Thursday: 3-1-07
After two weeks, today was finally check-out day at the Leo Hostel. I’d considered staying more nights until the hot water came out of my shower as only a slow drip this morning. The private rooms at this place are really a rip off considering they are the same price as some other much classier hotels in the city.
So, after check-out, I put my bags into the hotel’s luggage storage room and went off to attend a job interview on the city’s north side. I’d hoped to say goodbye to the few friends I’d made at the hotel, but they were nowhere to be seen. A chilly drizzle was falling outside and the directions to the job interview were worthless. After walking around helplessly for an hour, I finally gave up and had lunch at a Mcdonalds. The school administrator I was supposed to meet with had not even given a phone number. An Internet café may have provided some help, but there were none to be found. It sometimes seems like there is an Internet café at every corner in this country’s cities, so this figures.
Getting back on the subway, a red-haired Caucasian woman in a red coat was standing on a platform. As I suspected, she lived nearby and spoke Chinese. She was very helpful and asked a security guard about the place I had been looking for. It turns out that I’d walked just within a block or less of it, but it was now almost lunch time and I didn’t figure anybody would be there.
Returning to my hotel at noon, I checked my email only to find that the interview had been changed till 3 o’clock. The email offered no explanation and made no mention of the previously agreed to 10 o’clock time.
I now collected my bags from the storage room and went out to find a hotel nearer to where Johanna lives on the city’s north side. Instead of fighting the public transportation crowds with a big suitcase, I decided to take a taxi. When the taxi driver got to Johanna’s area, I accidentally got off at the wrong spot and was helplessly lost for the second time today. Another cab took me on to a subway station nearest to her apartment, but the hotel prices there seemed a bit expensive, so I took a bus closer to where she lives. Of course, I missed the stop and had to lug my bags back a quarter mile in the other direction. There just so happened to be a brand new Motel 8 across the street from her apartment that costs under $25 per night, less than what we were paying for the crappy room at the Leo Hostel. The building is so new that workers are still putting the finishing touches on the exterior.
My room here smells as if it has never been stayed in before and one of the chairs is still covered in plastic wrap. The time was now after three o’clock and I had to be at another interview, so I quickly went out to look for a taxi after check-in. The drivers didn’t seem to know the location of the hotel I was headed to, so the man I was supposed to meet spoke with one in Chinese over the phone. The hotel was the Lido Holiday Inn, a luxurious and famous place. The fame comes from the fact that it was the first hotel in Beijing to allow foreigners after the country’s economic reforms began in 1978.
This was the nicest building I’d seen since entering China 3 weeks ago and I instantly felt that I might be underdressed for the interview. Dress hadn’t been a problem before because almost all the previous interviews were a joke, but now my jeans and sweatshirt were seriously out of place. Sure enough, the interviewer showed up in a nice black suit and looked down at my clothes immediately after we’d shaken hands, so I quickly said, “Please excuse the informal dress”, and went on to briefly describe my hectic day and the fact that I’d been to a lot of really bad interviews over the past few days. The man then laughed and didn’t seem to give the issue a second thought. His name is Tom and he’s a Moroccan that has lived in China for 6 years. We went to a Starbucks in the hotel and he bought me a coffee before sitting down to talk. He went on to explain that I was applying for a job teaching business at an accredited college. I’d already read this in his emails, but after the lies and stupidity at my previous interviews, I hadn’t really believed it yet because I didn’t think a college would actually find me qualified to teach. It turns out that the university operates colleges in 20 cities and badly needs a teacher at its Shenzen campus before classes start in just a few days. According to Tom, I meet the minimum qualification because I’ve studied business and have management experience in a big corporation(Schnucks). It seems that I just might have gotten really lucky here. The pay and benefits are quite a bit better than anything else I’ve been offered. Pretty much every possible expense is covered.
After Tom felt confident I could do the job, he invited me to the school’s Beijing campus, which was just a short walk away. It consisted of classrooms and administrative offices inside a single building. The facility was small, but very clean and modern. I was shown the classrooms and introduced to the vice president of the school before Tom took me to the office and described a few more details of the job. According to him, the only possible stumbling block to my employment could be obtaining the proper work visa. The Chinese government usually requires that teachers have a bachelor’s degree, but he thinks that an exception can be made since I’m about to graduate and have already completed all the business classes associated with my degree.
Next, I took a cab and a couple subways to meet Johanna at Walmart, the same one I’d bought an electric razor at two days ago. After a few minutes of shopping, we ate dinner at a restaurant in the store before going back to the area of her apartment by subway and bus. I estimate that the double length bus had 200 people jammed on it. The doors nearly closed on us.
Back at the hotel, I figured there must be some kind of Internet connection in such a newly built American owned hotel. Wireless access wasn’t happening, but I discovered an Ethernet outlet hidden away behind the entertainment center that the TV and refrigerator was sitting on. At first, I figured it must not work if they were hiding it behind two hundred pounds of immobile furniture, but I was wrong. It just must be that the place is so new that nobody has complained yet.
Johanna came to the hotel later and we watched some terrible English language television. During a talk show, a bank administrator was the guest. He was so boring that the host was caught yawning on camera several times. This is typical of the English programming. The news can be especially amusing.

Friday: March 2, 2007 – Getting a job
Getting even a short distance in this city can be a problem without a helicopter, and even if I could afford one, private aircraft are not allowed in China. I had a 10:30 interview with the school I’d been unable to find for yesterday’s scheduled interview. Getting there by public transportation would have required a bus and subway ride, but I gave up on that plan after unsuccessfully waiting on the bus for 10 minutes. An hour seemed like more than enough time to go the relatively short distance, but not in this insanity.
In order to not miss the interview a second time or be late, I had a cab driver take me right to the building. I’d gone down the same street yesterday, so I was kind of surprised to see that the school’s logo is printed on the front of the building in giant letters. The building is a large office tower/exhibition center and the school, called ABC, is on the third floor. Even though I was dressed a bit better than yesterday, seeing the facilities instantly made me feel underdressed again. The school’s lobby is a very realistic looking artificial forest with a waterfall, bar and small fish pond. Two women met with me after I’d admired this lobby for a few minutes. After a few questions about my background and teaching philosophies, the women took me on a short tour of the rest of the school. Everything else was just as nice as the lobby, and there is even a decently equipped fitness room for the teachers.
I was next led into the office of the school’s manager, who asked the same questions the other two women earlier had before offering a contract right then and there. It was so far the best deal I’d encountered at a Beijing school, offering an $800/month salary, a $200 living allowance, and airfare. A major drawback was the fact that many of the classes are taught on nights and weekends, with the weekends being the busiest time of the week.
Despite the unfavorable hours, I was almost ready to sign up. The only things holding me back were yesterday’s potential college teaching offer and an interview with a different college at 1 o’clock. So, I told the manager that I would make a decision by the time the school closed this evening, which gave me time to discuss and consider the options with the college employers.
I wasn’t about to go to another interview feeling underdressed, so I walked to the nearby Wal-Mart to buy something better-looking. I already had a decent sweater on, but needed pants and shoes. The pants weren’t a problem, but absolutely not a single pair of shoes in the store would fit me. Of all places, it seems that Wal-Mart would be catering to the foreign bigfoot market, but that’s just not the case. My existing shoes would have to do, but the one with the missing tongue was boldly displaying the white sock underneath, so I bought some black socks to mask the problem.
Again not wanting to risk being late for what could be a good interview, I took a cab. The meeting location was at the college I’d interviewed with Tom yesterday. This is a bit confusing, but today’s interview was actually with another college across the street. We just met at this school because it was an easy location for me to find. Strangely, Tom had set up today’s interview. I don’t quite understand why he would want me to interview with another school, but my theory is that he doesn’t think his school will accept my teaching inexperience. By referring me to another school, he will probably get a handsome referral payment.
A middle aged woman named Kristi met me at exactly 1 o’clock and we went across the street to the Foreign Language Department’s office at the other school, called the Beijing Institute of Economic Development. This school has a real campus with about 5000 students, and also consists of a second campus on the city’s south side. There were six office desks and a large window in the spacious Foreign Language office. I was introduced to the Foreign Language dean and the office assistant before beginning discussions with Kristi.
So, this is the job I’ll be taking. It’s unclear yet whether I’ll be able to get all the benefits I want, but the pay is over $1000/month and will allow me to write on future job resumes that I taught at the Beijing Institute of Economic Management. The reason for the lack of clarity on the benefits is, again, my inexperience. According to Kristi, she may not be able to convince the school’s administrators to give me full time status. Full time status means that I get an apartment, airfare and holiday pay over the 8 weeks in summer when school is not in session. But, part time pay is nearly $20 per hour, so it adds up to about the same amount as the full-time salary and benefits. The potential major drawback is that part-timers don’t get health insurance, so I’ll just have to be careful to stay away from high risk sports and high alcohol content drinks. But, according to Kristi, there is still a very good chance that I’ll be accepted for full time. It may take two weeks before we know the outcome.
So, in the meantime, I’ll start teaching classes of 40-50 students on Monday afternoon. Kristi and I spent the next two hours reviewing my schedule and the class’s textbooks. Off days include Wednesdays, Saturdays and Sundays. I’ll teach for 3 hours in the afternoon on Mondays and Thursdays. Fridays are just three hours in the morning. The only really hard working days will be Tuesdays, when I’ll work for both 3 hours in the morning and three hours in the afternoon, with a 1 hour 45 minute break for lunch.
As for what to teach the students, this is largely up to me. The classes all involve either basic English conversation or business English conversation, so the grades will come from class participation and an oral final exam. There will be no take home written assignments, which means no papers to grade. As for the curriculum and the final, this is almost entirely up to me. Kristi just wants me to use the textbooks as a basic guideline. Interesting.
So, this two-hour conversation with Kristi was my entire crash course in teaching 20 classes per week. She’s already even given me grading forms for each class with all the student’s names. Every form is in Chinese, so it’s an opportunity to both work and learn at the same time. This all sounds a bit overwhelming, but not to worry because I will be provided with a student “monitor” for each class. A monitor is basically just an unpaid teaching assistant. This will be an adventure.
The school is not in a very convenient location when considering its distance from the nearest subway stop. It took nearly a one hour bus ride to get to the nearest station. The total travel time back to my hotel just a few miles away was over an hour and a half. The last leg of the trip, a ride on the dreaded bus 607, was the worst part. I feel sorry for Johanna because this bus is her main method of transportation to get to the nearest subway stop. Today’s ride was even worse because the brakes were catching, sending all 200+ passengers falling over each other with each stop.
I now returned to my hotel and Johanna came over an hour later. We took a walk down the street looking for a supermarket to buy some snacks. It didn’t take but a block to come to a massive Wu Mart Hypermarket, shopping of all kinds on several different levels. The food level was a madhouse of hundreds of shoppers, presumably because of the upcoming Monday holiday, called the Lantern Festival. The traditional Lantern Festival food is sweet dumplings, which look like little powdered sugar doughnut balls. Sure enough, the store was selling thousands of these little things, like probably every other supermarket serving the billion and a half other Chinese in this country.

