Well, not quite! But almost ... just a very brief entry to say that I am still okay and I will update more next week (when I have the whole week off for a holiday), and a special thank you to people whose mail has got through to me so far, most recently to Mariamelia. We had to find the postal depot because we were at class when it arrived, that in itself was a bit of an adventure, more on it when I write again, but it came through intact and now both you and I and everyone else knows that the addresses on my entry titled "CONTACT DETAILS" actually work when printed off and stuck to envelopes / packages / etc.
My unsubtle hinting here is that I could really do with some mail, just because I like it, and also because I want to decorate my walls a bit - so if anyone fancies sending me a postcard or a letter and some pictures or anything really, please just go ahead and do it :D I will love it (whatever it is) and you may even be able to poach my free time to receive a reply of sorts! :)
Wednesday 24 September 2008
Wednesday 17 September 2008
Pissup in a Brewery, Anyone?
*There was an alternative title to this post. I'll leave it up to your imaginations, suffice to say it was clean but very much taking the biscuit*
Will it never end? Seems like we get a couple of days when things run smoothly, and then everything hits the fan again. Two examples from the past two days.
POSTING A PRESENT ABROAD
How hard can it be to find a post office with an international service? This is a big deal - every other country I have been to has a facility for international postage in every post office, regardless of size, location, or how often this function is required. Sending a package to another country is as simple as going to a desk, filling out the required forms, and watching your post disappear into the black hole of the post office backroom. Here, it's enough if I can find a place that's open when I want it to be. Doesnt help that on the most recent holiday (Mid Autumn Festival?) the post offices stay closed but the banks open. Kind of like an odd bank holiday. So my second attempt to send this parcel was scuppered by poor timing (my first was ruined by the post muppet telling me that the present - a mug, yes you guessed correctly Lucy - was for drinking tea, and the letters -rolled up inside the mug for convenience - were for posting; actually I thought this was quite insulting and I wanted to hit the bloke square in the face for being so obnoxious, I was already having a crap day). Anyway, finally the post offices were open and I thought I would get this sorted once and for all. I went in and was informed there was no international service at that office. Honestly, what is wrong with this stupid place? I asked where I could find a branch to send my package and they said Hongshan. I asked if that was the one near the Xinhua Bookstore and they said yes, take the 101 bus (yes, yes, I know THAT). So I took the bus, it was the middle of the day, blazing hot, and I wasn't feeling good at all. But I got there, and it was a lot cooler inside, and then the fun began again. Turns out they don't have an international service. And after I got quite frustrated with them, it turns out they aren't the Hongshan branch, it's another 2 stops up the road. Gaaaaargh. I asked why they couldnt just have an international service in all branches like in England (or anywhere else for that matter) and was told (in English), "Ah, but that is your country and ... this is China" (yes, it IS China, which is fast becoming synonymous for "difficult" and "hopelessly slow" - aptly I learnt a very good Chinese word this week, 乱 (luan) which means "messy" or "disorganised".) Feeling even worse, I went to the Hongshan branch, where (after a LOT of hassle, rewriting my address on the parcel, and filling out various customs forms - acerbically I might add, the frustration by this point becoming tangible) the package was good to go and all that remained was the small matter of RMB 86 to pay for it. WHAT?! GBP £7.00!!!!!!! for a small parcel?! Gobsmacked, and with no other option, I paid for this service, but really, that is extortionate. I think post day is going to be a once a week, maybe once every ten days affair, and will mainly be limited to sending letters, certainly nothing much bigger if that's how much I'm going to have to pay!
On the plus side I wasn't required to show my passport (a first, maybe?)
OBTAINING A RESIDENCY PERMIT
It has been about 10 days since we got our temporary residents' permits, which took about 18 days from arriving in China (there was a 30 day limit, it wasn't exactly optional, but the process took forever). Now we need the permanent ones (apparently we have another 30 days to get this sorted, good, we'll probably need it), which are both a sheet of paper and a sticker in the passport (I think). This morning we finally got the uni to give us all the necessary documents for this permit, and off we went to the PSB office. For the record, our handbooks state that a member of the international school staff should accompany us, but I didn't see anyone offering, and like most other things I'm beginning to suspect it was a load of mouth and not much trousers. We got to the PSB offices at about 1220, took a ticket when we went in and noted the number ... 1070 ... the display was reading number 1032 or something ridiculously far from our turn, and as usual a massive crowd of people was aimlessly shoving and trying to plonk their docs on the table first (despite this numbering system, it would seem the Chinese attitude of "just barge and shove and get in front of everyone else" has infected foreigners now) ... so we decided to go for lunch and see what the numbering system was doing when we got back. about 45 minutes later and it was all the way up to 1042. hardly an improvement, and quite frankly shocking - if these people would actually QUEUE and follow some sort of discipline, I'm sure it would have gone a lot quicker. And finally, at 1330, the guard from the front door comes along and starts making a cut off point, because the office stops working around then (WHY?!) and informs us they will reopen at 10 the next day, please come back then. So we are skipping classes (I sent my teacher an apologetic text, explaining this), just to get this stupid bureaucractic rubbish done, when it should have been sorted weeks ago, we should have had more assistance, and it certainly shouldn't have taken longer than today to finish.
In brief, I would suggest the following changes to improve efficiency and keep people happy:
* Make your postal service, just that.
* Do the same for your banks (remember the hassle we went through earlier?)
* Work proper hours, and don't send everyone off to lunch at the same damn time, that's what SHIFTS were invented for.
* Research, and subsequently enforce, the idea of queues in public offices (at least, if not everywhere)
* University, if you say you are going to provide a service, provide it.
As soon as we have this stupid permit sorted, we are going out to celebrate in a small (but very nice) restaurant near our house. And we're taking at least one of our teachers with us, we have two absolute stars to thank.
Will it never end? Seems like we get a couple of days when things run smoothly, and then everything hits the fan again. Two examples from the past two days.
POSTING A PRESENT ABROAD
How hard can it be to find a post office with an international service? This is a big deal - every other country I have been to has a facility for international postage in every post office, regardless of size, location, or how often this function is required. Sending a package to another country is as simple as going to a desk, filling out the required forms, and watching your post disappear into the black hole of the post office backroom. Here, it's enough if I can find a place that's open when I want it to be. Doesnt help that on the most recent holiday (Mid Autumn Festival?) the post offices stay closed but the banks open. Kind of like an odd bank holiday. So my second attempt to send this parcel was scuppered by poor timing (my first was ruined by the post muppet telling me that the present - a mug, yes you guessed correctly Lucy - was for drinking tea, and the letters -rolled up inside the mug for convenience - were for posting; actually I thought this was quite insulting and I wanted to hit the bloke square in the face for being so obnoxious, I was already having a crap day). Anyway, finally the post offices were open and I thought I would get this sorted once and for all. I went in and was informed there was no international service at that office. Honestly, what is wrong with this stupid place? I asked where I could find a branch to send my package and they said Hongshan. I asked if that was the one near the Xinhua Bookstore and they said yes, take the 101 bus (yes, yes, I know THAT). So I took the bus, it was the middle of the day, blazing hot, and I wasn't feeling good at all. But I got there, and it was a lot cooler inside, and then the fun began again. Turns out they don't have an international service. And after I got quite frustrated with them, it turns out they aren't the Hongshan branch, it's another 2 stops up the road. Gaaaaargh. I asked why they couldnt just have an international service in all branches like in England (or anywhere else for that matter) and was told (in English), "Ah, but that is your country and ... this is China" (yes, it IS China, which is fast becoming synonymous for "difficult" and "hopelessly slow" - aptly I learnt a very good Chinese word this week, 乱 (luan) which means "messy" or "disorganised".) Feeling even worse, I went to the Hongshan branch, where (after a LOT of hassle, rewriting my address on the parcel, and filling out various customs forms - acerbically I might add, the frustration by this point becoming tangible) the package was good to go and all that remained was the small matter of RMB 86 to pay for it. WHAT?! GBP £7.00!!!!!!! for a small parcel?! Gobsmacked, and with no other option, I paid for this service, but really, that is extortionate. I think post day is going to be a once a week, maybe once every ten days affair, and will mainly be limited to sending letters, certainly nothing much bigger if that's how much I'm going to have to pay!
On the plus side I wasn't required to show my passport (a first, maybe?)
OBTAINING A RESIDENCY PERMIT
It has been about 10 days since we got our temporary residents' permits, which took about 18 days from arriving in China (there was a 30 day limit, it wasn't exactly optional, but the process took forever). Now we need the permanent ones (apparently we have another 30 days to get this sorted, good, we'll probably need it), which are both a sheet of paper and a sticker in the passport (I think). This morning we finally got the uni to give us all the necessary documents for this permit, and off we went to the PSB office. For the record, our handbooks state that a member of the international school staff should accompany us, but I didn't see anyone offering, and like most other things I'm beginning to suspect it was a load of mouth and not much trousers. We got to the PSB offices at about 1220, took a ticket when we went in and noted the number ... 1070 ... the display was reading number 1032 or something ridiculously far from our turn, and as usual a massive crowd of people was aimlessly shoving and trying to plonk their docs on the table first (despite this numbering system, it would seem the Chinese attitude of "just barge and shove and get in front of everyone else" has infected foreigners now) ... so we decided to go for lunch and see what the numbering system was doing when we got back. about 45 minutes later and it was all the way up to 1042. hardly an improvement, and quite frankly shocking - if these people would actually QUEUE and follow some sort of discipline, I'm sure it would have gone a lot quicker. And finally, at 1330, the guard from the front door comes along and starts making a cut off point, because the office stops working around then (WHY?!) and informs us they will reopen at 10 the next day, please come back then. So we are skipping classes (I sent my teacher an apologetic text, explaining this), just to get this stupid bureaucractic rubbish done, when it should have been sorted weeks ago, we should have had more assistance, and it certainly shouldn't have taken longer than today to finish.
In brief, I would suggest the following changes to improve efficiency and keep people happy:
* Make your postal service, just that.
* Do the same for your banks (remember the hassle we went through earlier?)
* Work proper hours, and don't send everyone off to lunch at the same damn time, that's what SHIFTS were invented for.
* Research, and subsequently enforce, the idea of queues in public offices (at least, if not everywhere)
* University, if you say you are going to provide a service, provide it.
As soon as we have this stupid permit sorted, we are going out to celebrate in a small (but very nice) restaurant near our house. And we're taking at least one of our teachers with us, we have two absolute stars to thank.
Thursday 11 September 2008
More Culture Shock?
... where to start?
I have no idea how to begin this post, or even what it will be about. Quite a lot of things have happened recently, and I'll try and put them in some order. At the end I think I will include some observations of life around here, because there are some things that need to be said.
We started classes on Monday and the pace of work here is definitely faster than anything I've been exposed to before. Firstly, there was some confusion over our timetables - on paper I have about 24 hours a week (maybe 25), which is about double my lessontime in the UK (because all my courses in England require me to go away and research stuff and learn around topics, whereas here there is direct tuition and you go away and learn the stuff that is very relevant to the books, words you dont know, etc). So that alone came as a bit of a shock. But I discovered some of the lessons are optional (those on Chinese culture for example) and some are repeats (there are 2 culture lessons a week, one is taken at a slower pace, but both are optional and there is no test, it's purely for information and enjoyment). Some are optional but I will be attending (the HSK lessons, for example, more on that when I've actually had one - tomorrow? the teacher didn't turn up to the last one). And some are just nondescript, we were supposed to have a "Second Learning Class" this afternoon, but no one showed up, so we got the impression it's optional. We can ask tomorrow. At any rate we think it might just be a homework class, in which case sod that, I can do homework at home, as the name suggests. So my workload is now down to about 20 hours a week, hurray. But what a 20 hours!
