My Journal

On Saturday night, my Chinese cellphone fell out of my pocket as I was exiting a taxicab (if you ever saw me climb in and out of one of these tiny cars, you would understand). Anyway, I kept calling it and no one answered. On Sunday morning, I got the “the phone you are calling is powered off message”. So off to get a new cellphone. In China, the GSM-based phones are all driven off SIM cards, which has the phone number and the phonebook stored on it. I could really care less about the physical phone, but the SIM card was what I really wanted back. That was not going to happen. In August, I had someone who spoke Mandarin help me obtain a phone. Today, I was going to try it alone to see if I could do it. So headed back to the same store that I used in August. As rode my bike down the street the second time looking for the shop, I could not find it. I then realized that the huge hole in the row of stores was the place where the building used to be that held the phone store. Uh Oh, this was getting harder now.

I ventured off and found some other stores that sold phones. At one store, the cheapest phone was $250US AFTER negotiating. I continued on. At the next store, after negotiating down to $150US for the same phone, the box came out with a different banged-up phone in it. So I moved on, getting farther and farther away from the main shopping districts and getting better prices. I finally ended up close to the big Electronics mart and went in there for the phone. I was able to get the same model for $93US. Now comes the fun part..trying to pay for it.

The first thing the sale clerk wanted was my name..No Problem. Then I thought she asked for my phone number..yep, she did..I responded that I needed to buy the phone and a phone number. I did not know my phone number, yet. This put a huge crimp in the process. Apparently, you need to have a phone number in order to physically buy a phone…go figure.

So I asked to buy a phone number / SIM card. This is a process of looking through a typed list of numbers and picking the one you want from inventory. Some numbers are more expensive than others. The number 4 is considered unlucky in China since it is pronounced very close to the word for Death. So I picked a phone number that had a 4 in it to save me…$4US. I had to take my sales slip to a cashier and pay for the SIM card…a process with a lot red stamping of pieces of paper and an official receipt with some more red stamps on it. I take the receipt back to the sales clerk and then start the process to purchase the physical phone again. She was happy now that I had a phone number to fill out the form. Now, I had to go back to the same cashier with a different receipt and go through the stamping process again. This time, I noticed a Visa acceptance mark and tried to use my credit card to buy my $93 phone. That would require my passport so they could photocopy it, and they also wanted to photocopy my credit card. I paid cash.I went back to the sales clerk and made her assemble everything, switch the phone menu to English and test the phone to make sure it worked. 3 hours later, $150 US lighter, I have a phone again. More importantly, I was able to do it by myself.

After years of gearing up for Superbowl parties on Sundays, I am beginning to wonder why the NFL doesn’t just move it to Saturday night. Based on the time difference, the Superbowl starts at 7:30am on Monday morning. Now, I am sure that the US has productivity issues on Monday morning after the Superbowl, but we clearly had it! We joined 300 of our closest American friends at the Goose n Duck to watch the game. Apparently arriving at 5:45am is not good enough to get a good seat in front of the Big Screen TV. We got a feed from ESPN with different announcers and did not get to see any of the commercials. We all agreed that it is harder to go to work right after the game than suffer through a short night of sleep on a Sunday night.

After spending almost 2 weeks in the US, I am now back in Beijing. I landed on Friday night and opted to join some of the team members snowboarding on Saturday again. I am hoping that some fresh air, exercise and bright light will allow me to convert easier. It is a beautiful day and the slopes are full. After a couple of hours and numerous runs I am completely exhausted. I do not recommend snowboarding when jet lagged. It did help me get some great sleep on Saturday night until one of my “buddies” called me from the Superbowl festivities in Miami at 5:22am Sunday morning…

After leaving the park around 6 after a full day of fun, we headed back to the hotel to freshen up. I was the only one who wanted to see Hong Kong at night. If I had caved, the team would have gone to bed. I got them into a cab to the Kowloon Ferry. We headed across the harbor and the fog to Hong Kong proper and everyone was rejuvenated. We hiked up the narrow streets and hill to restaurant / bar district and camped out at a streetside table to people watch on a Saturday night. What a great experience that was. Hong Kong has a very cosmopolitan population with varied styles and electric atmosphere..either shopping or clubbing. It was great to be outside in warm air, sightseeing and watching the action.

