I finally made it to Messenger. And I got very drunk.

Not unlike the Halloween/Thanksgiving/Christmas triple threat that is the American holiday season, it feels like the major Holidays of China are all bunched together. It wasn’t that long ago that we were gearing up for tomb sweeping day, and stores were already stocking fancy mooncakes for the mid-autumn festival.

I’m not sure exactly who buys this for whom. I would always get stuff like this from my bosses in China. They’re usually really nice packaging and the food inside is usually kind of gross and I feel bad throwing it away so I put it on a shelf somewhere in the kitchen with the other food I guess I could eat if I was starving.

Some people get upset about people wearing shirts of bands they don’t know exist. I think it’s kind of fun. Except I usually try to educate them and they usually don’t really want to learn about bands, because honestly who would.

So a short while after this photo was taken, I was carrying a package home from work. I ordered a lot of stuff online, including furniture. I’d just gotten a new desk for my apartment. The security guard at the front gate stopped me and started yelling at me about I don’t know what. This was a pretty common occurrence. He seemed to typically yell at me a lot and no matter how many times I tried to explain to him that I didn’t speak Chinese he insisted on yelling at me whenever he saw me, so I just ignored him. On this particular evening, a man nearby came up to me and said ‘I am a policeman. I will come to your home tomorrow.’ I thought it was strange but mostly kind of ignored it. I had people telling me things like that all the time. Do you remember when I moved to China and that guy told me he was in the Illuminati and that George W. Bush was his biological father? I swear I wrote about it but I can’t find it and I scrolled back to the first post on this blog.

Well it was a Saturday night and because of the Mid Autumn Festival none of us had to work on Sunday, even the schlubs like me who worked at training centers instead of actual schools. So I went out to Messanger again, and lo and behold, they were open and people were in there drinking and carrying on. Almost everyone in there was an expat like me. They were playing western music. One guy brought out his guitar and we were all singing and drinking, and it was the sort of amazing experience that you can relate to if you’ve ever been abroad, where you can enjoy something that feels like home, and it’s instantly endearing. Even though I didn’t know anyone there, except for a couple of people who I barely knew, we all knew what it was like to live in China and not be Chinese, and that can be a powerful thing to bond over when you’re in a world that’s so different.

For some reason these old computers were next to the stage. I was sort of interested. Were they there because there was no longer a use for them and they looked kind of cool, so now they were essentially decoration?

A Canadian and I talked about my weird interaction with the policeman. The principal from a local school, an Australian, showed up and started buying shots for the house, and I was already pretty tipsy at that point. I remember a Brazilian man showed me some music I liked and when I told him so he treated me like his new best friend. I spoke with a German about how dog meat is sometimes served in Chinese restaurants. A Mexican man tried to convince me that I was working for peanuts and I should quit and move to a real school, until I told him what I was making and then he conceded that I had a pretty good job. Then I think there was a contest to see which country could hold its liquor the best, and if you want to know who won that, you’ll have to ask a Ukrainian, because they are the only people who remember the evening from that point.

White Rabbit is a popular kind of candy in China. It’s a bit like taffy. Anyway, I guess they make soap now too, in case you want to wash yourself with candy.

So I still don’t know how this happened, but I woke up the next morning without even a faint hangover. Which is good, because I was awoken by the sound of someone knocking at my door. The policeman I’d met last night was back.

To be continued…

Maintenance, succulents, pizza

My washing machine, whenever I tried to use it, would put out the message E4. I’m assuming that’s Error 4, but I had no way to figure out what E4 was, and since this was some Chinese brand I couldn’t even find on Google, I wasn’t able to find a manual. I finally had someone from work come over and help me figure this out. The hose was not connected. Didn’t think to check that one.

I was finally getting Internet in my new apartment. This guy came by and asked me to show him where the box with all the wires was. I showed him this massive tangle of wires that was coming out of the wall next to my couch. I wanted to do something to make it look more tidy, but I didn’t know what any of the wires did, so I left it alone.

It turned out that the thing he wanted to look at was the cable box outside my front door. He was able to get the Internet up and running, but whenever I turned off my computer, when I turned it back on again, the Internet wouldn’t work, and the only way to fix it was to unplug the router and plug it back in like ten times. Since I wasn’t paying my electricity bill anyway, I just left my computer on.

This is the TV that came with the apartment. It did not work. They stuck a broken TV in the apartment so they could show off that the apartment came with a TV. I took it down and put it in the garage space I had, and put my won TV on a stand here.

One thing that I always find surprising in China is how it’s often unclear if stores are open or not. Like, from this picture, you would assume this is a store where they are getting ready to have a grand opening soon and they’re setting stuff up, but no. This is a section of an otherwise normal grocery store and they just left it looking like this for reasons that I can’t fully understand.

My coworker got succulents mailed to her. As you probably know, I’m kind of into succulents, and I was interested to see how they ship succulents in China. You don’t often see plants like this shipped bear root in the USA. I don’t know why not. If you’re planning to pot them, this is a fine way to do it.

They were wrapped in the little slips of newspaper, I guess to keep them together, and packed tight with wads of that plastic cotton-like fiber that they put in cheap pillows and stuffed animals.