This week alone I have been introduced to somewhere between 70 and 100 new words, new uses for words I knew, or combinations of words, and I've been expected to learn them within a day of seeing them. How it works is, my grammar and language teacher will go through a passage with us from the book. We'll see the new words, say them, use them in the passage, have things explained, etc. When we come back the next day, we have a test on these words. So you have about 24 hours to learn however many new words are being given to you, approximately 30 per lesson. We've had two lessons this week. Yup, that's right, twice this week I have had to learn 30 words (pronunciation, written form, meaning), and be tested on them. It was really brought home when the teacher got two students to go and write words she called out on the blackboard. I did not want to be shown up, so I got down and learnt the words! How much of it stays in my head is another matter, I'm guessing this pace is too intense to store EVERYTHING, unless you are recapping and using the vocab constantly. And even then you have to remember how to write it all. Yikes.
The same goes for listening class, all new words have to be learnt, and the reading class, and so on. This amounts to a LOT of new words. It doesn't help that sometimes I know some of the words in the list but don't know what other words in the book mean. I'm constantly using a dictionary to get the meanings of just about everything. Talk about being thrown in the deep end. Oh and my listening is rubbish. I barely understand the tapes when they are played, the people speak so fast. Talking of fast, that's one thing the day is not. Classes are two hours each, with a break every hour (about 5 or 10 minutes), but that's a lot of classtime. 0930 - 1130, 1140 - 1330, break for lunch, and then some days I have a class from 1600 - 1750. I imagine in the winter that last class will see me leaving university in pitch black and minus 20-something Celsius. Brrrr.
Thinking of "university", this place is WEIRD. It's not at all what I imagine an institute of higher education to be like. Perhaps the languages courses for foreigners recruit differently, I don't know. All I can say is the behaviour of some members of my class (notably the Kazakh males - the girls are really good students and I don't tar them with the same brush at all) is simply unacceptable. They turn up late for classes (three of them trooped in 50 minutes late today), are rude (one of the three walked past the teacher, who was telling him off, and just muttered "yeah yeah yeah"), and basically behave like they are in some crap middle school. Take for example the guy in Marta's class who was asked by the teacher to remove his chewing gum because they were doing pronunciation; he refused, the teacher insisted, so he opened the classroom door and spat his gum into the corridor. In the words of one of the teacher-trainers who will be working here for the next 2 years showing Chinese teachers how to teach Western-style, "I would have made him go out there, pick it up, and put it back in his mouth". Excuse my French, but too fucking right.
It's got to get to a head some time. I don't want to be in a class with these people really. Theyre not disruptive all of the time, but being even a BIT disruptive is inexcusable at a university. And getting up in the middle of a class to leave the room to use your phone ("sorry teacher" - yeah? if you are so sorry don't bloody well do it, moron) is bang out of order. Why the teachers don't take a firmer stance, or just kick people out of their classes, I do not know. It's even written in our handbooks (which we now, have, long story) that such measures can be taken. And yet for some reason they don't. If it goes on like this much longer I think I will be having a word with my teachers or writing a letter to the head of the school. These guys can go in their own damn class and maybe the rest of us can get on and learn.
In other news, Marta and I finally got our Temporary Residence Permits (YAY), and will soon have proper ones stamped into our passports (hope they look nice) ... and we were also given the International Students Handbook, which we should have got when we arrived, but our college forgot (how convenient). This book tells us how to do EVERYTHING from getting our residency permit to getting a dining card for the school canteen. In short, having this on Day 1 would have made things a lot easier for us. Still, we have copies now, that's what matters.
Penultimately, could someone please tell me if they have ever encountered something like this in child-raising around the world: the children here, up to a certain age (I assume whenever they know to go to the toilet on the toilet and not in their pants) have trousers that have been manufactured with a split around the middle, which allows the kid to squat / be held by their parents and urinate / defecate freely without soiling their clothes. This is bad enough, but when a parent is holding their child over paving and there is a grassy plot five meters away, one has to wonder about the workings of the Xinjiang mind. I've not seen it elsewhere in China so I don't know if it extends to other countries nearby, or other provinces, or what. I know nappies are expensive (and wasteful?) but there are things like terry-cloths, right? It's really brought home when you walk down the street and see a kid run out of a shop, squat himself down on the steps outside, pee, and then get up and run off again. I hope winter comes soon because they can't keep their kids like this when it's below zero. Disgusting. Simply disgusting.
Oh and finally, to Mum, Aunty Anne, or anyone else not technologically inclined, you can all leave comments on this blog (which will centralise things for me and save emailing everything) by clicking on the comments link, the grey bit underneath each entry that says how many "attempts to shut me up" have taken place. You don't need to be a member of blogger or wordpress or google, you can leave your name or remain anonymous, it's up to you, but I do like people commenting and I do (occasionally) respond! :)
I have no idea how to begin this post, or even what it will be about. Quite a lot of things have happened recently, and I'll try and put them in some order. At the end I think I will include some observations of life around here, because there are some things that need to be said.
We started classes on Monday and the pace of work here is definitely faster than anything I've been exposed to before. Firstly, there was some confusion over our timetables - on paper I have about 24 hours a week (maybe 25), which is about double my lessontime in the UK (because all my courses in England require me to go away and research stuff and learn around topics, whereas here there is direct tuition and you go away and learn the stuff that is very relevant to the books, words you dont know, etc). So that alone came as a bit of a shock. But I discovered some of the lessons are optional (those on Chinese culture for example) and some are repeats (there are 2 culture lessons a week, one is taken at a slower pace, but both are optional and there is no test, it's purely for information and enjoyment). Some are optional but I will be attending (the HSK lessons, for example, more on that when I've actually had one - tomorrow? the teacher didn't turn up to the last one). And some are just nondescript, we were supposed to have a "Second Learning Class" this afternoon, but no one showed up, so we got the impression it's optional. We can ask tomorrow. At any rate we think it might just be a homework class, in which case sod that, I can do homework at home, as the name suggests. So my workload is now down to about 20 hours a week, hurray. But what a 20 hours!
This week alone I have been introduced to somewhere between 70 and 100 new words, new uses for words I knew, or combinations of words, and I've been expected to learn them within a day of seeing them. How it works is, my grammar and language teacher will go through a passage with us from the book. We'll see the new words, say them, use them in the passage, have things explained, etc. When we come back the next day, we have a test on these words. So you have about 24 hours to learn however many new words are being given to you, approximately 30 per lesson. We've had two lessons this week. Yup, that's right, twice this week I have had to learn 30 words (pronunciation, written form, meaning), and be tested on them. It was really brought home when the teacher got two students to go and write words she called out on the blackboard. I did not want to be shown up, so I got down and learnt the words! How much of it stays in my head is another matter, I'm guessing this pace is too intense to store EVERYTHING, unless you are recapping and using the vocab constantly. And even then you have to remember how to write it all. Yikes.
The same goes for listening class, all new words have to be learnt, and the reading class, and so on. This amounts to a LOT of new words. It doesn't help that sometimes I know some of the words in the list but don't know what other words in the book mean. I'm constantly using a dictionary to get the meanings of just about everything. Talk about being thrown in the deep end. Oh and my listening is rubbish. I barely understand the tapes when they are played, the people speak so fast. Talking of fast, that's one thing the day is not. Classes are two hours each, with a break every hour (about 5 or 10 minutes), but that's a lot of classtime. 0930 - 1130, 1140 - 1330, break for lunch, and then some days I have a class from 1600 - 1750. I imagine in the winter that last class will see me leaving university in pitch black and minus 20-something Celsius. Brrrr.
Thinking of "university", this place is WEIRD. It's not at all what I imagine an institute of higher education to be like. Perhaps the languages courses for foreigners recruit differently, I don't know. All I can say is the behaviour of some members of my class (notably the Kazakh males - the girls are really good students and I don't tar them with the same brush at all) is simply unacceptable. They turn up late for classes (three of them trooped in 50 minutes late today), are rude (one of the three walked past the teacher, who was telling him off, and just muttered "yeah yeah yeah"), and basically behave like they are in some crap middle school. Take for example the guy in Marta's class who was asked by the teacher to remove his chewing gum because they were doing pronunciation; he refused, the teacher insisted, so he opened the classroom door and spat his gum into the corridor. In the words of one of the teacher-trainers who will be working here for the next 2 years showing Chinese teachers how to teach Western-style, "I would have made him go out there, pick it up, and put it back in his mouth". Excuse my French, but too fucking right.
It's got to get to a head some time. I don't want to be in a class with these people really. Theyre not disruptive all of the time, but being even a BIT disruptive is inexcusable at a university. And getting up in the middle of a class to leave the room to use your phone ("sorry teacher" - yeah? if you are so sorry don't bloody well do it, moron) is bang out of order. Why the teachers don't take a firmer stance, or just kick people out of their classes, I do not know. It's even written in our handbooks (which we now, have, long story) that such measures can be taken. And yet for some reason they don't. If it goes on like this much longer I think I will be having a word with my teachers or writing a letter to the head of the school. These guys can go in their own damn class and maybe the rest of us can get on and learn.
In other news, Marta and I finally got our Temporary Residence Permits (YAY), and will soon have proper ones stamped into our passports (hope they look nice) ... and we were also given the International Students Handbook, which we should have got when we arrived, but our college forgot (how convenient). This book tells us how to do EVERYTHING from getting our residency permit to getting a dining card for the school canteen. In short, having this on Day 1 would have made things a lot easier for us. Still, we have copies now, that's what matters.
Penultimately, could someone please tell me if they have ever encountered something like this in child-raising around the world: the children here, up to a certain age (I assume whenever they know to go to the toilet on the toilet and not in their pants) have trousers that have been manufactured with a split around the middle, which allows the kid to squat / be held by their parents and urinate / defecate freely without soiling their clothes. This is bad enough, but when a parent is holding their child over paving and there is a grassy plot five meters away, one has to wonder about the workings of the Xinjiang mind. I've not seen it elsewhere in China so I don't know if it extends to other countries nearby, or other provinces, or what. I know nappies are expensive (and wasteful?) but there are things like terry-cloths, right? It's really brought home when you walk down the street and see a kid run out of a shop, squat himself down on the steps outside, pee, and then get up and run off again. I hope winter comes soon because they can't keep their kids like this when it's below zero. Disgusting. Simply disgusting.
Oh and finally, to Mum, Aunty Anne, or anyone else not technologically inclined, you can all leave comments on this blog (which will centralise things for me and save emailing everything) by clicking on the comments link, the grey bit underneath each entry that says how many "attempts to shut me up" have taken place. You don't need to be a member of blogger or wordpress or google, you can leave your name or remain anonymous, it's up to you, but I do like people commenting and I do (occasionally) respond! :)
Monday 8 September 2008
CONTACT DETAILS
I hope by now everyone has recovered from the mammoth amount of updating I did in the last couple of days ... I'm sorry for the verbal diarrhoea, and it will probably stop now I have a regular net connection. Today was my first day at uni here, and I'm sure there'll be a blog about it sometime later, maybe at the end of the week when I can better judge how things are going - suffice to say I feel quite a bit out of my depth right now!
Maybe it's because of this that I would really appreciate some kind of contact other than email or blog-comments (though these are much liked!) ... and possibly something to put up around the house or create an illusion of being elsewhere (anyone who wants to send me Western shower gel, deodorant, a pair of casual trainers UK size 9, or some nice coffee is more than welcome! Chocolate never went amiss either.) So, I made some address printouts. If they load up you should be able to just save them as images to your hard drive, and then print them out to stick on items of post. I personally think a better idea is to print one copy and then photocopy any further ones, because photocopier toner is far less likely to smudge or become illegible if it gets exposed to wet (rain, snow, it's all possible here!)
EDIT - SECOND LAYOUT DELETED BECAUSE IT WAS INCORRECT! IF YOU SENT MAIL USING THIS LAYOUT DONT BE SURPRISED IF IT DOESNT GET TO ME. REALLY SORRY EVERYONE!
The telephone numbers are so the postmen can call us if we are not in when the mail arrives (honestly, I have no idea how it works here, we don't have a letterbox or anything - I don't even know where to go if I'm not in when post comes, and if I'm at university then I don't see how I'll be able to answer my phone even!). When I gave Lucy my address I also included the Pinyin (ie: transliteration of the Chinese), but I don't think this is necessary as long as people are printing the characters and they are coming out clearly. You may need to resize in Word or Paint or whatever you use - just make sure it looks CLEAR! If you are absolutely pedantic and worried no one will be able to read it, you may add the following to the address.
