Now, FOUR Years in China

The view from our window

I just wanted to say that I’m safe and sound after a night of serious pyromania. In all, the night was amazing. The amalgamation of millions of fireworks created an odd acoustic phenomena where all you could hear was an endless humming rumble 360 degrees around you.

A highlight (depending on how you look at it) was when a bad mortar shell blew my launch tube into pieces, setting off every car alarm within 500 meters and drawing unfavorable attention from the firemen. Fortunately some Germans arrived with a new tube and we sent a couple more large-scale balls into the sky to add to the thunder. Suprisingly, the smaller, self-contained, show-in-a-boxes did an admirable job but there was just something awesome about the deep, powerful thud of the big ones launching.

So at about 10 pm, the Germans picked up their launch tube and I asked where they were going…”we go drink now…we come back at 12″. I took a break to and went to a firework dealer to buy a case of 10 “da das” (big ones) for about $40. At midnight, the Germans returned a little tipsy and we successfully waged a blitzkrieg of 5 shots before they blew up their own launch tube. We shared some beers and they went home.

Lisa said I wasn’t allowed to keep these “bombs” in the house, so I traced the source of some other “big ones” going off outside the compound and drove out to take advantage of their in-tact launch tube. When I arrived, I found an affluent, english-speaking asian family who happily let me join in the fun and within 30 minutes, we had emptied our stash of commercial-grade fireworks.

By law, I’m supposed to say “Spring Festival” to describe Chinese New Year but let’s not be so politically correct and call it what it really is. The tradition of Chinese New Year is that you chase bad spirits away with fireworks. Beijing has lifted a 12 year ban on fireworks within the 5th ring road which means that Beijing is going to seem like a war zone as revelers unleash 12 years of pent-up pyromaniacal frustration.

For the past 2 weeks, the firework stands have been sprouting to life and their inventories have seem to grow way outside the bounds of their little tents. At first passing, I was stunned at the size of the packages you could purchase. They have battery’s of 36″ mortar tubes that weigh 60lbs and can fire an impressive 18 shots of flowering starbursts that would rival your local country club’s Fourth of July.

So as the big dumpling drops tomorrow at midnight, the men of Capital Paradise (including myself ) will unleash a form of armageddon that only Bush and his troops could rival. The management of Capital Paradise has kindly arranged to clear out a parking lot, set up launch tubes and hire a fire brigade to extinguish all the secondary fires that (apparently) happen.

Note: Last year, a resident left his car in the parking lot while traveling outside the country. In an attempt to keep dust off, he covered it with a canvas cover which caught fire and scorched the paint on the roof and hood of his car. A few minutes later, a row of bushes went up in flames. With skill and precision which can only be attained from countless Chinese fire drills, the firefighters extinguished the flames.

Below is a photo of my current stash. It contains all the basics…firecrackers, roman candles, fountain, screaming rockets, large bottle rockets, a small battery of mortars, and some sparklers for Madeline. But there’s also something else in the box behind it…shhh…read on.

This is China…and I figured that if I ever had an opportunity to buy something not typically available in the US, it would be in the form of fireworks. So while negotiating a giant, $75 mortar box, I asked another shopper (fluent in Chinese and English) to ask the stand owner if he had anything “special” that wasn’t on display. He took me to the back of his tent and uncovered boxes of the holy grail of all fireworks…commercial mortar balls! He reached in and grabbed a small one along with a 25″ steel launch tube and we walked across the street. He lit the ball, dropped it in the tube and I was treated to that low, gut wrenching thud as the charge propelled it a hundred feet into the sky. A second later, it filled the entire sky with a bloom of purple and gold.

We walked back to his stash and I asked for “surga jayga”, “sooga nayga”, and “arga nayga hen dada” which translates to some pretty serious pyrotechnics. I got ten of the ones he demonstrated, four frighteningly large 6″ diameter ones, and two really “big ones”. In the photo below, I placed one of each next to some familiar items to show their massive scale…and yes, they scare the bajeezus out of me.

In 48 hours or so, I will either be posting about an awesome Chinese New Year’s eve or else I will be posting about the quality of medical care available in Beijing. Most likely, I’ll ask someone with a bit more experience to light these while I stand 100 feet away as my eyes and hands are crucial to my profession.