Saturday: 3-3-07
I checked out of the Motel 8 at noon today and took my bags to the street looking for a taxi. A woman in a nice black sports sedan tried to get me inside like she was operating a taxi, but I got a real taxi to take me to the university I took the job with yesterday.
For some reason, the university operates a hotel on its campus. The school administrators said yesterday that it is for the purpose of hosting government officials, but that seems excessive. The building is about 30 years old and probably hasn’t ever seen any remodeling, but it’s classy and has been taken good care of. The large marble lobby has a fountain that’s turned off. Maybe they only turn it on when the government guests come. The whole building is abandoned and it seems that the only other guest is right across the hallway from me on the third floor.
So, the staff are of course very helpful because they don’t have anything else to do. A girl walked outside in the rain to show me how to drop my laundry off at the campus laundry facility. It rained absolutely all day long and I borrowed an umbrella from the lobby for a $2 refundable deposit.
The sidewalks in this area are a muddy mess, maybe because of construction, or maybe they’ve been that way for years, it’s hard to tell. There are a few construction cones lying around, but it doesn’t look like any work has been done in a long time. Due to the Lido Holiday Inn being so close, there are many businesses catering to foreigners. A gang of whores ran out of a building and chased me down the sidewalk. About 5 of them were standing behind a door and they burst through as I passed. One managed to grab hold of my shirt before I could bolt away, but her grip was loose.
At a nearby restaurant, I struck up a conversation with an American couple named Jeff and Jennifer, I think. They work recruiting Chinese assistant coaches to foreign sports teams that come to China, I think. I walked another block and went shopping at an indoor market. A blanket was suspended over the front door, which I pushed open with my umbrella and almost stabbed a guy in the eye who was sitting in a chair on the other side.
This market was located in what appeared to be an old warehouse. It was on two levels and absolutely every one of the hundred or so vendors harassed me as much as possible. I ended up buying a pair of dress shoes, sunglasses and a bag for my laptop computer. One shoe vendor had quoted her first price as $60 and then lowered it to $10 as I walked away. Bargaining at the markets is always an experience.
At 4 o’clock, I embarked on a 2 hour long public transportation adventure to meet Johanna at a subway station. A bus took 30 minutes to go a single block, then I got off at the wrong place and had to walk 30 minutes to get to the nearest subway station. Even after arriving at the correct station, it took me 20 minutes to find Johanna there.
Our original plan had been to find a certain large marketplace so I could buy some dress clothes, but neither of us really felt like doing that considering the long journey here, the rain and the cold air. So, we ended up getting back on the subway and going to the hostel I’d stayed at for my first two weeks in town. The reason for coming back here was that I’d left the painting I’d purchased from the house artist. The painting was still safe in the luggage storage room.
For dinner, we ate fries and pizza at the 365 Inn across the street, then went to the same massage parlor that we’d been to a few days ago, also in the same area. Last time at the parlor, we’d had regular massages, but we just had the foot massage tonight. We were put into a big dark room with a few dozen beds and two employees brought buckets of nearly-boiling water for us to put our feet in. The foot massage was a bit uncomfortable at first and we both burst out laughing on a couple occasions.
This lasted 30 minutes, then more employees came and started trying to give us other kinds of massages. We decided to also try the head massage, which I loved and Johanna hated. I actually fell asleep at the end. It was still raining at 10 o’clock when we got in a cab to leave the area. This entire city drains very poorly and large amounts of water pool everywhere, even on the freeway loops. One spot had water about a foot deep and we saw the aftermath of a minor car/taxi collision.
(I was not meant to possess the painting, as I left it in the cab, hopelessly losing it forever this time. It’s like another variation of those horror movies where weird things happen with paintings. The plan had been to send it to my family, but two failed attempts at mailing it last week resulted in this.)

Sunday: 3-4-07
Constant car horn honking woke me up at 8 o’clock this morning. The couple thousand students who live on this campus were attempting to all return from their long vacation at the same time. The school’s narrow lanes and small parking lot were a massive traffic jam of enraged drivers. Worsening matters, about 3 inches of snow had fallen overnight and everything was a soggy slippery mess.
Johanna and I made the mistake of getting into a taxi in the parking lot before we realized exactly how bad the traffic jam was. The driver started the meter immediately but we didn’t even get off the campus for another 15 minutes.
The standing water in the streets was even worse now. At one location, city workers were using small buckets to remove several thousand gallons from a street. We went to a clothing market in the Sanlitun area of the city so I could purchase some dress clothing to start my new teaching job with tomorrow. Since I don’t look much older than a student, I at least want to dress nicely to give myself some credibility.
This market was one of those multi-story madhouses of psychotic salespeople operating hundreds of small booths. We first had lunch on the 5th floor restaurant level. I quickly lost interest in this kind of shopping because it seemed like it could take forever and it was difficult to try things on. Walking around the surrounding area, the only place that was selling comparable merchandise was an upscale department store where the products were far too expensive.
Back at the market, I ended up buying three dress shirts, two dress pants, gloves, a belt and a coat, all for about $100. Not a bad deal, but I probably could have gotten better. As always, every salesperson starts with a price that is inflated by about five times. One young lady started with a very reasonable price so I gave her a $2 tip. She had let me try pants on by holding up a blanket over the front of her booth, which is the common method for most of the vendors. I’ve got to find a large store where things are priced reasonably.
Johanna and I had another meal on the food level at 3 o’clock before going our separate ways; she by taxi and me by bus. Back on the university campus, only about two cars were left over from the massive traffic jam earlier. If I was a student, I think I’d have waited till the afternoon to return.
The fireworks picked up again today because of the Lantern Festival holiday. Despite the bad weather, the air was filled with explosions emanating from every direction. It was again a full-fledged war by sundown, with the sky lit up like constant lighting. The explosions became so constant that they began to sound something like loud rushing water outside the hotel window.
My only other venture out was to buy a notebook and some food. The temperature outside had fallen below freezing and the slushy mess outside was turning into something even worse. There will surely be lots of falls on the first day of school, but hopefully not for me.

Monday: 3-5-07 – First and last day on the job
What a day, in so many ways. The woman who hired me for the job called at 10 o’clock to ask that I meet her in the Foreign Language office. There, she offered a shared room in the foreign student dorms so I could move out of the hotel and save money.
Since my first class started at one-thirty, this turned into a very rushed and chaotic move. The foreign student dorms are just about 100 meters from the hotel in a five-story building. Surprisingly, my “room” was actually a full one-bedroom apartment that was shared with a Korean student named Sim. Sim’s eyes and face were all red and he refused to shake my hand in the fear that the “disease” could spread. He only fluently speaks Chinese and Korean, and my pathetic Chinese is just about as good as his English.
I loved observing my students, but teaching was a miserable, miserable experience. A very deep belief that Chinese college students are more disciplined than Western ones was forever dispelled. All the classrooms have computers and projectors, so I started my first class with a Powerpoint presentation that briefly introduced myself, outlined the grading methods, discussed the need not to be shy when speaking and offered some ideas about discussions.
Since my attendance sheets were in Chinese, the classroom “monitor” read the Chinese names as I wrote down each student’s English name next to it. Things really started to fall apart when I tried to get the class interested in the speaking activities I’d prepared. The first one involved having each student tell a little bit about themselves, but after just one student’s introduction, I could tell that nobody else in the room would be able to hear. Not only was the room big, but there was a constant background murmur of about half the class whispering to each other. So, I tried to get people talking about what they had done over the long holiday break, but barely anyone had a comment. Everyone was either staring at me or not paying any attention at all.
I hadn’t wanted to start teaching anything from the textbook on the first day, but there was still an hour left in class and I didn’t see any other option. Things were initially quite promising as the whole class unexpectedly and simultaneously repeated a sentence I had read, but the success was short lived. If they weren’t repeating sentences, then there was chatter chaos and the rest of the class couldn’t hear what I was saying. My attempts to quell the chatter were only successfully for seconds at a time.
Twenty minutes before class was set to end, I gave up and asked that everyone work in groups as I walked around the room to answer questions. Nobody had anything to ask and I don’t think any studying was getting done, but this did give me the opportunity to speak with a student in the back who seemed especially bright. During the whole class, he had been the only one to raise his hand with a comment, and he seemed to be speaking with a slight American accent. Sure enough, he had lived in Southern California for five years with his grandparents when they operated a restaurant there. His name is Simon and he offered a wealth of advice about teaching the class, which is exactly the kind of information I was looking for. It just didn’t seem possible for a non-bilingual teacher to teach a class with such limited speaking and listening skills.
My next class started at 3:30 and I took Simon’s advice and ditched the Powerpoint presentation all together. Still, my attempts to spur the class into discussion were almost entirely unsuccessful, but there was at least hope from a large group of mostly girls sitting at the front center of the room. I again resorted to reading from the textbook and played the conversation CD that came with it. The girls in the front paid attention the whole time and even quietly answered some questions. But again, the constant chatter was ruining everything and I gave up 30 minutes early in order to walk around the room and speak with more students individually about different possible teaching methods. One of the attentive girls told me to “junk” the book completely and develop all new material.
Simon was waiting for me after class and invited me to come talk with him. Turns out he has an American girlfriend and a very diverse interesting group of friends from international diplomatic families in the city. He lives in the same foreign student dorm that I do, on the first floor in a three bedroom apartment with 13 other guys. He only pays about $20 month for rent.
After speaking for a while here, we went on to have dinner and coffee at a nearby Mcdonalds, then walked into a real-estate company to enquire about apartments in the area that I could possibly rent. We went to a nearby Internet café for an hour before returning to the dorms.
Sitting in my bed at the dorm, I made the decision that I would never be an English teacher. The only good that came from this experience was realizing this fact and meeting Simon. I packed my bags, said goodbye to my Korean roommate and took a cab back to the Motel 8 that I’d been staying at previously. Now what will I do? There is an American for rent in Beijing – No sex or English teaching.