Yes, it's quite a lot smaller. But that's because I don't think it's 100% necessary (and also because when I was sizing it, it was supposed to fit alongside the Chinese and still be able to go on a postcard!) ... Anyway, that's how to get in touch with us, sorry it all looks a bit complicated, and also I'm not sure if I should have put the address on backwards (you know, Country, Region, Street, House Number, Room Number) - I don't think it will make THAT much difference. Lucy, by the way, your letter to me still hasn't arrived, but I got impatient and want everyone else to start trying to send me things and we'll find out how this system works (or doesn't). On that note, would people mind telling me if the postcards I sent to them have reached their destinations? I posted them at least 10 days ago now.
Maybe it's because of this that I would really appreciate some kind of contact other than email or blog-comments (though these are much liked!) ... and possibly something to put up around the house or create an illusion of being elsewhere (anyone who wants to send me Western shower gel, deodorant, a pair of casual trainers UK size 9, or some nice coffee is more than welcome! Chocolate never went amiss either.) So, I made some address printouts. If they load up you should be able to just save them as images to your hard drive, and then print them out to stick on items of post. I personally think a better idea is to print one copy and then photocopy any further ones, because photocopier toner is far less likely to smudge or become illegible if it gets exposed to wet (rain, snow, it's all possible here!)
EDIT - SECOND LAYOUT DELETED BECAUSE IT WAS INCORRECT! IF YOU SENT MAIL USING THIS LAYOUT DONT BE SURPRISED IF IT DOESNT GET TO ME. REALLY SORRY EVERYONE!
The telephone numbers are so the postmen can call us if we are not in when the mail arrives (honestly, I have no idea how it works here, we don't have a letterbox or anything - I don't even know where to go if I'm not in when post comes, and if I'm at university then I don't see how I'll be able to answer my phone even!). When I gave Lucy my address I also included the Pinyin (ie: transliteration of the Chinese), but I don't think this is necessary as long as people are printing the characters and they are coming out clearly. You may need to resize in Word or Paint or whatever you use - just make sure it looks CLEAR! If you are absolutely pedantic and worried no one will be able to read it, you may add the following to the address.
Yes, it's quite a lot smaller. But that's because I don't think it's 100% necessary (and also because when I was sizing it, it was supposed to fit alongside the Chinese and still be able to go on a postcard!) ... Anyway, that's how to get in touch with us, sorry it all looks a bit complicated, and also I'm not sure if I should have put the address on backwards (you know, Country, Region, Street, House Number, Room Number) - I don't think it will make THAT much difference. Lucy, by the way, your letter to me still hasn't arrived, but I got impatient and want everyone else to start trying to send me things and we'll find out how this system works (or doesn't). On that note, would people mind telling me if the postcards I sent to them have reached their destinations? I posted them at least 10 days ago now.
Sunday 7 September 2008
Bureaucrapcy
Not a spelling error there, sorry, just a rubbish pun. Honestly, the amount of stuff that needs signing and photocopying to get anywhere in China is ridiculous. I bet they lose half the stuff we give them anyway, and why nothing is done electronically is beyond me. In order to register for a temporary residence permit we have to do the following:
1. Get forms from XNU
2. Make sure we make 4 photocopies of all the documents
3. Fill them out and take them back to the International Office for the school stamp
4. Take them to the Police along with copies of our landlady’s ID and rent contract
5. Don’t forget passport photos!
6. Obtain a residency permit from the local police station
7. Take it back to the University
8. Have it signed and stamped, and take it to the main Police office in the city
9. Here, they will issue us with actual residency permits (not sure, don’t ask) and include a stamp in our passports.
So, why can’t we just go straight to the main Police office? And why did we only get told about these other forms (specific to the University, regarding living off campus) after we had been to the Police station with our landlady’s ID and rent contract? And why is there no one to help us fill in one of the forms which is completely in Chinese? This is madness. The local Police office pretty much just waves us past the gate security now, we’ve been back so many times (and still have to go back again). I have about 15 days left before I am considered an illegal resident in China. I have no desire for this to occur, let’s hope some people pull their fingers out for us and get us these residency permits. I bet they don’t allow entry to China though, so if I want to travel internationally I will need to get another visa from someplace – or just not travel internationally. I hate the Olympics and all the heightened security measures that surround them.
On another note, I have finally completed my medical examinations and been registered for classes even though I’ve not yet received my student ID. The medical exams were not great but not the end of the world either – we had to fast for about 12 hours beforehand (and people that know me know I can pass out when I’m having my blood taken even on a full stomach), and in the morning we had to spend some time at the uni taking some language tests for class placements … I didn’t do as well as I wanted on those tests, but I didn’t do so badly either. I’ve been put in an intermediate class, and I know at least one other member of the group, there are only going to be about 15 of us total, I hope the others are good students or I will have to do more complaining (both here and formally!) … The medical exams were simple though – a blood test (a quick confirmation of blood type and then a sample or two to be sent to a lab for overnight testing, things like, white / red blood cell counts, HIV, Syphilis, Plague, and so on), a urine test (blood sugars and so on), X-ray (mobile not static, they sort of move the X-ray box around and it scans you in real time), 12 SL ECG, blood pressure, heart rate, vision, and an abdominal / lower chest ultrasound. Apparently I have type O blood – this I did not know. Now it’s possible, but mum always seemed sure I had type B. And Marta’s blood also showed up as O, but she is sure she has type A … whether the Chinese test was botched or not, we don’t know … but at any rate, at least O can be given to anyone, so if we have to receive maybe it’s just easiest! The X-ray was interesting, the doctor refused to sign off my sheet fully until he had seen my ECG report (which came back with the notes, “sinus bradycardia with sinus arrhythmia”, which they ummed and ahhed over for a minute or so, made a note on the paper, and then he signed me off as “healthy”) – really great for my confidence, eh. Blood pressure was stupidly low on the first reading (94 / 48) and not much higher on the second (103 / 58) but that’s hardly surprising given that I usually have it quite low, and that I’d not been eating for ages. The tests lasted about half an hour, and we paid RMB 283 (about £22.50) for them all, came back the next day and collected our health examination booklets which have our photo and all the results printed on the inside – they look like little passports, and have to be taken with us if we go travelling, inside or outside China I am told. At least we got all the results quickly – next-day service in the UK? I don’t think so, you’d have to wait a week. But it would be free I suppose. Swings and roundabouts really.
Back to my classes, I’m not sure what all of them comprise – I couldn’t translate all the Chinese – but I know I have quite a few! First class runs from 0930 – 1130, second from 1140 – 1330 and third class from 1600 – 1750, all Beijing times. Mondays, Tuesdays and Thursdays I have all three classes (oh fun), Wednesdays and Fridays I finish at 1330 (woop) … altogether I think I have something like 24.5 hours a week, much much more than I am used to in the UK! Although all the classes are in Chinese (as far as I know), I think four of them are not language classes per se – two are in Chinese culture, and two are for the HSK – a sort of exam to show what level of Chinese you have, internationally recognised (I think) … oh and one, I think is homework session, it’s the only one Marta and I share.
1. Get forms from XNU
2. Make sure we make 4 photocopies of all the documents
3. Fill them out and take them back to the International Office for the school stamp
4. Take them to the Police along with copies of our landlady’s ID and rent contract
5. Don’t forget passport photos!
6. Obtain a residency permit from the local police station
7. Take it back to the University
8. Have it signed and stamped, and take it to the main Police office in the city
9. Here, they will issue us with actual residency permits (not sure, don’t ask) and include a stamp in our passports.
So, why can’t we just go straight to the main Police office? And why did we only get told about these other forms (specific to the University, regarding living off campus) after we had been to the Police station with our landlady’s ID and rent contract? And why is there no one to help us fill in one of the forms which is completely in Chinese? This is madness. The local Police office pretty much just waves us past the gate security now, we’ve been back so many times (and still have to go back again). I have about 15 days left before I am considered an illegal resident in China. I have no desire for this to occur, let’s hope some people pull their fingers out for us and get us these residency permits. I bet they don’t allow entry to China though, so if I want to travel internationally I will need to get another visa from someplace – or just not travel internationally. I hate the Olympics and all the heightened security measures that surround them.
On another note, I have finally completed my medical examinations and been registered for classes even though I’ve not yet received my student ID. The medical exams were not great but not the end of the world either – we had to fast for about 12 hours beforehand (and people that know me know I can pass out when I’m having my blood taken even on a full stomach), and in the morning we had to spend some time at the uni taking some language tests for class placements … I didn’t do as well as I wanted on those tests, but I didn’t do so badly either. I’ve been put in an intermediate class, and I know at least one other member of the group, there are only going to be about 15 of us total, I hope the others are good students or I will have to do more complaining (both here and formally!) … The medical exams were simple though – a blood test (a quick confirmation of blood type and then a sample or two to be sent to a lab for overnight testing, things like, white / red blood cell counts, HIV, Syphilis, Plague, and so on), a urine test (blood sugars and so on), X-ray (mobile not static, they sort of move the X-ray box around and it scans you in real time), 12 SL ECG, blood pressure, heart rate, vision, and an abdominal / lower chest ultrasound. Apparently I have type O blood – this I did not know. Now it’s possible, but mum always seemed sure I had type B. And Marta’s blood also showed up as O, but she is sure she has type A … whether the Chinese test was botched or not, we don’t know … but at any rate, at least O can be given to anyone, so if we have to receive maybe it’s just easiest! The X-ray was interesting, the doctor refused to sign off my sheet fully until he had seen my ECG report (which came back with the notes, “sinus bradycardia with sinus arrhythmia”, which they ummed and ahhed over for a minute or so, made a note on the paper, and then he signed me off as “healthy”) – really great for my confidence, eh. Blood pressure was stupidly low on the first reading (94 / 48) and not much higher on the second (103 / 58) but that’s hardly surprising given that I usually have it quite low, and that I’d not been eating for ages. The tests lasted about half an hour, and we paid RMB 283 (about £22.50) for them all, came back the next day and collected our health examination booklets which have our photo and all the results printed on the inside – they look like little passports, and have to be taken with us if we go travelling, inside or outside China I am told. At least we got all the results quickly – next-day service in the UK? I don’t think so, you’d have to wait a week. But it would be free I suppose. Swings and roundabouts really.
Back to my classes, I’m not sure what all of them comprise – I couldn’t translate all the Chinese – but I know I have quite a few! First class runs from 0930 – 1130, second from 1140 – 1330 and third class from 1600 – 1750, all Beijing times. Mondays, Tuesdays and Thursdays I have all three classes (oh fun), Wednesdays and Fridays I finish at 1330 (woop) … altogether I think I have something like 24.5 hours a week, much much more than I am used to in the UK! Although all the classes are in Chinese (as far as I know), I think four of them are not language classes per se – two are in Chinese culture, and two are for the HSK – a sort of exam to show what level of Chinese you have, internationally recognised (I think) … oh and one, I think is homework session, it’s the only one Marta and I share.
Calming Down
Following the debacle that was last week, I decided I just cannot get stressed about stuff – number one it gets me nowhere here, people just close off, and number two there is no point worrying my way to an early grave. It also helped that today has so far been quite perfect!
