You think traffic is bad in your town?

On the subject of China, we tend to get inundated with statistics: the biggest this, the most that, and so on. I heard the other day that in Beijing alone, a thousand new cars are on the streets every day. That kind of growth on top of a population of 16 million and a bunch of cars already out there leads to some pretty nasty traffic. Today was the worst day I’ve seen yet. I think a substantial fraction of the next two years of my life will be spent sitting in taxis that are not moving.

As an American, I’m used to very rigid traffic flow. Cars stay in their lanes, pedestrians stay on the sidewalks, and there aren’t really that many bicycles. Pedestrians have the right of way, and there are thousands of rules which are actually enforced. In Beijing, traffic rules are only guidelines. And cars have the right of way over pedestrians and bicycles. Maybe it’s due to the construction, but you see many streets wide enough for six cars abreast each way with no lanes painted at all. There’s usually a fence down the center separating the two directions of flow, but when there isn’t, it seems to be a matter of which driver has the most guts that decides who drives where. When the street is crammed, cars drive on the sidewalks, or park there if it suits them. A police car with flashing lights gets no special treatment either. We have a joke here: the green walking person on the pedestrian crossing light doesn’t mean WALK, it means GOOD LUCK.

It’s ironic that a country viewed from the outside as being populated with conformists with a strict government should have such extreme freedom, whereas the US, a country of individualists who celebrate personal freedom, has rigid rules.

Just an observation.

I’ve seen a few accidents, including a little Nissan that caught the front end of a bus, but surprisingly few considering the chaos. All in all, it works amazingly well. Construction is the wild card in the system.

Picking up where I left off last time…

When I got home from work yesterday, I took a little while to rest in my room and caught up on email, then packed up the camera and went out to wander the neighborhood. The sidewalks (and streets and so on) were crowded with people and bicycles and cars going every which way. I just walked around feeling like a nerdy kid. I went into the Wonderful Digital Jungle, which in addition to a bunch of booths selling just about any kind of electronic gear you can imagine, contains several restaurants and a big supermarket. After that, I was tired, so I just hit the hotel’s BBQ buffet, where you pick out your ingredients and a guy cooks them for you, more or less like the Mongolian places we have in the US. With some different ingredients, of course.

And it was my best night yet for sleeping, straight through from 11 to 6:30, with only brief interruptions. I don’t know if I’m actually adjusting yet, or was just exhausted.

Today was another long day, and it’s not over yet. I had a conference call with people back in the States at 7, which I took in my hotel room. The car was scheduled to pick us up at 8 – there are three of us now staying at the Kuntai – so I had very little time to get ready, and I had to dress nicer than usual. We were going to the press conference to announce officially that Ticketmaster is the exclusive provider of ticketing services to the 2008 Olympic Games. There were press cameras everywhere, and I suppose I’ll be visible on Chinese TV in the background of shots. Since every speech had to be done in two languages, it seemed to take forever. Then we had to pose for pictures.

Then upstairs to the office and a bit of work. For lunch we went back to the same place we ate on Tuesday. I’ve been accused of writing mostly about the non-Chinese food I’ve had (pizza, KFC), but I promise, I have been eating Chinese as well. We like this place a lot. I don’t know what it’s called, but the food is good and it’s quite inexpensive. Six of us ate well on 77RMB (around $10). There was a great chicken-peanut dish with hot peppers in it (basically kung pao chicken), a broccoli dish, one with pork (I think) and some sort of green vegetable, and two different kinds of fried rice. Then back to the office for more work, until a little after five, then hop in the van for a few minutes at home (or hotel) until dinner at 7:30 at a place called the Green T. House, which is supposed to be really good. I’ll keep you posted.

And it’s about time for me to leave for dinner.

Later…

The Green T. House is a very interesting place. It’s a combination art gallery (more to the modern side than Rembrandt) and restaurant. The sign outside is a long piece of etched glass vertical along the entrance, and the door is painted pure white and is ten feet wide and around twenty feet high. You push on it and it swings away from you, revealing a curtained entry way. It’s in a large space with very high ceilings, and all the walls are painted white. They have projectors and multicolored lights that move around onto different walls. The chairs are all works of art too. At our table, most of them had backs about eight feet high, in an sinuous shape, which is interesting looking but awkward to hang a coat on. At one end of the table was a very strange couch of an asymmetrical curvy shape.

The cocktail menu was etched onto a piece of glass, and the food menu was a bound book of 50 or more pages done in a combination of Chinese calligraphy and English writing, and instead of simple descriptions of the dishes, there are poetic phrases. “The fish swims in a stream of light” and so on. Several of the group had been there before and took care of the ordering. I started off the evening with a Green T. Martini, which came in a large fluted glass; the olives were threaded onto a long thin bamboo leaf. For utensils we had really long chopsticks, about 14 inches or more of dark wood. I will try to do justice to the presentations.

