Only in China….

It’s been a long time since I’ve posted. Our life here is quite busy and I often don’t have time to post all of the things that we’re doing. Hopefully I’ll start making the time.

Here is something interesting from China.

Apartment Fungus

I’ve been sick again recently. It seems like every time I get better, it isn’t long before I’m down with something again. Hopefully this time it’s the last time though!

A few days ago, we noticed some patches of green on the wall behind/beside the wardrobe next to our bed. Moving the wardrobe to investigate further revealed this:

From China – Apartment

The wall was completely covered in mould. I’d been breathing it in every night while I was sleeping. No wonder I was getting sick all the time!

We aren’t 100% sure, but we think that this guy might be to blame:

From China – Apartment

This is the humidifier we used when the weather was extremely dry, the minimum setting pumps out large amounts of moisture and using it next to the bed probably contributed to the problem behind the closet.

We sprayed the wall with tea-tree oil and water to kill the mould and scrubbed it down. It’s looking nice and clean again now and hopefully I’ll be less sick!

There and back again.

Yesterday I came back from my fifth trip to Shanghai since the start of April. I’m helping my friend with his business and travelling there to inspect shipments of satellite dishes before they’re packed off to South America. The first couple of trips were for test-sized orders, the last two trips have been for runs of 10,800 dishes both times.

It takes about 3 hours to fly from Kunming to Shanghai, and about 2 hours in the car on the other end to get to the factory. Twice now I’ve gone and come back on the same day which was quite tiring – waking up at 5 to get to the airport on time and not getting home until 1 the next day.

This last trip the factory had some problems so I was delayed by a night and came back on Friday instead of Thursday. The guys from the factory were really sorry about the delay and took me out for lunch and dinner. Lunch involved a dish I like to call “still kicking shrimp”. It was a dish of prawns that had been cooked somehow, but the little fellas were still thrashing around when they put the plate on the table. You had to pick them up while they were still kicking and bite the body off. Interesting sensation to have in your mouth!

While delayed, there were no serious problems with the shipment and I spent today writing up the necessary reports to send to my boss and the clients in Brazil.

I’ve always enjoyed flying and being able to do this kind of work is much more interesting than getting up and teaching English from a textbook each day. Getting to see life inside a factory is certainly eye-opening, especially with all the recent troubles that China has been having with it’s cheap labour. For now I’m really enjoying doing this work and looking forward to doing more of it.

In other news, Korea is about to win just won it’s (first?) word cup match. I never expected my wife to get excited about soccer, but she’s pretty into it – jumping and shouting player names and “yes” and “nooooo” at appropriate times. I’m not sure when Australia is playing or if it’ll be shown on TV here. Watching this game on TV here makes me remember what it was like 4 years ago in Korea, unfortunately the blog entries from that far back are gone.. but it was definately good times.

Sometimes it’s scary living here

This is about 130km from where we live.

Fallen behind

With multiple business trips and a sinus infection I ended up not attending my Chinese classes for about 2 weeks. During that time, the classes have moved ahead to a point where I’m pretty much lost.

The other students in my class are all on scholarships and spend all afternoon every day reviewing the material from class or preparing for the next classes. With the meetings and other work that we do here in Kunming, I don’t have the time to study as much as they do. They were already leaving me behind when I got sick, but now I’ve completely fallen off.

I decided this week to not attend any more of the listening classes. While I was away they started on a new textbook, and I don’t want to spend the money on a new book that I’m only going to use for about 2 more weeks and whose tapes/listening tracks are so ridiculously hard that even the other students don’t understand what’s being said.

With only 2 weeks or so left of this semester, it’s hard to be motivated to keep going to class when I am so far behind everyone else, but I’m not going to give up on study. I’ve just lost motivation for these particular classes.

29 (and 8 days) today

I turned 29 last week – the last of my ’20s’ birthdays. Unfortunately I spent most of the day crook with a sinus infection that I got after I went swimming*. However I did get to speak to most of my family and a  few other friends from home.

Cathryn got me a new suit which is quite useful with the work that I’ve been doing recently and my friends here got me the Chinese bootleg of Ticket To Ride: Europe, and a laptop cooling pad.

The bootleg of TTR:Europe was CHEAP compared to how much we payed for the legitimate version in Australia (~80RMB vs ~80AUD). However the bootleggedness shows. All of the colours are faded and the names of the cities on all of the destination cards are all in Chinese instead of English. Some of the Chinese characters on the cards don’t even match the characters on the board. The rule book is also in Chinese, so I went to the website and downloaded the English rules and had a read through them again because it’s been so long since I played. Upon reading the rules again, it appears that my family has been doing it wrong since we started playing, so it was good that I got a refresher.

*The last 4 times I’ve been swimming at a swimming pool I’ve come down with something the day after. This time I finally figured out that something might be going on, and it turns out that the chlorine at the pools might be having some kind of effect (maybe combined with the nasal polyp things that I already have) and causing the problems each time I go swimming.

I put up with it for a few days hoping it would clear up, but when it just seemed to be getting worse we dropped in at a pharmacy and got some over-the-counter anti-biotics. I finished them this morning and I do feel a lot better, hopefully I’m getting over it. Only salt-water swimming for me from now on.

