and there's no way I could simply tell her that this is the one she should be etc.  Turns out though, after about half hour what she really was looking for was what type of Christianity was the most popular in America, of course there really isn't an answer to that one two but I listed off a few I knew.  Anyways I just thought all of this was oddly ironic, but it made me smile, and no, I didn't take the opportunity to try to convince her to join the Dark Side or anything like that.  I did find out why she's Christian though, apparently her grandmother was Christian but her mother wasn't until one day her mother got a really bad tooth ache and the doctors couldn't fix it, so she went to church and asked Jesus for help and then the pain went away.  Go figure.

By the way, apparently there's a different branch of Christianity here in China then there is in other parts of the world.  If I had more time here I would be really interested in hearing how the story has changed.

During class though I actually gave a presentation on the various risks I think China is facing which I gathered from China's own book of statistics.  The big one was economic disparity between West and East, gender ratios, over population, environmental concerns, use of cars, and lack of funding in education.  Of course there are others that I would like to have mentioned, like the housing bubble, but I had to use stats found in this book.  The reaction from the class was pretty good; one of my classmates even mentioned that he thought I had "a better understanding of China then most Chinese," I guess you can't get a better compliment then that.

Let's move on to today.  Today was my last Risk Management class, compounded with the last dinner with the French.  In class one of things we discussed was starting a non-profit consulting company within ECUST, I actually really like this idea and think it could be applied to universities in America (German universities are already doing this) sadly I'm not sure Hendrix would be a good fit, but maybe we could our Accounting and CompSci students could be the consultants.  Something to think about.  I then got to have the joy of taking my test an hour after the class was done.  I think it went alright though, so I'm not too worried.

Then I relaxed in my room for a bit and soon found myself heading out with the French kids, and Charlie for dinner (Sophie and Nathan would join us afterwards cause they were on a dinner date).  We went back to the Korean place that we went too last time where you got to grill your own food.  Clement touched my meat… it was then that I came to an understanding that Americans and more specifically Texans, do like people touching our food without permission, certainly not our meat.  I think this was compounded by the fact that this was the closest I had gotten to cooking in five months and it was almost like a sacred ritual for me.  Luckily I got over it pretty quickly.

Once we had consumed our food we headed out to the bund was last time.  Once we were there we posed and took photos with about three Chinese families and generally just had a good time.  Nathan and I discussed video games, moding video games, and how in the world can you screw up a game about Star Wars or D&D.  Then on the way back we talked about the stagnation of Japan, what would happen if America was invaded, and aliens.  We are Geek.

Father should now be on his way over here, tomorrow I'll meet him at the airport, but until then I really should get some stuff together.  I intended to do it tonight but then dinner thingy came up.  Night.

Last Day of Work

0045 7-17-10

Wow so it has been awhile hasn't it?

Sorry I guess I've just been slipping recently, also not much has really gone on.  The weather has kept me pretty much inside.

Well today was the last day of work, which I guess was cool.  The end of something is always the beginning of something else.  HR bought me some milk tea and a slice of cake which was thoughtful… and tasty.  Sadly Niko wasn't there today because he just had a baby the day before so naturally he was out.

Mostly the day was spent wrapping up the last bit of my projects and talking with the guys around me.  Edward suggested I check out a company called Stratfort which is a private intelligence agency with their office in Austin.  While they offer internships to recent grads they're unpaid which kind of puts me in a bind.  But o well, it looks interesting if nothing else.

Also had a closing interview with Trent as well as gave him a report on "areas needing improvement" as requested by HR.  That's always fun, ask the intern that's only been there for a few months to tell you what's wrong with the company.  Super.  But an outsider's perspective can be useful I guess.

Let's see what else is going on… bought dad's Expo ticket today.  Oh did I tell you that I now have VIP Expo passes?  Ya, I'm that good at networking.  :P

Anyways other than that I've just been trying to relax and enjoy my last few days of peace before I head back to America and corporate slavery for the rest of my life… whoopee!!