July 2007

Sunday: 7-1-07

I enjoy watching mosquitoes accidentally kill themselves when they try to bite me. The often fly through fan blades and underneath the water when I’m taking a shower. It reaffirms the fact that I’m the dominant organism in the apartment.
The sky was bright blue and the air was clear early this morning, a sight unlike I’d seen in weeks. But, the temperature was miserable and the sky started to turn its normal smoggy grey by afternoon.
Walking to work at 9:30, I stopped to talk with the old man Mr. Ma and his wife, who were tending the melon garden they have growing on the terrace above the benches in the courtyard. They assured me that the melons won’t fall on my head, but I’m not so sure.
Arriving at work, the school was all locked up and nobody was to be found. The new guy Henry showed up a few minutes later on his bike with his shoes and pantlegs all muddy. His bike was covered with over an inch of mud in some places. It was his first day on the job and he had arrived at 9 o’clock to find nobody here. The mud was the result of the heavy rains yesterday. Nice first day, trekking through mud to an empty office.
Maria arrived at 10:15, an hour and a half late, then realized she had forgotten her keys. Joe arrived with his daughter at 10:30 and realized that his keys would not open one of the locks. We were able to remove one lock and open the gate less than 12 inches, which was just enough for us all to slide through.
I taught Joe’s daughter for two hours and had a hard time keeping her in the classroom. She broke some things and almost got into a bottle of ink.
I had egg with noodles in the donkey restaurant for lunch. Finding enticing food is really getting to be a problem around this isolated area. Some times I just would rather go hungry than eat another donkey pita.
The driver took Maria and I to the supermarket at 3:30, where we met Mandy at the school’s promotional booth. I returned by bus one hour later for dinner. Instead of eating food from the donkey restaurant on the school’s patio as usual, Joe ordered dumplings for himself and me from another restaurant. So the others wouldn’t feel left out, he had his assistant deliver them to his office and we ate there.
The school was full of customers for the rest of the evening, and four people paid for classes, a new one-day record. Much of the customer traffic was due to the new employee Henry’s amazing sales efforts on the sidewalk outside. This is the same guy that I met at the supermarket just last week and told to come apply to work at the school. He is by far the best salesperson in our team now.

Monday: 7-2-07

Another new girl started working at the school today, who looks like a cute little Anime character. This was my second decent payday since starting the job, as I received money from the last two weeks of teaching. Teaching payments and regular work salary are paid at different rates.
I spent the afternoon and early evening beginning to edit a video for the school, which will be used on the website and a promotional DVD. My special affects include the school’s logo spinning into the screen, an effect I also use as a transition between scenes. For background music, I chose some modern instrumental blues.
From 7-9, I stood at the school’s booth on the sidewalk and helped with recruiting new customers. A shirtless 13-year old crazy boy was interested in signing up that just might be more trouble than he’s worth.
I couldn’t fall asleep when I went home, so I got out of bed at 11:30 and walked to one of the vendors selling BBQ kabobs on the corner. A young muscly guy who called himself Richard struck up a conversation with me, who was sitting at a table next to me with his girlfriend. Richard spent the last six hears studying in England, so his English is very fluent, a rarity around this part of town. He lives in the more wealthy apartment complex across the street from me with his girlfriend, and said he’s just relaxing for the rest of the year before starting work. We sat and talked for two hours while his girlfriend waited with their 4-month old husky puppy. He kept buying us beers for the whole two hours, so I agreed to make it my treat sometime in the next few days.

Tuesday: 7-3-07

My website has been down for a week now with only a single two-sentence email from my hosting service saying they would look into the problem, so they lost my business. I paid for four years of service through godaddy.com for a monthly cost of just $2.80. This is one of the most popular hosting services available, so I shouldn’t have anything to worry about till 2011 now, as far as my website is concerned at least.
My workday was spent continuing to develop the school’s promotional video and adding Chinese text to the brochure, which is also still under development. The Chinese staff has to translate many thing I create into Chinese, like emails, brochures, etc. This takes them a lot of time and they probably hate it.
A fog/smog hung over the area so thick today that even the closest mountain was completely hidden in it. Then all of the sudden, within a period of less than an hour, all the fog/smog just disappeared. Strange.
I taught my intermediate adult class for the second time tonight. A third student joined, the guy with the crushed hand who I met about three weeks ago. His hand was still swollen and unusable. When I asked how it happened, he initially said it was a bad story, then admitted that he had punched a door. I can’t imagine how punching a door would crush a whole hand that badly, so that may not be the whole story.
The local police station threatened to cancel the school’s planned July 4th promotional event tomorrow. This station is the big modern 10-story brick building that looms a block away, the biggest building in the vicinity, Big Brother. My coworkers had gone there to make sure that the event would not break any regulations, and they were assured that everything would be OK. But, later in the afternoon, someone from the station called to say that we would not be permitted to hold the event. As is supposedly so typical in China, the officers agreed to relent on this only after we promised to take them out to dinner.
I had a dream last night that an unknown person visiting my apartment found a briefcase full of bloody hand tools in a cabinet. The person thought they were mine and went to the police. The briefcase had a name on it, which I looked up online(in the dream) and found that it closely matched that of a convicted serial killer. The rest of the dream I was being followed by an unknown person I could never see.