Later on, I saw this at a shop, and I was tempted to buy it, because it looked very cool. It’s a kit where you build this fun looking rabbit and then you can use its head to grow plants. What a neat idea!

So, I’ve told you some horror stories about going to the hospital. Olga turned me on to Jiahui Health, and I’m sure I’ll talk more about it later, but Jiahui Health is a hospital in Shanghai that was wonderful and everyone spoke English and everything was clean and nice and I was so happy to find it. I was making enough money at this point that I was ready to start tackling the umpteen health issues I was having at the time. I also liked that Jiahui had their address in English. I’m not sure it would help if I was taking a taxi with a Chinese driver, but at least I had it.

This is the screen on the water vending machine outside my apartment. I would take my bike over there, load as many bottles of water onto it as I could, and take it back. When I moved to China, we were told to just boil the water. Then a friend told me that in an effort to combat COVID-19 the sewage treatment centers had started adding bleach to the water, so it was no longer safe to drink unless it had been boiled and filtered. I bought a water filter that attached to the faucet, but I never figured out how to attach it properly and it would fall off after a few minutes, spraying water everywhere. So I opted to just drink bottled water. This left me with a lot of bottles for recycling, which the elderly woman who lived in my building was overjoyed to take off my hands. Collecting recycling is a common pastime for older people in China. When I saw old people digging through trash, I used to think it was very sad that they had to do that just to get by, but I learned afterward that even rich old Chinese people, whose grandkids would never have to work a day in their lives, would go out to pick through trash cans to see what they could find. It’s good to have a hobby.

Another thing I was making enough money to do a lot was order pizza. The delivery app I use in China is named Meituan. It’s a lot like delivery apps from the USA, although it’s typically all in Chinese so I don’t always know what I’m getting. I got what I thought were chicken nuggets once and they were actually fried fish balls. And even places that look familiar, like Pizza Hut, can be very different in China. Here we have a pizza I ordered. Those pointy bits are filled with some manner of a sweet cream cheese spread like you might put on a bagel.

And here we have what I thought was an onion and potato pizza. Turns out it was a fish and shrimp pizza. It wasn’t terrible, but I don’t think I’d ever order it again.

When you live somewhere, every day you get a little better at living there. That makes it hard for me to want to leave a place, even when things are looking kind of bad. Like many expatriates living in China at the time, I would tell people down at the bar ‘I’m going to give it another six months. I’ll save up some money and then go home.’ I noticed a lot of people saying that, and none of them ever seemed to leave. It’s hard to just throw in the towel. Even when it was clear my boss didn’t know what he was doing and the ABIE I was working at was clearly a sinking ship, it’s hard to jump off a sinking ship when they’re paying you a lot of money to stay on. Let’s give it another week. Oh, but I wanted to try this. Okay two weeks.

Looking for Messenger and the Typhoon

These are the single serve coffee containers, like Keurig cups, that are for sale in China. The thing that I found interesting is that they were for sale at KFC. In the USA, you don’t think of KFC as a place to buy coffee, but in China KFC is second only to Starbucks in foreign chains that offer coffee, so I guess it makes sense that they’d want to offer the KCoffee (Yes, that’s what they call it.) experience from the comfort of your own home.

My coworkers turned me on to a WeChat group for foreigners living in Jiaxing. There was a guy on there selling his old electric scooter. These are very, very popular in China, and it’s a really convenient way to get around that I wish would gain more momentum in the States. Someone explained to me that because of the way the law works, in other countries scooters are classified the same as bicycles, so there are laws to obey, but you don’t need a license to use them. In the USA however, scooters are classified the same as motorcycles, so you actually need to get a special license to use them. I wonder if that was just poor planning or a malicious lobbying by the auto industry. Anyway I had a bike.

So I had a bike now, and another thing that happened is that on this Jiaxing foreigners group, I made a post offering some action figures that I didn’t have space to display and was ready to get rid of (These action figures, to be specific. God, that took me an eon of scrolling back.) And I found someone who would be happy to have them. We met at a bar that I can’t even remember the name of, that was started by some guy who had traveled abroad and now wanted to be a cool owner of a bar, but the place was a closet. That was a neat little place. I went back there a few times and I hope I took some pictures, because I think he moved, and like I said, I can’t even remember the name. Anyway, at that meeting I learned about another bar named Messenger, and Messenger was supposed to be the bar where all the foreigners hung out, so I was excited to check it out and meet a few friends.

Messenger was about the maximum distance from my apartment that one should go on an electric scooter. We had been told the schools would be closed the next day as part of a typhoon warning, so I had the day off tomorrow and I wasn’t sure if Messenger would be open or not, but I figured it would be fun to go and find out. And it was fun except it was closed despite having a few lights on, and I had to pee really bad. Messenger was in the middle of a large park, which was kind of neat, and it wasn’t hard for me to find a place to pee. I think I learned later that Messenger actually was open on that day, but they weren’t real sticklers about making sure to open at any particular time, so if I’d shown up an hour later I could have met the local expatriates (Is local expatriates an oxymoron?).

Elsewhere in the park, I came across this odd looking water park. I thought it would be fun to visit and see once there was nicer weather. I talked to friends about it but I haven’t gone to the park yet.

