So many umbrellas, so little rain...

So as you can see from this picture on my campus, Chinese girls do not like catching a tan. On this very sunny day (or as sunny as it can be here, considering the pollution), most girls carry an umbrella. When I asked one of my new Chinese male friends whether the boys also use umbrellas, he laughed at me and said of course not, the boys are manly, instead of umbrellas they get skin nourishing and pore cleansing lotion for their face to keep their faces nice and smooth in the sun...

Lost in Translation

Finally got the internet up and running again after 4 days offline. According to my Chinese co-worker who I am supposed to call whenever there is a problem, the internet people on campus do not know what the problem is and they need to negotiate with a third party but the third party says it is not their fault. After hearing this for 3 days I told him to just call them again and tell them just to get my internet to work because I must have it for class. He suggested we walk to the office where I paid for the internet, and when we did it turned out they merely lost my information (?) Anyway, now it is working and I can catch up on some posts. I was surprised to see exactly how few people speak English and also how difficult it is for Chinese people to understand anything I say in Chinese. Many of them completely shut down and seemingly do not even try to understand me. The good news is that there always some English major students who do speak fair English and are extremely motivated to learn. There are 7 universities all within a 4 square mile radius and whenever I am in the area at least one student will run up to me and want to "be my friend". This has been very helpful since they take me around the city to wherever I need to go, plus they insist on paying for everything, no matter how hard I resist. When I do go the supermarket by myself, I have to try to understand what something is by the feel and look of it. The few products that do have some English writing on them are clearly not translated by good English speakers. Take a look at the translation on this bag of sugar free oatmeal (click to enlarge):

What exactly does this mean: "the finger does not increase whatever external sweet copy"? The money situation is rather interesting as well. Similar to the Eurodollar (€), the RMB aka Yuan aka Kuai comes in notes of 100, 50, 20, 10, 5 as well as a coin for 1. The similarity ends there. There are also paper notes for the



Jiao which are the smaller denomination, each Jiao is worth 1/10 of a Yuan. There are 5, 2 and 1 Jiao notes. Here is a picture of a 5 Yuan note and one of a 5 Jiao note. Apparently sometimes tourists who try to be tricky by exchanging money on the street at "better" rates are given Jiao notes instead of Yuan notes...


To add to the confusion, there are coins for both the Yuan and the Jiao, see below. The top right coin is the 1 Yuan coin worth 10 times as much as the 1 Jiao coin on the top left and 2x as much as the 5 jiao coin on the bottom right. Also, as you can see the 1 Jiao coin has been changed in recent years to be much thinner and smaller than the old 1 Jiao coin, but about 3 times as heavy. To further add to the confusion, there are also Fen, which are worth 1/100th of a Yuan and they also have paper notes of 5, 2 and 1 as well as coins of the same value. There is apparently a big problem dealing with all these small denomination coins, so much so that there is a big shortage of coins and banks now charge a 1 Yuan fee for every 50 coins they count and many vendors will only give you change in napkins and candy! Here's the link: http://english.hanban.edu.cn/english/China/232499.htm maybe someone can help me do an embedded link, I've tried some scripts but keep getting errors.

I have arrived! My Apartment

Ok, so I left at 8:30 am on Tuesday and arrived in China at 10 pm on Wednesday b/c of the time change situation and since I flew west across the pacific, I never had any darkness even though a whole day went by since we were basically outrunning the spin of the earth. I guess I didn't really fly but rode in an airplane, for as we sky divers say: "if riding in an airplane is flying, then riding in a boat must be swimming...get out of the vehicle and enjoy the thrill!" Anyway...so I get picked up in the airport by a couple of Chinese teachers, but I am deathly tired so that's all a blurr and they drop me off at my apartment, but they can't let me inside the apartment until this apartment worker arrives to check the meter for the water and electricity and walk through the apartment with me and see what's broken, at this point it's after local midnight time and I am about to fall over. So they finally all leave and when I wake up about 5 hours later when the sun rises and the jet lag kicks in, I get a good look at the place. Here's what I found:















Ok, so the interesting things to note here are that the shower is not separate from the toilet at all. Matter of fact, I could even be sitting on the toilet and be showering if I wanted to be particularly efficient. Hmm, now that I think about it, that would be like having an awesome bidet... It is annoying though b/c now I can't really pee in the shower anymore b/c I realize that all of the golden flow will be all over the floor...anyways...Once I took a shower, the whole bathroom including the toilet and sink was completely splattered with water which took about 4 hours to dry, there is a drain in the middle of the floor and there are big bright heat lamps on the ceiling but it still takes about 4 hours.

Speaking of lamps, take a look at my bed, yes those are blue mood lights built into the bed, and the light switch for the bedroom has options to be yellow-normal light, or blue-trippy mood light, or combined yellow and blue really weird light. But I think I got bruises from jumping on the bed the first time b/c it's about as hard as the box spring without the mattress in the U.S., I mean really, they could use this bed for those commercials that show that the red wine won't spill even if she jumps up and down, except that you cannot make any indentation into this bed unlike the Tempur-Pedic, well at least that's excellent for your back, my mom sleeps directly on the floor for the back benefits.

Here are a few random pics showing the views inside and out of my China apartment:









Tomorrow, I will post about my first shopping experience and my apparent Pied Piper like effect on everyone that sees me.

So it begins...

So this is it, the time has come, I have the visa in the passport and in T minus 8.5 hours I will be on the plane to the People's Republic of China (not to be confused with the Republic of China aka Taiwan, a separate country to some, a part of the PRC to others). I plan to post a bunch of pictures in the future on this blog, and given the rather public nature of this blog, and the possibly controversial nature of said photographs and various rants I may be prone to spewing on this blog, I would request that when posting comments, said commenters eschew the utilization of the legal name of this blogger and instead refer to same as Stormseeker, or Storm for short, or some snide nickname if the commenter so prefers.