Tuesday: 3-6-07
I spent much of the day walking around the surrounding area with Johanna. This part of the city, on the northwest side, is called Wudaokou and contains everything from luxury office towers to dilapidated slums. The main point of this walk was to find an ATM machine that would allow Johanna some money. Getting foreign cards to work here is always a battle, sometimes involving visiting several machines before finding one that’s willing. Eventually, we came to a Bank of China inside the main lobby of a big glass office tower. The Bank of China’s ATM’s seem to always be the most reliable.
Our walk next took us to Beijing’s version of a home improvement superstore, a narrow filthy road with dozens of hardware stores that seemed to perpetually experience a massive traffic jam of a couple hundred small vans loading up merchandise. Beijing people don’t usually take much notice of foreigners, but nearly everyone did on this street. Entering a small general store, the employees even tried speaking to us a bit in Chinese.
Just after dark, I contacted an agency that helps foreigners with visa-related problems. My problem is that my tourist visa will expire in a few days and I need an extension. The procedure seems a bit complicated, so paying a few extra dollars to an agent seemed like a good idea considering the fact that overstaying a visa can get you kicked out of the country for a year. The agent spoke on my phone with a clerk at my hotel’s front desk and the clerk then told me to go to a place next door called, “The Foreign Student Activity Center” to obtain a Beijing residency permit application. From what I’ve read about China, Beijing has required for some years that everyone living here have residency permits due the fact that the population has been growing out of control. The permit costs nothing for foreigners, but the price for Chinese citizens is apparently very high, which in turn helps control the population.
Hotels can help their foreign guests obtain residency permits, so the Foreign Student Activity Center next door must be owned by the same company that owns my Motel 8. According to the visa agent, the next step of the process was to obtain two passport-sized photographs. The hotel clerks said that there was such a photography business just down the road, but all I found there was a dinner from Mcdonald’s and two beers from a small food store. Speaking of beer, I love the Yanjing brand because it tastes good and a huge one in a glass bottle costs 25 cents.
Watching the news on CCTV9 tonight, they featured a new kind of chicken farm cooperative in the countryside. The footage showed chickens freaking out while having probes stuck up their butts, then showed them dead and plucked hanging by their necks on a conveyor belt. Even the most boring coverage is always unintentionally interesting somehow.

Wednesday: 3-7-07
I went out this morning in the pursuit of getting my almost-expired visa extended. Men and women were riding on carts pulled by donkeys around the Wudaokou area. Some of the carts were stacked with bricks and others were empty. Animal-pulled carts are absolutely not a common sight in the city, so it’s unclear why this was the case today.
I’d planned on taking the subway to a visa agency that could help with the visa application process, but getting there seemed like it was going to be problem, so I cancelled the meeting and decided to try and find an agency closer to my area. The man I’d talked to at the first agency kept calling and sending messages after I cancelled our meeting, but I didn’t reply or answer. His persistence suddenly made it seem that the $40 he was going to charge me for the service might not be such a good deal after all.
So, I walked around the Wudaokou subway station looking for a visa agency in this more convenient location, just a short bus ride away from my hotel. The location was all the more important considering I would need to leave my passport and pick it up next week after the new visa has been added.
A visa agency was nowhere to be found here, but my search did result in lots of valuable information I hadn’t expected. Entering a foreign language school with lots of young foreigners standing outside, I thought someone might know the location of a nearby visa agency. The school appeared to have a few hundred students studying Chinese and the facilities seemed quite organized. After getting the information I needed from a woman working at the school’s main desk, I inquired about the price of the school’s tuition. I’d expected the cost to be about $1000/semester, like most of such schools, but classes here are actually paid for by the hour every two weeks. The per hour cost is only $1.50 and each class meets for two hours per day five days per week, meaning the cost would be just $60/month. I was invited to attend a free class in the morning and I’ll probably now start attending here regularly.
I next got onto the subway headed to a government office the school had said could solve my visa problem. Transferring from the orange line train to the blue line, the crowds at the transfer point were worse than I thought possible, and that’s saying a lot here. There was almost a complete people-jam in the station’s underground hallway leading to the ticket booths. Police were screaming to try and keep order, but the situation was out of control. Each individual person had no control over their movements, they could only go where the mass pushed them. To make matters worse, a lot of dirty travelers seemed to be carrying everything they own in huge bags made of out tarp and sewn together.
Getting off the train at the northeast side of the city, the walk to the government office was a few blocks. I asked an old woman for directions who just so happened to be looking for the same place. She got us lost once but eventually found the place after asking someone else for help. The office was a sprawling complex with thousands of people caught in passport and visa limbo. After asking a few more people for help, I was instructed to fill out a form and wait in a line that was luckily much shorter than most of the rest. My passport was then taken and I was told to return next Wednesday to get it back. The cost will only be $20, so it’s no wonder why the agency had tried so hard to contact me earlier after I’d cancelled our meeting. A $20 profit is equal to 240 yuan, which is more than lots of workers here make in a whole week.
Getting back on the subway, I purchased a card that now allows me to board all public transportation without having to buy individual tickets, which is a huge benefit when passing through incredibly crowded stations. Also, the bus fare is only half price with this card(5 cents instead of 10 cents).
I met Johanna at 5 o’clock to have dinner at a cafeteria-style restaurant next door. There is no English spoken or written here, so we used my Chinese dictionary to order the food. Johanna didn’t get exactly what she ordered, but ate in anyway. Price for the whole meal for two including a bottle of water: $2.25.
The rest of the evening was spent in my hotel room researching apartment options online. I have the option of renting a one-bedroom by myself for about $250/month or sharing a 2-bedroom for about $100 less. A shared apartment is easy to find because the large Beijing Language and Culture University is just a few blocks away.

Thursday: 3-8-07
I had my first Chinese class this morning at the small language school by the Wudaokou subway station. It started at 10 o’clock and was already in progress when I walked into the small classroom at that time. There were less than 10 students and the teacher was having them take turns asking each other simple questions. Two students questioned me as soon as I sat down, one asking how old I was and the other asking what my nationality was.
This upper intermediate-level class seems to be appropriate for me, but my listening skills seem to be a bit below some of the other students. The teacher only spoke English once during the whole class, which was when I didn’t understand a concept. Studying Chinese at SIU, my class was not at the level to be taught completely in Chinese, so this will take a bit of adjustment.
The class lasted two hours, but I left at the 10:50 break since I hadn’t paid for the class and didn’t have my own textbook. I had lunch at a nearby Subway (sandwich) restaurant, which seems to be a quickly growing chain in the city. The Sandwich Artist had much better than average English and even knew the names of all the condiments, but the price was too high.
I next got on the subway and headed towards the college where I’d quit the job two days ago. The hotel and apartment on campus still were holding about $60 of my deposit money. Sitting on the blue-line subway, a terribly burned couple was begging on the train. They appeared to be in their 50’s and seemed to be cooked from head to toe. Their faces were deformed and they even had some fingers missing. How ever this severe burning happened, it must have been horrific. Like a little girl I saw on the train the other day, the man had a microphone in his hand and an amplifier in his backpack. He sang the same line over and over as the women held open a paper bag.
I couldn’t figure out how to get all the way to the college by public transportation, so a taxi had to complete the last leg of the journey. Getting the non-English speaking hotel and apartment clerks to understand my situation was much simpler than I expected. They gathered and giggled at hearing my Chinese, but all the money was returned.
I took the 45-minute bus ride from the school to the Dongzhimen subway station, then transferred back to the Wudaokou station and ate an egg burger for lunch at Mcdonalds. Yes, you can order an egg burger at Mcdonalds, served with mayo, mustard and ketchup. It costs 80 cents and tastes good, for a burger with an egg on it at least.
After the meal, I needed to find an area where I’d agreed to meet a real estate agent to look at apartments. I asked a woman for directions who didn’t speak any English. Walking on at least a hundred feet, the woman ran up from behind and pulled me back into a restaurant to speak with a girl that could speak English. Walking on even further than before, the girl ran up from behind to say that she’d given the wrong directions. She was out of breath from the chase. Now that’s service, and all for free.
The meeting with the real estate agent took place at the west gate of the Beijing Language and Culture University, which is the school that Johanna attends. This is a large, fancy(by Chinese standards) school with about 6,000 students. A wall surrounds the school’s grounds and most of the space inside seems to be taken up by dormitories. Although, there are some nice wide-open areas for sports and leisure.
A female English student met me at the gate, then a man named Mr. Zuo met us a few minutes later. Mr. Zuo was the real estate agent and the girl was his interpreter. We spent the next two hours looking at three different apartments, and a landlord met us at each one. After each showing, the sales pressure was intense. Every apartment was at about the standard of high-rise public housing in the US, but that’s quite common here. I was quite willing to rent the second one shown, but then came the surprise that I would have to pay a whole month’s rent to the agent and a 5% monthly “foreigner” tax to the local police department.
Seeing the last apartment required a ride in Mr. Zuo’s car, then I had him drop me off at the Wudaokou subway station afterwards. From there, I walked to a nearby real estate agency that I’d remembered seeing advertisements printed in English yesterday. There were many young agents working behind computers in the tiny office, one of which spoke good English. After telling the English-speaker what I was looking for, he put me on the phone with a girl who was looking for a roommate. The girl then met us in the office a few minutes later and the English speaker said that we would have to pay him $200 if we moved in together. This seemed like a joke so I said goodbye and walked out. The girl followed and invited me to have coffee with her, so I figured that this was her plan to avoid the middle man’s cost.
The girl’s name is Siyao and we communicate best with a mixture of Chinese and English. The first part of a sentence may be English while the last half is Chinese, or vise versa. We went into a coffee shop in a bookstore that was as quiet as a library. Siyao had a laptop computer sitting at a table, which she had apparently left sitting there to go meet me at the real estate office. She insisted on buying me a glass of tea while we spoke. Although we were whispering, an older man nearby shushed us, which seemed very weird in this insanely noisy city.
We met Johanna on the street a few minutes later and had dinner together at a restaurant across the street. The language got even weirder here as Siyao and Johanna often found a mixture of German, Chinese and English the best way to communicate. Siyao recently spent some time studying in Germany, and Johanna knows the language I guess because of her country’s close proximity to Germany.
Johanna took a cab home after the meal and I went with Siyao to look at another apartments. A real estate agent met us on a bike across the street from the restaurant and the three of us walked 20 minutes to an apartment complex. In the complex’s lot, the agent got confused as to the location of the apartment and another agent that happened to be standing nearby took this opportunity to move in and try to steal the business.
When looking at apartments with Mr. Zuo earlier, he would often stop on the street and talk to other people who were carrying the exact same kind of bag he was. There was one time when I found myself standing among four agents carrying this exact same kind of bag. They were all scouring the area like hungry vultures. In this current situation, the agent on the bike became upset at the encroaching agent and he backed off. Immediately after we’d seen the apartment, the other agent ran up behind us like a secret agent, looking over his should the whole time to make sure he wasn’t spotted. He herded us into the shadows and offered a fee that was only about 10% of the other agent’s fee. SiYao may meet with him tomorrow, but I won’t go along because she says that agents try to charge her more when they see her with a foreigner. So, she’ll look at the apartments first from now on, then I’ll look later.
Living with Siyao seems like a great idea because of the language possibilities, but her curiousness about my relationship with Johanna makes me a bit suspicious. We will see.
I tried to take a bus back to my hotel at 10:30, but it was already passed the time the last bus ran, so a taxi had to make the short trip.