1. Walnuts and gorgonzola on a wafer of Asian pear, served on a platter featuring a live goldfish swimming in a large wine glass.
2. Wonton dumplings spaced around a black slate slab with small bowls of dipping sauce.
3. Scallops encrusted with something crunchy, a dab of wasabi on top, and a puff of slivered seaweed (I think that’s what it was).
4. Hollowed half tomatoes stuffed with shrimp and kernels of corn in a creamy sauce.
5. Thin asparagus spears cut in half and arranged with the tips lined up in a square on top of the stems, which were lined up at a 90° angle, topped with a light sauce and raspberries.
6. Small barbequed ribs in criss-cross pattern with puffs of slivered carrot on top.
7. Roast duck in a fancy presentation (this is Beijing after all).
8. Little bits of meat (consensus was lamb) in a dark sauce.
9. Pancakes of dough cut into curves and arranged with drops of sauce.
10. Cylinders of seasoned ground beef wrapped around some kind of green vegetable, arranged standing vertically in a diagonal line across a large platter.
11. It seems like there was another “entrée” kind of dish.
12. A large round platter with balls of ice on top of dry ice, so fog rolled off of it. Balls of green ice cream (not sure what flavor) dotted the mound, along with a bunch of grapes and a sprig of some plant kind of like holly only the leaves weren’t spiky.
13. A long thin platter with little triangles of really intense chocolate.
14. A large round bowl with fog rolling off it so thick you couldn’t tell at first what it was. In the center was a small bowl of incredible chocolate mousse.

Out of solidarity with JW’s wife K, I opted for the white wine instead of my more usual red. It was probably the best pinot gris I’ve ever had. I don’t remember the winery, but it was Alsatian.

Well, now that everyone reading is convinced that I’m a hoity-toity cuisinary snob, I’ll wrap up. Tomorrow is my first day of tourist-type activities. JW, KW and I are going up to Badaling to see the Great Wall.

An unusual construction site.

Chinese pizza and other strange things

Wednesday morning I got up early enough to go downstairs to the breakfast buffet, which consists of a variety of Chinese and Western style foods. They have a cereal bar, pastries, an egg station where you can have eggs cooked any way you like, bacon, sausage, and so on, plus fried rice and other Chinese dishes. There are also fruits and cold cuts, including some kind of smoked fish that I really like. While I was eating, another coworker came in and joined me. HC is in town for about a month; he works on the website designs for the Olympic ticket applications.

At 9, several of the rest of the gang met us and we went to the BOCOG (Beijing Organizing Committee for the Olympic Games) building for a meeting. After the meeting, some of us visited the gift shop and bought some official items. I got a baseball cap and a set of the small mascots, the Friendlies (now called Fuwa). Read about them here.

For lunch we decided on a shorter walk and went to KFC. I've seen several of them around town. The weather had cleared up by then and the typical hazy sky had turned an actual shade of blue. It was warm enough I didn't need my jacket. Anyway, the menu was rather different than an American KFC, so I just pointed at combo #2 on the menu, which looked like a chicken sandwich. It came with a very sweet orange soda drink and a little corn salad instead of coleslaw. The sandwich was a little spicy; I will not even hazard a guess what part of the chicken was featured in the meat.

The official contract signing ceremony is coming up Friday morning, so a couple of Ticketmaster bigwigs flew into town Wednesday afternoon. We met up with them at the Raffles Beijing Hotel. HC and I got there early and wandered around looking at the art on display and the fountains. It is quite a place. We had dinner at the restaurant called East 33. If you check out the slideshow on their web site, you'll see some pictures of it. We all opted for the buffet, giving us a huge selection of very nicely prepared dishes. I went for a combination of Western and Asian items. We had some very nice wine, and the desserts were luscious. It was on the way back from there that I saw the rainbow neon over the street.

I went right to bed after getting back to the hotel. It was about 10:30 by then. Once again I woke around 3:30 and slept badly after that.

I had only a half day in the office today, since the afternoon was given over to apartment hunting. More on that later. The interesting part of the day at the office was lunch. We had food delivered from a Pizza Hut that is not far from the office. Delivery in this case meant we paid for the pizza and cab fair for the delivery guy both ways. We got a variety of pizzas, but not many of them would appear on the menu of an American Pizza Hut. One had pineapple, black olives, little chunks of tomato, some kind of chicken meat, fake crab meat, kernels of fresh corn, and mozzarella, and the sauce tasted like 1000 island dressing. Another one had sausage, pepperoni, ham and cheese and didn't seem to have hardly any sauce at all. The seafood pizza had little shrimp, fake crab, calamari rings, little bits of octopus tentacle, pineapple, green pepper, and a sauce that tasted a bit like cocktail sauce. The seafood one was my favorite.

