My Journal

One very short week in the USA and I am now back in Beijing. I had a wonderful time catching up with family and friends, playing tennis and doing chores around the house that had been waiting for 4 weeks.

I tried not to switch time zones, so I pulled Navy time: 8 hours up, 4 hours in the rack, 8 hours up and 4 in the rack. Since construction is still going on in the house, my 4-hour nap during the daylight hours did not really materialize. Anyway, jet lag has been much easier with that schedule. I have only had a 2-hour drowsy stint on a colleague’s couch so far.

Saturday, September 23, 2006 was a beautiful, hot, smoky day in Beijing so we opted for a day excursion to the Beijing Botanical Gardens and Wofo Temple outside and northwest of Beijing. The place is huge and on a scale unimaginable. We found a nice creek with a plank walkway that meandered up the mountainside to the December 9th Memorial. We have no idea what December 9th memorialized because that was all that was written in English. We had a hard time deciphering the tree tags, but we did have a good time walking amid the (we think) sequoia, poplar, ginko, various pine and willow trees. We also found an amazing rose garden.

The evening was spent having the first Beijing cookout with colleagues: chicken, burgers, beans and franks, homemade applesauce and finished with S’Mores on the griddle. The night sky was clear, and there were no bugs. A great Saturday night to cap off a week of travel.

September 14th and the day is finally here to head home to be reunited with the family—yippee!!!! My pictures of the family have started to become too routine. I need some new fresh ones to capture the changes and expressions of Fall. I am really excited to get home, but I dread the actual day since it I live it “twice”, mostly in seat 3K. I starve myself of sleep after a very stressful workday – I go to bed around 3am Beijing time and rise at 6am Thu morning (6pm EDT Wed 9/13). This is to ensure I get some sleep on the airplane and be ready to go when I actually arrive home around 7pm on Thu Night in Delaware, 25 hours later.

I find that the actual job of packing a suitcase is hard to do. I am officially saying good-bye to summer as I fold the shorts and polo shirts into the bag, trying to calculate the space required to bring sweaters and sweat shirts back. The nights have been getting progressively cooler and the “rumor” is that heat does not get turned on until Nov 15. You have to love a country that dictates when you can use heat! That is still a number of weeks away. I will hopefully survive!

The morning is spent in meetings, but the airport run begins at noon with the usual Beijing Smoky Sky (you can’t see it…). As I wait in my third line to collect the same information given in the last 2 lines (name, passport nbr, purpose, DOB, etc) during the airport check in process, I start doing a mental count of workers to passengers. The ratio is roughly 1:1, yet I am still standing in a line and waiting 15 to 20 minutes. I then get to the security checkpoint. I have already removed all toothpaste, hand sanitizer (except for a really small bottle) and liquids to get through. The Beijing airport has reserved security gates 16-19 for those lucky people going to the USA. Your bag goes through the X-ray machine, you go through the detector, you then stand on a box and get wanded as you watch your bags get opened and emptied..everything is hand searched. My small bottle of hand sanitizer is discovered and confiscated. Then my safety net of CVS baby swipes is also confiscated as contraband. This further proves my point that they just don’t want you to be clean in China.

As I waste my time in the Spartan terminal waiting for the flight and firing emails off to the East Coast at 3am in the morning, I start creating my wish list of items / things to do when I reach Terra Firma in the good ol’ USA again:

1) Hug my wife for being such a Saint while I was gone
2) Hug and play with my kids because I miss them
3) Drink a REAL Diet Coke with lots of ice in the cup
4) Walk outside and look at the stars and moon, because I have only seen them 3 times in the last month
5) Brush my teeth with the water running and dunk my toothbrush into it as many times as possible (Seriously)
6) Play tennis
7) Surf www.google.com just to make sure there are no mandarin characters on the page (and read what they actually mean again)
8) Have the biggest, crunchiest salad with all of the fixin’s because most of my veggies have been cooked beyond all recognition
9) Grill something, just because I can

As I go to board the plane, all of our carry-ons are searched by hand again to ensure no liquids (or babywipes are brought on board). This even astounds me more as I watch 35+ strollers with newly adopted Chinese babies get on the plane and all of the wipes are confiscated. I hope someone told the flight attendants!!! They will need more tissues!

It has been an incredible four weeks with me learning something new every day. Either about myself (patience is a virtue..), the culture (look at the speaker even as the translator translates the sentence.. silent death stare while listening to the voice off to the side), or the city (never,ever go on Ping An avenue…ever..). Living vicariously through colleague’s children on the weekend or cleaning dishes and clothes with new equipment and lousy instruction manuals.