Riding back, I was trying to figure out what this tall building was I think it might have been a Hilton, but don’t quote me on that.

Well, the typhoon was officially upon us. I had these dinosaur skeleton kits, and since we couldn’t go out, I decided now was the time to work on them. One of them I was given by work when they did a dinosaur thing with the kids and the other I bought because it looked cool.

I’ve always found these kids kind of crappy. They really don’t recreate the experience of unearthing a fossil in any realistic way, and the chintzy plastic tools they give you are usually useless, also they get plaster of paris dust all over.

So one thing that I learned over the years is that you can just soak the plaster of paris in water and after a couple of hours you can just break it apart in your hand, and the plastic fossils will be much easier to extract.

The English here is spot on, so that’s a nice surprise.

The plastic skeletons were pretty chintzy and I had to use glue to get them to stay together. The Stegosaurus is actually pretty cool though. I think it’s based off Sophie. Usually they just take an outdated old diagram or something.

I’m sort of glad I got the crocodile, even if it’s not as necessarily prehistoric, because the other skeletons look rather crappy.

Statwars.

Well, that was my time during the Typhoon. It wasn’t super exciting, but as a lot of us found out during the COVID lockdown, it’s weirdly kind of fun to have a change of pace where you stay inside for a while and do something you wouldn’t normally do. To that end, I’m glad I did that.

Cleaning My Apartment

In China there’s a day each year that’s Teacher’s Day. We were each given this basket with candy and flowers. It was a simple gift but it was nice. I didn’t want to throw away the basket but I never did find a use for it.

We were getting down into the nitty gritty. I’d hired a crew to come in and clean everything. With the mold and the cockroaches, I wanted the best once over money could buy. In this picture they are going through my kitchen, and you can see they’ve taken everything off the shelves so they can clean.

They offered to clean the window screens, and I couldn’t say no to that. You’ll notice there’s a huge puddle of water on the floor in the bathroom. Bathrooms in China typically have a drain in the middle so that water spilled on the floor can just flow out. I wonder if this doesn’t make for an excellent hiding place for cockroaches.

Back in the kitchen, they’re getting into the cupboards, and you’ll notice that there’s dead cockroaches all over the ground. I bought that vacuum cleaner specifically for cockroaches because I didn’t want to have to touch them.

That’s just a guy standing in my bedroom. That’s not a very interesting picture, but you can see how I hadn’t really unpacked.

I had to move stuff in order to let the cleaners into places, and it was making an awful mess. I don’t think the pink motorcycle helmet was mine, so it probably belonged to one of the cleaners.

One thing they did, which was really cool, was they cleaned out my fish tank that had become overgrown with algae. The woman in this picture became a very helpful friend. She was convinced that the algae would kill the turtles, which I am skeptical about, but getting it cleaned was nice regardless.

This man is cleaning the grease off of the stove and range hood. They have a special tool for it that shoots very hot steam.

I didn’t realize how filthy my air conditioner was. They took it apart and cleaned out all the filters and things like that.

The kitchen looked practically new. Well, no it didn’t, but it looked like a very clean place with a lot of stuff that should probably just be replaced. In the cardboard box there was a water filter that I bought that attaches to a faucet. I didn’t have the right kind of faucet in this kitchen, so there it sat. I wound up mostly buying bottled water. There was a vending machine outside.

I was never given the key to this drawer and I tried many times to get in. I bought a small file that could go in over the top of the drawer and I tried to use it to file away the latch, to no avail. I finally managed to pry it open with a crowbar and it was filled with mold, of course.

One thing I liked about my friend who cleaned the fish tank was she knew someone who could help with everything. Here she’s found a friend to help me take apart my washing machine and fix it, and clean it. She also showed me these special large, spring loaded clothespins that I could use to hold sheets or heavier articles of clothing to the rack I had. Remember, the rack was outside my window, so having stuff blow off was not idea. She ran down to a shop in the area and bought them for me. She told me it cost her ¥12. I’d been to that store before and I knew they uncharged foreigners. When I told her they would have charged me ¥50, she said, with a laugh, she should do all my shopping for me. I didn’t take her up on that, but if I had I bet she would have done it sincerely.

Here’s a cool display from a home furnishings shopping center.

One thing I’ve noticed about reality TV is they always go for an ‘instant transformation’ narrative. They love to show stories of people losing massive amounts of weight in short amounts of time, or having their house remodeled in a week. The catch is, of course, that life doesn’t work that way. legitimate change generally takes a long time with prolonged concentrated effort. People usually don’t come into your life and fix everything. However, it felt very gratifying to hire a team of people to go over every square inch of that apartment and turn it from a disgusting filth dungeon to nice place. I should have taken more after pictures, but I still had all my stuff laying around. I guess what I’m saying is that every so often, in small ways, if you can afford to hire a lot of people, you can have that instant transformation in your life, and in my experience it’s just as nice as reality TV makes it out to be.

My new apartment, in depth.