Each Friday afternoon, Madeline’s brownie troop does some type of group activity. Today’s activity was a trip to go snow-tubing and being the proud new owner of car, I was recruited to be the brownie bus. I guess there’s a downside to owning a car. Anyway, I followed the troop leader through 2 intersections, a right turn and couple clicks to a man-made snow hill just 5 minutes away from the school!

The vertical elevation was approximately 30 feet and the length was about 100 yards. As we approached, I noticed that kids were tubing on one side, but the main part was for snow skiing!

So, we unpacked the kids, paid 20rmb to enter the park and went to the “lodge” where we rented the tubes for 60 rmb each (about $7.50). The kids (and the adults…including me) had a blast on the tubes. Not to sound like a broken record but the lack of lawsuits here allows for people to have the type of fun that we had when we (and our parents) were kids. The tubing run had been iced down with nice little ramp at the bottom and we could pile 2-3 kids into each tube with reckless abandon. In other words, the staff deferred to the parents to set the safety parameters. But let’s save that thread for another day.

While Lisa, the other moms and the kids tubed, I rented a crappy pair of snow skis and white boots. The guys at the rental counter seemed to be laughing at me…maybe because I was simply wearing some work clothes or maybe it was the size of the boots. At times like this, the language barrier is awesome…I was able to look them straight in the eye with a big smile on you face as if I was laughing with them …”yep..this big American actually does know how to ski…and while you are at it, I recommend staying off the crack pipe”. So I popped my skis on, zipped on over to the rope pull and hooked my butt to the handle for the 2 minute ride up. At the top, I pushed off and after a moment of adapting to the crappy, unwaxed skis, I was able to get just enough speed to get 2 turns in before reaching the bottom of the hill.

I repeated this about 8 times and called it quits. In terms of skiing, it could hardly be worse but in terms of a fun day with the family, it was awesome. The proximity of the hill is great and I suspect that some of us from the school will sneak over at lunch some day to get 30 minutes of skiing in. An even more exciting idea is taking the IT staff there with a bucket of KFC….that would be a riot.

Note: Within a 1.5 hour drive, you can access a number ski areas in the mountains to the north. Skiing is such a new thing to China that it’s probably similar in scale to some of the North Carolina areas. But like everything else here, it’s probably going to boom as more Chinese come into the level of disposable income required to do this type of recreation. I will probably try out some of the ski areas here in the next few weeks and post more about my findings.

Since the previous post, I had to spend an entire day buying the new (used) car. Little did I realize that the dose of Chinese culture I received while choosing a car was simply an appetizer to the main course of buying it.

On Wed, I returned to the used car market with our favorite driver Mr. Lu who assisted me the entire day and genuinely seemed to look out for my interests.

10 am. Spent 40 minutes in the stinky sales office amongst the grasshoppers, fish, worms, and drunk, smoking in-laws. The car hadn’t been cleaned yet and I didn’t have time to wait. I verified that they fixed everything I had asked them to fix, and I handed him a 2 lb stack of cash - imagine $6500 worth of $10 bills. I must say, I felt a bit like Tony Soprano when handing over bundled stacks of cash out of paper bag. Well, actually it was an envelope from the bank…but let’s just call it a bag.

11:00 We went to a government-run title-transfer office at the used car market and spent the next 3 hours in what seemed like the place that poor souls have to wait on their way to hell…only, this wasn’t hot…it was an un-heated metal building. There were 60 window-counters but only 12 were occupied. An LED panel displayed ticket numbers with the corresponding window. Sadly, there were about 100 people in front of us.

11:15 After waiting 15 minutes to get a number, our car dealer quickly found a freelance “transaction handler” woman to manage the rest of the sale so he could return to his liquor, worms and ciggies.

12:00 Stomach starting to growl because I was getting hungary.

12:15 Quickly ended my hunger by watching the DVD loop of the Chinese equivalent of Blood Runs Red on the Highway. Yes, in one of the nastiest buildings I’ve ever been in, they had 60″ plasma monitors showing real footage of busses running over bicyclists, endless dead bodies, and one scene where a guy runs across the highway only to get flipped 25 feet into the air by a speeding motorist.