I always say that I have a good day when I learn something. I have had 4 weeks of good days. I just never thought it would be unplanned learning.

The adventure of the weekend was to go to the Summer Palace, in the Northwest suburbs of Beijing. Because maps are not really to scale (at least the English/tourist versions that I use for survival), it looked like this was an average park on the outskirts of Beijing. Was a I surprised! It is even more impressive because you really cannot see any of the buildings as you approach the park; walls and trees hide them. So you enter through a gate and are now standing around a huge lake with impressive temples and views. We spent 5 hours in the park and covered about one quarter of it. What I found most impressive was the Chinese Naval Academy practiced on the lake. That means that the boats/ships had to be transported there…Beijing is not near the water…

The Picture Album link will show some of the scenes on this crisp, autumn day.

I continue to be amazed by the building styles in this city. Concrete boxes with small windows, near stunning new sleek construction, next to a power plant. Part is city-planning nightmares; part is pure imagination; the rest is history surviving. We do not have this timeline of history and renewal to consider in the US.

Check out the Picture Album link for some more examples

We decided to go to a Japanese Hibachi style restaurant on Monday night. The menu was in English, but the waitresses could only speak a few words of English. My colleague and I ordered what we thought was the surf and turf special for 2. After much confusion with the waitress, we were not quite sure what we were going to get. The first item to hit the griddle was bean sprouts. Right after that, 2 sunfish in all of their whole glory hit the griddle…when my colleague and I were growing up, we called them “sunnies” and we never ate them, we threw them back. We frantically searched for the English menus and pointed to Fried Rice as another dish to have. Right after the “sunnies”, the prawns hit the griddle…heads and shells included. Now, the fried rice was what we were holding out for. Then the beef and chicken (!) came out with the fried rice. Truth be told, the beef, chicken , prawns (hard to get used to eating the shell) and “sunnies” were actually quite good, but not what we were expecting.

As we were finishing up and laughing at how hard of a time we had and how surprised we were, this German couple comes up to order a dinner. They point and the waitress says, “two?”…they say, “ein” (one)… we realize that we were having a hard time, and that the German couple is far worse off than we will ever be. One of our other colleagues had pointed this out for people living in his building. People in China try to speak English. I have not come across anyone who tries to speak another language at first step. In fact, my basic dodge tactic for beggars and hawkers who yell, “Hello, buy this!”..is..”Sprechen Sie, Deutsch?” to avoid the gauntlet. They relent quickly.

PS – the German couple did get a good meal!

Labor Day weekend was a changeover weekend for me. After 15 days of hotel living, I finally got to move into my apartment. So from Friday night at 6pm to 7:15pm, I packed up one room, had the porter take one of those large hotel dollies that allows hanging clothes down the middle of the street to the adjacent apartment building and unpacked into my new “home” away from home.

After the adventure to the Great Wall on Saturday, Sunday became the domestic day…and it was quite welcome. My colleague and I headed out to purchase an espresso machine, a quick automatic Tea Pot and some fresh groceries. After 15 days of lunch and dinners at various restaurants, I was ready to try my pots and pans in my new kitchen. We got our appliances and I spent some time at the Carrefour market getting an organic, imported, frozen chicken to make for dinner on Sunday night (quite a challenge in a foreign language).

When I got “home” and defrosted and cut up the chicken, I found more parts than I was used to. The Bare Naked Ladies song One Week sprang into my head…”The Chicken from China, the Chinese Chicken...have a drumstick and your brain stops tickin’..” I thought about cooking all of these parts, but then lopped them off. Purdue Oven Stuffer Roasters have never looked so good.

So after that was done, I decided to use my new washer/dryer combo (this is not one over the other..this is the same machine that does both..no moving clothes) to do laundry for a reasonable price. The instruction manual was translated from Italian to Mandarin to English -- incomprehensible. I tossed it aside and decided to try it on gut instinct. I definitely got the clothes clean, but after 3 hours of “drying”, I took the clothes out and hung them up to dry. This was harder than I thought.

We got up early on Saturday morning and took a car north to Mutianyu, about an hour and half outside of Beijing. It is very rural, but urban sprawl is creeping closer. If there had been some wind to blow the haze away, I am sure the views would have been spectacular. Even with the haze, it is a very impressive engineering feat.
Click on the "Picture Album" link to the left to view the pictures.

I spent last Sunday on a 3 hour bike ride around Beijing snapping pictures of some beautiful scenes and dodging taxi cabs and buses. No injuries (except the tops of my knees as they hit the handle bars..).

Click on the "Picture Albums" link at the left to view the pictures.

(This is a tad late based on techical difficulties ranging from the wrong camera cord in my bag, to locking myself out of my PC for a day or so).