Inspiration

I met a fellow Aussie at church this morning, he was translating for an American pastor who was preaching, and he blew my mind with his Chinese ability. When the two of them got up to preach, there was a bit of a rustle through the congregation as people wondered why the regular Chinese girl who does the Chinese -> English translations wasn’t getting up there. Then as soon as this guy started speaking, there was another collective drawing of breath as people were stunned by his fluency.

After the service I had a bit of a chat to him and found out that we had quite a bit in common. He certainly doesn’t look old, so I was a bit shocked to find out that he’d started studying Chinese at the University of Canberra – before it was called the University of Canberra – around 1987. He’d come to China straight after finishing his course and aside from 5 years in Taiwan and a few in Australia after getting married, he’s been here ever since. About 20 odd years in a Chinese speaking country all told.

I hope to one day speak Chinese as well as this guy. I also hope it doesn’t take me 20 years to get there!

Battle of the Choirs – China Style

Last night we were invited by some of our student friends to their university as one of them was competing in the schools first ever choir competition. Unfortunately the invitation was sprung on us by surprise so we weren’t able to take a camera.

There were 11 teams competing and 5 judges giving scores. It took a bit over 2 hours to get through 2 songs from each of the 11 choirs.

The costumes ranged from jeans and t-shirts to some pretty elaborate dresses and gowns and it was great to see the effort put in, even if red was used a bit too often and a bit too heavily.

The sound in the theater was terrible, and the mikes they were using for the choirs didn’t even sound like they were turned on. This made it hard for us in the middle of the theatre to hear what was being sung and it was flat-out impossible at the back of the theatre. That meant that the people at the back (who couldn’t hear) felt that were free to talk as much and as loud as they want, which made it even harder to hear.

The parts of the songs that we could hear were good, none of the students singing were professional. They were just people from the different faculties/schools at the university who signed up to sing in a choir. (I doubt any Australian University would get 11 choirs signing up if they had registrations). Each choir sang two songs, and I’m not sure who picked the songs (our friend said that he didn’t know who picked the songs for his choir), but there wasn’t enough variety for my tastes. In fact, six of the choirs same exactly the same song – “Me and my country”. From the little bit of Chinese I understand and the little bit of translation I got from Cathryn, it sounded like it was about how great China and Communism is.

I suggested to my friend that next year/time the choirs discuss beforehand what songs they will sing and maybe throw an English song or something more upbeat into the mix.

Mourn…. or else

Today was a day of national mourning/rememberance/contemplation for the victims of the earthquake in China last week.

To ensure that everyone spent a suitable amount of time in contemplation the government stopped broadcasting TV and turned off the internet from late yesterday until about lunchtime today – apparently across the entire nation. I don’t know all the details because my internet hasn’t been working.

I’m also not sure how effective it is. I’m sure a lot of people felt more annoyance at the fact that they were without internet and TV rather than sympathy for the victims. Especially those people who didn’t know why everything was broken.

My mind boggles that the government can just throw a switch like that and turn off the the internet for the nation. Also at the fact that they did it. I wonder what would happen if the Australian gov’t did that on Anzac day….

A day filled with suck

Yesterday was a terrible day. As I mentioned previously, I have to return to Shanghai to re-inspect the goods before they ship. I was contacted by the manufacturer to say that everything will be done by Monday, so yesterday we tried to arrange a ticket.

A Chinese friend of ours let us know about a travel agent, and Cathryn tried to talk to them on the phone. The phone call lasted about 20 or 30 mins and the whole time the person on the other end was rude and discourteous, complained about Cathryn’s Chinese ability and Korean people in General, and in the end Cathryn was pretty much in tears. So we decided to pursue another option, even though it might be more expensive.

So I was going to go out and get another Korean friend to help me buy the tickets, so I asked Cathryn for our ATM card. At that point we discovered that Cathryn’s purse had been stolen earlier in the day. We don’t know exactly when, but it was probably on one of the crowded busses. Her purse contained photos, our bank card and a not-insignificant amount of money. So after 5 or 10 mins of panic-filled house-searching, I called my friend and told him I’d be late.

Next we were off to the bank to report the card stolen. We arrived and were directed to a phone number. Cathryn asked the customer service guy to call and have the conversation because she’d already had such a bad experience with phone-Chinese already that day. After a 10 minute conversation, which was about 7 mins of trying to explain Cathryn’s name, then 3 mins where we had to answer questions such as “when was the card stolen?” “When did you last use the card?” “How much did you withdraw at that time?” we were told that someone from the customer service line would call us back. Until that time, we can’t get a new card and we can’t withdraw cash. Great! Luckily, my boss Steve had paid me in $US when I went to Shanghai last week. So I asked them if I could change $US to RMB. The answer was “No. Only at the Bank of China.”

So off we went again, this time to our friends office, knowing that there is a Bank of China about 1 minute walk from there. As we approached the Bank of China doors, the customer in front of us went inside, then a big guy holding a pump-action shotgun, and another one holding an electrified baton stepped in front of us and made some guestures that I interpreted to mean “The bank is now closed”.

We proceeded to our friends office and he helped us by arranging a ticket through another travel agent, that was slightly more expensive in the end, but didn’t abuse us on the phone. Thankfully our friend had enough money to cover us for the ticket until we get access to our money again – hopefully sometime today.

I go to Shanghai Monday morning and return Tuesday morning.