So I mentioned that I had cockroaches bad at my second apartment in Jiaxing. As I continually discovered, there was also a serious mold problem. I don’t know how it would happen, but I would often walk into a room and find a puddle of water on the floor. Somehow the apartment just attracted dampness, and where there is dampness, there is mold. I had been struggling to shove a drawer closed and I finally took it out to discover there was so much mold growing behind the drawer that it literally wouldn’t close all the way. It was a mess. Luckily, I had a job that paid well and I didn’t have to pay rent so I had a great deal of disposable income, and that meant I could just hire someone else to take care of all this for me.

As you can see, I still have unpacked as little as possible. This living room had an ugly L-shaped couch in one corner that didn’t have a seat back on one side, and is covered by an ugly fabric that I suppose is supposed to protect from stains, and maybe provide comfort, though it was about the same softness as a horse blanket. The small refrigerator was next to the window on the left. This was a long, skinny room, and the couch and TV were at opposite ends, because there was no other way to realistically arrange them. I watched a few movies in here, and I eventually bought a coffee table and a short table to put the TV on, but it was a terrible setup no matter what I did.

This is my second bedroom. I had planned on moving the bed in here and letting it be where I slept while I had my home office in the bedroom with a bay window, so I could set my aquarium on the bay window and watch it while I worked, but China is bullish on huge solid wood furniture and my bed easily weighed 800 pounds, so I left it where it was.

Here’s the other side of the home office. The sliding glass doors barely slid and you had to channel your inner Hercules any time you wanted to get something out of that closet. I bought some WD-40 and tried to fix it but I think the rails were installed wrong so one of the doors was just digging a grove into the wood frame.

This is the one thing about this apartment that’s sort of nice, if you’re Chinese. I had a laundry room that got lots of natural light so I could hang all my clothes after I took them out of the washing machine, and it had a special set of things to hang clothes on (I have no idea what they’d be called) that folded out to expose the clothes to the sun. I lost one of my favorite t-shirts because the wind caught it as it was drying. I don’t know how they avoid this in China. Maybe they don’t.

When I moved in, the cupboards in the laundry room were full of weird old cushion things that seemed kind of gross. I wound up using them for tools and other stuff that could withstand a little exposure.

This is the kitchen. You’ll notice the plastic wrap on the range is still on there. Often in China, people won’t take the plastic wrap off appliances to keep them looking nice. The burners on the stove used gas I suppose. I never really messed with them. Indeed, I barely used this kitchen because of the cockroaches.

The main reason I signed off on this apartment is because it had a full shower. I really enjoy these large showers that you see in China. The toilet in this house didn’t really flush. The red bucket is there because I had to fill it any time I did a #2 so I could dump it into the toilet and cause it to flush, because no matter what I did the button on top never seemed to work, and I don’t know how to work on a button toilet. I’ve only ever worked on handle toilets.

As you can tell, this little window in the corner doesn’t let much light in. It was a dark apartment before I flip the light switch in the morning.

There were some bad black mold patches in the kitchen and in the bathroom. This was one of the better ones. I wanted to make sure the cleaners knew to take care of this even if it isn’t prominent.

The wooden frame under the sink should have probably been replaced completely. It was overgrown with mold. The weird thing with the tubes and the white hose is, I think, part of the solar powered water heater that the apartment used. You’ll notice it doesn’t hold a lot of water. I largely did without warm water in this apartment.

It wasn’t the nicest apartment I’ve ever had, but it was a place to hang my hat, and my salary was so high that I could just throw money at any problem I happened to be having. I hired people to clean, and when it got so cold that my clothes wouldn’t dry, I said ‘Well, am I rich or am I rich?’ And I took all my laundry to the local cleaner, so I was frustrated with a few things but overall life was okay. Also, I think I already mentioned this, but most of the tenets of my apartment complex were old people, and I hate to think of old people having to live like this. There was an old lady in my building that I would always give my recycling to, and she seemed like a really lovable old lady who I hope had family that cared for her as much as she deserved.

Fall in Jiaxing

Be careful to meet. Yeah, me neither.

It was almost time for National Day on October 1st, and you could tell because suddenly all the grocery stores had giant displays of these fancy looking boxes full of moon cakes and other treats.

These are less fancy boxes of moon cakes, for people who were just buying moon cakes for themselves and didn’t care much about the presentation.

And these are the single packs. I’m sure I’ve mentioned this before, but moon cakes are mostly kind of gross. I wouldn’t recommend them. Also, moon cakes are more of a New Year’s thing than a National Day thing, but similar to how stores in the USA start stocking Halloween decorations in August now, stores in China will use any opportunity to sell people moon cakes.

These are the toys you get with your kid’s meal at Pizza Hut in China. Yeah, me neither.

I was just thinking the other day about how it really is frustrating when people try to help you by dismissing your problem. Like, if you said ‘My record player is broken.’ some people would say ‘Records are obsolete anyway. Get a this new gadget and pay $14.99 to subscribe to this music service.’ For some reason some people can’t intellectually process the idea that I might like my record player and prefer it to whatever tech gadget is in style this month. (I’m literally listening to an album I’ve owned on CD since I was 12 on Spotify, so maybe I’m not a shining example of this, but you get it.) I feel like this problem often gets exacerbated for me when I’m in China. In the previous example, I feel like in China I might come home to find my record player in the trash and my ‘helpful’ friend handing me a brand new iPhone and expecting me to pay him back, and when I ask him to leave while I try to clean a banana peel off my record, he gets apoplectic, because he was helping and I’m not even grateful. There’s a real life example of this above, where I couldn’t get my American phone to charge. This happened before, and I paid some guy about two bucks to clean the gunk out of the charging port with a fancy brush. That was in Hai’an, In Jiaxing I didn’t have a guy, so I asked my coworker if he knew anybody. He said he could do it, and he proceeded to do a factory reset on my phone. I had most stuff backed up to clouds but I couldn’t connect to Chinese WiFi for some reason so it effectively bricked my phone, and I needed to act like I was so glad he was willing to help. Just another day in China.