Friday: 3-9-07
I’d planned on attending another Chinese class this morning, but just slept through it instead because I hadn’t had time to review the textbook material and some strange activity in my hotel’s hallway kept waking me up all night. People constantly kept coming and going from a room across the hall between about 12AM and 5AM.
Most of the day was spent researching jobs and apartments online, with little progress. Almost all the apartment listings in English are posted by agents who want to charge a whole month’s rent for their service. It’s possible for me to decipher the Chinese advertisements, but negotiating a deal is impossible at my language level. As for the jobs, mostly everything is English teaching, which I’ll now only do as a private tutor. So, I posted information and a short introductory video on a private tutoring website.
Johanna and I went to lunch at 2:30 at the small cafeteria style restaurant nearby, then I met Siyao an hour later to look at another apartment. Her motivations for wanting a foreign roommate are now more questionable than ever. The apartment she showed me was a one-bedroom. I at first thought she intended on using the dining room as a living room and converting the existing living room into a second bedroom, but when I mentioned this, she wasn’t interested in the apartment anymore. We also looked at a second place, but the tenants wanted a one-year lease.
During about 13 hours of the day, from about 7 AM to 8PM, it’s quicker to walk than drive in these terribly overcrowded streets. On the dreaded bus 607 going back to my hotel, the big hydraulic doors closed on a girl that weighed about 80 pounds, with enough force to suspend her in midair, but she appeared unhurt and everyone laughed, including her.
I spent the rest of the afternoon and early evening continuing to search for apartments and jobs online in my hotel room, then took a short cab ride at 8 o’clock to look at another nearby apartment. A 20-something girl met me outside of a high-rise complex and led me to the tenth floor. The apartment looked good and only cost about $225 per month, but then the girl showed me a hidden door that led to a second bedroom where another person was living. On the phone, she had said “one-bedroom”, and she meant that literally. The deal suddenly wasn’t so good anymore considering I could find a real one-bedroom apartment for about the same price.
Johanna met me at my hotel an hour later and we walked to a restaurant for dinner, then looked around the neighborhood for a bar. Entering what we thought looked like a bar, it actually turned out to be a place where people rent karaoke rooms, which is a common kind of establishment in the city. Groups of friends will get together in these rooms and get drunk while singing to each other all night. Johanna and I ended up drinking a long island iced tea at a nice restaurant/coffee bar that we’d eaten lunch at two days ago. We next unintentionally ended up in another one of those karaoke room rental places, again thinking it was a regular bar. This time, we allowed the staff to take us into one of the rooms and serve us two beers. Another man came in and hooked up 2 microphones to the equipment. The room had a coffee table, wrap around couch, large TV and computer monitor. The computer was used to select songs, but all the text was in Chinese. One of the staff put on a Backstreet Boys song and I sung it for Johanna, then we couldn’t figure out how to get the computer back to the screen of English song selections.
Using the bathroom here, a man came in and projectile vomited all over one of the walls.

Saturday: 3-10-07 – Renting an apartment
I checked out of the Super 8 at noon and left my luggage with the front desk in order to go look at another apartment. A real estate agent whom I’d spoken with about apartments on the phone with two days ago had called back this morning with more offers. I wasn’t sure I’d get offered anything decent, but wanted to check out of the hotel before the noon checkout time just in case.
The weather was colder again today, at about the freezing temperature, and the wind was gusting hard enough to make life miserable for the hundreds of thousands of people riding bikes around the city against it.
The real estate agent met me at the west gate of the university at 1 o’clock and we took a 10 minute walk to the apartment. He spoke only a very basic level of English. The apartment was located on the first floor of a ten-story building and the landlord met us there after waiting another 10 minutes. The apartment was disgusting, but the monthly rent was only $225 and the agent’s fee was only a half-month’s rent instead of the usual whole-month’s rent that most agents have wanted. Despite the terrible appearance of the place, I was desperate and the price was right. The agent did his best at translating important parts of the 6-month contract while I signed it. The move in costs included the agent’s half-month’s rent, a one-month security deposit and the first three month’s rent. I had almost all the cash in my pocket, but still needed another $200. We all walked to a nearby Bank of China so I could use an ATM, but I’d already taken a large amount of money from another machine earlier and this one now said that I’d exceeded my daily limit, so the landlord agreed to come to the apartment at noon tomorrow to collect the rest of the money.
Now that I had a place to live, the next thing I needed to do was make it livable, and that would take some work. I walked to the big department store by the subway station and bought supplies until I couldn’t carry any more. These supplies included bedding and a bunch of cleaning materials, among other things. A cab took me home, then I went out again to try and buy some flat white paint to put on the walls. The logical place to buy paint seemed to be that crazy dirty nearby street where all kinds of construction supplies are sold at about 100 different stores. It was now after dark and many of the smaller stores were closing, but the biggest store was open for business. Just about all the smaller stores would fit in this biggest store. It’s about the size of one of the home improvement superstores that can be found in the US, but appears to be geared more toward contractors than individual consumers. Every customer and employee stared as I walked around looking for paint and a roller. A young guy then walked up with a grin and started saying all kinds of unknown things to me in Chinese. I eventually realized that he was trying to help me with the checkout process, as this wasn’t a store where a person could simply take their goods to the checkout. He took me to the front of the store and had a woman print out a form, the we went the rear of the store and got the form stamped several times by a bunch of women that were sitting behind a long row of desks. I then paid one of these women and we took the form back to the front and showed it to two more people before I was allowed to leave with the paint and roller. I think I’ll go to the smaller stores next time.
Scraping loose paint off the walls of my apartment took the next four hours and I ended up with about 5lbs, most of which came from a single wall in the dining room. Paint also still needs to be removed from the kitchen and bathroom, but those rooms are much smaller. By the time everything is scraped, painted and cleaned, the work total will probably have been over 12 hours. I’ll spend the entire day working tomorrow and hopefully have at least a semi-real apartment then.

Sunday: 3-11-07
I went out this morning running apartment related errands, including getting some money from an ATM to give the landlord and buying paint to make the terrible place not disgust me to death over the next few months. I bought the paint from a small paint store on the street where construction supplies are sold. The owner didn’t have any other customers and very patiently spent several minutes trying to understand that I wanted to buy a small can of brown and green paint. The cost of each was $1.25.
I next met Johanna in front of her apartment and we walked back to the construction street so I could buy a can of silver paint and a wire brush. Both of these purchases were again a challenge and I had to look up the words for wire and brush in the dictionary that Johanna carries in her purse.
We went back to my apartment at noon to wait for the landlord, who said he’d come pick up the rest of the money at that time. He arrived just a few minutes late, then Johanna and I went to a very crowded Kentucky Fried Chicken for lunch. This KFC happens to be just a 2 minute walk from my apartment. We walked through a few nearby small stores after the meal so I could find a small brush for cleaning.
Johanna spent the next few hours patiently helping with the cleaning, including the deadly refrigerator, which had old food covered with mold inside. I got the walls of the dining room covered with a single coat of white paint, which used up the whole can, about a gallon and a half. So, the work I want to do is still less than half done, so this will take at least another day, maybe more. I’ve never put this kind of time into a rental before, but I’ve never had a rental like this before. But, when all is done, it will be very livable, as long as I find a job soon and don’t starve in it.

Monday: 3-12-06
My entire day was spent continuing the work on my new apartment. I bought another gallon and a half of flat white paint this morning and spent about 6 hours painting the living room from floor to ceiling. Johanna and I went to dinner at a nice (but cheap) restaurant that’s in the alley leading to my apartment building. The top half of all my pants are getting stained because my chopstick skills are still developing. The Chinese will use chopsticks to eat anything, no matter how awkward, and they’ll laugh if you’re caught cheating.
In the evening, I scraped and painted the terrible bathroom and kitchen ceilings. The entire building is made of concrete that seems to be falling apart. While I was painting, roaches could be seen running out of the cracks that have formed in these ceilings. The roach problem is quite bad in all the rooms, but I’ve always come out the winner in these wars. I learned my battle moves while living in a 150 year old house when I was 17 years old. After watching the enemy in that house for some time, I started regularly bombarding their bunkers. Small dead roaches, foot soldiers, could be seen for the first couple weeks of the attack, then some bigger enlisted officers started falling. The size of the dead steadily increased, then there was silence for several days. I got up one morning to see the 4-inch long commander-in-chief laying belly up in the middle of the kitchen floor, dead as a doornail. I’ve always thought it was funny how he exposed himself for death, as if he was surrendering. I never saw a single other roach after that.