Even though the weather was not the best, we all agreed that Hong Kong would be worth another trip!

We get to the Disneyland Hotel late on Friday night and are grateful and relaxed. Think Grand Floridian / Coronado Beach Victorian hotel with great service and Pacific Island ambience.

To me, it is impossible to have bad time at a Disney resort. It is made for magic! I get up early and go for a swim in the outdoor pool. I am the only one out there. After a breakfast with Mickey and Friends, we head for the park.

We are not sure what to expect…researching it on the web was hard based on the telecommunications issues. When we get there on Saturday Morning, we do a loose plan of attractions.
It is a small park, but crowds are thin so we were able to see most every attraction. We also re-rode the bigger attractions multiple times.

A few of us decided to take a field trip to Hong Kong this weekend. We got a good package deal to stay at Hong Kong Disneyland. So off we went on Friday evening to my second city in Asia. I keep forgetting how far Beijing is from everywhere. We had 3.5 hour non-stop flight to Hong Kong. If memory serves me correctly, flying 3.5 hours due South from Philadelphia would put you deep into the Caribbean islands. We land in Hong Kong and I am again amazed at the scale of the airports in Asia. This airport is huge – 80 gates all capable of handling the biggest planes made.

I called the Embassy on Friday afternoon to see if my passport was ready. It was. I asked if I could pick it up on Monday, and they said fine. On Monday, I went over to the Embassy and the guards would not let me in. The Embassy was closed for Martin Luther King Day. This should have been my first clue that I was going to have some issues.

I returned first thing on Tuesday Morning and got my new passport. As they were punching holes in my old passport to cancel it, I had a chill pass over me signifying the point of no return. I should pay more attention to that chill in the future.

At the Public Security Office to “transfer” my Chinese Visa to my new passport, reality set in. There is no such thing as transferring a visa. You have to re-apply. It takes over 5 days (I am supposed to leave in 3 days for Hong Kong) and requires a number of documents (most out of my control or possession).

The quote of the day from a visa official: “You can probably talk your way past the guards at the airport and get a new visa in Hong Kong. It will be faster.” I could not keep a straight face.

We called our relocation specialists and they started a fast-track process. Then came the next bump. I needed my resident permit for a new visa. My permit had a typo – it was issued and expired on the same day, instead of being good for 1 year. In order to get a new resident permit, I needed a valid visa. In order to get a visa, I needed a resident permit --- checkmate..

Again, our relocation experts got a new resident permit in about an hour…and my visa came back in 2 days…but stress was very high for day!

Next time, I will sit in Philadelphia for a day….

Almost every day, I drive by a surviving section of the Second Ring Wall of Beijing which has some ancient celestial orbs and gauges on it. Today, we decided to take a closer look. The most amazing artifact (to me) is a large orb with the stars plotted on it. It is amazing from 2 aspects: it was made in the 1600’s, which is earlier than I thought the heavens were mapped and more impressively, the large orb was cast in metal. The engineering alone is rather complex for something that size.

Sunday afternoon, I headed for the Chinese Military museum with one of the staff from my favorite German restaurant. Most museums do not have English translations, so I needed someone to assist. Wang Chun (Tony) had never been to the museum, so we both learned a lot. There were many leftover trophies from the Korean war from Japan, US, Canada and other European countries.

The museum, surprisingly, had a wing dedicated to the cultural revolution and Mao’s ascension to power.

The first time I went snowboarding, no one wanted to come with me…I was the sacrificial lamb. The second time, one other family joined me. This weekend, we filled the van with 9 people and had to turn 2 people away! We went to a different mountain this time, the first ski mountain in Beijing. They advertised 7 runs. It was really 7 lifts/tow ropes. 4 of them emptied onto the same slope. It was steep and icy. We like Nanshan better, but we are glad we tried something different.