Okay, so the poison we put out for the cockroaches doesn’t seem to have done very much – there are no carcasses lying around anyway, and I think Marta said she saw one alive this morning. Damn it. I think the only solution really is going to be calling the landlady and telling her we want to get rid of this fridge and have a new one – they are clearly living inside it. That aside, we went to the university to meet Mr Deng, one of the teachers in our language department, a meeting arranged by our new best friend in the whole world, Zohra ☺ We took the bus (always an adventure) and it turns out it stops right outside our university, but we missed the stop and had to go one further, which meant a 10 minute walk back – oops, I’m sure we’ll get used to the timings of the buses though. We were early, and he was on time, but that’s better than us being late, right? And my, what a difference. This guy is wonderful. From the beginning you could almost feel the changes – his appearance, his nature, his mannerisms, all of them just exuded calm and professionalism, quite unlike certain other members of the university team. He listened to us, and our questions, and though his English was not perfect, and he had been in Kazakhstan recently (so probably thinking in all sorts of other languages), he was clear, concise, and most importantly, helpful. He arranged for another teacher to come in (again, professional looking, calm, collected), and she had a quick discussion with us, followed by a short Chinese exam for me (not sure about Marta, but I think they got that her Chinese isn’t quite as good as mine, and they asked if we minded being in different classes – not at all). I didn’t do as well in the short test as I would have liked but I explained I haven’t seen my books all summer and she said don’t worry within a couple of months you will get much better. Mr Deng is going to arrange a formal testing of our Chinese level, and will give us a call regarding the time and place – hopefully in a couple of days, so we can study a bit. He is also arranging for a Chinese student to meet us on Thursday or Friday morning, to guide us to the medical examination building, and help us with this process. The reason for the previous lack of assistance was apparently because the office upstairs (no guesses for who is in charge of that department) didn’t send our papers downstairs so no one knew who we were! But now they do know, it seems all of our college staff are on the level. Wow, what a difference this makes to our picture of China.
We then went to the Bank, where troubles began again (but only a little) – first, the taxi driver didn’t know where to go, and Marta kept saying oh he’s just going another way, but after we had gone for at least a mile in the wrong direction (I used a major landmark – Xinhua Bookstore – as a reference point), and I could hear him on his CB radio asking his boss and other drivers where the Bank of China was, while scanning out the window at all the other passing banks, I decided to correct him. Following my directions, we made it to the bank, though I didn’t notice him offering us a discount for the cost which was about double what it should have been! Once in the Bank, the manager met Marta and reviewed her paper slips, which she shouldn’t have been given (according to yesterday’s phone call), and told her she hadn’t got the right paper slip they were after, could she go home and look again, and give them a call – if she can’t find it she’ll have to come back and sign papers all over again, whew what a cock-up, eh? No bother, we’ll just go home after our other errands, and sort it out.
Stopped for brunch on the way to some shops, man I am loving some of the Uyghur stuff on offer here – it’s Middle Eastern really, warm thick pitta style breads filled with chicken or lamb or mutton or beef (not pork, these guys are Muslims remember), and some spicy, some less so (though even asking for “not spicy” can sometimes result in a bit of a mouthburn!) … and on the way to a shopping centre we saw a China Mobile store. This time I had my contract with me, and a much calmer demeanour, plus the assistant was more intelligent than the ones in the last store – she could understand what I wanted even from my garbly Chinese, and she managed to get me Caller ID Display activated on my SIM card ☺ Hurray! This day is getting better and better. A quick walk to the local superstore and we had soon managed to get Marta a memory stick, (Kingston, 2GB for about £16, is that value for money, anyone?) … sure, we could probs get it cheaper elsewhere but we really didn’t know where to look and there are some documents that STILL need printing and sending to Newcastle.
Next stop, Xinhua Bookstore (yes, the major reference from before) – but how to get into it??? The ground level seemed quite inaccessible so we got on a lift, and took it to the 6th floor, just to see what we could see … well not a lot. It was all dim lighting and almost immediately some policeman / guard / assistant came to see what we wanted … but we’d stopped on the 5th floor on the way up and I had seen what looked like a gym logo, so we went down a level, away from the shady upstairs area, and indeed it was a gym. Long story short, they let us look around, and I decided it had everything I wanted, and the price for a year was only RMB 1600 (that’s about £130, slightly cheaper than what I pay in Newcastle for a year) … then the bloke said I could have the membership fee for just RMB 800 … yeesh, that’s cheap! ☺ Of course I said yes, it’s on the same bus route as university, and at £65 for a year’s membership how could I refuse. They have showers there (so-so, but I’m sure they will do just fine after a workout), and one of the instructors was in the gym working out (a huge beast of a man, maybe only 5” 7’ but with about a 48in chest, all muscle) and he seemed really friendly, despite having very little English. So I think I will be in good hands when I go back. This just about made my day, as if everything else before hadn’t!
Leaving the gym, with my new membership, we wandered round the corner to Xinhua Bookstore, and straight into the wrong department – we went downstairs to the medications and cosmetics area, but this was okay because Marta saw something she needed to buy (need is perhaps a strong word, but she is so neurotic that perhaps it is an actual requirement for her to have some stupidly expensive cream of some sort). We then entered the bookstore, which comprises about four levels and sells almost anything besides books (sports equipment, pens, pencils, charts, posters, etc) and had a good time browsing – I was particularly taken by the bilingual anatomy posters (Chinese and English, but no Pinyin), but didn’t buy any … maybe another time. Also on my list of things I liked were the bilingual novels (Lucy, I may one day read Pride and Prejudice, it just might be in Chinese …), and the cheap cheap notebooks (most important book to have in the gym is a record of what you did the last time you were there), oh and the gluesticks (Prague book, sometime soon maybe Lucy, honey). Having spent ages looking around and buying very little, we left to get some water and go to the bank for Marta. As we exited, Marta decided she knew which way the bank was and started in completely the wrong direction, but refused to acknowledge she was heading the wrong way. “But noooo, we came this way in the taxi, and then we turned here, and so it must be this way”, she protested. No, Marta dear, you are completely wrong, we have to go this way instead, look I know I am right. (She is the girl who can’t even visualise an underpass to get to the correct exit on the other side, when the Chinese have these four-way subways, so why she thinks she knows best about this I do not know. Eventually, I asked if she wanted to put money on it, and she said the didn’t gamble, but that if I was wrong I should clean her room for a month, but if she was wrong, nothing would happen. That hardly seems fair or sounds like someone is convinced they are right but I agreed, and … you’ve guessed it … I was right. (Apparently this doesn’t make her wrong – she is such a poor loser, it’s shameful). So we went back to the bank to tell them we couldn’t find the slip of paper they needed, but as we were waiting in their lobby, Marta found the paper … joy of joys, we handed it to the security-guard-cum-financial-advisor, she signed it, and off we went.
This day had to get worse, at some point. It was far too good to be true. Lo and behold, gloomy clouds of difficulty began to form. We got home and settled down a bit while we waited for the clock to approach 1600 – no business gets done at the police station between 1400 and 1600 for some reason, everywhere seems to go on lunch siesta or something … we got to the station, and were quickly seen by someone who started to write down our registration details in a book, but yet again the Chinese were confused by middle names, and the fact that European passports have the dates written with the months as TLA’s (eg: JAN, FEB, MAR) and in French too (MARS, for example) … somehow we bumbled through this formality, and were then sent to another office, where a woman told us we would not get the residency permits without photos – grah, we should have known. Off we went to get passport photos (yes, we didn’t have any left at this point), and ended up in a Kodak store, but they didn’t take cards, so we had to go to a nearby bank (or two, because the ATMs I tried were “temporraly [sic] out of service”) – all the while Marta was stressing because she had now managed to lose her brand spanking new Bank of China dual-currency account card. The woman is a walking black hole. And yet despite losing shit all the freaking time, she STILL stresses when something goes missing. She’s already on some low dose of anti-depressant, personally I think a couple of sedatives here or there wouldn’t go amiss. So I’m being trailed by Little Miss Stress 2008, who is seriously annoying me by telling me to ask for this and that, or don’t forget this and that while I am talking Chinese (because hers is not so good, and she’s been relying on me a bit for the last couple of days I just seem to have got used to talking to people on her behalf), which is not helpful, because I can’t hear what the other person is saying, nor can I concentrate on what I am doing … so we finally get these photos made up (the shop manager took us into a room, took photos using a digital SLR, then put them on a computer, and they resized and edited them a bit before printing off some passport-photos for us … in the UK this would cost about £4 for four photos and take about three minutes. Here it cost us about £1.10 per set of four photos but the whole process took something like 20 minutes, by which time we needed to get back to the police because we had to be at home sooner than later what with having the internet installed tonight (we hope) … the police discovered another problem, we didn’t have a permission slip from the university to enable us to live outside of campus. Honestly this is just getting stupider and stupider, the amount that the international department doesn’t do for its students … so tomorrow, we need to go see Anniwar (AGAIN) and get this document, and make him send our registration off to Newcastle (we used the memory stick to get Marta’s documents printed off at last, that was one more positive thing to happen today).
So … *deep breath* … we set off home, I ran ahead and got a couple of bottles of water (two 4L things, enough for at least the next three days of house use) and a can of red bull (for me, as a reward for putting up with her so long), and then ran on to the house, catching up with Marta (slow walking, you see) just before our block of flats. Once inside she ran around like a madman, trying to find her card, cursing in Polish, and generally being scatterbrained while I tucked into some peanuts and let her get on with it – there is no sense getting in her way. She couldn’t find it. Seriously, she got this card yesterday and she has lost it already, despite having used it earlier. Then she tells me she must cancel it because Chinese cards are not as safe as English ones, and she doesn’t have internet banking (or the net, yet) to check if it has been used improperly, and she has XYZ amount of money on it, and so on … only she can’t explain over the phone who she is to the bank, so I had to, and they gave me their English-speaker who was very nice and gave us a number to call, except this number didn’t work. So Marta rings back, but then her phone is out of credit (“But how? You put RMB 100 on it just yesterday or two days ago??” “Yes, but I call England” … this is the kind of idiocy I am currently putting up with), so she has to use mine. She is currently somewhere in the region of RMB 4500 in debt to me, and she is wasting money calling England??? Bloody hell. Finally she is able to cancel her card, and I think tomorrow she has to go to the bank (AGAIN) to sign some more stuff and I’m sure she will want me to go with, but I am less than keen. To be honest I would rather have nothing more to do with any of her disasters – if she had turned up to Year Abroad meetings or listened to what I told her she wouldn’t have needed to print these documents out, if she had packed her own stuff instead of letting her mother do it she wouldn’t have left her Polish card at home, if she had paid attention to what I was saying about backup money etc she wouldn’t be borrowing money off me right now, and if she was just a little bit more careful she wouldn’t have half the stupid troubles she is currently facing. How she has managed to live in the UK and Belgium for periods of at least one year each, without dying (through stress or just carelessness), or falling victim to poverty is beyond me.
So yes, today has turned a little for the worse, but only for one of us! Now if the internet would just come along and get installed, it might be enough to get us back on a “positive” track.
UPDATE: The internet did come and get installed, but not in the way we had in mind. Bloke turns up (two days later than planned) and pulls out a router – mint, we think, here we go, something to get us back in touch with the world again … wrong. He explained that this was just a normal router, we’d need to plug in via Ethernet and only one at a time (instead of the wireless jobby we had ordered, which allows both of us to get online at the same time) … the wireless one will come in a couple of days (so, basically, they don’t have any right now. Seriously, what company have we gone with here???). Okay we say, let’s set this up and try. The problem, my computer is an Apple and the guy has never seen one before – he starts saying how it may not work because our computers are in English, not sure how that makes a difference. He doesn’t know how to set up an Apple, but he tries to give me the information that will let me – now I’m used to just turning the laptop on and plugging in, and automatic settings usually do the trick. Not with this box of tricks. I tried for the best part of a day (long after he left) with all sorts of fancy combinations of DNS servers, router IDs, passwords and account names (supplied by the installation “expert”) … but to no avail. A second man came and told us if we were desperate for a wireless box (we were – first up we PAID FOR ONE, second Marta’s machine’s Ethernet port is broken, and third we both have used wireless internet across the globe and not had a problem, hence wanting it in our house), we could go to another address and swap boxes if we talked to this man, Xiao Dou. Well, eventually we got there (the taxi couldn’t get close enough and then it was hidden round a corner … it was some poxy small room and Xiao Dou turned out to be a fat unhelpful man sitting in a chair untangling wires for a living. He ignored us while his minions ran around trying to find a wireless box, until another man arrived, and asked for the telephone number of the man who had sold my internet package. Crikey, there is no such thing as organisation in this place. He turned up and explained that the wireless router would be installed in two or three days (so why the second installation man had told us we could get a wireless router at this pokey place, we’ve no idea, all we know is we wasted 20 yuan on taxis that we didn’t actually have to take) … It’s now Saturday and we stayed at home waiting for this magical box to arrive, until about 1500 when I went out to the shop and asked if it was coming today because we can’t just sit in the house and hope someone arrives. The answer was that it would come tomorrow, sometime after midday. How helpful. And why not call us in future, so we’re not sitting around doing nothing! Customers foremost my arse.