So there are certain things I’ve always wanted to do but never had a chance, and one was getting a straight razor shave at a barbershop like they do in movies. It’s always been really difficult to find someone who does straight razor shaves. A barber explained to me once that they fell out of fashion during the AIDS crisis. Anyway, I discovered randomly that this salon in China did them. It was kind of a skeezy looking place, and I went there a couple of times for a shave and a haircut. In general I got the impression that I was probably the only customer who went in there for a shave. I still have no idea if that was actually a service they offered or if they happened to have a razor blade and some towels and when I asked they figured ‘How hard could it be?’ I wasn’t super impressed with the shave. This isn’t a dig on the salon. I just wanted to believe that a shave existed that was so close that it would make it so that my neck hair wouldn’t prickle my fingers when I ran them over my neck afterward, and I don’t think such a thing exists.

At the salon there was a cute young woman sitting on a purple couch playing with an adorable white kitten. The young woman had a large scar on her arm that looked like it was from surgery. Weirdly, this will come up later.

This is BM KinderGartEn (sic). I don’t remember why I took this picture, but I was always curious about how things were at other schools in the area, and I was perhaps thinking about jumping ship. Although at the time, I figured ABIE only had a couple of years left. My plan was to save up a heap of money and take it back to the USA. I was thinking I’d board a plane and not even tell then I was leaving. I’d seen two bosses turn from good friends to bitter enemies when I tried to leave, and I wanted to save myself the drama. It’s sort of a neat building though. It’s U shaped.

This is a mobile phone store, and I probably took this picture to send to someone on WeChat to explain where I was. There’s nothing like Google maps in China. Not in English at least. The best I am able to come up with is Didi, which is a rideshare app, so they have maps, but they’re not intended for you to figure out where you are. Also, they doesn’t seem to be any rhyme or reason to how they translate things into English. They might just anglicize the Chinese characters (jia xing), or they might translate them (Chia Prosper), or if there’s an English name, they might just go with that (Shanghai Sculpture Park), but you can never depend on them to use the right one. Couple that with addresses being written totally differently in Chinese and stores closing on a whim and not bothering to tell anyone, and the whole thing is deeply confusing.

I hadn’t unpacked. This was 90% because I am lazy and I work full time, and 10% because I wanted to exterminate the cockroaches before I set up the place.

My new apartment had gold glitter grout. I’m not a refined person, but this felt especially kitsch, even by my standards.

Here’s the new trash setup from my new apartment. If anything, it’s more confusing, but the old lady who works there is much more understanding than the old lady back in Hai’an.

I haven’t talked much about the electrical outlets in China. They have two types of plug, and outlets usually have space for both, like the one in the middle. You have the one with two prongs, which looks a lot like the two pronged electrical plugs we have in the USA, but if you try to plug anything in you’ll learn real quickly that they are not interchangeable. Little things like lamps or kettles use the two pronged outlet. Bigger things, like computers or guitar amplifiers use the three pronged plug, which you can see on the bottom of the outlet in the middle. The circular outlet on the right is, I’m guessing, for cable. I never used it. I had two or three plug converters when I moved to China, and I grabbed a couple more when I moved back to China the second time, but the only electric thing I ever used in China was my hair trimmers, and they stopped working very soon after I moved there. Honestly most electric stuff is so cheap that I just replaced everything. I remember when I first moved to China I bought a nice little bedside lamp for the equivalent of $4.

I have a lot of odds-and-ends pictures in my album. Most of the pictures I took, I took for this blog. Sometimes I have an adventure to talk about, but when you live in another place you spend a lot of time doing boring normal things, and while I do boring normal things sometimes a photo opportunity pops up. What can I say? I hope this blog gives an in-depth perspective of what my life in China is, and sometimes it didn’t follow a particular narrative.

The Weekend Warrior Returns

This is the roller skating ‘rink’ that was outside ABIE. As you can see, they’ve just set up some stuff around a corner of floor space. Business was booming on this day though.

So I already talked about this trip to Shanghai and returning, but I found a few more photos that I wanted to share, like this one of the bulls in the Shanghai sculpture garden. It’s not the most special photo in the whole world, but it’s nice and I wanted to share it.

I’ve talked about this before, but hotels in Shanghai all had robots at this point. If you order room service, you would usually find a robot delivering it. I was pretty shocked the first time it happened to me. I have tried to get the robot on video, and I have made multiple orders at hotels for the express purpose of getting the robot so I could video it, but it just never came together.

The company that made the elevators in the hotel is named Schindler. I thought that was a bit surprising.