Wednesday: 7-4-07

I discovered something new to eat, frozen dumplings, which are sold at nearly every market in Beijing. A pork-garlic kind tastes great boiled.
I met Joe and Henry in the main office at noon and the driver took us on a 25-minute ride into the city so we could buy ground beef and beef hot dogs from a large Muslim supermarket. The reason we traveled so far was that beef hot dogs are hard to find. We bought nearly 20 pounds of ground beef and had the meat cutter regrind it with four onions. The hot dogs were the size of big salami sticks and cost about 50 cents each.
Our next stop was Wal-Mart, because that’s one of a very few places in the city to buy mustard. Finding ketchup is not a problem, but Chinese people do not do mustard. We found a single variety of mustard that costs about $4.
We pattied up the ground beef in my apartment because it was the only decent-sized kitchen we had access to. It took Joe, Henry and myself about an hour to patty about 50 hamburgers, then we ate six of them.
The reason for all this food preparation was the school’s Fourth of July promotional B.B.Q., held in front of the school. It started at six, and a few attendees were starting to trickle in when we arrived with the meat at that time. I did most of the cooking, on a grill that Joe had purchased a couple weeks ago. The first two hot dogs we served had a thin layer of plastic on them. I noticed this only after one person had completely eaten theirs. Grilling was tough because the only charcoal available burns very fast and hot. Standing over the hot grill in the humidity was exhausting. I didn’t hand the job over because my coworkers were unfamiliar with cooking hamburgers and were ripping them apart when trying to move them on the grill. We sold about 2/3 of the 30 hot dogs, but only about half of the hamburgers.
The crowd that showed up was quite impressive and it maxed out at about 300. Well over 500 people attended all together. We started out by playing country music and serving the food. I had suggested to Joe to mix up the playlist, but he insisted that country was more “American”.
At 7:30, we played our wheel game for 30 minutes, which Joe was the host of this time instead of me. Of about 20 contestants chosen by drawing numbers, 2 or 3 were adults.
A fireworks salesperson was supposed to arrive at 8, but he was 20 minutes late. Most of his loot just consisted of big brown cardboard cylinders with no labels and very cheap dangerous wicks. We quickly ended the show after a huge commercial grade mortar exploded on the ground and sent fireballs through the crowd. Luckily, the only injury was the leg of the firework saleperson, which apparently wasn’t too serious. Henry had also been standing next to the man when he lit the firework, and he told me that instead of sitting it upright as directed, the man just lit it and threw it in the field.
The main event of the night was the movie, “Mighty Joe Young”, which was played on a projection screen that was about 20 feet tall. We had been unable to get our normal projection screen rental people to come, and it’s a good thing, because these people charge the same price for a screen several times bigger. We even had to hire several off-duty security guards to come and help set it up from a nearby apartment complex. They only payment they required was 3 packs of cigarettes. We apparently also had to pay off some officials at the local police station who were threatening to cause us trouble. Interestingly, they had never used to pay attention to our events before they became aware we were having an American Independence Day Celebration. Business is never as usual.
Maybe the best thing to come out of today was a freezer full of hamburgers. Leaving the school at 11 o’clock, I asked my coworkers if the cooler inside was still plugged in, which is where the hamburgers were stored. They didn’t know, so we unlocked the building to go back and check. Sure enough, the cooler was off, so I carried three plate fulls backs to my apartment and carefully wrapped them individually and put them in my freezer.
It’s really hard to find food I like around here, so if the hamburgers had sat in the school unrefrigerated overnight, then I would have gone through all the stages of mourning. I feel as if I rescued them. My freezer is a hospital. Hopefully I don’t get food poisoning.

Thursday: 7-5-07

Sometimes days are really average and I have to think hard in order to come up with something to write about, as was today. Average now means hot, humid and sitting in my office all day using my computer to work on various projects. I had lunch with Echo at the donkey restaurant, then later went home and cooked myself two of the leftover hamburgers from last night for dinner. I feel bad not joining the others for dinner, but donkey restaurant food is really getting old.
The new brochure I’m designing for the school is now 99% completed. I printed out another rough draft today and had several people look over it for errors. Other than that, I also worked on restoring my own website, which is a 3GB task consisting of some hundreds of thousands of files. The backups of my weblog database seem to be corrupt, so I’m keeping my fingers crossed that nothing is lost.
I spent the whole rest of the night in my apartment continuing to work on the website, and mostly getting nowhere trying to fix the database issues. This has happened so many times now and is exactly the reason I paid for 4 years of hosting this time.

