beijing

I definitely filled up a karma quota this evening!

Diana and I went to the central train station to buy tickets for Hong Kong. Spring festival is coming up and we're heading to 中山 (ZhongShan) to spend it with her parents. Before we reach her parents we're heading a few hours south to catch out the sites in Hong Kong and to cross a border ;) . I'm going to try to sneak in some surfing too.

Ok so now for the karma part. After we purchased our tickets I was approached by a middle eastern man whom asked if I spoke English. I responded yes and answered a few of the questions he had. He said OK to everything I told him, I pointed him to the correct window and then he went to stand in line. I needed to purchase a second ticket to Harbin so I also stood in line behind him by a few people. As he approached the window he asked a few questions and the responses weren't satisfactory so he left. I didn't hear the questions/answers but I assume they were something like "Do you have a ticket for here/there" and the answer was "no".

It was my turn at the ticket window and they, sadly, didn't have a ticket for me to Harbin. After I left the window the man approached me again. Apparently he didn't fully understand what happened at the window and all he wanted was a ticket to Guangzhou A.S.A.P. Also his English wasn't as good as I had originally thought. He English was like my Chinese. He said OK to everything even if he didn't really understand (I've been know to say hao, hao (OK) to things that we're probably selling my soul)

Diana and I spent about 20-25 minutes speaking with them trying to figure out where they wanted to go and HOW they want to get there. Explaining to them that a Chinese train has 2 different types of beds and 2 different types of chairs, additionally the beds have 3 different locations. All of these have different prices so its kinda important to know what you want especially with the craziness of a Chinese train station moreover one in Beijing! (its nuts).

So it took a while as the English level was definitely a barrier. Fortunately we had a notepad so I was able to write down things like times, days, etc. as well as using Diana's brilliant idea of drawing a chair and a bed so they understood the difference. I went to the ticket counter with them 4 different times asking about prices, the soonest train, etc. etc.

After the 3rd time to the ticket window I realized two things. The first is that they wanted out of Beijing A.S.A.P. The second was a bit of naivety on my part. Only the 20 minutes they made several gestures that to me indicated they wanted a seat and not a bed. What I realized is that they were trying to communicate that they were willing to stand! Standing never occurred to me as trains in the U.S simply do not allow standing let alone sell a ticket for standing room only.

The train to Guangzhou is 21 hours! That's the fast train.

I'll admit it. I was naive. It never occurred to me to purchase a train ticket for standing room on a 21+ hour train. I realize that trains in China, India and, apparently, the middle east sell these tickets but it didn't occur to me. I went back to the ticket window for a 4th time to ask for a standing only ticket. A phrase that wasn't in our phrase book.

This is where it gets interesting for all of us. They did sell tickets for standing room only but not at that train station. They had to go to a completely separate train station. Oh boy I had a hard time communicating the words "Wednesday" and "the day after tomorrow" as well as variants of those. Now I had to communicate that they could get to Guangzhou but they would have to go to a different train station to buy the tickets.

It took a good 10 minutes to communicate this but eventually we did. Diana wrote down a note that they could hand to the ticket window and then we walked them out to a Taxi. I, yes I, talked to the cab driver and told him where to take the guys as well as approximate prices. I translated this back to the men and sent them on their way.

I don't know what happened to them after that but I hope they made they made to Guangzhou(广州). I think the entire back-n-forth took about 40 minutes including a nice and long 5 minutes outside in the -7 (C) night.

Over the past two weeks I have been fighting a cough and, possibly, a cold. Mainly I've been fighting a nagging cough. On Thursday and Friday I was stuck indoors for two main reasons. The first was that I wanted to give my body time to recover. The second was that I was actually fearful of going outside. Yes, fearful.

A nice thick blanket of atmospheric haze covered Beijing on those days as well as the days prior. The haze reminded me of the thick blankets of fog that would cover one of my old hometowns of Fowler, California or to use a bigger more well known city, San Francisco, California. Unfortunately this haze wasn't fog it was a thickly polluted nasty mix of smog/coal dust/diesel fumes. The effects of burning coal, too many cars, too many factories in the city, and simple inefficient energy methods that are high polluters.

Simply put I was scared of going outside in fear that the air would make my condition worse. Of course all of that was speculation until this morning when Diana found a few other people blogging about it. This is what they said.

How bad was the air the last two days? If it was a person it would have been a seedy, broad-shouldered thug, dressed in filthy leathers and reeking of grain alcohol, last-night's whorehouse and cheap cigarettes, that hauled you into an alley by your collar and beat you senseless with a lead pipe wrapped in duct tape, emptied your wallet, found your grandmother's address inside, went to her house and beat her senseless with the same pipe, cleared out her jewelry box and sodomized her golden-retriever on the way out the door before setting fire to her cottage, coming back to the alley and kicking you in the ribs one more time for good measure.

Then she found the SEPA index. 400! 4 F*in hundred. Shanghai 50ish, Hong Kong 20ish. My guess is that most U.S. cities (L.A aside) are at like 10 or 15. 4 F*in hundred. Are we serious?!?
(update: actual index 451)

Fortunately for me the winds picked up on Friday night and were howling through Beijing all day Saturday. The winds were fierce and strong enough to carry the polluted air out of Beijing. Unfortunately for everyone else in the world that air, the same air that exacerbated my health problems is now coming towards you. Diluted yes, non-existent no.

Beijing has a long way to go before its the World Class city like they think they are.

P.S. I'm still not moving at least not yet. There are many, many other items in the city that counter the negatives.

The 2008 Olympics are in the second of three phases of ticketing. Due to extraordinary demand, and I would say a poorly design ticketing system, they were unable to handle the ticket requests on a first come first serve basis. In order to handle the demand everyone must submit an application. Ticket will then be dispersed via a lottery system.

This past Saturday Diana and I moved into our first apartment in Beijing. The three week long apartment search is finally over and I think we have found the nearest-to-perfect-est apartment we could have found. I really do like it. Everyday I am finding something new about the apartment and the neighborhood that I like.

This quick n' dirty video is from our move on Saturday. I was really, really tired during our move and I'm really glad that we don't own that much stuff. A single 30RMB taxi ride from 五道口 to 和平里北街 and we were done! Now we just have to "fill out" the house with all those little things (chopsticks, cookware, towels, sheets, pillowcases, bookshelves, shoe racks, etc. etc.)

With the help of Oleg (litwol on d.o) I have, once again, assumed ownership over another Drupal group. The Beijing Drupal group on g.d.o seems to be rather dead BUT I know there are lot of Drupalers in Beijing. I took over ownership to see if I could help breathe some life back into the group.

You often learn languages in the most common of places. This evening Diana and I went out to our local hotpot restaurant (火锅饭店). The meal started off as normal except that I can now fully understand when the waiter/waitress (who, I'm pretty sure, are also the owners) ask if we want a spicy sauce or not (I get the spicy). That in itself is pretty cool but today I was also able to ask what another customer ordered. It looked good and I wanted some.