1:00 Practiced my Chinese with Mr. Lu as I looked up the words for “hungry”, “bored”, and “freaked out by the entertainment”.

1:45 Our number finally displayed. I watched our “handler” handle stuff at a few different windows.

2:00 Handler Lady, Lu and I took the new car to the government tax office to acquire the “black plates” (foreigners’ license plates are black…more about that later). This office was swankier than most corporate headquarters and had vending machines with Red Bull which substituted for my lunch.

2:15 Watched more of the carnage video which was the only thing this building had in common with the first one. Lu removed the blue plates from the car.

3:30 Led to the foreign affairs counter where a pretty serious government official scrutinized my passport and residence papers. I then had to choose my new license plate from a computer kiosk where the handler-lady put my title document under a laser scanner and the machine came to life. I pressed a couple things on the touch-screen (with help from Lu) and the display, akin to a video slot machine in Las Vegas started spinning. I pressed the “Stop” button and was presented with eight plate numbers to chose from. Lu immediately directed me to choose the one with the “lucky number” - 30116 . The government official handed over the plates and we quickly went outside and installed them. An official photographed the car, with the plates to finalize the registration.

4:00 While waiting to receive the final paperwork, we watched a young Chinese man pull up in a new Ferrari F50…talk about having some guanxi.

4:30 Drove back to the used car market and had to spend another 30 minutes in the nasty sales office. Lu gave them instructions to deliver the final documents to the school after some sort of heated exchange. Afterwards, I took the wheel of my new car and drove home with Lu leading the way.

6:30 Drove back to Shunyi (home) where I left my car at a car wash near my house where a team of guys descended upon the dirty SUV and claimed that it would be clean in 30 minutes. Lu drove me home.

7:00 Walked back to the car wash and brought home a happy car. Gave Lisa and Maddy a short ride to the grocery store.

8:00 Put my bike rack on it.

On Saturday, I went to the Auto Parts Market where I tried to get a replacement for the spare tire cover, a seat belt for the 3rd row seats and “something” to make the front-end look less wimpy. It’s amazing how far $110 will go to “pimp-your-ride” here.

This post won’t cover the details of what was required to do this so I’m writing a whole other page about this experience with photos and everything related to the complexity of purchasing an automobile here. Anyway, here is the scoop…

We bought a used 2005 Chinese SUV called a Tiān Qì Qí Bīng or “Cheer”. Except for the front grille, It’s identical to the Great Wall “Sing” which leads me to believe it’s basically the same car. Of course, if you are reading this in the US, this has absolutely no meaning to you. It’s basically a large SUV with fold-down 3rd row seat in the cargo area. It has a whopping 2.2 liter engine but otherwise, it’s styling is pretty nice. It has a leather (with a capital p) interior, a nice cd player, reverse proximity sensors in the bumpers, dual digital climate control, power windows, locks etc. In all honesty, it’s not that bad. The engine ran smoothly, and while it’s not an automatic transmission, it shifted smoothly.

When traveling home, we saw one on the road which gave me the opportunity to shoot a much better photo of what it looks like. Stay tuned for my “car shopping mini site”.

In the meantime, have a look at this site…http://www.car-solution.com. This is a company that handles all the tricky details of buying a car here. I didn’t use them because I have a friend here who helped me. If you browse through some of the vehicles on this site, you will see the prices in RMB. Just divide by 8 to get the US dollar price. Take notice of the fact that the imports cost double what they cost in the US (a Chrysler minivan costs about $75K). Unless you are married to a local, it’s cash only…no financing or leasing unless you company offers some assistance. Needless to say, I didn’t have a choice when it came to buying a Chinese brand. And, fortunately, my employer offers an interest free loan that is automatically deducted from your paycheck over 7 months.

China Daily just announced that the competition will begin for designing the Olympic medals.

As a former graphic designer, I thought I would throw my idea into the mix. My inspiration came from a medal that Madeline purchased at the Great Wall.

After a painstaking long design process, audience analysis, consultation with social anthropologists, Chinese historians, and 2 days of meditation in a Buddhist monastery, I have completed my award winning design. I’m certain that no other submission will have such a bold and passionate design as mine.
Click HERE to see my design…

I just completed my first pass at a 5 month summary of all the things people seem to ask me. It’s located here… http://www.db3.net/blog/?page_id=105

After a brutally long flight on Thursday, we arrived back in Beijing. It’s a process that begins with hitting the snooze on the alarm clock a few times around 3am.