Hopefully this will be uploaded from an internet café this evening, and then we’ll actually have a home network from tomorrow. Not putting any money on it though. [EDIT - it is being uploaded from our spiffing new wireless router in our flat, hurray)
Okay, so the poison we put out for the cockroaches doesn’t seem to have done very much – there are no carcasses lying around anyway, and I think Marta said she saw one alive this morning. Damn it. I think the only solution really is going to be calling the landlady and telling her we want to get rid of this fridge and have a new one – they are clearly living inside it. That aside, we went to the university to meet Mr Deng, one of the teachers in our language department, a meeting arranged by our new best friend in the whole world, Zohra ☺ We took the bus (always an adventure) and it turns out it stops right outside our university, but we missed the stop and had to go one further, which meant a 10 minute walk back – oops, I’m sure we’ll get used to the timings of the buses though. We were early, and he was on time, but that’s better than us being late, right? And my, what a difference. This guy is wonderful. From the beginning you could almost feel the changes – his appearance, his nature, his mannerisms, all of them just exuded calm and professionalism, quite unlike certain other members of the university team. He listened to us, and our questions, and though his English was not perfect, and he had been in Kazakhstan recently (so probably thinking in all sorts of other languages), he was clear, concise, and most importantly, helpful. He arranged for another teacher to come in (again, professional looking, calm, collected), and she had a quick discussion with us, followed by a short Chinese exam for me (not sure about Marta, but I think they got that her Chinese isn’t quite as good as mine, and they asked if we minded being in different classes – not at all). I didn’t do as well in the short test as I would have liked but I explained I haven’t seen my books all summer and she said don’t worry within a couple of months you will get much better. Mr Deng is going to arrange a formal testing of our Chinese level, and will give us a call regarding the time and place – hopefully in a couple of days, so we can study a bit. He is also arranging for a Chinese student to meet us on Thursday or Friday morning, to guide us to the medical examination building, and help us with this process. The reason for the previous lack of assistance was apparently because the office upstairs (no guesses for who is in charge of that department) didn’t send our papers downstairs so no one knew who we were! But now they do know, it seems all of our college staff are on the level. Wow, what a difference this makes to our picture of China.
We then went to the Bank, where troubles began again (but only a little) – first, the taxi driver didn’t know where to go, and Marta kept saying oh he’s just going another way, but after we had gone for at least a mile in the wrong direction (I used a major landmark – Xinhua Bookstore – as a reference point), and I could hear him on his CB radio asking his boss and other drivers where the Bank of China was, while scanning out the window at all the other passing banks, I decided to correct him. Following my directions, we made it to the bank, though I didn’t notice him offering us a discount for the cost which was about double what it should have been! Once in the Bank, the manager met Marta and reviewed her paper slips, which she shouldn’t have been given (according to yesterday’s phone call), and told her she hadn’t got the right paper slip they were after, could she go home and look again, and give them a call – if she can’t find it she’ll have to come back and sign papers all over again, whew what a cock-up, eh? No bother, we’ll just go home after our other errands, and sort it out.
Stopped for brunch on the way to some shops, man I am loving some of the Uyghur stuff on offer here – it’s Middle Eastern really, warm thick pitta style breads filled with chicken or lamb or mutton or beef (not pork, these guys are Muslims remember), and some spicy, some less so (though even asking for “not spicy” can sometimes result in a bit of a mouthburn!) … and on the way to a shopping centre we saw a China Mobile store. This time I had my contract with me, and a much calmer demeanour, plus the assistant was more intelligent than the ones in the last store – she could understand what I wanted even from my garbly Chinese, and she managed to get me Caller ID Display activated on my SIM card ☺ Hurray! This day is getting better and better. A quick walk to the local superstore and we had soon managed to get Marta a memory stick, (Kingston, 2GB for about £16, is that value for money, anyone?) … sure, we could probs get it cheaper elsewhere but we really didn’t know where to look and there are some documents that STILL need printing and sending to Newcastle.
Next stop, Xinhua Bookstore (yes, the major reference from before) – but how to get into it??? The ground level seemed quite inaccessible so we got on a lift, and took it to the 6th floor, just to see what we could see … well not a lot. It was all dim lighting and almost immediately some policeman / guard / assistant came to see what we wanted … but we’d stopped on the 5th floor on the way up and I had seen what looked like a gym logo, so we went down a level, away from the shady upstairs area, and indeed it was a gym. Long story short, they let us look around, and I decided it had everything I wanted, and the price for a year was only RMB 1600 (that’s about £130, slightly cheaper than what I pay in Newcastle for a year) … then the bloke said I could have the membership fee for just RMB 800 … yeesh, that’s cheap! ☺ Of course I said yes, it’s on the same bus route as university, and at £65 for a year’s membership how could I refuse. They have showers there (so-so, but I’m sure they will do just fine after a workout), and one of the instructors was in the gym working out (a huge beast of a man, maybe only 5” 7’ but with about a 48in chest, all muscle) and he seemed really friendly, despite having very little English. So I think I will be in good hands when I go back. This just about made my day, as if everything else before hadn’t!
Leaving the gym, with my new membership, we wandered round the corner to Xinhua Bookstore, and straight into the wrong department – we went downstairs to the medications and cosmetics area, but this was okay because Marta saw something she needed to buy (need is perhaps a strong word, but she is so neurotic that perhaps it is an actual requirement for her to have some stupidly expensive cream of some sort). We then entered the bookstore, which comprises about four levels and sells almost anything besides books (sports equipment, pens, pencils, charts, posters, etc) and had a good time browsing – I was particularly taken by the bilingual anatomy posters (Chinese and English, but no Pinyin), but didn’t buy any … maybe another time. Also on my list of things I liked were the bilingual novels (Lucy, I may one day read Pride and Prejudice, it just might be in Chinese …), and the cheap cheap notebooks (most important book to have in the gym is a record of what you did the last time you were there), oh and the gluesticks (Prague book, sometime soon maybe Lucy, honey). Having spent ages looking around and buying very little, we left to get some water and go to the bank for Marta. As we exited, Marta decided she knew which way the bank was and started in completely the wrong direction, but refused to acknowledge she was heading the wrong way. “But noooo, we came this way in the taxi, and then we turned here, and so it must be this way”, she protested. No, Marta dear, you are completely wrong, we have to go this way instead, look I know I am right. (She is the girl who can’t even visualise an underpass to get to the correct exit on the other side, when the Chinese have these four-way subways, so why she thinks she knows best about this I do not know. Eventually, I asked if she wanted to put money on it, and she said the didn’t gamble, but that if I was wrong I should clean her room for a month, but if she was wrong, nothing would happen. That hardly seems fair or sounds like someone is convinced they are right but I agreed, and … you’ve guessed it … I was right. (Apparently this doesn’t make her wrong – she is such a poor loser, it’s shameful). So we went back to the bank to tell them we couldn’t find the slip of paper they needed, but as we were waiting in their lobby, Marta found the paper … joy of joys, we handed it to the security-guard-cum-financial-advisor, she signed it, and off we went.
This day had to get worse, at some point. It was far too good to be true. Lo and behold, gloomy clouds of difficulty began to form. We got home and settled down a bit while we waited for the clock to approach 1600 – no business gets done at the police station between 1400 and 1600 for some reason, everywhere seems to go on lunch siesta or something … we got to the station, and were quickly seen by someone who started to write down our registration details in a book, but yet again the Chinese were confused by middle names, and the fact that European passports have the dates written with the months as TLA’s (eg: JAN, FEB, MAR) and in French too (MARS, for example) … somehow we bumbled through this formality, and were then sent to another office, where a woman told us we would not get the residency permits without photos – grah, we should have known. Off we went to get passport photos (yes, we didn’t have any left at this point), and ended up in a Kodak store, but they didn’t take cards, so we had to go to a nearby bank (or two, because the ATMs I tried were “temporraly [sic] out of service”) – all the while Marta was stressing because she had now managed to lose her brand spanking new Bank of China dual-currency account card. The woman is a walking black hole. And yet despite losing shit all the freaking time, she STILL stresses when something goes missing. She’s already on some low dose of anti-depressant, personally I think a couple of sedatives here or there wouldn’t go amiss. So I’m being trailed by Little Miss Stress 2008, who is seriously annoying me by telling me to ask for this and that, or don’t forget this and that while I am talking Chinese (because hers is not so good, and she’s been relying on me a bit for the last couple of days I just seem to have got used to talking to people on her behalf), which is not helpful, because I can’t hear what the other person is saying, nor can I concentrate on what I am doing … so we finally get these photos made up (the shop manager took us into a room, took photos using a digital SLR, then put them on a computer, and they resized and edited them a bit before printing off some passport-photos for us … in the UK this would cost about £4 for four photos and take about three minutes. Here it cost us about £1.10 per set of four photos but the whole process took something like 20 minutes, by which time we needed to get back to the police because we had to be at home sooner than later what with having the internet installed tonight (we hope) … the police discovered another problem, we didn’t have a permission slip from the university to enable us to live outside of campus. Honestly this is just getting stupider and stupider, the amount that the international department doesn’t do for its students … so tomorrow, we need to go see Anniwar (AGAIN) and get this document, and make him send our registration off to Newcastle (we used the memory stick to get Marta’s documents printed off at last, that was one more positive thing to happen today).
So … *deep breath* … we set off home, I ran ahead and got a couple of bottles of water (two 4L things, enough for at least the next three days of house use) and a can of red bull (for me, as a reward for putting up with her so long), and then ran on to the house, catching up with Marta (slow walking, you see) just before our block of flats. Once inside she ran around like a madman, trying to find her card, cursing in Polish, and generally being scatterbrained while I tucked into some peanuts and let her get on with it – there is no sense getting in her way. She couldn’t find it. Seriously, she got this card yesterday and she has lost it already, despite having used it earlier. Then she tells me she must cancel it because Chinese cards are not as safe as English ones, and she doesn’t have internet banking (or the net, yet) to check if it has been used improperly, and she has XYZ amount of money on it, and so on … only she can’t explain over the phone who she is to the bank, so I had to, and they gave me their English-speaker who was very nice and gave us a number to call, except this number didn’t work. So Marta rings back, but then her phone is out of credit (“But how? You put RMB 100 on it just yesterday or two days ago??” “Yes, but I call England” … this is the kind of idiocy I am currently putting up with), so she has to use mine. She is currently somewhere in the region of RMB 4500 in debt to me, and she is wasting money calling England??? Bloody hell. Finally she is able to cancel her card, and I think tomorrow she has to go to the bank (AGAIN) to sign some more stuff and I’m sure she will want me to go with, but I am less than keen. To be honest I would rather have nothing more to do with any of her disasters – if she had turned up to Year Abroad meetings or listened to what I told her she wouldn’t have needed to print these documents out, if she had packed her own stuff instead of letting her mother do it she wouldn’t have left her Polish card at home, if she had paid attention to what I was saying about backup money etc she wouldn’t be borrowing money off me right now, and if she was just a little bit more careful she wouldn’t have half the stupid troubles she is currently facing. How she has managed to live in the UK and Belgium for periods of at least one year each, without dying (through stress or just carelessness), or falling victim to poverty is beyond me.
So yes, today has turned a little for the worse, but only for one of us! Now if the internet would just come along and get installed, it might be enough to get us back on a “positive” track.