Friday: 7-6-07

People in the neighborhood have really started to warm up to me lately. The retired people who sit on all the benches wave and the kids yell “hello”. They rarely said a word for the first 6 weeks. I now regularly have morning conversations with my neighbor Mr. Ma and his wife Mrs. Zhong(last names are not changed). There are always some other random people with them that also speak. Our talks are simple but we usually understand each other.
Maria escorted me to the bank to pay my phone bill in the afternoon, which cost about $2.50 for a month. A recorded message had regularly been calling in the mornings saying it needed to be paid. Turns out the DSL Internet must be paid at a different location.
I had lunch with Echo and my new Anime-looking coworker at the donkey restaurant. For dinner, I returned to my apartment and cooked leftover hamburgers and hot dogs for Joe and myself. Returning back to the school with them, we decided to eat in the main office so the others wouldn’t feel left out, but I don’t think they really like hamburgers all that much anyway.
At 7:30, I attended a meeting in the main office with Joe, Henry and three men who are looking for financing and assistance to make a movie. Joe wants to get involved in entertainment activities and these men had once heard him speak at a conference. One of the men is supposedly quite famous in the Chinese media and has played major roles on TV and in movies. He looks kind of like the late Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping and played him in a well-known movie roll. This new movie/TV project would require recruiting hundreds of beautiful women. Sound too good to be true….we will see.

Saturday: 7-7-07

The clerk of a small store accidentally gave me extra merchandise worth about $15. I went in to buy a card to recharge the minutes on my cell phone and realized there was a second card stuck to it as I was walking away. The pretty young girl working at the store almost surely wasn’t the owner and probably would have been fired for a such a mistake, so I returned the card to her. She gasped as I pulled the stuck card from the one I’d purchased.
This is the second time something like this has happened over the past few days. Last week, I put $15 worth of credit on the card that charges my apartment’s electrical meter, then when I put the card into the meter, it registered as $30. That’s a bank error that I definately wouldn’t admit too even if I knew how to tell them.
I didn’t go in to work till 12:30, then took the bus to the shopping center and bought lunch from KFC. The lines were out the door and I was desperate enough to wait for about 20 minutes. Both the upstairs and downstairs part of the lobby were packed full, so I took the food up to the 5th floor of the shopping center where there is a large food court. What I thought was popcorn chicken turned out to be some kind of battered gristle.
The main reason for the trip to the shopping center was to work at the school’s promotional booth in the basement. My new coworker Rachel was already there, who just started a few days ago. She left after an hour to take customers to the school. Her replacement employee didn’t arrive for a few minutes, and my Chinese ability is not good enough to have any decent conversation with potential customers, so I walked around the shopping center looking to buy a couple small items. For my cell phone, I purchased a belt pouch, because my boss wants me to carry it all the time and my pockets are always too full. The cell-phone vendors wanted to charge $7 for pouches that had a big ugly Playboy logo on them, but I found one from a small phone accessory vendor for just $1.25, which is actually real leather, unlike the Playboy one. Playboy is a very popular counterfeit brand for everything from shoes to furniture. Weird.
And when the vendors quote a high price for such merchandise, they always point to the rabbit logo like it’s the real thing or something.
My other purchase turned out to not really be a purchase at all. A screw had fallen out of my sunglasses and a young girl at a booth selling glasses fixed it for free.
Waiting to take the bus back to the school at 4 o’clock, the first driver stopped far away from the designated stop and didn’t stop again at the real stop, which sucked since it was the average 95 degrees. I didn’t eat with my coworkers tonight because I was hot and full of fried nasty gristle. My children’s class started watching the movie “Finding Nemo”. They always complain when I put a movie in English with English subtitles, but then all quit their normal screaming after a few minutes and watch it intently. The student Mary threw a paper airplane and a marker at me. She also had a tennis ball in the classroom.
Joe usually takes Saturdays off now, but came in at 7 to teach an adult class that nobody else was available to teach. I wish somebody would teach the children and let me have the adults, as they would never throw markers at me.
Leaving the school at 10 o’clock, I had beer and lamb kabobs from the “restaurant” in the field. A rain shower had moved through earlier and cooled the air down nicely.

Monday: 7-9-07

Joe asked me today to re-film his part of the school’s promotion video because he thought he was holding his head too high in the air in the last video clip we shot. This time, we shot it with him sitting at his office desk, and it only took about 5 takes instead of about 50 like it did last time.