3am-ish EST - Wake up and get dressed
4am EST - Load car and head to airport
6am EST - Flight leaves for Toronto
8am EST - Arrive in Toronto, clear customs. 2 shuttle busses and 1/2 mile of walking puts us into the departure gate.
8:45 am EST - Board the plane and whine to the flight attendant about our un-retractable armrests.
9:45 am EST - Depart for Beijing
10:30 am EST - Discover that we accidently packed the Ambiens in a checked suitcase…damn!
11:30 pm EST (12:30 pm Beijing time) - Land
1:00 am EST - Drive to our Beijing house
3 am EST (4 pm Beijing) - Eat an early dinner of Chinese take-out (I guess it’s just callled take-out here).
4:30 am EST (5:30 pm Beijing) - Get Lisa and Madeline who are both asleep on the couch into their beds…I follow close behind.
2:30 am (Beijing) - Wake up refreshed and ready to start the d..uh…oh damn. Take an Ambien go back to sleep.

Packing the Contraband
The game is called “maximizing your luggage allowance” and you are limited to the following requirements…
Each person can check two (2) 50lb suitcases and carry on a 22″ case along with a “smaller” type of handbag on the plane. With 3 of us traveling, we can check 300 lbs of luggage and by maximizing our carry-on allowance, we can probably add about another 150 lbs.

During any trip back to the US, the first stop(s) are to Costco, Target, and CVS for vitamins, Clif Bars, skin care products, and various other health and beauty aids. We bought close 80 Clif bars, 6 boxes of Emergen-C vitamin packs, 6 bottles of Neutrogena skin wash, 2 large bottles of Cetaphil moisturizer, and other items. I used a scale (available at Mori luggage) designed for weighing suitcases in order to pack each bag to it’s 50 lb. limit.

Here’s what we took to the airport with us…

2 Ballistic nylon suitcases
4 Inexpensive Ricardo (from Costco) rolling duffles
1 Tumi rolling carry-on suitcase
1 Tumi shoulder bag
1 Swiss Army rolling carry-on suitcase
1 North Face day-backpack

Madeline has an American Girl carry-on rolling suitcase which was cute for about 5 minutes until she wanted Lisa or me to carry it. Now we only take 2 rolling carry-ons and her books go into a backpack.

Getting to the Airport
With 400 lbs of bulky luggage and a 6 am departure, our options are limited.

- MARTA - We drive 2 loads of lugguge to our MARTA station 5 minutes away. Pros: Cheap. Dependable. Cons: Major hassle at 3:30 am. Car would need to be picked up and taken back to the house. Doesn’t run until 6 am.

- Taxi - Pros: reasonably cheap compared to a limo or van. Cons: Unreliable. Luggage won’t fit unless it’s a van.

- Limo - Pros: Conspicuous bling. Luggage fits. Cons: Expensive. Can’t make it up the driveway.

- Van - Pros: Lugguage fits. Cons: More expensive than limo. Wasted space = wasted $$$. Uncomfortable. Ugly.

- Friend - Pros: Free. Cons: Not at 3:30 am.

After looking at these options, we were scratching our heads. I called some limo companies to book a van but found an excellent comprimise. Starlight Limousines has a nice, comfy Chevy Suburban. This turned out to be the perfect solution. It was less expensive than the van and a only about $20 more than a Taxi. It was comfortable as a limo and could ascend our driveway. Problem solved.

Checking In
Air Canada doesn’t have curb-side check-in and I was too cheap to use a skycap. Lisa took a couple bags and lined up at the counter while I made a couple trips to and from the car. Once checked in, the rest of the trip was a piece of cake.

Beijing
Unlike every other airport in the US with $3 carts, Beijing has free carts; so getting our giant pile of lugge into a transportable form was no problem at all. But getting it home would be. While waiting for the baggage, I called Mr. Lu and asked him to bring another driver for the luggage. Within 20 minutes he arrived with his friend, we loaded both cars and headed home for about 1/8th the cost of the Suburban in Atlanta…I guess in some ways, I’m really happy to be back.