My Journal

After 4 months of working in China, I have to say that it has had a positive impact on me, but it also comes with some sacrifices.

As I rocket over Siberia heading for the North Pole (pretty cool close to Christmas…I wonder if I will see Santa!), it is a good time to reflect on the year.

I am grateful for the opportunity to experience a new country and culture in one of the fastest growing economies of the world. It has opened my eyes to some of the great things that we take for granted in the USA:
- safe food, for the most part
- freedom to have a family of any size
- OSHA, EPA, FDA and any other agency that ensures quality and safety
- Moon, clouds, stars and clean air
- Ability to vote
- Freedom of the press
- Freedom of Google and the internet
- Real Diet Coke served with Ice

This has come with a greater sacrifice from my wife and children. My wife has had to be a single parent during a busy time period, where our schedules physically overlap for 5 hours in any 24-hour period. I am very lucky to have such a great partner.

It will great to spend more that a jet-lagged week with the family!

Merry Christmas or Happy Hanukkah, and may you too have a great holiday period and a Happy New Year!

My actual departure date has moved around a lot based on some scheduled meetings on Dec 18, 19 and 20th in Beijing. As a result, I have changed my return date at least 4 times on my wife and kids (and rarely in their favor –always extending my time), which has resulted in some interesting phone calls home.

I had settled on returning on Tuesday Dec 19. My meetings on Monday ended at 1:30pm. On the way back to the office, I wondered if I could make the 5pm flight. (I usually leave for the airport at 1:30pm for the 5pm flight). A quick call to the airline and I decided to go for it.

There was one small problem: I had not packed yet. The airport is an hour from the office and my apartment. So I raced home, literally packed 3 large bags and 2 carryons in less than 20 minutes. I figured that if I got my passport and had a credit card, everything else would be a bonus. So armed with snowboard, suitcases and briefcase, we got to the airport…

Every thing was going great until the China interpretation of TSA rules and regulations kicked in. The entire 777 had to go through one (1) metal detector for special screening. Every bag gets a hand search. It took forever. I got in my seat 8 minutes before the door closed. Way to close for comfort…I obeyed the flight attendant and shut off my email.

Then I remembered that I had not let my wife know that I am coming home early. Hopefully, it is a nice surprise for her.

Sunday Night – domestic day – my laundry has piled up and needs to be done. My Italian washer/spinner combo decides to have an episode on me. The main breaker (not the circuit with the machine, but the entire apartment!) keeps tripping as I try to do my first load of wash. It plunges me into darkness.

First let me explain where my breaker box is --- above the kitchen sink. Even for me to reach it, I have to lean against a metal sink (that has water near it) and flip a door and flip the breaker in the pitch black. Now, China runs 220 volts vs the 110 in the US (220, 240 – what’s the difference?). My washing machine is in the kitchen and is connected the same pipes as my sink. If something is wrong with the machine, I really don’t want to get fried. I put on my thickest sneakers, put plastic baggies on my hands and felt for the breaker to flip. The lights came back on and I started the machine again…10 minutes later, it tripped the breaker again.

My washing machine is a front loader. So I flipped the breaker again, popped the door of my machine open and promptly flooded my kitchen with soapy water. And proceeded to finish the load by hand in my bathtub.

I hope it is fixed by the time I get back…I really do not want to do that exercise ever again on a Sunday night.

Before Thanksgiving, I learned that there were a number of small ski areas outside of Beijing that open on December 10. I brought my snowboard back to China after Thanksgiving (sorry, no pictures of me, my luggage and my 6 foot snowboard stuffed in a Jetta Taxi cab from the Beijing airport to my apartment – there were 5 cabbies betting that we would not fit :-)).

So this past Saturday, I ventured about an hour outside of Beijing to Nan Shan Hua Xue Chang (Nanshan ski village). It has 11 trails (1 double black, 2 Blues and the rest greens).

Here is the low down on Nanshan...think Doe Mtn/Bear Creek. Tons of beginner slopes, 2 blues and the double black was not open yet.

Double Black - narrow, steep mogul trail that funnels into an immediate 175 degee cattrack with nothing but that red snowo fence to keep you from sailing into a ravine. That ranks as a double black in my book.

2 Blues - short runs (longer to ride the lift than ski the run) but fun. Slopes are covered in my favorite Pennsylvania Blue, but good for edging.