I was so bored of being in my office by mid-afternoon that I went to the supermarket to join my coworker Rachel in giving out flyers. She wasn’t there, so I instead took bus 333 another 30 minutes farther until I smelled Mcdonalds. There was an albino Chinese person dining in the lobby.

Rachel(the coworker) was at the supermarket when I returned at 5 o’clock, so I stayed there for an hour with her as we taught each other words and gave out brochures. We took the bus together back to the school at 6 o’clock and I was instantly bored as ever again. My office doesn’t even have a window and it’s only big enough to comfortably fit one person. This area is the Tinbucktwo of Beijing and all there is to eat is donkey. It’s nice and quiet, but I’m obviously bored. Hopefully the company grows sooner rather than later.

Several potential customers where speaking with the staff just before 9 o’clock when the power went out. This has happened several times since I’ve worked here, because everyone forgets to check the pre-pay meter. I had lamb kabobs and a beer from the vendor in the field and everyone was still at the school waiting to get the meter charged when I finished at 10 o’clock. One of the girls was crying because somebody yelled at her when she knocked on a door to look at the meter.

Tuesday: 7-10-07

Beijing is under siege by billions of centipedes. I come across gobs of these creatures with every trip outdoors. They often get attacked and ripped apart by armies of ants.
Today was the brightest blue day in months, which even included real puffy white clouds. After so much pollution, I sometimes forget what a truly clear day really looks like. Even the view across the street slightly changes.

After a couple hours editing video on my computer in my office, I took bus 333 to the Shangdi subway station, then took a motorcycle taxi to the post office. I once rode a motorcycle taxi in China in 2004, but don’t remember it being so dangerous. Today’s driver jumped curbs, almost hit a pedestrian and sped between turning vehicles, all for about 75 cents.

At the post office, I successfully mailed a package to the US all by myself, a feat to be proud of. Walking on afterwards, I passed a beautiful small park with large weeping willow trees and bright green water flowing under arched stone bridges. Entering the park to take some pictures, I spent 20 minutes talking with a man who’d I’d seen struggling to read an English version of the China Daily.

Walking on, I entered a Bank of China branch in the hopes of paying my Internet access bill. The employees here didn’t seem to understand what I was talking about, so I walked on and entered an Industrial Bank branch. An employee here gave me a number to wait with, then said that Internet access couldn’t be paid for at this bank. I put the employee on the phone with my coworker Annie to help sort things out. The bank employee then led me outside and asked a young man to show me where to pay the bill across the street. The young man was extremely polite and had a great struggle with English. He led me to a China Telecom branch across the street, apparently not understanding what I needed. I got Annie back on the phone again and the young man then seemed to understand. He led me into another bank, then an employee there directed us to another office nearby to finally pay the bill, which was about $20.

The man then escorted me all the back to a bus stop, where I took bus 982 back to the school. For dinner, I cooked hamburgers and hot dogs in my apartment for Joe and myself. A head of lettuce and two cucumbers to go with it only cost 25 cents. Produce is dirt cheap here. Both Joe and I ate 3 hamburgers and one hotdog each. He proposed an agreement where he would next buy us a freezer full of real beef steaks if I’ll be the cook. Sounds good to me.

In intermediate adult class, I couldn’t get the word “novel” to not sound like “lovel”. At 9:30, I took my USB drive to Joe in his office so he could take it to a printing company tomorrow to have a first copy of the new brochure printed out. Henry and a computer repair person were also in the office trying to fix the computer system there. A single computer is serving 4 terminals and the system has been working miserably, probably because it’s running on a meager 512MB of RAM. How it ever even worked in the first place with such limited memory is surprising.

Wednesday: 7-11-07

My external computer speaker set started working again today after being damaged from the Great Flood of Three Weeks Ago. I had planned on going to buy another one today, but first of all just decided to check the old one one last time beforehand. My original assumption must have finally proven true: that the speakers would work again after the particle board casing of the subwoofer fully dried out. It must have just taken three weeks for it to fully dry. So, that saves about $20.

After sitting in my office for a couple hours and editing video, I went with Janet to work at the school’s booth at Merry Mart for two hours. Traffic was pretty slow at this time, so I spiced things up by attaching about a dozen brochures all over my clothing. Brochures were sticking out of all my pockets, clipped to my tie, stuck under my belt and stuck under the collar of my shirt. I stood really still and some people who weren’t paying attention thought I was a manikin. These people jumped in fright when I moved to hand out a brochure. Hillarious. We also walked around asking people to remove brochures from me. Plastering myself with brochures was the most success we had giving them away all afternoon.