Tuesday: 3-13-07
My apartment is finally done and I’m exhausted after another 12 hour day of straight cleaning, from 10AM till 10PM. Everything is shiny and the place smells like new. Considering I only saved a couple hundred dollars by renting this apartment and had to spend about 40 hours cleaning it, I effectively worked for only $5 per hour, but since I don’t have a job, maybe it was still a good idea.
Today started with 4 hours of cleaning the tiny disgusting kitchen, where the grease was so thick in places that it had to be scraped off with a putty knife. The rest of the time was spent painting and cleaning throughout other areas. The finishing touch was putting a coat of shiny silver paint on the many rusty pipes in the bathroom and kitchen. I was out of usable brushes by this time, so a sponge had to do. The sponge actually worked great for the task and it turned me into a silver monster, dabbing silver paint on the radiators and any other metal surfaces I could find. There is a story about a person who could turn things to gold and goes crazy, eventually turning some person he knows to gold because he gets to greedy. This pretty well describes me with the silver paint, and this may have been in part due to the delicious fumes. It’s probably a good thing Johanna wasn’t helping tonight or she may have ended up Silver Woman.
Now, here’s an idea for a job. It’s common to see street performers in the US who put silver makeup on themselves from head to toe and impersonate statues, but I’ve never seen such a performer in China. My dad actually suggested this as a joke several weeks ago, saying something like, “If you get low on doe, remember Silver Man”. He was speaking of the Silver Man that we’d seen in San Francisco during our family trip in January. Seriously, I’m willing to do almost anything other than teach English.

Wednesday: 3-13-07
I walked to the west gate of Johanna’s campus to meet her at noon this morning. We had lunch at a nice restaurant called Mr. Pizza that ended up being a bit expensive at $5 for each of our meals. She told a story of a Finnish politician who had translated his website into the Klingon language to attract nerd support for the upcoming elections. I’ve got to find that story and submit it to fark.com.
Johanna traveled with me to the Llama temple subway station so I could pick up my passport that I dropped off there to get a visa extension last week. People picking up passports have to pass through the cashier line first to pay and get a receipt before entering the passport pick-up line, but we of course didn’t know that and wasted our time waiting in the passport pick-up line first.
Leaving the passport building, we stopped at a pharmacy so I could buy some pain killer and Johanna could buy some chapstick. I didn’t have any pain, but was just planning ahead since it seems that medicine is only sold at pharmacies. Since we were so near to the Llama temple, we decided to go there next. It’s one of the main tourist attractions, so there were plenty of other foreign faces. Surrounding the temple and inside of it are at least a couple dozen small colorful stores selling incense, because it’s a customary religious offering. The traditional Chinese buildings inside the temple were quite impressive, with the main attraction being a 55 foot tall Buddha statue carved out of wood from a single tree. A plaque outside from the Guiness Book of World Records proclaims that this is the largest statue in the world made of a single tree. Alone, the building housing this statue is impressive with its 3rd story walkways leading to other buildings on either side. Not only is the statue’s height jaw-dropping, but its width also is. I can’t imagine that it was made from the same tree without splicing pieces of wood together, but Johanna insisted that was a retarded idea and the tree had just been really wide. But, I think that maybe it’s not my idea that’s retarded.
Returning to the Wudaokou subway station, Johanna went home and I walked to the nearby Lotus Center to buy some supplies for my apartment. The Lotus Center takes Visa, but I hadn’t thought to bring mine and I realized a cash shortage at the checkout, so the cashier had to keep a couple plates and other items. A crazy woman kept walking up and down the row of checkout isles screaming to herself in a high-pitched voice the whole time, causing about a hundred customers and a dozen employees to stare, but no workers attempted to escort her out.
Now, I had 5 bags, a desk lamp, two small trash cans and a computer speaker set to carry. There was less than a dollar in my pocket, so not enough for a cab. The mile-long walk back to the apartment was painful. Making matters worse, the short cut was nowhere to be found. This shortcut is a narrow slot on the west side of the brick fence that surrounds the apartment complex. I walked up and down this fence two times before giving up and taking the long way in. The fence and slot in it appeared to be decades old, but just maybe they sealed the slot shut today.
The computer speaker set I bought is brand named Awesome, but the quality was questionable since they cost less than $20 with subwoofer included, but they’re actually quite awesome fom the price.

Thursday: 3-15-07
I’ve paid about $110 in international ATM usage fees so some executives can finance their jets and whores. It serves them all right if they get cancer and can’t enjoy my money. An $11 charge shows up on my account each time I withdrawal money, and the biggest withdrawal that’s allowed at a time is about $320. They wouldn’t want to raise that limit now, would they? Of course not. Maybe wishing cancer on them is a bit unethical, but I just don’t understand how things ever could have been allowed to get this way. Just two years ago, I remember paying only about 1/5 of that price to withdrawal money in China.
After taking out some money and paying my outrageous fee, I fed another monster and gave $3 to KFC. Colonel Sanders was the antichrist, you know. My entire day was spent in front of computers, most of it at an Internet café that’s a two-minute walk from my apartment. I hadn’t been online in days due to all the apartment move-in activity. This nearest café is one of the largest I’ve seen, with at least 500 computers in several smoke-filled rooms.
The best thing I did all day was create the website wudaokouapartments.com. It’s now online with a page that says “testing”. The purpose is to bring a centralized website to the chaotic apartment market in this part of the city, which is haphazardly run by a not-so-small army of real estate agents who prowl the streets and put up flyers. Most of their targets are foreign students who can speak English and use the Internet, so such a website seems ideal. I don’t have the technical skills to run a sophisticated commercial website, but I think an agency will be willing to buy it if they see that some traffic has been generated. After I get a simple message board online, then I’ll post my own flyers with the address. Once some listings get posted to the board, then maybe someone will realize the value and offer to buy me out. Just a dream, but who knows, and creating the site cost very little.
The internet café was giving me all kinds of problems with constructing the new website, so I eventually got my laptop and took it to a wireless access coffee shop near the Wudaokou subway station. I only knew of this place because it’s where the once-potential roommate Siyao had taken me on the night of our first meeting. I made a brief Skype phone call to my dad here tonight and a Korean man nearby overheard the conversation and handed me a flyer about English teaching. The job was just a short walk from my apartment and the classes were small, so I asked for more information. The man led me to a block of Korean-owned businesses on the nicest street in Wudaokou. His school’s offices were on the third floor of a hotel/office building that contains a massive indoor swimming pool on its first floor. It was now nearly 10PM but some students were still having classes in one of the rooms. The man spoke in Korean with a couple other men in the office, then I was led into the classroom to introduce myself to the four high school students studying there. They are all Korean and study from 8AM to 10PM five days a week. They get up before 6AM and don’t get to bed till midnight. I was offered a Saturday class teaching these 4 students for 4 hours for $75. I can do this every Saturday if I wish.
It just so happens that I had received an email earlier from the Israeli teacher, Keren, I met at the hostel 3 weeks ago, potentially offering a well-paid position in a city 2 hours from here. Even though I’ve already rented this apartment here, the pay is so good that I’d consider subleasing it to take the job. So, my job future has been uncertain for days, then all of the sudden, two options find me. Today’s second option teaching the Korean kids is only part time, but these jobs always tend to lead to much more. We’ll see.
After following the Korean to his school, he walked back to the subway station with me and pointed out another nearby coffee shop with wireless internet access that was open till midnight. I was here for another 2 hours trying to get a simple bulletin board up on my new website, but am still having problems. It may be the terrible service in this country, or the problem might be on my end. Not sure yet.

Friday: 3-16-07
I tried out my strange washing machine for the first time today. It’s on wheels and has to be rolled into the kitchen and hooked up to the water faucet and drain. All the dial labels are in Chinese, but after trying every possible combination of settings, I determined that the rinse section doesn’t work. The wash and rinse tubs are separate from each other. The rinse tub is also supposed to spin the clothes dry, so this may be a problem. Making matters worse, the machine leaks and a pan must be kept under it. We will see.
The Korean guy who gave me a one-day-per-week job yesterday asked that I meet him at his school at 1:30 so he could give me some textbooks and a bit more information about how to teach Korean kids. The only way I knew how to get to the school was a bit indirect, so I tried to find a shortcut though an area of highrise apartments across the street. Finding shorcuts is always an adventure because every property owner here thinks they need huge fences and guards. There are passageways through most of the gated communities, but finding them can be a problem the first time. My shortcut didn’t work out, but led to an unexpected sight. A young guy on a motorbike going down one of the alleys hit the sharp edge of a speed bump and lost control of his bike. As he approached the bump, I’d already noticed that he seemed to have little if any previous experience on a motorbike. Hitting the bump, he accidentally gave full power to the accelerator and lost control at about 15MPH. He and the bike both went sliding across the ground just 20 feet in front of me. The bike was still running and the guy dusted himself off and then almost crashed a second time before riding off around a corner. A couple dozen people had stopped to watch the scene, with several of them having to jump out of the way as the man almost crashed the second time.
Talking to Jacob at the school, I asked if a 10 minute break should be given after each of the 4 class hours tomorrow, but he said only 5 minutes at most. These kids are raised like machines and will end up being little business Terminators, or worse, T-1000’s.
Next, I walked to the area by the subway station where the wireless internet coffee shops are so I could continue working on Wudaokouapartments.com. The sandwich I had for lunch was great, and the internet access was fine, but I seem to be helplessly stuck with getting the website to work properly. Getting software to work with databases always seems to be a nightmare for amateurs. I spent another 4 hours on the problem today.
Assuming I’ll eventually figure things out, I walked across the BLCU campus just before dark looking for a printing service that could print out a document 100 times on bright pink paper. One way I’ll introduce my new site to the market is have the name of it printed very large on pink strips of paper, then put these strips of paper on the many nearby bulletin boards that real estate agents have posted their tens of thousands of flyers. I’ll also regularly post the name on the existing real estate bulletin board websites, which are not specifically directed towards this area but regularly contain Wudaokou listings. Then, we will see.
A Scottish girl on campus led me to a printing place that was very primitive, then she directed me to a better one very near my apartment, but they didn’t have any pink paper. Walking on, I noticed an even bigger one even closer to my apartment, but it was already closing.