Great snowboard park and tons of open space to teach kids how to ski / board.

Unique to China:
Entrance fee to get to ticket booth to buy lift ticket. If you have a reservation, you need to go BACK out and get refund of entrance fee...ugh.

People will ride the lifts (quad and double) without skis or boards on. If in the middle seat at disembarking, they will run over the back of your board to get out of the way of chair...makes for interesting lift accidents....

You need to be aware of people BEHIND you. Right-of-way concept on roads NOT replicated on slopes. I saw some nasty takedowns and one girl almost took me out (she went over the rear of my board and swung me around).

People stopping at the actual lift after being queue to wait for friends (when you are in the chute)....

Nanshan strategy when I go again:

I will be there at opening and get off the slopes at 2.

Skiing blues and the one black + park is safest. Bunny slopes away from palmo lifts also great.

I will eat a different lunch there. (different story)

I will not EVER, EVER use the cesuo(cross between toilet and outhouse) there EVER again.

I will buy pijou (beer) down the street for 2 kuai vs the 25 kuai for a skunked 10 oz bottle of Heinekein.

From 2 onwards, there is great entertainment watching the novices and neo novices careen down the slopes and a) take someone out, b) self destruct into a yard sale, c) get overrun by another a).

With renting a car and driver for the 9 hour excursion, the whole day cost me 50 USD. Not bad.

I got an invitation from a colleague to visit the Lao She tea house for dinner and a show. My Chinese surname is Sun and he has called me Lao Sun for a while. The show at the tea house is based on a Chinese fable about the Monkey King ---- Lao Sun! They do an amazing show here with shadow box theatre (paper puppets), voice mimcry, clowns, acting and kung fu exhibitions in an intimate setting with great food…and tea. Another great cultural experience that you cannot find easily in the United States.

The lights went out at prime dinner hour at my favorite German restaurant, Schindler’s. It was pitch black. There was some quiet laughter, the staff quickly deployed candles and flashlights and everyone kept eating in an orderly manner. No one left. In the US, there would have been shrieks and everyone flooding out of the restaurant. In fact, people kept coming in for dinner. Loss of power here is treated like an everyday occurrence and a mild nuisance. What a different cultural response and perspective.

We have a weekly standing reservation for any and all team members to come to Morel’s to have dinner on Friday night. Based on the retreat, we moved it to Saturday night this week. After dinner, we usually explore the area in the Sanlitun Embassy area. We went shopping in the Yashow Market for a while (Christmas is coming :-) ) and then we discovered “The Den”. It is a decidedly British pub with foosball and 1980’s music playing with soccer and rugby on the TV. We had a great time escaping Beijing on a crisp, cold night. We could have been in any city in the US. It was a great place to know for future reference as the weather turns colder and nights longer.

After a long week at work our small party of expatriates were invited to join the local company office on an overnight retreat to a corporate training ground about 2 hours outside of Beijing. So off we went after 5pm through the village of Shunyi to a facility run by Sinochem (Pictures are in the album). My first shock came when we reached the village of Shunyi. It is huge. It turns out the village of Shunyi has a population over 1 million people. There are overpasses, expressways, a central business district, etc. My definition of village is quite a bit smaller.

The facility is huge and an eclectic mix of architecture, but it exceeded all of my expectations. I had envisioned a yurt with no running water and got a French Provincial Room. There were some interesting construction techniques used, but very pleasant.

The place had a bowling alley, so some of us did that. I had to prove that a size 12 shoe (their largest) would not come close to covering my US size 14 feet. Bowling in socks is not as fun as I remember as a kid…

There was an indoor virtual shooting rang done with an HD projector. The attendants kept rebooting the machine in hopes that the focus would clear up. I finally jumped the counter, focused the projector manually and we promptly got an hour’s worth of free “hunting” on the virtual range.

And my favorite adventure came when we joined our Chinese colleagues for Karaoke. They put “Take Me Home Country Roads” on the box and handed me a mike. Well, the video was showing 2 ballroom dancers and the words were all wrong. I started laughing so hard that I couldn’t sing. My colleagues were not amused. I finally turned away and sung from memory. I think they were whispering that “the American doesn’t know the words to the song..”

We explored the property and found many interesting items the next day in this architectural experiment!