I’ve had stomach problems my whole life. I’ve had a weak stomach and I’ve had difficulty finding medical assistance with that. Well, I’ve mentioned before that hospitals in China can be pretty terrifying. Olga recommended this hospital in Shanghai, and when I went there it felt just like hospitals in the USA. I made a preliminary visit and they scheduled me for a gastroenterology, which is terrifying but it’s also very exciting to be making headway on something that’s plagued me my whole life.

Another thing that was really nice is how well everyone at the hospital spoke English. I am okay with having to do my best working with someone when ordering food or playing a game, but when someone is planning to pump you full of drugs and then stick a camera down your throat, you want to make sure you are communicating clearly.

So, one thing I have always heard about in China is that when you stay in a hotel people will slide these little cards advertising prostitution under your door. I’ve stayed at a bunch of hotels in China, and I’ve never seen a single card like this in the hotel, but on this particular trip to Shanghai, I did see some cards thrown on the sidewalk outside the hotel where I was staying. I started to pick one up so I could take a picture of it for this blog, and then I realized that I probably didn’t want to touch the card and I probably didn’t want to be seen picking up the card. Explaining to a police officer that I just wanted to take a picture of the card for my blog would probably not fly. So how did I get the picture above? I belong to a couple of Facebook groups for foreigners. At some point, someone brothel with a VPN, or some scammer with a VPN, posted this to the group. It seems awfully bold of them, but then again, what is Facebook going to do? Call the local police? They’ll block the account but it was probably a fake account anyway. I still, to this day, have never gotten a card in my room. I don’t want to solicit the services of the card, so I’m okay with that, but I’m not okay with the fact that the cards exist and are being given out at all, because sex trafficking is a horrific practice.

Naturally, I have even more pictures of buildings I thought looked cool, that I haphazardly took out of the window of my taxi. I was always hoping I could find a way to learn more about these places, but beyond asking friends, who usually didn’t feel like being helpful in this regard, I had no way of ever figuring out what any of these places were.

And perhaps it’s a bit silly of me to think these buildings are so interesting in the first place, but a leopard never changes its spots. Look at the weird thing on top of this building and the cool bridge thing going to another building. How do you not find that interesting?

The subways in Shanghai have little dots that light up to show where you are and where you are going. Super helpful! I wish every subway in every city had this.

You know what I don’t find helpful, when two trains share a track and they describe them thusly. The words ‘first’ and ‘next,’ in this context, could be synonyms, or antonyms. It’s the sort of unclear language that I’ve come to expect when dealing with people who know little if any English and are charged with translating stuff. Also, I don’t know when else I would mention this, but in British English the first floor of a building is what Americans would call the second floor, and what Americans call the first floor the Brits call the ground floor. So that’s an example of first meaning second. Language is confusing.

We made a stop at the Shanghai Zoo, and I didn’t have time to visit a zoo on this particular trip, but I snapped this photo of the post at the subway station and made a mental note that I should check out the Shanghai Zoo because according to the pole, they might have a walrus, and I’ve always wanted to see a walrus in person.

In the interest of making blog-worthy life experiences, perhaps I should have tried the messy cod burger, but I couldn’t help but feel it was probably gross and not worth the calories. By the way, I just learned that the Chizza, which premiered in Chinese KFCs, is now available at American KFCs, so that’s surely something we were warned about in the book of revelation as one of the harbingers of the apocalypse.

Shanghai Weekend Warrior

My modem and my computer were in opposite ends of my apartment, and I didn’t want to deal with having to move the computer because the cable was too short, so I bought the longest ethernet cable I could find, which, as it turns out, was really really long. Luckily I randomly found a spool that some coworkers were throwing out, and it was perfect.

So at this point, I was going back to Shanghai whenever I had time off from work. I was dating two women there, after all. Like most cities of 27 million people, Shanghai is a difficult place to be bored in. Despite this, when Olga and Lydia didn’t have time to hang out, I usually stayed in my hotel room and slept. I work hard and I sleep harder.

The walls of the Shanghai Hongqiao train station were all tv screens playing a video of Coca-Cola splashing, and I gotta admit, it was a neat effect. There was another time when they were playing underwater footage and it really did seem like you were submerged.

At this time you wouldn’t dare take the subway without a mask. Social distancing though, well, that wasn’t really feasible.

I’d gotten a lot better about knowing which hotels I could and could not stay at. There’s a chain called Ji that are pretty good about processing paperwork. Sometimes I would have a difficult time finding them, which is true of everything in China, including Shanghai. I don’t understand how they are able to do this, but hotels will be on the fifth floor of an unmarked office building and somehow you’re just supposed to figure out where it is. Of all the places that should be well designated, I would think hotels, who cater to people unfamiliar with an area, would want to avoid being nondescript. Anyway, this is one of the shopping centers right outside the Jing’an Temple, which is probably the ritziest place in all of China. Olga lived right down the street, fashionista that she is, so even though it’s not really my scene I found myself here weirdly a lot while we were dating.

I thought those weird little doodads on the rooftops were interesting. I really didn’t get up to much during this trip. Like I said, I would put a lot of time and energy into getting to Shanghai and then I would watch a movie with Olga and sleep and/or watch a movie with Lydia and sleep. It did not create great content for the blog, but a great life and a blogable life are not necessarily the same thing.