Saturday: 3-16-07
Today was my first and last day as an English teacher of Korean students. My class of 6 started at 8:30 this morning. They are all Koreans who have been attending a boarding high school for the past 1 to 3 years here, aged 16 to 17, 5 guys and one girl. I’d expected them to all be very good students since they are attending an overseas private school, but the guys were just as out of control as the Chinese college students had been two weeks ago. I even had to ask one to quit playing games on his PSP during class. Eventually, I gave up and agreed to play Hangman during the last 30 minutes of the 4-class.
The school is located in a hotel that also contains other businesses, including a recreation center, restaurant and DVD shop. I had fried rice for lunch at the restaurant and bought 3 DVDs for $1 each at the shop, Babel, Running with Scissors and Apocolypto. In the late afternoon, I went to the internet café to continue working on wudaokouapartments.com, finally getting the site’s main message board up and running. For dinner, Johanna and I met at a restaurant located halfway between our apartments, then I watched Babel later in my apartment, good movie.

Sunday: 3-18-07
I spent another three hours in a coffee shop with my laptop today working on the new website. There’s some real progress to be seen now, but I’d still like to add a feature where users can upload images of apartments, which is common on most other similar websites.
Coincidentally, Johanna showed up at the same coffee shop to meet a classmate. There are a few hundred thousand people in Wudaokou, so I really wasn’t expecting to randomly run into the one person that I know here.
Despite the plethora of businesses located all around my apartment, I’ve only found one general store within a 10 minute walk. Stopping there for the first time on the walk home from the coffee shop, I discovered it to be very overcrowed with extremely narrow isles. There is definitely a market around here for another such store. Maybe some of the people who are selling things off the back of their bicycles should pool their money together and open one. How the bicycle people afford to live is a mystery, as they sell their goods for pennies among stiff competition from other bicycle salespeople selling identical goods. It’s not uncommon to see four pineapple slice vendors working the same corner, selling huge pieces for 12 cents.
The evening was spent back on a computer, this time in the internet café reviewing all the local job websites for non-English teaching jobs. There were at least a couple promising leads there. For dinner, I ate at the small street market that is located in an alley behind the hole in my apartment complex’s brick fence. I’d passed through the hole and street market several times, but had never enquired about prices. Most of the vendors are either selling fruit or cooking meat on sticks in large vats of boiling spiced liquid. The meat stick vendors have stools set up around their carts and one invited me to have a seat, saying that each stick cost only 7 cents. There were a couple dozen different varieties of sticks to choose from floating in three different vats on the cart. Each time I finished one, the vendor picked out another that he thought I’d like. I was full after 50 cents, then bought one of those huge slices of pineapple from a next-door vendor.
The night ended with watching Apocolypto on DVD.

Monday: 3-19-07
My temperature in my apartment has ranged between about 45 and 50 degrees for the past week, with the estimated record and high low at 40 and 55, respectively. As for that free heat that was supposed to be provided by the hot water radiators in each room, they went cold a couple days ago. They are probably shut off every spring at this time.
Accordingly, I woke up with a sore throat this morning, so I decided it was finally time to do something about the problem. The solution came from the nearby large home appliance/electronics store, in the form of a small $20 electric heater. Almost all stores selling anything of considerable value require two steps for the check-out process. First, an employee must give the customer a form listing what they wish to purchase, then the customer must take this form to a desk where the money is collected. These desks often are surrounded by glass from floor to ceiling. Buying the heater even required a third step; a woman took my receipt and went upstairs to the inventory room to get the heater(the one I had looked at was only the display model).
Next, I took the heater along to the Internet café to check email. Of all those jobs I sent messages about yesterday, the only response was from a director looking for a white American to act in his Bruce Lee movie. Ha, we’ll see. I called the man to give more info and he said that he might call back to meet sometime soon.
My new real-estate website got a couple new registered users today and one of them posted an apartment listing. Stepping up my marketing effort, I went to the large printing/office supplies business next to the internet café to purchase 100 sheets of paper with “Wudaokou Apartments.com” printed across them. Each sheet has the name written across it 7 times in large letters, and I had the employees cut the paper into strips on their cutting press. So, I now have 700 pink strips of paper with the website’s name on them, each about 12 inches long and 1.5 inches tall. The cost, $6. The plan is to go all around Wudaokou with a tape dispenser sticking these things up. A large strip of clear tape will completely cover the paper, hopefully preserving it for months. I also bought a small stapler and some tacks incase some surfaces are untapeable. Shopping for the office supplies, one of the employees was running around crying hysterically and loudly. Nobody seemed to take any notice at all, even the other employees. This is just one of many times that I’ve now witnessed unusual loud disturbances in stores that are ignored.
For lunch, I again ate food from one of the meat stick vendors behind the hole in the wall. The vendor who served me yesterday wasn’t present, but at least 3 others were. The one who waited on me today had about 500 sticks cooking at any one time. I was at first the only customer, then about 20 people were consuming sticks 5 minutes later. Walking on further down this alley, I realized that absolutely everything I could possibly need to live is behind the hole in the wall. Exiting my apartment from the main entrance requires walking a quarter mile to get supplies, but the hole in the wall is just feet away from my front door. Unfortunately, a gate is closed over the hole after midnight, but the stores are probably closed by then anyways.
I purchased a shower rack from one of the stores before going back to the computer lab for the rest of the evening to continue building the new website. Tonight’s main task was adding a feature where users can upload pictures of the apartments that they wish to sell/rent. Making this modification was a bit complicated and I was continuously worried that I would mess the site up and have to spend a dozen hours trying to fix it. But, things went better than expected and the only problems were rather easily fixed by just searching for help online.
My next goal for the site, which may actually prove to be too complicated, is to add RSS feeds. RSS(Really Simple Sindication) is a method websites use to share information with each other, including some sites that list real-estate in Beijing. I’m confident that I can add the feeds, but the potential problem is filtering out the non-Wudaokou listings.
Leaving the internet café, I courageously tried food from another popular kind of street vendor. The man’s entire operation consisted of a cart on the back of his bike that was surrounded by high glass on three sides. Inside the glass, he poured pancake patter across a large hot plate and spread it into a thin later. It was too dark to tell exactly what ingredients he was including, but I know that he at least threw in a whole egg. In the end, the whole thing is folded over itself several times and put into a little bag with a napkin. The taste; good, the price; excellent (25 cents).

Tuesday: 3-20-07
I was still feeling sick today, but at least things weren’t any worse. In the evening, I walked around the neighborhood beginning to put up my wudaokouapartments.com advertisements on some of the bulletin boards. It was my first time exploring the areas to the west of my apartment, and it turns out that there is another big university behind the unassuming walls there, which explains all the marketplace activity in the alleyway.
Walking on towards the BLCU campus, I did some shopping at the DVD store in the building I worked at last Saturday, this time buying 10 more disks. Since I haven’t been working or regularly attending classes yet, and since I don’t really have any friends nearby yet, watching cheap movies is a good alternative form of entertainment in the evenings.
There is a massive construction project of some kind happing in the road by my apartment. The project stretches down the road for what seems like miles in either direction. The entire construction area is surrounded by temporary blue metal fences, but barely any work is being done inside. Every few hundred feet, squares made of steel beams protrude above the fences. These squares support pulley systems that raise large buckets up and down. The buckets go up and down all day; going down empty and coming up full while trucks hall away the dirt. Temporary housing has been built next to each steel square for the workers. So, why are they taking all this dirt out of the ground for miles? I haven’t asked yet, but my best guess is that they are building new subway lines. There are a few breaks in the fence where traffic is allowed to cross over to the businesses and homes on the other side. The asphalt has been removed from these areas and they have been left a muddy mess with slabs of sharp concrete sticking out of the ground, but that doesn’t stop thousands of people per day from passing through each one, because they don’t have a choice other than walking a mile out of their way.

Wednesday: March 21, 2007
My phone received a text message from a potential employer at 9AM asking that I check my email. Arriving at the Internet café 30 minutes later, the message read, “Could you please come for an interview at 10:30 today”. So, they expected me to show up almost instantly in a city of 14 million people. That obviously wasn’t going to work, especially considering the email didn’t even mention the address. Reaching a secretary on the phone, she said, “OK, how about 11 o’clock then”. That still left no time to even get ready, so she agreed to meet me 1:30.
Before going, I visited the office supply/printing business to have a few resumes printed and buy a folder to store them in. Seeing the address in Chinese, a cab driver knew right where the company’s building was. Taking a cab the first time to a new place is always a good idea here, even when you leave an hour and a half early like I did today. The area was just a 15 minute ride away in a business district with some large department stores. A clerk in one of the department stores helped me find the office, which was above the store. She patiently walked all the way outside to point it out.
I was still very early, but just wanted to make sure and find the place before going off to lunch at a Mcdonald’s across the street. Passing through a pedestrian tunnel, I bought a nice brown leather wallet for $4 from a vendor that had them displayed out on a sheet. The wallet’s label has the character for dragon on it, and I wanted to ask the vendor if it was made from real dragon hide, but I don’t know how to say that yet. If he had thought I was serious, he would have surely said “yes”.
After lunch, I walked around the area looking for a tie, which was I thought was a good idea since this interview was at an investment firm, called the American Frank Investment Group. One small store wanted $10 for their ties, then I found one at a large underground department store for $5, still very expensive, but it slightly changes colors when looked at from different directions.
Like every other job interview I’ve had in this country, this one was strange. A secretary led me to a conference room where the company’s interpreter, named Annie, interviewed me a few minutes later. After a few very brief questions, Annie said that I was qualified. She seemed very sincere, professional and polite, but her description of the job made it sound like I wasn’t qualified at all. It entails translating investment project summaries from Chenglish to English, then attending negotiations and asking questions about the summaries. As for what questions to ask, Annie had no advice, but just said I was qualified. The job is only part time and pays about $13 hour. Each week will involve attending 4 or 5 of these meetings, so it may be possible that I could at least make enough money to live. This should be interesting.
After the interview, Annie found out what bus would take me back to my area of the city and escorted me all the way to the bus stop, saying that she hoped we could be friends. The bus went within about a half mile from my apartment, then I walked the rest of the way through an industrial area of small alleyways, trying to find a shortcut, which surprisingly worked this time.
I slept again in the afternoon in the hopes that my light sickness will continue to subside. Getting up in the late afternoon, the low sun was useless because of the smog, as it just hovered in the sky as a pale orange disk. I walked into a bike store considering to buy, but want to check more prices first. This store didn’t offer any bikes with gears. Gearless bikes can be found for as little as $15 new, but that might not be a good idea.
I spent the next 3 hours at the internet café working on my first assignment for the investment company, which must be done for free as a test. This project summary described an “amusement” park that a government-owned company wants to build on the tropical Chinese island of Hainan. The English name of the park will be, “The Education Base of the Chinese Communist Party History”. Park attractions will include a Communist Museum and monument to the Red Army Fourth Unit.
My instructions simply were to translate the poor English to business English and form some questions to ask during the negotiations. The company was asking for over $10 million in investment, so I’m skeptical as to what the real purpose of my job may be. I can only assume that this is a very preliminary negotiation for the purpose of gathering more information, but even still, why not pay a real professional in such a situation. As for my negotiation questions, I came up with two pages, including advising the company to change some of its English names to appeal more to western investors.