A new teacher was supposed to have dinner at the school with us at 5 o’clock, but as usual, they didn’t show up. At least this one called. About half of our teacher interviewees fail to appear it seems. That’s more money for me, but eventually there will be too many classes for one or two people to teach.

I taught a new beginning level adult class from 7-9 o’clock, which has 10 students and consists of everything from a 13 year-old to a retired professor. Three or four of the students were also in my last beginning-level class. Everyone seemed happy with the class tonight.

My coworker Maria battles me every day now. We drew pictures of each other this morning; her as a boy and me as a girl. She taped her picture to my back and I stuck hers high up on the wall where she couldn’t reach. She punches, pinches and generally attacks with every chance she gets. She’s the top-selling salesperson and is always full of energy.

After the school closed, I went with Joe and Annie to Joe’s office, where we watched some to the new videos I’ve been working on. Joe also had a sample copy from a printing company of the new brochure I worked so long on. Everyone that sees it seems to laugh, but it can’t be that bad.

I often buy canned beers now from a small store near my apartment after work. When they are out of my normal brand, called YanJing, I let them throw in other random kinds. Last night, they gave me something called “Special Beer”, with a design that looks kind of like Budwiser. Last night’s Special Beer tasted like stale fruit juice and tonight’s tasted strongly like chocolate. So is the “specialness” random flavors or is there something wrong?

Here is the text of an email I received today from the young guy who helped me pay my Internet bill yesterday. Anyone can feel free to also post evidence of my Chinese skills online……..

I took you to pay a net fee yesterday. Not busy now?
I am very sorry to help you to also increase trouble to you yesterday.
Because my English isn't good.
So I want to study English.
I don't know to have what English . Hope to obtain your help .
The girl's English that conversed yesterday is very good.
Sincerely hope oneself can attain her level like .
The time which hopes to be next time to meet with you can use fluently English and your confabulation .
Also hope your Chinese language can obtain a progress .
I am very happy to can know you and that Chinese girl .
Believing her is a beautiful girl .Hope to still have to be at the opportunity for meeting .
Hope you to are the whole smoothly . nice to meet you again .

Thursday: 7-12-07

The bright blue skies of the past two days were gone this morning, but heavy smog that moved in overnight left the air feeling nice and cool. A rooster in the “zoo” outside my bedroom window started “crowing” at 3AM. I say “crowing” because it seems to have had its voice box deactivated somehow. Instead of the normal awful screaming crow of a rooster, it sounds like someone has put rubber bands around its neck, and maybe they have. It seems to be aware of its condition because it rarely even tries to crow. But, when it does get in the mood, the sound is still loud enough to wake me up. When I heard the odd sound for the first time a few weeks ago, I had no idea what it possibly could have been.

Thursday: 7-12-07

I cooked hamburgers for an early lunch and then went outside and talked with my neighbors in the courtyard for a few minutes before going to work. From the sentence above, you might have already guessed that today was pretty average despite for the fact that I’m in China. The main part of my work this afternoon involved adding Chinese subtitles to the school’s promotional video.
The driver took Joe and I to the Xierqi subway station at 4:30, then we took the train to eat at Mr. Pizza in Wudaokou. I left at 6 o’clock and Joe stayed to wait for Nancy, the patent attorney that we ate at the same place with two weeks ago. The subway was so crowded on the way back that not all the people would fit on at every stop. Closing the heavy doors on the squeezing crowds solved the problem. I was lucky enough to get a seat for the bus ride back from the subway station to the school.
My intermediate adult class has two new female students now. Two of the four male students failed to show. I heard that one of the other teachers asked the student named Al what he did for a living and got a strange answer recently. Al is an animal husbandry professor at the Agriculture University, and his answer to the question was “Sex with animals”. It wasn’t a joke, but rather just a poor choice of English.

Friday: 7-13-07

I realized another casualty this morning from the Great Flood of Three Weeks Ago; the power adapter for my Bluetooth earpiece, which I use to make phone calls on Skype. So, I thought it was $50 down the drain because this adapter is not replaceable with anything generic. But, I was later able to clean the tiny contacts on the plug with a tiny sunglass screwdriver.

I cooked two extra hamburgers for lunch and took them to Maria at the school, because she had requested them yesterday. Her and Mandy also asked me to take pictures of them and Photoshop in a blue background so they can use the pictures to register for some kind of test.

Beginning to edit the 4th of July celebration video footage was my project of the day. I also uploaded my other 3 videos of the school onto the school’s website and started making a page for them. For dinner, Annie ordered me a Korean rice dish instead of the normal boring food from the donkey restaurant. A new American teacher named Yves joined us for dinner, who calls himself Steve. He appears to be in his late 30’s and has blonde-dyed hair. He taught the Beginning level adult class and had me spend 30 minutes going over the material with him beforehand.