This past week, most of our team went on a roadtrip around China. For the morning carpool, our building has Xing Bu Ke (Shing Buck Ka = Starbucks) where we get morning fuel for the entire van. Since I am not a coffee drinker, this was my first experience getting the morning order. At 7:20am, there is a line and people fidgety waiting for their morning jolt of Starbucks. I had been “coached” the night before on how to order the coffee… a “Large Coffee of the Day” in Mandarin. When I got to the counter and spouted my rehearsed line, the barista replied in perfect English. “You want Japanese Coffee?”. The guy behind me was Japanese (and spoke Mandarin) started chuckling…In English, I asked for the “coffee of the day”. The Japanese guy behind me was now laughing hysterically. “Da Ben Ri Ka Fay” is what I wanted to say..”Da Ri Ben Ka Fay” is what came out of my mouth. Reversing those two characters changed Coffee-of-the-Day to Japanese Coffee. I have now perfected the right order and can get the daily order without a hassle, however my colleagues still send me out for “Japanese Coffee”.

Just North of the Forbidden City stands a man-made hill from all of the dirt from the moats and lakes around the palace. According to Feng Shuai principles, the north side of a house should be protected by hill to block the cold North wind. The wind was from the West today, but we got some amazing pictures of Beijing from this once-tallest point in the city. There was virtually no smog. What is not captured in the picture album is the sounds emanating from the park. There were literally hundreds of people singing in different groups, each trying to out do the other groups. Add to that various performers from a man playing Simon and Garfunkle on a saxophone to elderly couples ballroom dancing in the park brought an interesting perspective to this ancient park.

I went back to Nanshan for a half day of skiing on Saturday. This time all of the slopes were open so I ventured up to the top and the expert slope. It was an icy narrow run with large moguls. I started down and a Chinese man with a death wish went flying by very close to me, hit one of the bumps and launched into the air. He lost control and slammed into one of the icy moguls and tumbled/slid down the hill into a fence. I realized that getting down this slope was based not on my ability but on the other skiers’ ability. I clicked out and downloaded on the lift. I had no desire to go to a hospital with a ski impaled in my leg. The weather was another clear day and it was good to get outside of Beijing to clear the lungs of smog.

My Chinese visa expires in February. I planned on re-applying for another one when I returned to the US at the end of January. Talking with one of our visa experts, a passport needs to be valid 6 months beyond the desired expiration date of the visa…oops..my current passport was expires in early ’08. So, I could spend a day when I return to the US sitting in the Philadelphia passport office getting an expedited passport or I could try to get a new passport while in China and just get a new visa when I get back to the US.

So, off I went to find out if I can actually get a new passport in Beijing. It turns out that the US Embassy processes passport renewals, so off I went on Friday afternoon to start the process.

First, I had to get 4 AMERICAN standard passport photos in Beijing. It was not as hard as I had anticipated.

Then off I went to the US Embassy in Beijing. The security is very tight around the US Embassy. I entered and walked down a closed street towards the Embassy. I was stopped every 100 feet by 4 guards who did not speak English and asked for my passport before they would let me proceed. I had a long way to go, so put my arms in the air and held my passport above my head as I walked down the street. 5 more Chinese guards stopped me on my way. At the 10th guard (American), I get told that they liked my cautious approach and had not seen that before as I walked a cool kilometer down a gauntlet of security people. They had radioed ahead :-)

I was feeling very uncomfortable as I got to the Embassy. However, I got the best service ever from friendly people at the Embassy. They said that my new passport would be ready in 7-10 days and then I just needed to go to the Chinese Public Security Bureau to transfer my current visa to my new passport, which would take 2 days.
I was feeling very good about this approach. Sure beats sitting all day in Philadelphia.

On December 26, there was an earthquake off of the coast of Taiwan which broke most of the fiber telecommunication channels between Asia and North America. Up to this point, life on the far side of the globe was bearable since there was inexpensive email, web and telephone access to the USA. The cable break made it very hard to do use of these forms of communication. From my apartment, I could not bring up any website in the US. My vonage/voice-over-ip phone would not work and I could not access my other email accounts with any reliability or frequency. It demonstrated how much I depend on telecommunications for news and living while here. It also made me feel very isolated over here.