UPDATE: The internet did come and get installed, but not in the way we had in mind. Bloke turns up (two days later than planned) and pulls out a router – mint, we think, here we go, something to get us back in touch with the world again … wrong. He explained that this was just a normal router, we’d need to plug in via Ethernet and only one at a time (instead of the wireless jobby we had ordered, which allows both of us to get online at the same time) … the wireless one will come in a couple of days (so, basically, they don’t have any right now. Seriously, what company have we gone with here???). Okay we say, let’s set this up and try. The problem, my computer is an Apple and the guy has never seen one before – he starts saying how it may not work because our computers are in English, not sure how that makes a difference. He doesn’t know how to set up an Apple, but he tries to give me the information that will let me – now I’m used to just turning the laptop on and plugging in, and automatic settings usually do the trick. Not with this box of tricks. I tried for the best part of a day (long after he left) with all sorts of fancy combinations of DNS servers, router IDs, passwords and account names (supplied by the installation “expert”) … but to no avail. A second man came and told us if we were desperate for a wireless box (we were – first up we PAID FOR ONE, second Marta’s machine’s Ethernet port is broken, and third we both have used wireless internet across the globe and not had a problem, hence wanting it in our house), we could go to another address and swap boxes if we talked to this man, Xiao Dou. Well, eventually we got there (the taxi couldn’t get close enough and then it was hidden round a corner … it was some poxy small room and Xiao Dou turned out to be a fat unhelpful man sitting in a chair untangling wires for a living. He ignored us while his minions ran around trying to find a wireless box, until another man arrived, and asked for the telephone number of the man who had sold my internet package. Crikey, there is no such thing as organisation in this place. He turned up and explained that the wireless router would be installed in two or three days (so why the second installation man had told us we could get a wireless router at this pokey place, we’ve no idea, all we know is we wasted 20 yuan on taxis that we didn’t actually have to take) … It’s now Saturday and we stayed at home waiting for this magical box to arrive, until about 1500 when I went out to the shop and asked if it was coming today because we can’t just sit in the house and hope someone arrives. The answer was that it would come tomorrow, sometime after midday. How helpful. And why not call us in future, so we’re not sitting around doing nothing! Customers foremost my arse.
Hopefully this will be uploaded from an internet café this evening, and then we’ll actually have a home network from tomorrow. Not putting any money on it though. [EDIT - it is being uploaded from our spiffing new wireless router in our flat, hurray)
Chocolate Kettles
A very long entry, in which I lose the will to live. Also, if you are offended by rude language, don't read. The frustration is at points tangible.
Marta and I have just had an awful couple of days – today was probably the worst, because it was just an extension of the uncertainty of the last so long. The vast majority of people here are so unbelievably unhelpful, and when things are getting done, they take about ten times what they ought to … a few examples from the very recent past.
* SETTING UP A BANK ACCOUNT – you would think this was a relatively simple task, no? On Friday, Marta and I went with Zohra to the Bank of China to set up some local accounts. The first difficulty was finding the branch, because it had moved, without notice or leaving directions, to a temporary location about a mile away while its ordinary premises were being redecorated. The temperature, even early in the morning, was high, and neither Marta nor I had had enough water or breakfast – fortunately we were able to pick these up on the way. Having found the branch, we had a meeting with a man who appeared to be the bank manager (and also the security guard, who seemed to know as much about banking as all the clerks there, really it was weird), and it eventually transpired that we couldn’t open accounts today, even with Zohra being there to translate and all, no, we had to come back on Monday. Seriously. They have a day for people to open bank accounts, this is just odd (not to mention inconvenient). So, okay let’s come back on Monday.
Well, we went back on Monday, and oh my, I’m glad we budgeted some time for it – setting up Marta’s account (she wants one which can have USD put into it, but take RMB out, so her parents can send her money, because she’s lost her Polish bank card, which was her only source of money for a year – that in itself is stupidity) … it took at least 20 minutes before we were seen, despite being there bang on 10 as requested, and then a further 40 minutes (minimum) to even get to a stage approaching the opening of a bank account. Finally she was done, and luckily my account (a simple RMB-only job) took only a few minutes to get sorted.
The whole process took 90 minutes, to set up two accounts. What a joke. Even worse, tonight the bank phoned Marta and said they had forgotten to take back one of the (many) slips of paper that they had given her in the account-opening palaver, and could she please come in tomorrow to give it back? Yes, the afternoon is okay. Christ.
* REGISTERING WITH THE UNIVERSITY – so, you’re an exchange student, you’ve just travelled thousands of miles to be at your new institution, and you know damn well that the students who have gone to your place of study will be well-received, looked after, guided through all the formalities, etc etc. You expect the same in return? Well, don’t. Not if you come to XNU anyway. The entire affair so far has been nothing short of shambolic. If we didn’t have Zohra we would be absolutely lost. Anniwar was so vague last week, “oh you will come back on Monday to register for classes, have your medical examination, and so on, your college will take care of you”. Today we went back to ask some basic questions, like if a printer was available (Marta forgot to print off a couple of important documents, so we wanted to hook my computer up to a printer and get them sent off as soon as possible) – the answer was that our college would take care of it, for sure.
US: Oh and where IS our college???
HIM: It’s on the 4th floor of this building, you didn’t know this?
US: No we did not know this, we don’t know anything here.
HIM: Didn’t you talk to last year’s students?
US: No, barely, and not about this. (We expect this to be the kind of information that is provided when we arrive not passed on like some kind of chain letter!)
So, down to the fourth floor we go. There’s a room with a load of international-looking people inside, it seems to be the place to wait for some kind of registration … but we need to sit down, it’s been boiling outside again, and we’re virtually passing out. As we take a seat, maybe it looked like we were queue-jumping, because the bloke in the desk opposite got uppity, but we explained we were just sitting. Then we got chatting to a Japanese student, who had some English as well, and while this was going on some woman came over and asked if we wanted to pay the tuition fee. WHAT FUCKING TUITION FEE? We are EXCHANGE students. We tried to get this across to her, but she didn’t understand and then the main man in charge of the office, some fat bastard, told us to go to the 8th floor. “But we just came from there!”, we protested, but he jabbered off in Chinese at us, and then said “Hao?” (OK?) to which I said no, not OK and he just said “Good, not okay, go upstairs”, and basically shoved us out of the office, in front of everyone. Both Marta and I felt treated like shit, and totally confused about the whole situation. The Japanese girl has arranged to come back in the morning for some kind of language test, and maybe we will be there for it too (or maybe just to REGISTER, would be nice) … now, onto the medical exam.
* MEDICAL EXAMINATION – the university requires us to have something like a urine test, blood test, X-ray (possibly) and ECG, presumably to make sure we aren’t diabetic, HIV-positive, carrying TB, or about to drop dead from heart failure (I hope they check blood pressure too, because by now mine is absolutely through the roof). They require it. You would expect them to a) set it up for incoming students, b) have the facilities close to hand, c) give out information on where these facilities are located, d) all the above. Apparently (a) has been done, but without (b), (c) and (d), that’s quite useless. By hook and by crook, and through our multi-national foreign friends (both teachers and students, all of whom are being fucked around as much as we are) we discover that the medical centre is at a different location (someone wrote the address so we can use a taxi), and yes they require all the above tests, and it’s a good thing we didn’t have them done in the UK because they don’t recognise foreign lab results (or not without a fuss, anyway), oh and you can’t eat on the morning of your tests, they have to be “clean”, which makes me think they are testing sugars. The centre is only open for foreigners’ testing on Mondays, Thursdays and Fridays, which means we have missed the boat for today, what with having eaten and all. Still, this gives us time to get the required passport photos, photocopies of our passports and visas, and medical examination fee together, as well as some food for immediately after the testing, because seriously, not eating and then going out in the heat they have here, and then having blood taken after 10 in the morning (plus a long wait if I know the Chinese system by now) is a little more than stupid. I will pass out, simple as.
It is unbelievable, and unacceptable, that a host institution does not have available someone (or some people, plural) to guide visiting students through their registration and help them set up in the university. The people who are available as standard are rubbish – it is only by chance that we have Zohra, who is patient and goes out of her way to help us. Without her, I don’t know what we would have done – packed up and left by now, I am almost certain.
* PRINTING – we need to buy a memory stick, transfer the files, and print them off someplace else, nowhere and no one here at the university seems to have a printer. Marta if you are reading this, you could have avoided this problem by just turning up to one of the year abroad meetings and / or paying attention to everything I told you about the process.
* HOUSE REGISTRATION – you want to live somewhere in China, you have to register with the local police. Local is the key word there. You’d think any old police station could register you but no, it has to be the one nearest you. Why they couldn’t tell us this before, I don’t know … so we spent ages this afternoon hanging around waiting for the police office on campus to reopen (they have some kind of afternoon break, from about local time 1200 til 1400, which is Beijing time 1400 til 1600, and most annoying really. They opened and it then took a further half hour to establish some kind of contact and then for them to tell us (via Zohra, on the phone) that we need to go to the police office nearest our house, now we are living in a different part of town … add to this the extremely lazy and unprofessional look of almost all the police stations I have seen here, and the picture is not a pretty one. Virtually everyone we are dealing with in this country is unhelpful, and worse, they can’t see they are being anything other than normal.
* MAIL – if people send us post, apparently the way we get it is someone comes round and rings our doorbell (no mail slots or anything), and then rings our telephone number (I will include them on the mail printouts when I get round to posting that) if we are not in (which we may not be, given that we have classes and hopefully some kind of social life developing) … so this is just one more crazy annoying thing that we have to contend with, living here. I hope nothing goes missing, maybe people can just send us postcards or letters, nothing too special to begin with, so we know the system works.
* CHINA MOBILE – I bought my SIM the other day from a China Mobile store, and they said come to a CM store in September to add on Caller ID Display function, an extra Y5 a month … it didn’t occur to me that that was only 40p and I should have asked for it there and then, but anyway, I went to a CM store today and I wasn’t able to understand a word they said to me, except the gist of it which was they couldn’t / wouldn’t / weren’t going to do it for me. Infuriated, I left.
* SHOPPING – we went shopping today, for other household goods. Slowly but surely we are turning this flat into something resembling some kind of Western home. If we could sort out the fridge (there appear to be a load of insecty-type things that live inside it, if we can’t clear them out or put poison down for them, I think we might just ask the landlady to buy us a new fridge, it would be better for the apartment anyway). I digress, we went to a department store because of the many things we still ought to have for basic living, a mattress for my bed is definitely high on the list. Currently I am sleeping on one side of Marta’s double bed because the mattress in her room is at least remotely comfortable (once you fold your duvet in half and lie on top of that) … Mine is a thin padding that covers my bed, which is a couple of boxes put crudely together in some kind of DIY fashion – honestly, it’s crap. And why my room, so small, needs a double bed which takes up most of the living space, I do not know. Point is, we went shopping, and got a mattress, and a pillow, and we then had to pay for these items immediately. But surely you check out with ALL your goods and pay at the main till? No, not here. So then we spent another 30 minutes in the store looking at other things while wheeling around these two products that we had just bought … incroyable. For the record, the “mattress” I now have really isn’t so great either, it’s some kind of thin thing again, but because it’s just me on the bed I am going to use half the bed for books and general storage, and the other half (nearer the door) for sleeping on, so I can fold this “mattress” in two and then wrap up in my duvet as well, to pad myself somewhat. It’s crazy.
* OLYMPICS – “Wow, you’re going to China in 2008? Aren’t you excited? Are you going to Beijing? Do you think you will see the Olympics?” … a number of people have asked me these questions a number of times. The answers are “Yes”, “No”, “Hell no”, and “Again, no” … Beijing is not a pretty city. At least it wasn’t when I went there for a week in 2006. The only nice bit was when I got out of the city and went to the Great Wall for a day, that was amazing and I would definitely go again (Lucy?) … Beijing being busy with Olympic fever just makes it an even less exciting prospect as far as I am concerned; it’s most of the reason I chose to fly to Shanghai in the first place. Visas were supposedly harder to get hold of and prices rose, flights became hard to find, and now even at the university things are put on hold while we wait for students to make their way back to XNU having been in Beijing – but of course no one tells us this until today, while we are stressing that our classes have begun and we don’t know where they are. Also, if term starts in another week, that could have been a week that I spent in England. I am not pleased.
