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)