After lunch, BG and I took a cab to her apartment to meet up with our real estate guy. She had already checked out two potential vacant places in her complex, which consists of ten big buildings. Each building has two numbers, split vertically down the middle, so they say there are twenty buildings, but it's just ten structures. The first apartment was on the second floor looking down onto the garden area at the center of the complex. It was pretty nice, with a very large kitchen, but had a kind of dark quality to it.

This is the building with both flats.







The other was on the eleventh floor (though they call it 12 since buildings never have a floor 4 here, 4 being an unlucky number, along with 13 and 14) and has light colored wood floors, and very cheerful light. It also faces onto the central garden, but the extra height gives it views out over the city.

Living room of second flat.






It's a little smaller than the other one, but I liked the feel of it more, and the bathroom was nicer. The kitchen is smaller, but it also has a window to the outside for some natural light, and the washer/dryer is enclosed in its own little room off the kitchen.

Guest bedroom.












I gave to go-ahead on the second place, and if all goes well, I'll be able to move in next week. More on that as things develop.

Kitchen.

And as this post is getting a bit long, I'll sign off for now. Time to think about dinner, and I'm on my own tonight.

Skip Monday, go to Tuesday

One of my coworkers says it always seems to take people eight days to adjust to the change in time zones. I would hope for something shorter, but we'll see.

As we rode in from the airport, JW would point out the window and say, "When I first visited here in May, those buildings weren't there. And that was just open space over there." I mentioned before that construction is going on everywhere, and that is no exaggeration, just plain fact. I have not seen a single block of a single street that didn't have work in progress. Old buildings are being ripped down, new ones are going up, sidewalks are getting redone, cranes adorn the skyline in every direction. It's simply mind-boggling — I swear 50% of the population is involved in construction, and the other 50% are out on the sidewalks or riding bicycles or in cars. I've been told that by law or decree or something, all the visible construction has to be done in a few months (I forget the exact date), so they'll be finishing up the outsides of all the buildings and working inside after that. All the cranes are supposed to be gone. Already, I'm told that workers are camping out in the buildings they're working on, and our future office space is housing the security and construction staff who work there. Work goes on 24-7, so you'll see sparks from welding in the middle of the night.

The Kuntai Royal Hotel is one of the nicer hotels I've stayed in, with marble in the room's entryway and bathroom, nice furnishings, and attentive service. I've taken some pictures, but don't have a way to get them out of the camera right now since I didn't bring the USB adapter for it. There's an electronics store close by, so it shouldn't be hard to find one.

Later: As you can see, I've taken care of that.

As I mentioned previously, there's lots of neon. Parts of this town are like Las Vegas or Tokyo in that respect. Very fancy light shows going on. Last night I saw an arch over a street that was like a rainbow with the colors flowing from either side to the center. I think that was down near Tian'an Men Square, though it was dark and I didn't see the square itself. Everything seems to shut down around 11pm, so in that respect it's different than Las Vegas.

Tuesday morning I went in to our temporary office, which is in a run-down old hotel called the Huabei. Half of the building still seems to be a hotel (the A side), and the other side (B) is the Beijing Olympic Media Centre. They have a lot of press conferences and so on down on the 2nd floor. We're on the 4th, and there's a sign that says Forbidden City Film Company when you get off the elevator. The hallways are lined with posters for Chinese movies. But it's a dingy, smelly old building with ratty carpet and lousy ventilation, and our part of it is in the center so we don't even have any windows. The smelly part comes mostly from cigarettes. It is very strange for me to see people smoking in the office, and the lack of air circulation doesn't help. Every once in a while I have to get up and walk out into the hall for air that's slightly fresher.

Tuesday the Americans of the office walked a few blocks from our building to a restaurant for lunch. We had one Mandarin speaker with us, but they also had a big color-picture menu, so we could just point at what we wanted. We ordered way too much food, which was of course served on a big lazy Susan in the center of the table so we could all help ourselves to what we wanted. I liked most of the dishes we had. And yes, it was not like Chinese food I've had in the US. Before we got our food, they brought out a live fish flopping in a net for our approval. There was a kind of salad made from very thin strips of celery, a dish that consisted of pecans or walnuts glazed with a sweet soy sauce, a very strange looking kind of mushroom, and a bunch more. The fish came steamed and filleted in a very attractive presentation, and tasted delicious.

After stuffing myself at lunch, it was especially hard to stay awake. Between the jet lag and the full stomach, I was nodding at my desk. I got back to the hotel around 6pm, took care of a bit of email, and was in bed shortly after 7 without thinking about dinner.

I woke around 3:30 and only slept fitfully after that.