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.

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.