This is the Chinese name for Mandarin. If you had asked me last year if I would ever need to learn another language, I would have laughed. I learned German in High School and College and have not used it in 20 years. (Most Germans speak perfect English, too)

I am now 10 hours into my Chinese language lessons and had to make a choice. Mandarin is a pictogram-based language. In the 50’s, a roman letter equivalent called Pinyin of each character was created with some symbols to show the tones. As I have adventured around Beijing with my dog-eared phrase book, Mandarin Hanzi characters are what people know. Very few people know Pinyin. I constantly have to show characters to communicate. So what is the choice?

Our language teacher shows the Mandarin Hanzi characters, says the word and does not write down the Pinyin equivalent. As more and more forms of the word “zuo” and “you” [Pinyin] came out, it was very hard for me differentiate which tone I should use. Second, I have come across very few signs and menus which use Pinyin (read: none). So, if you really want to learn Putonghua, the characters seem to be the right way to go.

With that decision, I now have to learn vocabulary, characters, pronunciation and grammar vs. Vocabulary/pronunciation and grammar. Over the past 2 weeks, I have committed more than 100 or so key characters to memory with pronunciation. I have also gained basic grammar principles. It is amazing how learning some key characters has opened up the world that surrounds me. Now, 100+ characters are .001 percent of the total characters in the language, but the basics are enabling me read and do basic communication at a survival level.

The picture of the Heinz Ketchup Bottle above is a great example. Of the 5 Hanzi characters, the last 3 say “ Tomato Sauce”. The first 2 perplexed me (and 2 of the wait staff at the restaurant) as to the meaning. “Hin Sure” is the pronunciation…which I finally got is “Heinz” picto-gramly in Mandarin. So the bottle is “Heinz Tomato Sauce” on the label…I wonder what a can of “Heinz Tomato Sauce” has written on the side of it????

I can now confidently get into a cab and tell the driver where to take me, order food in a full sentence, and say the names of most of my favorite restaurants.

What is also helping is a set of flashcards that I got at Barnes and Noble. They are instant ice breakers for wait staff and other patrons in the restaurants and shops that I visit. Our drivers have also gone through my flash cards to try and help my language skills and their English vocabulary.

When we first got here, you would get a standing ovation from Chinese people if you said “Thank You” or “Good bye” correctly. Using a complete sentence, instantly moves you to the center of attention…now if I could only understand what they say back to me….

Sunday morning following the Messiah concert, I decided to explore some of the Eastern part of Beijing on foot before the afternoon Lacrosse clinic. It was a clear, crisp cold day. In the summer, I decided not to see all of the temples within Beijing until I understood more of the history. Today was a perfect day to pick a temple to explore.

Dongyue temple sits 500 meters OUTSIDE the original city wall of Beijing. This temple has been ravaged many times over the years, but it now sits as an island in the middle of skyscrapers on one of the busiest streets in the center of Beijing.

Upon entering, I am overwhelmed by the number of red cards on strings hanging from anything that can hold a string. (see the photo album) The wind was whistling through the temple and these cards clacked in the wind. I later found out that these are “Good Wish Prayer Cards” that you purchase and bestow upon the 70 some odd Gods in the Temple. The Temple had many rooms with statues to represent 50+ areas of heaven, 20 areas of Hell, etc.

It is a very impressive display of architecture, devotion and belief to the Taoist gods. The fact that it still exists is also very amazing.

During my week back in the US and while trying to recover from jet lag, I spent a number of the wee hours of the morning ripping our Christmas CD collection onto my iPod so I could return to China with some holiday spirit. I figured that the non-religious culture of China and the fact that Chinese New Year is in February would make December in Beijing a very quiet affair.

Boy, did I make another wrong assumption! Christmas is everywhere in China, which is really funny when you consider that Christianity and religion is not openly supported here. Santa pictures abound, Christmas carols are blaring in elevators and we even came across Auld Lang Syne in Muzak in a Men’s room of a Chinese hotel.

Upon my return to Beijing, I got a opportunity: a concert at the Forbidden City Concert Hall on Saturday Evening --- Handel’s Messiah! There is no way that I was going to miss this. Four soloists were imported from the United Kingdom and the medium sized hall was filled with mostly expatriates for the great performance. It was very interesting to watch Chinese citizens sing about God in English, while sitting in the Forbidden City. What a cultural experience!

It appears that the power of the almighty dollar in the US for Christmas is even stronger in China. I have started a “Christmas in China” photo album for glimpse at Clark Griswold in Beijing. Enjoy!