Thursday, 3-22-07
I went out walking to catch a bus to my new job today, but ended up buying a bike on the way instead. I’d had my eye out for a good-sized bike store for about a week now, and I finally found what I was looking for just around the block. The cost was more than I wanted to pay, $85, but the bike is exactly what I was looking for, a traditional style with gears. By traditional style, I mean the kind that has full splash guards. Most Chinese bikes are the traditional style without gears. The splash guards are important since the bike will be used for the 30 minute ride to work in nice clothes. Gears probably aren’t all that important since all of Beijing is almost perfectly flat, but oh well, I wanted gears.
Getting to work involved asking for directions several times along the way. Even in relatively light traffic, the bike is faster than the bus. I arrived 45 minutes early and spent some time browsing the large department stores there. In the computer section of one, all kinds of usually expensive software is sold for $5 in “Certified Microsoft” boxes with manuals included. Not surprisingly, the store’s front door displays a picture of a camera with a red cross through it.
At the investment agency, my boss Annie spoke with me for a few minutes before the scheduled meeting with clients. We reviewed the information I’d sent last night and she said she was very pleased with all my suggestions, even changing the English name of the client’s company to sound less communist. She gave me business cards to give the clients in the meeting. The cards stated that my name was “Donald” because there hadn’t been time to get any new cards printed. Donald is the name of an old employee. So, at the meeting, I introduced myself as Donald and answered to that name.
Only Chinese was spoken at the meeting and Annie translated what she wanted me to type for the record. Among the 4 clients were 3 employees of the tourism company that was applying for the loan and a government official. The government official was the youngest person there, probably in his early 20’s, but Annie said he held a very prestigious post. Of the 3 company employees, two were also very young and were not dressed professionally. The other employee was a man of about 50 years old, and he did almost all the talking.
Another part of my job was to ask a few questions in English, which Annie translated to the clients. Anybody else could have asked these questions directly in Chinese, so it would appear that part of my job is just for show, maybe to try and get a better deal in negotiations. My part of the meeting only lasted for one hour, then Annie and I left as it was continued with the other investment company employees, two young women. Going back to Annie’s office, she said that she liked working with me a lot, so hopefully that means she’ll call me for more meetings. I had to be in several pictures with the clients and employees before leaving the office. Business here is just not as usual, but maybe that’ll work for me somehow.
On the way home, I stopped at WuMart to buy an iron, which is a necessity with a semi-broken washing machine and no dryer. Back at my apartment, I did some shopping at the large supermarket down the alley, buying some chicken breasts for dinner. Later, I watched a movie called Goya’s Ghosts, about the famous painter by that name. The only reason I bought this is for the great description on the back. Worth reading:
“This film lacked any real punch. No real statement of continuity came forth by the time the credits rolled up. No character is really explored deeply and focused is changed far too often. Take the sudden jump of 15 years midway through the film. Most characters are done away with completely and all others are beyond recognition except the main protagonist, the painter Goya. Even he is not really that interesting. He paints paintings.”
Another quote on the movie packaging reads, “THE FILM IS SIMPLY TOO DISJOINTED, THE CHARACTERS MOSTLY DULL AND THE PLOT FAR TOO LINEAR”
Isn’t China great…..

Friday: 3-23-07
The view out my living room window is an ugly dilapidated brick fence that’s about 7 feet high. There was a large tree by the fence and I thought it would be a better view when the tree leafed out and blocked all the ugliness. Somebody cut the big tree down this morning. A large work crew began tearing down sections of the fence 4 days ago and have since been painstakingly chipping the concrete off of each brick that was removed, presumably for the reason of using them to rebuild the fence. One of the workers always makes a strange whistling sound when I walk by, then all the others look up and smile. This crew of about 20 men has moved into one of the bicycle storage rooms while they work here, cooking meals and sleeping in the tiny open-air building.
I spent a couple more hours in the internet café searching for jobs, but didn’t find many new listings. In the late afternoon I rode my bike through the area near the subway station, which is a strange combination of Hutongs and high office towers. Hutongs are those really narrow alleyways that people live in. Supposedly, there used to be as many as 10,000 Hutongs in the city, but are now only about 2,000. More and more are bulldozed every year to make room for larger buildings, so there will probably be none left here in 25 years. It is common all over the city to see areas of 10-20 acres which are just piles of bricks being cleared out, the remains of recently demolished Hutong blocks. I’m curious as to where the people go and how much time they are given to prepare for the move.
I received an email at 5 o’clock from the investment agency, saying that a new project had been sent to my email account to work on, so I spent another couple hours at the internet café getting it done. This one was about another government-owned company that was trying to promote tourism. Parts of the project summary made no sense whatsoever and I just omitted them.

Saturday: 3-24-07
A pretty meter reader knocked on my door this morning. The meter is in the kitchen, so they must knock and get permission to enter. If you don’t let them in, then your gas, water and electricity will just get shut off eventually. The lady was waving a pink form around speaking all kinds of things I didn’t understand. Eventually, she knocked on the neighbor’s door to see if they could speak any English. A family lived there and the young son said, “take paper to bank”, which I had actually already understood. The meter reader then said something else and the boy translated, “go home”. So, if I understand correctly, the pink form will be placed on my door in one month, then it must be taken to any bank and paid for. Hopefully I’m right about that.
My new bike received about 15 new miles on it today, as I rode all the way to the mountains that can be seen to the west of my apartment in the far off distance. These hills are by no means small and I’d been wanting to go check them out since arriving in Beijing. Riding towards them, I didn’t know the best route and ended up twisting and turning through large streets and small alleys. This led to the discovery of a huge nice park just 15 minutes from my apartment. The park is free to enter and contains many traditional buildings surround a very scenic lake. The main sight here is a pagoda that rises at least 200 feet into the air. Today was the warmest day of the season and the park was full of thousands of people, but the size is large enough that it didn’t seem particularly crowded. Everyone seemed to be really enjoying themselves among flowering trees and bright sunshine.
Nearing the mountains, I came to the first open area I’d seen in weeks, hundreds of acres where millions of trees have been planted. From the size of the trees, it appears the project was undertaken maybe 10 years ago. Riding into the trees continuing towards the mountains, the road got narrower and eventually turned to dirt. Surprisingly, I now began to encounter small villages off these dirt roads. Some of these settlements were only comprised of a single short Hutong with a few homes and a single store. It appeared that some of these villages were supporting agricultural projects next to them. There is a series of water channels built through the entire area, which are green like sewage and smell just the same. Finally coming to the base of the mountains, what looked like elaborate churches or small castles could be seen at the tops of some of the smaller hills. This is all fascinating and I must go hiking in to these mountains next weekend. Hopefully there’s no psychotic Chinese people or bears living up there, or worse, psychotic bears.
Luckily the sun wasn’t obscured by clouds today or I would have had no idea how to get home. It turns out that there is a very direct route from my area to the mountains by just following a main highway. One nice thing about Chinese cities is that they planned all their transportation routes to allow for adequate semi-safe biking paths. Taxis and busses also use these paths sometimes, but they’re better than nothing.

Sunday: 3-25-07
I went on another biking expedition through the city, again to the mountains in the west, but this time to their northern section. I stopped to buy a piece of pineapple for a snack and the vendor prepared a whole one instead of just a slice, then overcharged me. People constantly stare as I travel the edges of the city by bike. At the pineapple stand, a group of 5 people surrounded me and started asking all kinds of weird questions, like what time it was in America. As for the whole pineapple, I was able to eat about half, then attached the rest to my bike rack. For lunch, I had beef and noodles from a tiny restaurant at the base of the mountains. A man and woman were running the place with a single table on the sidewalk. When I asked for water, it was brought out in a large bowl.
The plan had been to walk up one of the mountains and get some pictures, but most of them appear to be fenced off with some pretty formidable fences. It’s not clear what they are trying to keep out, or in, but these mountains seem to be off limits, at least the eastern side of them.

Monday: 3-26-07
There are two kinds of weather that I really hate here, wind and rain. Ironically though, the wind isn’t as bad when it come at the same time as rain. The problem is that rain can turn the streets into a muddy mess and wind can blow dust into the air. But, if it’s raining or has just rained then there’s no dust. Today was dry and windy, leaving my mouth gritty and my eyes itchy all day. Lots of pedestrians looked like Michael Jackson.
Riding my bike to work at 2 o’clock, I happened to pass Johanna on the sidewalk. We recently agreed to not see each other any more, but we live so close that random run-ins will be unavoidable. She was on her way to buy a bike and a camera, so I filled her in on some nearby stores to check.
I had two meetings today working at the investment firm. One was with a client that the company had already invested in, and the other was with a potential future client. As usual, the meetings were conducted by the female employees and I was pretty much just there for show. I still have to answer to the name Donald because the company still has me using that former employee’s business cards. My interpreter at the first meeting last week had been Annie, the woman who hired me, but I worked with a different interpreter today, named Catherine. Today’s potential client was asking for $20 million to invest in a tourist development project, and just like last meeting, the company is government owned.
The Internet access in my apartment has never worked. The landlord said it would take three days to get turned on, and that was three weeks ago. He doesn’t answer my emails and I don’t even think he speaks any English. Using the Internet café has been a real problem because their Chinese Windows operating system will not read some of the files created on my laptop’s English operating system. In an amazing stroke of luck, unsecured wireless access showed up in my apartment tonight when I turned on my laptop. Such an event seems extremely unlikely considering how poor the people are who live in this building. Not only is the signal strong, but the speed’s not bad either. Hopefully it doesn’t disappear by tomorrow.