The driver delivered 5000 copies of our new brochures at 9 o’clock. So, my first major graphic design project is completed. It was mostly a success except for the fact that the printing company didn’t lighten some colors that they were supposed to.

Saturday: 7-14-07

The monkey was out of its cage this morning. The “handler”, a man who lives in the apartment building across the courtyard, had it chained to a fence and it just sat there picking at its fur like it wasn’t the least bit excited. The “handler” usually sits by the “zoo” a few mornings a week with a woman. He is tall and muscular with long hair and a beer belly and he wears the same black tanktop every day. I saw him petting the monkey’s head, so I thought I would also go out and give it a try, but the monkey was already in its cage by the time I got out there. So, I spent a few minutes talking with Mr. Zhong and his wife about their strange vegetables growing in the courtyard before going to work. On a basic level, life here isn’t really much different than a suburb of any American city. Instead of people always focusing on their lawns and the kids’ soccer practice, these people spend their days thinking about the “zoo” and the strange vegetables they grow in all the courtyards.
I went to the school’s booth at the supermarket at noon only to find that nobody was there. I won’t stand there and hand out brochures myself because I can’t speak enough Chinese to any customers who are really interested. Joe had called and asked that I go there to meet another employee, but it seems there was some miscommunication among the staff.
So, I walked around the supermarket and outside for a while, then I went home after nobody had shown up at the booth after 45 minutes. At 3 o’clock, Henry called to say he was at the booth so I returned. My pretty ex-coworker Suzie happened to be shopping at the market and we talked for about an hour by the booth. She even offered to cook me some dinner at her dorm, but I just got something from KFC because I had to be back at the school to prepare for tonight’s classes. The American named David taught the children’s class tonight, and I taught the Intermediate adults. I usually teach the children on Saturday, but David had agreed to come so I could be free to teach the other class. David prefers children and that’s a good thing because I really prefer adults.
After the school closed, I took my camcorder over to the whip scene on a nearby street. The whip scene is the mostly deserted 4-lane divided street where a few dozen people gather every night and snap whips as loud as big firecrackers. I’ve passed this scene every night for the last two months on my short walk home from work, but had never walked the 50 feet down the other street to check it out more closely. Turns out that a whole whip club meets here every night. The group has about a dozen whips and everyone takes turns. Some big muscular men stand stoically as the whip explodes all around them, and some tiny women struggle to get a few soft pops without accidentally whipping themselves. Most of the whips are about 8 feet long, made out of chains and fabric. The first 4 or 5 feet is chain and the end is fabric. At times there were up to six people snapping the whips at the same time while one yelled chants to keep them in unison, but mostly, it was just disorganized snapping.
I was so enjoying watching the whip scene that I went to get a beer and came back to watch some more. Walking back towards my apartment at 10 o’clock, a group of 3 young guys sitting outside at a table at the store/restaurant by the south gate of my apartment complex invited me to join them. They were 17, 18 and 20, all without jobs. None spoke more English than “How old are you”? Our Chinese conversation was pretty crude, but I did understand that they like skinny women.

Sunday: 7-15-07

Yesterday, my coworker Henry requested hamburgers from my freezer stash for lunch today, so I cooked them up and we ate in the main office at noon. I ran out of buns last week and was using hot dog buns, but today was out of those also so I had to buy some strange bun-shaped bread from a local shop. Not bad, though.

At work, I started designing a photo album system for the company’s website. We needed something customized, so I downloaded a free album system called JAlbum and modified the JPEG and GIF image files from one of the existing skins. Pictures of butterflies and daisies became the logo. This was an experimental approach that worked quite beautifully.

For dinner, I had the staff order me beef dumplings from a restaurant that wasn’t the donkey restaurant. The American teacher David showed up for dinner not knowing that his Sunday children’s class had ended last night. He talked of his acting career as we ate, which included filming for five weeks in Inner Mongolia with Dolf Lundren. His other various jobs included donning priest’s robes and conducting a wedding ceremony. Apparently, some Chinese people want a western-style wedding and will pay random foreigners to put on some robes and play the part. Good one.

In the evening, the driver dropped Lisa, Janet and myself off at Merry Mart to work at the school’s promotional booth there. We had great success and nearly always had a crowd of people stopped to speak with us. One middle-aged woman, named Lisa, chatted for nearly an hour. She owns a software company and offered to drive my family around in her big car when they come to visit in November. Sounds good.