* POSTAL SERVICE – I want to send a present to Lucy. I want to put a letter inside this present, the two must travel together, that’s how it works. So I go to the post office and try to get a box for the present. Yes I can have a box, says the idiot behind the counter. But we won’t send that. Why not? Because it might break. I’m sorry but since when has a post office made the decision not to send something in case it breaks? That’s the sender’s risk. And also, I would PAD IT OUT, I am not stupid. But no, “We can send the letter. But not that” … I cannot believe this country. Or maybe it is just this postal branch, I will try a different one and see what they say ☹ Sorry Lucy, no letter or present just yet, I’ve been stupidly busy getting frustrated with all the other rubbish that is going on here.
* REGRETS – do I have any? Oh yes. Not having even LOOKED AT the other apartment we were offered, because it was out of our price range (though realistically speaking it wasn’t, we just didn’t want to spend that much, but maybe we should have since it came furnished and was apparently very nice to live in last year). So if I could go back and do this all again, I would at least LOOK at the other place. On the plus side, living here is not SO bad, and I do like the grounds of the complex we are in, and everyone here is Chinese so there’s no chance we can speak English with the neighbours, and I am sure at some point (maybe when we have some classmates, a routine, a house that works somewhat normally, and some more contact with our Western friends who are having as much trouble as we are and who exert some kind of calming normality influence on me, I will stop getting stressed about everything. Right now, however, I just wish that I was at home, and that I had never bothered learning Chinese or coming here. Really.
Mum and Dad, if you’re reading this, yes I am actually that frustrated and depressed, and I’m sorry I haven’t phoned or texted but texts cost 49p each (from my O2 card, the Chinese one won’t send to the UK and if it does I don’t know how much it costs), so I have just been texting Lucy. We are due to have the internet installed tomorrow evening, so hopefully I will be able to get online regularly then and you can Skype me or I can call you, whatever. I miss almost everything back home, and you know I don’t get homesick easily (ever?) – all the events of the last few days have just made me want to pack up and go. I guess I will stick it out, at least a couple of months, see if things improve. It doesn’t help that Marta and I made this choice on a flat, but by local standards it is definitely (more than) good. I think that just makes it worse.
[EDIT – Today, Tuesday, I am much less stressed. See more recent entries]
Marta and I have just had an awful couple of days – today was probably the worst, because it was just an extension of the uncertainty of the last so long. The vast majority of people here are so unbelievably unhelpful, and when things are getting done, they take about ten times what they ought to … a few examples from the very recent past.
* SETTING UP A BANK ACCOUNT – you would think this was a relatively simple task, no? On Friday, Marta and I went with Zohra to the Bank of China to set up some local accounts. The first difficulty was finding the branch, because it had moved, without notice or leaving directions, to a temporary location about a mile away while its ordinary premises were being redecorated. The temperature, even early in the morning, was high, and neither Marta nor I had had enough water or breakfast – fortunately we were able to pick these up on the way. Having found the branch, we had a meeting with a man who appeared to be the bank manager (and also the security guard, who seemed to know as much about banking as all the clerks there, really it was weird), and it eventually transpired that we couldn’t open accounts today, even with Zohra being there to translate and all, no, we had to come back on Monday. Seriously. They have a day for people to open bank accounts, this is just odd (not to mention inconvenient). So, okay let’s come back on Monday.
Well, we went back on Monday, and oh my, I’m glad we budgeted some time for it – setting up Marta’s account (she wants one which can have USD put into it, but take RMB out, so her parents can send her money, because she’s lost her Polish bank card, which was her only source of money for a year – that in itself is stupidity) … it took at least 20 minutes before we were seen, despite being there bang on 10 as requested, and then a further 40 minutes (minimum) to even get to a stage approaching the opening of a bank account. Finally she was done, and luckily my account (a simple RMB-only job) took only a few minutes to get sorted.
The whole process took 90 minutes, to set up two accounts. What a joke. Even worse, tonight the bank phoned Marta and said they had forgotten to take back one of the (many) slips of paper that they had given her in the account-opening palaver, and could she please come in tomorrow to give it back? Yes, the afternoon is okay. Christ.
* REGISTERING WITH THE UNIVERSITY – so, you’re an exchange student, you’ve just travelled thousands of miles to be at your new institution, and you know damn well that the students who have gone to your place of study will be well-received, looked after, guided through all the formalities, etc etc. You expect the same in return? Well, don’t. Not if you come to XNU anyway. The entire affair so far has been nothing short of shambolic. If we didn’t have Zohra we would be absolutely lost. Anniwar was so vague last week, “oh you will come back on Monday to register for classes, have your medical examination, and so on, your college will take care of you”. Today we went back to ask some basic questions, like if a printer was available (Marta forgot to print off a couple of important documents, so we wanted to hook my computer up to a printer and get them sent off as soon as possible) – the answer was that our college would take care of it, for sure.
US: Oh and where IS our college???
HIM: It’s on the 4th floor of this building, you didn’t know this?
US: No we did not know this, we don’t know anything here.
HIM: Didn’t you talk to last year’s students?
US: No, barely, and not about this. (We expect this to be the kind of information that is provided when we arrive not passed on like some kind of chain letter!)
So, down to the fourth floor we go. There’s a room with a load of international-looking people inside, it seems to be the place to wait for some kind of registration … but we need to sit down, it’s been boiling outside again, and we’re virtually passing out. As we take a seat, maybe it looked like we were queue-jumping, because the bloke in the desk opposite got uppity, but we explained we were just sitting. Then we got chatting to a Japanese student, who had some English as well, and while this was going on some woman came over and asked if we wanted to pay the tuition fee. WHAT FUCKING TUITION FEE? We are EXCHANGE students. We tried to get this across to her, but she didn’t understand and then the main man in charge of the office, some fat bastard, told us to go to the 8th floor. “But we just came from there!”, we protested, but he jabbered off in Chinese at us, and then said “Hao?” (OK?) to which I said no, not OK and he just said “Good, not okay, go upstairs”, and basically shoved us out of the office, in front of everyone. Both Marta and I felt treated like shit, and totally confused about the whole situation. The Japanese girl has arranged to come back in the morning for some kind of language test, and maybe we will be there for it too (or maybe just to REGISTER, would be nice) … now, onto the medical exam.
* MEDICAL EXAMINATION – the university requires us to have something like a urine test, blood test, X-ray (possibly) and ECG, presumably to make sure we aren’t diabetic, HIV-positive, carrying TB, or about to drop dead from heart failure (I hope they check blood pressure too, because by now mine is absolutely through the roof). They require it. You would expect them to a) set it up for incoming students, b) have the facilities close to hand, c) give out information on where these facilities are located, d) all the above. Apparently (a) has been done, but without (b), (c) and (d), that’s quite useless. By hook and by crook, and through our multi-national foreign friends (both teachers and students, all of whom are being fucked around as much as we are) we discover that the medical centre is at a different location (someone wrote the address so we can use a taxi), and yes they require all the above tests, and it’s a good thing we didn’t have them done in the UK because they don’t recognise foreign lab results (or not without a fuss, anyway), oh and you can’t eat on the morning of your tests, they have to be “clean”, which makes me think they are testing sugars. The centre is only open for foreigners’ testing on Mondays, Thursdays and Fridays, which means we have missed the boat for today, what with having eaten and all. Still, this gives us time to get the required passport photos, photocopies of our passports and visas, and medical examination fee together, as well as some food for immediately after the testing, because seriously, not eating and then going out in the heat they have here, and then having blood taken after 10 in the morning (plus a long wait if I know the Chinese system by now) is a little more than stupid. I will pass out, simple as.
It is unbelievable, and unacceptable, that a host institution does not have available someone (or some people, plural) to guide visiting students through their registration and help them set up in the university. The people who are available as standard are rubbish – it is only by chance that we have Zohra, who is patient and goes out of her way to help us. Without her, I don’t know what we would have done – packed up and left by now, I am almost certain.
* PRINTING – we need to buy a memory stick, transfer the files, and print them off someplace else, nowhere and no one here at the university seems to have a printer. Marta if you are reading this, you could have avoided this problem by just turning up to one of the year abroad meetings and / or paying attention to everything I told you about the process.
* HOUSE REGISTRATION – you want to live somewhere in China, you have to register with the local police. Local is the key word there. You’d think any old police station could register you but no, it has to be the one nearest you. Why they couldn’t tell us this before, I don’t know … so we spent ages this afternoon hanging around waiting for the police office on campus to reopen (they have some kind of afternoon break, from about local time 1200 til 1400, which is Beijing time 1400 til 1600, and most annoying really. They opened and it then took a further half hour to establish some kind of contact and then for them to tell us (via Zohra, on the phone) that we need to go to the police office nearest our house, now we are living in a different part of town … add to this the extremely lazy and unprofessional look of almost all the police stations I have seen here, and the picture is not a pretty one. Virtually everyone we are dealing with in this country is unhelpful, and worse, they can’t see they are being anything other than normal.
* MAIL – if people send us post, apparently the way we get it is someone comes round and rings our doorbell (no mail slots or anything), and then rings our telephone number (I will include them on the mail printouts when I get round to posting that) if we are not in (which we may not be, given that we have classes and hopefully some kind of social life developing) … so this is just one more crazy annoying thing that we have to contend with, living here. I hope nothing goes missing, maybe people can just send us postcards or letters, nothing too special to begin with, so we know the system works.
* CHINA MOBILE – I bought my SIM the other day from a China Mobile store, and they said come to a CM store in September to add on Caller ID Display function, an extra Y5 a month … it didn’t occur to me that that was only 40p and I should have asked for it there and then, but anyway, I went to a CM store today and I wasn’t able to understand a word they said to me, except the gist of it which was they couldn’t / wouldn’t / weren’t going to do it for me. Infuriated, I left.
* SHOPPING – we went shopping today, for other household goods. Slowly but surely we are turning this flat into something resembling some kind of Western home. If we could sort out the fridge (there appear to be a load of insecty-type things that live inside it, if we can’t clear them out or put poison down for them, I think we might just ask the landlady to buy us a new fridge, it would be better for the apartment anyway). I digress, we went to a department store because of the many things we still ought to have for basic living, a mattress for my bed is definitely high on the list. Currently I am sleeping on one side of Marta’s double bed because the mattress in her room is at least remotely comfortable (once you fold your duvet in half and lie on top of that) … Mine is a thin padding that covers my bed, which is a couple of boxes put crudely together in some kind of DIY fashion – honestly, it’s crap. And why my room, so small, needs a double bed which takes up most of the living space, I do not know. Point is, we went shopping, and got a mattress, and a pillow, and we then had to pay for these items immediately. But surely you check out with ALL your goods and pay at the main till? No, not here. So then we spent another 30 minutes in the store looking at other things while wheeling around these two products that we had just bought … incroyable. For the record, the “mattress” I now have really isn’t so great either, it’s some kind of thin thing again, but because it’s just me on the bed I am going to use half the bed for books and general storage, and the other half (nearer the door) for sleeping on, so I can fold this “mattress” in two and then wrap up in my duvet as well, to pad myself somewhat. It’s crazy.
* OLYMPICS – “Wow, you’re going to China in 2008? Aren’t you excited? Are you going to Beijing? Do you think you will see the Olympics?” … a number of people have asked me these questions a number of times. The answers are “Yes”, “No”, “Hell no”, and “Again, no” … Beijing is not a pretty city. At least it wasn’t when I went there for a week in 2006. The only nice bit was when I got out of the city and went to the Great Wall for a day, that was amazing and I would definitely go again (Lucy?) … Beijing being busy with Olympic fever just makes it an even less exciting prospect as far as I am concerned; it’s most of the reason I chose to fly to Shanghai in the first place. Visas were supposedly harder to get hold of and prices rose, flights became hard to find, and now even at the university things are put on hold while we wait for students to make their way back to XNU having been in Beijing – but of course no one tells us this until today, while we are stressing that our classes have begun and we don’t know where they are. Also, if term starts in another week, that could have been a week that I spent in England. I am not pleased.
