Beijing

Hello,

i just got back from Beijing yesterday. I had an amazing trip for lots of different reasons!

I'll start with the work part of the trip. We met with our vendor on Monday morning and started the training. They seem like very qualified people and I am excited to work with them. Mostly I am excited because they will take a huge load off my shoulders here in Dublin. The training went very well and they asked some very good questions. On Tuesday & Wednesday we did more hands on training and they continued to impress me. On Wednesday night we met with the COO of the company. It's a 3000 person company, so that's pretty impressive. He was a very sharp guy. I always enjoy talking to great leaders and seeing what makes them tick.

Of course, my favorite part of the trip was not the work but rather the city. On the first day, we got into the airport around noon. We were pretty tired but needed to adjust to the new time zone. We decided it best to just take a small nap then go out. When we went out, we grabbed a taxi and went to a night food market. The taxis are crazy cheap. Most of our journeys were around 2-3 Euros. The night market was a very interesting sight. It looked like this:

These stalls went on for quite a long way. It was about 95% meat which was somewhat disapointing to me. However, there were a few stands that were vegetarian and I got this amazing soup and veggie plate. The soup was a spicy noddle soup and it was amazing. That soup really gave me a great first impression for Beijing :). This dish below cost me about 3.50 euros and I'm pretty sure I got ripped off.


I got pretty handy with the old chopsticks! By the end of the trip I was being complimented on my chopstick skills.

After that nice meal, my impression of Beijing was quite good. We kept walking and these 2 girls came up to Stephen & I and started talking to us in pretty good English. They were visiting from another part of China and trying to navigate around Beijing themselves. They asked us if we would like to walk with them for a bit and try to find a bar to go to. Stephen & I were a bit skeptical, but they seemed nice, so we walked with them for a bit. When we walked by a tea house with Karaoke, they pointed to it and recommend we go in. My immediate thought was positive and thought that sounded good but Stephen quickly figured out what was going on here. This was a textbook scam. The scam is, they get you in for a drink but start to do Karaoke. The drinks are moderately priced but the Karaoke price is not listed and its obscenely priced. After we left those girls, Stephen showed me the Lonely Planet travel book and showed me this exact scam. The description in the book was EXACTLY what happened. This incident took my previously great impression of Beijing and shattered it. I really had a hard time sleeping that night. I was quite badly affected by these scam artists and how close I came to being sucked into this textbook scam.

Breakfasts in the hotel were a mix of Asian & Western. I ate western breakfasts every single day. The Asian breakfast is pretty much just lunch - noodles, rice, veggies, etc.

The next day was Sunday and one guy from our vendor (Chao) wanted to show us around Beijing. He took us to the Forbidden city, Tiananmen square, the Hutongs, and the Houhai park. At lunch, we went to a restaurant in the Hutong village. This restaurant did not cater to foreigners as the menu had no English nor pictures. However, Chao helped us order. I told him I was vegetarian and he picked some nice things out for us. The ordering process seemed to be pretty long considering there was only 3 of us. Stephen & I wondered what he was doing. for some reason the waiter then moved us to a different table. It turns out we were moved to a different table because Chao ordered so much food that it wouldnt all fit on the table we were sitting at. Here is a picture of what he ordered (this all cost 12 euros). The food was amazing by the way.

One strange thing when ordering food is the procedures are different. In western cultures, the waiter gives you the menu then you peruse it for a bit and the waiter comes back. In China, the waiter gives you the menu and just stands there until you order. You should not feel intimidated by this... its supposed to just represent very good service. It felt awkward to me though.

An interesting thing about the Hutong villages (that you can read about on wikipedia as well) is that they are traditional Beijing style homes. However, only a few have been preserved for tourism sake. Almost all of them have been bulldozed in favor of high rises and freeways. The communist party has a lot more leeway to do things like this than Western governments have. In fairness, the urban planning of Beijing is pretty rock solid. Much of that good urban planning can be attributed to knocking old things over and starting again with a clean slate.

The Western influence in Beijing is massive. Hundreds of millions of people all aspiring to a western style of life. In a lot of ways I was surprised at how much was NOT different when I first got there. People seem to dress the same, buy the same consumer products, even watch the same TV shows. Chao's favorite TV shows are: Friends, Prison break, & Lost. Most of his favorite movies were western films as well. He owns and iPhone 4. Although he lives in Beijing, his dream home would be a nice detached house with a 2 car garage, a bit of grass out front, and a german shepherd dog. Sound familiar? Sounds like the American dream to me... I just didn't expect the China dream to be exactly the same.

That being said, there are still quite a lot of cultural differences and it would still be easy enough to experience culture shock going over there.

The internet in the hotels was interesting. The Chinese government controls what you can and cannot see online. I could not access facebook or youtube. Both sites just gave me a 404 - page not found error. I managed to get around this by VPN'ing into Microsoft servers in Ireland and then using that internet. Also, I found the internet to be very slow.

On Thursday we went to the Dinghao market. It's the largest electronics market in Beijing. It was massive. It was about 4 floors of wall to wall computer electronics. Everything from GPSs, security cameras, computers, motherboards, ram, etc. Stephen bought a 16 gb USB key for 17 euros (it would be about 30 euros in Ireland). Of course, nothing has a price tag and everything needs to be bargained for. The bargaining system is interesting. Every single vendor seems to have the same calculator. It's a very basic calculator with big buttons and a big screen. You point to what you want, they show it to you and then they type a number in the calculator. You then say "no no" and you press clear and type in a new, lower, number. They get visibly offended and make a new offer. This goes on and on. Here is one reporters story about this market.

Later, we went to a very similar market that sells clothes and other consumer goods. It was the exact same story, nothing had a price tag and you had to bargain for everything. We wanted to buy a coworker a small chinese baby outfit for her new baby. We saw one we liked and she started us off at 65 euros! that was crazy. In the end, she was very mad but sold it to us for 8 euros! From 65 to 8 is a long way to come down. Even at 8 euros, Chao was saying that we paid too much. The outfit was something similar to this:

On Sunday, Chao and 2 of the top performers on his team joined us for a trip to the great wall. The trip was as much about just a hike through the forest as it was about the great wall. Although they all lived in Beijing, none of them had been to the wall yet. (I suppose this is not surprising since I still haven't been to Niagara falls). We started the day off with a hike around the wall, then had lunch, then went on top of the wall. It was very nice. I think the hike around the wall was more rewarding than going onto of the wall - the other team members I think would agree to that.

For some reason, the girls & women in China were all very interested in Stephen & I. It's probably just because we are white and they are not used to seeing many europeans in China. Chao seems to think it's just because I am so handsome - I hope this is the reason. Anyhow, on several separate occasions, people were taking photos of me or with me. 2 separate groups of girls on the great wall asked to have their photo with me. Chao took the photo below of one such occurrence (I am looking at another persons camera in this photo). On another occasion, we were all having drinks at a bar and an older woman was setting up a tripod outside taking pictures of us through the window. She then invited her friend to do the same thing.

There was a lot of interesting things about Beijing and I could probably say more about it. I think for now, I will leave it at that. All of the pictures can be found on facebook here. Enjoy.