Leaving Merry Mart at 9 o’clock, we ran into Henry riding his bike down the street, then we saw Janet on the bus. It seems that I’m always running into to people in the neighborhood now. A woman who works at the police station had recognized me earlier at the booth tonight, and I ran into one of my students on the bus yesterday.
Back at the school, I ordered 25 lamb kabobs from the field vendor to share with Annie and the driver. My ex-coworker Denver happened to be dining out in the field. Joe taught a one-on-one class from 6 till 10 o’clock. Leaving the school with him, he told me that it’s illegal for regular foreigners to convert more than $85,000 per year into Chinese currency. Such regulations seem to make no sense on the surface, but I’m no economist. What I have realized is that doing business here is a huge elaborate labyrinth for foreigners.

Monday: 7-16-07

Henry and I took the bus to the sprawling nearby software park this afternoon, where we set out trying to find some corporate clients who would like to provide English training to their employees. This area is beautifully landscaped and features companies like Oracle.

The job wasn’t easy because every building is well-guarded to keep unwanted people out, including salespeople. It was like a game of cat and mouse and the cat usually won. However, the first building we entered was the exception. Henry is a good talker and convinced the young male guard at the door to let us walk around upstairs, where many different company’s offices were located. The receptionist at the first door we entered allowed us to speak with a marketing director. She escorted us into a conference room, then someone brought us cold water before the marketing director entered, a pretty woman in her 30’s. Henry spoke with her for 20 minutes and she agreed to come check out the school in the evening.

So, the rest of the day was hot and our beginner’s luck didn’t continue, but I always enjoy working with Henry. Going from building to building, some had guards and some didn’t. Some guards opened doors for us and other said to get lost. One building that we did manage to enter was a disappointment after we realized that each company inside required a keycard even to get access to the front desks.

The software park is only about half completed and has a beautiful park surrounding a lake at one end. The park has a vast variety of plant life and great landscaping, but almost no people. We considered taking a walk around the lake “marketing research”, and that turned out to be true because we discovered the “secret” back door of a luxurious office building under construction that a new company was just moving into. Inside, vast atriums were filed with the music of recorded birds and the center boasted a real indoor lawn, trees and waterfall. A guard stepped in front of us after we’d entered, but Henry simply pointed at the front desk and walked past him. The HR director was not available, but the staff did take some brochures and a business card.

Our next stop, an IBM building was equally weakly guarded. The security man didn’t notice us because he was chatting with some people, then one of the keycard-access doors malfunctioned and let us in. The staff accepted some information, but then followed us out to check what was wrong with the door.

Walking back on the mostly-deserted highway that circles the software park, a wonderful man and woman in a van stopped to offer a ride, even turning the van’s rear air-conditioning on full-blast. We have no idea who these people were, but they took us to another nearby large company that they knew of just on the outside of the software park. Henry was also able to talk his way past the security guard at this company, called HuaBei(sp). Inside, a couple guys working at the vast circular main desk were initially unresponsive, but again, Henry worked some magic and was able to get the phone number for the HR director. Stopping to have a Coke break, he was also able to convince some people at a credit card booth to display some of the school’s brochures.

Our last stop was at an office of Proctor and Gamble, at which we were told to talk to headquarters downtown somewhere. We had dinner at the school after a bus ride back. At 6:30, the woman from the first software company came in, but I think she might be more interested in training for herself, not her company. I had a beginning adult class at 7, then went to the main office afterwards to collect pay from the past two weeks from Joe.

Walking outside with Henry afterwards, we came across a funeral procession of several hundred people. There were no cars, only people. About half the crowd was just random people following along the sidewalk. The dead person’s ashes were in a covered wagon pulled by a bicycle. About a dozen men were playing various instruments. According to Henry, this is a very common tradition in the south, but not Beijing. The procession continued for another few hundred feet, then the covered wagon and a branch with white rags were ignited. The fire quickly grew to about 15 feet and the crowd quickly dispersed after it died down a few minutes later. Some strange men tried to talk to me as I watched the fire die. Some of them spoke an unknown dialect that I couldn’t catch a word of. The way they were looking me up and down seemed a bit suspicious, but I think they were just from some small town where there are no foreigners. Although, carrying my laptop and a pocket full of money didn’t seem like a good idea, so I quickly said goodbye after speaking a few words.

Tuesday: 7-17-07

Henry and I rode our bikes back to the software park today to continue our marketing effort. We had taken the bus yesterday, but biking is more efficient. Although, the extreme humidity made it pretty uncomfortable.

Wandering through one of the many vast buildings, we came across a cafeteria where about 500 employees were eating a buffet. The cost was only $1.25, so we got some food and found two of the few remaining seats. Two other guys sitting at our table chatted with us about the school for a while and took some information to share with their colleagues. The cafeteria walls were white and bare, so we asked the manager about advertising. He gave us the nearby address of the property management offices of the software park.