* POSTAL SERVICE – I want to send a present to Lucy. I want to put a letter inside this present, the two must travel together, that’s how it works. So I go to the post office and try to get a box for the present. Yes I can have a box, says the idiot behind the counter. But we won’t send that. Why not? Because it might break. I’m sorry but since when has a post office made the decision not to send something in case it breaks? That’s the sender’s risk. And also, I would PAD IT OUT, I am not stupid. But no, “We can send the letter. But not that” … I cannot believe this country. Or maybe it is just this postal branch, I will try a different one and see what they say ☹ Sorry Lucy, no letter or present just yet, I’ve been stupidly busy getting frustrated with all the other rubbish that is going on here.
* REGRETS – do I have any? Oh yes. Not having even LOOKED AT the other apartment we were offered, because it was out of our price range (though realistically speaking it wasn’t, we just didn’t want to spend that much, but maybe we should have since it came furnished and was apparently very nice to live in last year). So if I could go back and do this all again, I would at least LOOK at the other place. On the plus side, living here is not SO bad, and I do like the grounds of the complex we are in, and everyone here is Chinese so there’s no chance we can speak English with the neighbours, and I am sure at some point (maybe when we have some classmates, a routine, a house that works somewhat normally, and some more contact with our Western friends who are having as much trouble as we are and who exert some kind of calming normality influence on me, I will stop getting stressed about everything. Right now, however, I just wish that I was at home, and that I had never bothered learning Chinese or coming here. Really.
Mum and Dad, if you’re reading this, yes I am actually that frustrated and depressed, and I’m sorry I haven’t phoned or texted but texts cost 49p each (from my O2 card, the Chinese one won’t send to the UK and if it does I don’t know how much it costs), so I have just been texting Lucy. We are due to have the internet installed tomorrow evening, so hopefully I will be able to get online regularly then and you can Skype me or I can call you, whatever. I miss almost everything back home, and you know I don’t get homesick easily (ever?) – all the events of the last few days have just made me want to pack up and go. I guess I will stick it out, at least a couple of months, see if things improve. It doesn’t help that Marta and I made this choice on a flat, but by local standards it is definitely (more than) good. I think that just makes it worse.
[EDIT – Today, Tuesday, I am much less stressed. See more recent entries]
Room 101
Househunting was frustrating and haphazard. There was no formal support from the university, just Zohra’s assistance, which was able and her patience most abundant, but the method of finding a place to live here was just to go from one complex to the next and look for adverts … We had been offered a place that last year’s students used but had ruled it out on the grounds it was too expensive (not by Western standards but by the average here, which seemed to be a good way to go – after all, people are living here just fine, right?) … so the first place she showed us was in a great location, just 10 minutes (if that!) walk from the university, in the teachers’ complex, so nice and safe and quiet and scenic. Except the flat, it really wasn’t very nice at all … the bathroom wasn’t great, there was only one bedroom (the living room could be made into a second one apparently), and there was even a room that wasn’t being rented out (why? the landlord was using it for storage, quite cheeky I think, to expect us to pay for a house we can’t even fully use!) … So we moved on, the next place was too small, the next one didn’t want to rent to us, I don’t know why, until we found a housing complex with a lot of adverts, and one that looked good. So Zohra called the number and the results were sounding very positive. Then a lady who was putting up posters on the advert wall introduced herself as an estate agent and would we be interested in seeing a place in this complex? Well, sure … ! I mean, it’s a bit far from the uni, but there’s a bus service and it shouldn’t be too hard, right? So we made an arrangement to see this flat, but by that time Zohra had to go, she was busy in the afternoon, fine we can look at it ourselves and if we need her in the morning for signing a contract she will be around. Yay. So that’s what happened. We looked around, we liked it a lot more than the other houses we had seen – it wasn’t amazing but it wasn’t rubbish either, and we thought yes, we would be happy living here for 11 months. The rent is very reasonable, and although we have had to buy some amenities in the last couple of days, we’re still not breaking the bank over our living … however it has some problems too, like the little insecty creatures living in our fridge – I think some poison is in order there, or a new fridge, and the fact that the beds (mine in particular) are very hard – well mine is just some MDF with a thin padding over it! Oh and the toilet we thought was blocking, but it turns out it was our flushing technique (you need to hold the button down), and the shower method in this part of the country is crazy (you have the shower next to the toilet and just stand there, it will drain into the floor, it’s very … basic. Not to mention our shower doesn’t even fit into the holder on the wall, it rests on some makeshift line that the landlord put in … Oh and our washing machine is in the same room which makes it quite cramped. I think the bathroom is my least favourite part of the house. Maybe my own room, I don’t know I haven’t slept in it yet, I haven’t had a mattress! If I can find a decent gym with decent showers I will probably end up just washing there for the most part and maybe here just once or twice a week. Still, the place is habitable, and it will make me appreciate what I have back at home that much more, when I return.
Oh and for those of you versed in English TV … yes, we are living in Room 101, address printout to follow for anyone who wants to send us mail to cheer us up.
Oh and for those of you versed in English TV … yes, we are living in Room 101, address printout to follow for anyone who wants to send us mail to cheer us up.
Pre-Registration
So much has happened since my last entry, life seems to have been moving at rocket pace. On Thursday, before Marta arrived, I went to the China Mobile store to see how I could top up my SIM card – turns out it would just be easier to buy another one, change my number and start from scratch. Okay, let’s do it … easier said than done. As well as having to explain everything to me (because I am pernickety and want to be sure I am not making a huge mistake), there was the business of setting up the SIM card, which over here means filling out a lot of documents and having copies of your passport taken; basically, the SIM becomes registered to you, none of this chopping and changing, even for PAYG cards. This is hassle, but there you go. Eventually all the documents were complete (I had to sign about seven different sheets of paper), and I was ready to go – but please do come back to a China Mobile store every time you want to top up (what? not online, or over a counter at a newsagents?) and definitely come back in about two days’ time to add on “Display Caller ID” which is an extra option over here rather than the standard we expect elsewhere. This service costs Y5 per month on top of the contracted amount (see below), and the assistant didn’t want me to spend Y5 now for about four days worth of service. The fact that Y5 is 40p didn’t occur to me until afterwards … So, how much am I paying for this SIM? UK readers might want to sit down, because the tariffs here are so ridiculously cheap.
Y15 per month (just gets taken off the card balance) which allows me 100 free texts to other Chinese mobiles. There were other tariffs of 20 and 30 RMB per month which gave 200 and 300 texts respectively, but I think here I will be calling more than texting. Add the Y5 caller ID display charge and I pay Y20 (£1.60) a month for the use of my phone. Calls are charged at different rates, depending on the time they are made – between 0900 and midnight they are charged at Y0.2/min (1.5p) and between midnight and 0900 this is reduced to Y0.1 … calls made to numbers outside of Xinjiang province are charged at a higher rate but this can be reduced a bit by dialing a special extension before the number, making the cost 0.39 at peak times and 0.19 offpeak, still dirt-cheap. The SIM cost Y100, but it came with Y100 credit on it, so effectively it was free.
Anyway, I had my phone up and running – ace. I went to the Post Office and got some touristy stuff sent off – might as well do the tourist stuff at the beginning, like postcards with pretty pictures, so Mum, Dad, Nana, Lucy, Lari and Jenna, you may get cards in the next few days … I don’t remember doing much else that day apart from waiting for Marta to eventually arrive, and when she did, watching my stress levels rise. She’s lovely but she’s an incredibly nervous, fretty character and it means more work for me trying to calm her down. She got into the hostel in the early evening, and took a couple of hours to sort herself out, having flown from Dusseldorf to Beijing and then on to Urumqi, where a taxi driver had ripped her off. What a great start for her.
We took dinner in the Kazakh place below the hostel – I say we, it was really me, she wasn’t so hungry – and then went out to see some Kazakh shops but for some reason they were all shut … instead, we bumped into one of the Chinese people working in the hostel, and he directed us to the Wu Yi Night Market, a big T-shaped affair, the horizontal bar of the T being food stalls (all remarkably similar, and quite unappealing I thought), the vertical section being miscellaneous stalls selling jewellery, clothes, knives, batons, exercise equipment, candy-floss, and so on. It was interesting, but a little samey after a while and of course neither of us could be sure our stomachs weren’t going to turn nasty at any moment. On our way out of the market though, Marta stopped to buy some melon (which turned out to be a good call, since it was very tasty) and my eye was taken by a cart with a load of rocks on it. Except these rocks smelt really good, almost like … no, it can’t be … that’s honey! Yup, it was solid honey – the stall owner broke a bit off for us to try, and it is the best honey I have ever tasted. I think I’ll have to go back to get some, it was that good.
We got back to the hostel and got our heads down quite fast because the next day we had made plans to register with the university and meet a teacher (a friend of the students who were here last year) who would help us look for a house which would be a real help to sort out before we start lessons.
Y15 per month (just gets taken off the card balance) which allows me 100 free texts to other Chinese mobiles. There were other tariffs of 20 and 30 RMB per month which gave 200 and 300 texts respectively, but I think here I will be calling more than texting. Add the Y5 caller ID display charge and I pay Y20 (£1.60) a month for the use of my phone. Calls are charged at different rates, depending on the time they are made – between 0900 and midnight they are charged at Y0.2/min (1.5p) and between midnight and 0900 this is reduced to Y0.1 … calls made to numbers outside of Xinjiang province are charged at a higher rate but this can be reduced a bit by dialing a special extension before the number, making the cost 0.39 at peak times and 0.19 offpeak, still dirt-cheap. The SIM cost Y100, but it came with Y100 credit on it, so effectively it was free.
Anyway, I had my phone up and running – ace. I went to the Post Office and got some touristy stuff sent off – might as well do the tourist stuff at the beginning, like postcards with pretty pictures, so Mum, Dad, Nana, Lucy, Lari and Jenna, you may get cards in the next few days … I don’t remember doing much else that day apart from waiting for Marta to eventually arrive, and when she did, watching my stress levels rise. She’s lovely but she’s an incredibly nervous, fretty character and it means more work for me trying to calm her down. She got into the hostel in the early evening, and took a couple of hours to sort herself out, having flown from Dusseldorf to Beijing and then on to Urumqi, where a taxi driver had ripped her off. What a great start for her.
We took dinner in the Kazakh place below the hostel – I say we, it was really me, she wasn’t so hungry – and then went out to see some Kazakh shops but for some reason they were all shut … instead, we bumped into one of the Chinese people working in the hostel, and he directed us to the Wu Yi Night Market, a big T-shaped affair, the horizontal bar of the T being food stalls (all remarkably similar, and quite unappealing I thought), the vertical section being miscellaneous stalls selling jewellery, clothes, knives, batons, exercise equipment, candy-floss, and so on. It was interesting, but a little samey after a while and of course neither of us could be sure our stomachs weren’t going to turn nasty at any moment. On our way out of the market though, Marta stopped to buy some melon (which turned out to be a good call, since it was very tasty) and my eye was taken by a cart with a load of rocks on it. Except these rocks smelt really good, almost like … no, it can’t be … that’s honey! Yup, it was solid honey – the stall owner broke a bit off for us to try, and it is the best honey I have ever tasted. I think I’ll have to go back to get some, it was that good.
We got back to the hostel and got our heads down quite fast because the next day we had made plans to register with the university and meet a teacher (a friend of the students who were here last year) who would help us look for a house which would be a real help to sort out before we start lessons.
Apologies in Advance
Sorry to everyone that I haven’t been around recently. We’ve had very limited and infrequent access to the internet and all my bloggings have been stored on my laptop in Word documents while I wait for it to be installed at home. So, a special apology to Marta’s mum who thinks I’m lazy when it comes to blogging (there will be more than enough to read in just a bit!) … and to Mariamelia, who was worrying that I am in some kind of trouble – I’m alright, just deprived of electronic communication ;) And a big apology to any avid readers who will now have about 50 pages of my stuff to sift through.
Normal Service will be Resumed Shortly
Normal Service will be Resumed Shortly
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