Look at that building over there. It reminds me of the Daily Planet. I have always been enamored with the architecture in China. I don’t know if I’m just too much of a hick to discern tacky design, but I have a lot of friends in China who were designers and architects, and they tend to think the buildings in China are sort of ho hum. I can’t relate. Look at how that building on the far right is shaped like a horseshoe. It’s remarkable, isn’t it?

I got a Ji hotel that was within walking distance from the Shanghai Sculpture Garden. I’ve talked about it before, so I won’t go into it. What you’ll notice is that the renovations on the left are merging well with the COVID restrictions on the right. What you can’t notice is that Lydia was about an hour late and there’s nowhere to sit. I tried sitting on the steps at the Sculpture Park Subway station, but I got shooed away by a security guard.

There was a cool mosaic at the Sculpture Garden Subway Station. Lydia eventually did show up. We wandered around and watched the stray cats and I talked about wanting to find good homes for them, which I think she felt was silly. Then we went back to my hotel and watched a silly horror movie. She then went home and I took a nap and then went back to Jiaxing.

McDonald’s seems to have used whatever they had leftover from previous releases for their happy meal toys. Spongebob Squarepants, Frozen, and Avengers.

Actually, that was a bit of an adventure. So Shanghai Hongqiao Railway Station is also an airport and a huge subway port and I always manage to get lost, so I decided instead of going there I would just go to Shanghai Railway Station, which was just a train station. I got there and they told me there’s no train from Shanghai Railway Station to Jiaxing, so then I had to take the subway all the way to Shanghai Hongqiao and go from Shanghai Hongqiao to Jiaxing. I was about 3 hours late to work but nobody said anything, which is probably not a great sign. If nobody in admin has time to tut tut you for being 3 hours late, that’s a sign that the company is not in a stable place. Just my opinion.

At a fancy stuff for homes warehouse and I saw this chair that I thought was kind of neat. I wish I’d taken more pictures of this place, but I was in a hurry.

So, there was another time I was at Shanghai Hongqiao Railway Station and I waited for my train at the wrong place, and I didn’t realize my mistake until after it had left. I went to get a ticket for the next train to Jiaxing, and it turns out there were no more trains to Jiaxing that day. I screamed a very bad word that I hope nobody at the Shanghai Hongqiao Railway Station knew enough English to understand. A taxi ride to Jiaxing is about $100, so it’s an expensive mistake to make.

The Performance

The slogan for ABIE was ‘Speak like American Born.’ I think it’s worth noting that the slogan, trying to encourage potential customers that ABIE would help them to say things like a native speaker, is stated in an awkward way that differs from how native speakers would usually say it. This is a common theme of working in China. Employers want you to work for them simply so they can show off that they have native speakers working for them, but they rarely if ever want your advice on how to actually use English on things like their marketing materials.

I mentioned in a previous post that we had been rehearsing a stage version of The Jungle Book. Mostly it was just one of the members of our team saying some stuff and then they’d play a song from the Disney cartoon that I’m sure they didn’t license and then we’d go on to the next scene. I think they had previously done this performance for something and they were dusting it off again to… well… I wasn’t made privy to why we were doing this. I just went along with it. I have a bad habit of going along with things when I really should be asking more questions.

So now I’ve found myself at this theater in the middle of Jiaxing on an afternoon.

So, I was told to show up to this theater at around 1 to get ready for the performance. I went there straight from the bank. The showtime was something like 7, so I had a bit of time to hang out. It was kind of interesting to explore the theater, not interesting enough to take up 6 hours, but it was okay. This whole building was huge and had a lot of dressing rooms and hallways. I went down one corner and found a door that opened up into a movie theater. I think they were playing Star Wars. I was tempted to go check it out but, especially because I would have come into the theater directly in front of the screen, I figured I might get in some trouble. I found a dressing room that was unlocked and I just hung out back there and tried to take a nap.

The blue banner was hanging off the top tier, so the little part that hung down below the bottom looks like, to anyone sitting behind it, like the stuff on it was printed backwards. Why would you put a banner going the opposite direction of where the audience is to look anyway? I mean, I guess if you have nowhere else to put it.

If you look closely you might notice that there are black bags resting on each of the seats. The bags have boomwhackers in them. They invited a bunch of small kids to wait for a show and gave them a thing that makes noise to play with. I thought this was a profoundly terrible idea.

I was really elated when people started to show up. I’d been wandering around this theater for hours. I didn’t bring anything to read. I’d run out of stuff to talk about with just about everyone. I was definitely at the point where I just wanted it to be over. It’s sort of weird that I was asked to go backstage so close to the performance.

You’ll notice everyone is still in masks all the time. This was definitely at the point where there were legal repercussions for leaving the house without your mask.

Our performance was a little underwhelming for such a grandiose theater. It would have been just fine for a summer camp skit or something, but it was not a big extravagant production. I didn’t have any lines. I just went onstage in a tiger mask and looked menacing and then shuffled off. My manager, who is named Abby, yelled at me for not standing in the right spot backstage, and I think that was my first hint that she might not be a very nice person. This will come up later.

After we were done, another English education outfit of some kind put on another show. I think it’s sort of rude to have your phone out during a performance so I just got a little bit of it.