Tuesday: 3-27-07
The main events of the day were getting my hair cut under a bridge for 70 cents and quitting my job at the investment company. I went to the barber I’ve seen a few times cutting hair under the subway bridge. They call it a subway but this line is actually above ground, hence the bridge. Before, I’d seen the barber from a distance and thought it was a woman, but it’s actually a man. He’s old and tiny. His skin is dark brown and well worn. All his possessions are just as worn and kept in the compartment of his tricycle. To use electrical shears, he has a car battery and a power inverter in the back of the tricycle. I had to wait on another customer when I arrived, then another one had to wait for me. The barber has always had a customer every time I’ve passed. He’s very slow and methodical with his cutting. His hands shake sometimes like he may have some kind of serious neurological disease. The shaking worried me just a bit when he got out a straight razor, but he was very slow as to not make any “mistakes”. He didn’t say a word till after he was done, then asking me a few basic questions like where I was from and what I’m doing here. I think he asked me to have a seat and speak with him more, but the other customer wanted his hair cut then.
As for my job, I kind of liked it, but I’m getting used. They refuse to even pay me for the work I must do before the meetings, which is taking a couple hours. Editing the English in the project summaries is time consuming because of the technical nature. Translating bad English can be hard enough, but this is even worse. I had another meeting scheduled for tomorrow afternoon. They sent the project summary tonight and I spent 2 hours fixing it. The file was somehow corrupt and everything was lost in the end, so that was the end of the job to. Enough.

Wednesday: 3-28-07
The Summer Palace is one of Beijing’s main attractions, so I thought that the Old Summer Palace could also be interesting. On the city map, it’s a huge area of lakes and canals, but in real life, it’s like a desert. The location is only a 20 minute bike ride away on a big modern highway with a strange absence of traffic. Some massive high-rise apartments have been built on this route, one of which alone is comprised of six interconnected 20-story towers, but people are nowhere to be seen. One side of the road features thousands of newly planted trees, the other side is the new apartment buildings, and almost no people are to be seen anywhere. Apparently, the area is newly developed, just waiting for people to move in.
So, about the desert that appears as an oasis on the map. It is indeed huge, with high brick perimeter walls encompassing hundreds of acres. The luxurious traditional buildings that once stood here were burned down by invading armies nearly 150 years ago, with just foundations still remaining. All the lakebeds and canals on the site appear to be dry due to drought, but I’m uncertain about this. A series of locks holds water from most areas, apparently in an attempt to at least have water remaining in some areas. The most elaborate ruins required an extra ticket to enter, which I hadn’t purchased, but they could still be clearly seen from the higher elevations surrounding them.
Riding back towards my apartment, I took a different route, passing through some very poor areas. Debris was scattered everywhere underneath a large highway overpass where some small businesses had recently burned. About a dozen people were rummaging though partially burned piles of clothes and building materials. Going under the bridge and taking a few pictures, a couple of older men approached and seemed to be upset at my presence, so I moved on.
I next came to another area where hundreds of thousands of new trees were planted, similar to what I saw over the weekend on the city’s western edge. Following some dirt paths through the trees, I came upon a circuit board salvaging community. Trucks were coming in piled with old TV’s, computers and anything else with a circuit board inside. Just about every family that lived on the street was breaking these appliances up and removing the circuit boards. Thousands of boards at a time were being loaded onto the back of flatbed trucks and driven away. I’ve seen a lot of communities filling niche markets around here, but this is a first. Walking on, I realized that this activity was not just limited to a single street, but maybe dozens of blocks. This may explain some people I’ve seen in the streets holding up circuit boards and signs. They were probably advertising that they would pay people for their old electronics. I’ve heard before that there is a very active circuit board salvage market in the world, but didn’t expect to find this kind of a side to it.

Thursday: 3-29-07
Riding around the glass-filled streets on the outskirts of Beijing has flattened two bike tires this week, one over the weekend and one yesterday. For the last repair job, I’d taken the bike to a man who changed the innertube and charged $4, way to much. Today, I had a different man patch the tube, which cost about a quarter.
Today’s random bike ride took me to the city’s main area of development for the 2008 Olympics, in the north-central part of the city. Billions of dollars in construction are taking place in a several-hundred acre square of land. The most spectacular structure here is a stadium that looks like a giant piece of steel wool. A latticework of steel beams sticks out all over the jellybean-shaped building. Surrounding it, thousands of new hotel rooms are being constructed. Temporary housing units have been built for the army of workers this project requires. The site is like its own self-contained city, with stores and even a gas station.
Reading the news tonight, I came across the following article. Subway line 10 is the one under construction just next to my apartment, in the Haidan district, so this must be within a few blocks away. Read below.
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MARK COLVIN: Rescuers in Beijing are trying to reach six trapped workers who were building the city's new underground railway to the Olympic village. The men have been given little chance of survival after they were caught in a tunnel collapse.

The story is also about the intense pressure the Olympics is putting on the city and the culture of secrecy which still reigns in China.

The Chinese Government is determined that there will be no last minute worries about completion for the 2008 Olympics, in contrast to the last games in Athens.

The project manager for the subway kept the cave-in secret for eight hours, a decision certain to have endangered the trapped workers and which may have sealed their fate.

The accident follows a series of floods and cave-ins at the subway construction site, as contractors race against the clock to get the Olympic project built on time.

China Correspondent Stephen McDonell reports.

STEPHEN MCDONELL: At 9am yesterday Beijing's subway construction site collapsed. Six workers who were building the underground railway which will take spectators to the Olympics were trapped underground and are now feared dead.

The site manager tried to cover up the accident, sealing off the area and confiscating workers' mobile phones. He was possibly hoping to rescue the men using his own staff before word got out.

When police arrived at the construction site soon after the cave-in, he reportedly told them there was nothing wrong so they left. The authorities finally found out about the trapped men via a circuitous route.

Workers were able to call the wife of one of their trapped colleagues 700 kilometres away in Henan province. She rang the local police who, in turn, rang the Beijing police who then raced back to the construction site. The official rescue attempt didn't start till more than eight hours after the initial cave-in.

By this morning the Chinese media had found out about the accident and reports of it were being broadcast around the country.

(Excerpt of Chinese broadcast)

According to local media the cave-in happened in a construction area which will become an exit for a new underground station. It created a 20 square metre hole which is five-and-a-half metres deep.

The workers are believed to have been trapped under a two-story construction containing a mobile office and a meeting room. They're almost certainly dead.

Beijing is building four new underground railway lines to be completed before the Olympic Games.

The line to the Olympic precinct faces an especially tight deadline. At best it will be finished six weeks before the games begin next August.

It's already had a troubled history.

In November 2005 a section of subway tunnel collapsed under a roundabout. The ground sank more than 10 metres and nobody was hurt.

Last January a waste water pipe burst open and flooded a section of tunnel. The tunnel collapsed but nobody was hurt.

Then last June there was another cave-in close to the location of yesterday's accident. Two workers were buried underground. When they were found they were dead. The official accident report said their death was caused by quicksand.

Tonight in Beijing's northern university district, known as Haidian, the rescue attempt continues. Local reports are expressing little hope that any of the workers could have survived, especially given that what was already a desperate situation was made almost impossible by the subsequent cover-up.

For the sake of making the Olympic deadline and retaining his business, this contractor may have sacrificed his own workers' lives.

This is Stephen McDonell in Beijing for PM.

Friday: 3-30-07

Cold and wet today. I at least ventured out for lunch and dinner, getting some lamb skewers in the alley for lunch and going to a little café just down the street to have pizza and a beer for dinner. Other than that, I had an eventful day of laundry and looking for jobs online. That’s only 3 sentences, so hopefully there’s no rain tomorrow.


Saturday 3-31-07:

Fierce wind was blowing this morning, strong enough to blow over just about every bicycle in the area and rip small branches from trees. Earlier in the week, there had been a dust storm warning for this weekend, but the air luckily turned too moist. This is a yearly spring occurrence in Beijing, caused by dust blowing in from the Mongolian deserts.
The wind suddenly died down just before I walked to McDonald’s for lunch. The day was sunny and 60 degrees then, but I was on the computer all day and didn’t enjoy it. The job search is looking worse everyday, so it looks like I may have to make other plans soon. Without a better understanding of Chinese, there’s little I can do other than teach English, which I’ve completely given up on.

I use Craigslist.com regularly and I noticed the following line on the site today:

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You can be fined more than $10,000 for each discriminatory ad, plus damages in court, plus loss of license if you are a professional
avoid phrases which could be interpreted as discriminating by race/color/origin (e.g. "hispanic area" or "asian building"), religion (e.g. "christian household"), age / familial status (e.g. "no kids" or "prefer student"), disability, or sexual orientation
the words you choose can cost you - get the facts and avoid being prosecuted under fair housing law.
So, this got me to thinking of other such phrases that should also lead to fines, like “retirement community”. Why should only old people be allowed to live there? How about ads for roommates, like “female preferred”? I think, that even saying “human preferred” is already going way to far already. People are just so insensitive. I was reading a hostel’s website recently and came across this sentence, “Before booking your room, we may ask you some personal information in order to keep the freaks and wierdos out, because they make other guests uncomfortable”. Why would anyone ever stay at such a place, there will be nobody to laugh at and make fun up. To increase business, they should spice the place up with a big sign out front that says, “SERIAL KILLERS WELCOME:)”. People just have no business sense.
At 8 o’clock, I took the subway to the city’s northwest side, to the main entertainment district for foreigners, called Sanlitun. Here, I met up with Simon, who was a student in my classes the one day I taught English at the university a few weeks ago. We went into big nearly empty bar and played several games of pool with his friends, a group of friendly Muslim guys from various Middle Eastern countries. Later, we took a cab with two of the guys to another bar and spent the rest of the evening there.