Setting off to look for this address, a group of kids on the street screamed “Hello”, so I gave them brochures. The property management office staff was very receptive and a manager there agreed to speak with his boss about arranging an advertising deal. There are tens of thousands of middle-class employees at this software park working just a few minutes away from the school, so it’s our best target.

The driver took Joe and I to the nearest Mcdonalds at 5 o’clock, which actually isn’t all that near, unfortunately. Joe ate 2 Big Macs, 2 Quarter Pounders, a McChicken, large fry and a large Coke.

Arriving by taxi back to the school, my friend Simon was there for a job interview with Joe. My intermediate adult class started at 7 and we watched a video about Washington DC that was so difficult a new student quit. That student, Rita, is the woman that Henry and I met at the software park yesterday. She decided to switch to the basic level class.
Simon was still at the school after the class. He had taken the job and was supposed to be back at 9 AM. Since he lives so far away, I invited him to stay at my apartment. We ate some lamb kabobs outside at the store/restaurant nearest to the gate of my complex. I had a beer but Simon didn’t because he just became a Muslim.

Wednesday: 7-18-07

A strong storm went through about 6AM this morning, briefly knocking out the power a couple times. Simon quietly got up from his couch bed at 9 o’clock and went to work, leaving a video titled, “How to Tie a Windsor Knot” open on my computer. He was at the school sporting a nicely done Windsor and a suit jacket when I arrived.
The morning’s storm took much of yesterday’s terrible humidity with it, but the beating sun made for even more excessive heat.
Two new children’s classes started at 2 o’clock, one for beginner’s and one for intermediate’s. Both of these are taught by other teachers; one by David, who co-taught the last children’s class with me, and the other by a guy named Davis. Davis and David have both recently spent a lot of time living in California. This was my first time meeting Davis, who’s probably about 30 years old. Speaking with him after the class, he said, “Even any of my friends in the hood would be shocked to see some of the behavior around here”. Well, I must agree with that, especially the common practice of old men picking noses and closely examining what comes out.
I was feeling quite exhausted and sick by the time my adult class ended at nine. I’d waken up with a slightly sore throat and things never got any better throughout the day.
At home, I sat up watching a documentary about Chernobyl on YouTube. According to it, the accident was mostly the result of a single senior engineer that directed his staff to perform a test in a dangerous way. This worried one of the staff members so much that he refused to continue, so the engineer had someone else take his place at the control panel. There were only 4 or five people in the control room, all of whom had no idea what was actually taking place in the reactor core itself. An engineer walking by the core was the first to notice the problem. He was horrified to see steam pressure so powerful that it was lifting the core’s 1,660 800lb control rods out of their sockets. Two explosions quickly resulted, the second of which was powerful enough to blow the reactor’s massive cap off, which landed several hundred yards away. Without the cab, the radioactive cloud of smoke and dust was free to enter the atmosphere. Most of the engineers working that night died a few days later, continuing to proclaim their innocence till the end. The senior engineer lived several more years and laid blame on the government.

Thursday: 7-19-07

Simon was just arriving at the school at the same time as I, so we had lunch together at the donkey restaurant, where he ate all of his meal and a good portion of mine that I didn’t want.
He left at 1 o’clock with the driver to make copies needed for the school’s classes and didn’t return for 9 hours because the copy shop was waiting on preferred customers first. Yes, 9 hours.

Life at the school really has changed this week since we started two new afternoon children’s classes. The place is full of activity now as the kids run around on their breaks and more and more people come in to sign up for classes. The school really is tiny, so it’s a full house all the time. We finally have enough classes that I had to make a class schedule in order to keep up with all my support and teaching duties. Even if I’m not the teacher of a class, I still must provide the material to the teacher who is teaching. This just requires knowing what papers and what DVD’s go with each day’s class, but most classes have fifteen separate days worth of material, so this gets a bit confusing now.

I started showing the movie Garfield in my intermediate adult class and everyone thought it was too difficult. Simon still hadn’t arrived back with the copies by the time the school closed at 9 o’clock. Instead of waiting at the school, I had lamb kabobs and a beer across the street.

Henry got a customer to come in and pay tuition at 9:30, which meant that Joe had to give him $7. Joe had said that anybody who signed up a customer tonight would get $7 on the spot. Seven dollars is equal to 50 yuan, a respectable amount for average Chinese people. The customer that Henry signed up makes less than $1000/year, so paying $250 for a month’s worth of classes seems outrageous.

We couldn’t go home till Simon got back with the copies, so Joe, Henry and I went back to the office and waited there. The driver arrived with Simon and the thousands of copies just after 10 o’clock. After I went home, Simon called at 11 o’clock and said he was lost. I retrieved him from the west gate of the complex and he slept on the coach again.

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