The headlining act was an outfit that combined music, dance and English called Samajam. Their performance was on point, and basically made everyone else’s look bad. They had the kids use the boomwhackers to play along. You could tell the kids were really into it and the parents were really impressed.

So, you’ll remember that a coworker of mine once got detained in a police station because he was working at an address that was different to the address listed on his work visa, even though he was working for the same company. It didn’t occur to me until after the show that technically we had all done that same thing, and in front of a theater full of people.

I have no idea how our boss heard about this performance. I’m guessing Samajam was looking to do a free promotional event and they didn’t want to have to pay to rent out the theater space by themselves, and they offered to let other English places open for them. I don’t know. I don’t think it helped us to get many more students and was a really long and boring thing and I was onstage for about ten seconds. That’s okay, I’m such an acclaimed thespian that I do in ten seconds what other actors couldn’t do in an hour.

Going to the bank and dreaming of an apartment

A reoccurring theme in life in China is being in a situation where you have no idea what’s going on. I showed up to work on this day a bit early and there were a couple of security guards in the lobby of ABIE. There was also a guy taking out the trash. None of them paid me any mind so I didn’t pay them any mind and I got to work.

I’ll be talking more about this later, but ABIE had, at some point before I started there, done an adaptation of The Jungle Book for the stage. I don’t know where they performed it before, but this time we were performing it as part of a thing somewhere. I was asked to be Shere Khan, which is pretty awesome. I didn’t have any lines, but I got to wear a tiger mask and look menacing. Sina is the young woman who is playing Mowgli in this photo. As you can see, her Mowgli costume is a problematic Native American costume that you could buy at a Halloween store in the USA up until about the time political correctness saw mass adoption. These sort of issues are.. well.. political correctness really isn’t a thing in China. I’m willing to bet the reason they got that costume is because they went online and searched for ‘Indian boy costume’ and nobody caught that this was a costume for an Indian boy in the other sense of the word Indian. I mean, I caught it, and I can’t remember if I said anything or not. I think at that point I’d realized that nobody cared. For context, in China it’s common for students to adopt an ‘English name’ when they start taking English classes, and often the names are peculiar and would be considered unusual in an English speaking area. I had a student of about 7-years-old whose parents chose the name Chauvin for him. Like Derek Chauvin. I don’t know where they got this name, but I brought up several times with my Chinese coworkers that this was a name that would be controversial at best should Chauvin find himself amongst native English speakers, and they might want to mention that to Chauvin’s parents. To the best of my knowledge nobody ever said anything to them.

I had a new job, which meant I needed to update my bank account. So I went across town to the bank. This is the bank storefront. I thought it was impressive looking enough to take a picture.

I don’t know if I mentioned this before, but Imperial China officially surrendered to the communists in the city of Jiaxing. The Chinese Communist Party was officially founded in 1921, and in 2021 they decided to celebrate the centennial of this historic event. The anniversary was so important that you would see displays like this everywhere, even in banks.

Also, check out the base relief on the wall behind the display, it has old Chinese coins. That’s cool!

So I remember going to the bank was a major hassle, and then it turned out that I’d gone to the wrong bank. I needed the Industrial Bank Company Limited of China, not the Chinese Banking Association Limited, or something like that. There’s about ten banks in China and 8 of them basically have the same name. If you ever do get a bank account in China, use Bank of China, because that’s the only one I’ve ever used (and I’ve had about 6 different bank accounts in China) that made it possible to transfer money to and from the USA.

On the way to work after my failed attempt at banking, I noticed this cool looking walled city area. I took a photo in the hopes that I could go explore it later. I have not gotten a chance yet.

And one thing I was doing a lot of at this time was looking at apartment complexes. I was really desperate to move to my permanent residence, and I highly suspected that if I didn’t bother the administration of ABIE regularly they would never get around to it. I like these apartment buildings because they have nice round patio places and trees on the rooftops.

This apartment complex had some cool angles. I imagine the windows on the short side there let lots of light in. Maybe not so much on the long side.

These apartment complexes look kind of neat. The remind me of a television broadcasting tower or a transmission tower, if it also happened to have a bunch of apartments stuck to it.

I saw these yellow buildings many times as I was in a taxi going across town. I always wanted to figure out what they were. They were very traditional looking and I felt like they much be some manner of important historical site. I never did figure out what they were, and since I didn’t know what they were called, it wasn’t like I could just take a taxi there and check them out. I took the picture to several coworkers and none of them seemed to know what the yellow buildings were, even though they were in the middle of town and they looked interesting and they were yellow. China is a consistently interesting place but it is rare that I’m able to have my curiosity rewarded with the little information and skills I had. I think it’s worth noting that most locals aren’t curious about a bunch of unique yellow buildings in the center of town. Most locals saw my curiosity as an invitation to waste their time and tried to discourage it, so it was rare that I was able to get assistance in exploring. And of course, if it’s a city you’re familiar with, in a country you’re familiar with, you’re much less likely to see adventure around every corner. Well, I hope you’re able to find adventure wherever you happen to be right now. What are your unique looking yellow buildings in the middle of town that you don’t even realize might be really interesting if you view them through the lens of an outsider?