tbaroundtheworld

It was sort of a tough week for me, after a couple of months of deliberations my management and I decided that it would probably be best for me to take a breather in the US for a couple of months. We’d started this dialogue when I returned to China in January as the change to our program schedule had resulted in my crew being delayed in coming over for about six months. And while I did have a few people on site, the bulk of my work remained in the west and I was finding that it was pretty hard to stay on a western schedule while living in the east - too many late night meetings leading into early morning meetings. So I put the wheels in motion and made my plans to leave with an eye to returning when everyone else moves over. It is funny how attached you get to a place. My emotions were all over the place, obviously glad to be going home but sad to be leaving people behind. And while living here can be tough, it can also be challenging in a fun and exotic way countered well with the tir...

Saturday was pretty much wasted on a trip to the clinic on a minor note and washing my jeans two pairs at a time in my tiny washing machine. It’s amazing how long it takes to get 10 pairs through that undersized contraption between stopping to put in soap and waiting to put in fabric softener. It was also a bit of a challenge to find a place to hang those 10 pairs to air dry. The rack I have was good for 5, and the rest ended up over towel bars and the shower curtain rod and the backs of chairs. I was glad to be able to fold them up and put them away this morning, the clutter was annoying. I also had a walk down to the edge of town where the estuary behind the bay comes in between Kai Fa Qu and the peninsula that holds Dalian proper. I stopped to watch an almost fistfight between four people, one woman and three men. It was a little bit one-sided as three of them seemed to be trying to make the same point to the odd man out. It was at a bus stop and from what I could gather the one guy...

I drove to work this morning through a mini-ice-fog. We were heading down the boulevard that runs parallel to the light rail tracks and suddenly the visibility fell to about 10 yards. Looking out the window I could see that all of the bare branches on the bushes in the median of the street were covered in clear, fresh ice. And the pavement looked to be a bit shiny too. My driver slowed down mainly because a police car with its lights on came across two lanes and merged into the not quite adequate space between us and the van in front. We went along for a quarter mile or so as a threesome, the van leading, the cop and then us. When we reached the intersection where we normally turn left, the policeman swung right, cut off a couple of cars, shot left across the intersection, did a sharp left U turn back so that he was facing traffic, stopped and backed up until the rear of the car was tight against the median on the perpendicular street. He got and stood there, on post, putting the fear ...

I exchanged email with my relocation consultant on Friday setting up an appointment at 9:30 AM on Monday to meet with her and my future landlord to go furniture shopping. Like everything here in China, dealing with apartments is a bit different than what I am used to. For one thing, I’m not sure the word “apartment” is correct as most of these places seem to be owned by the landlord. I think these would qualify more as a condominium in our country. I’ve had multiple experiences riding up and down elevators with the same person, going from unit to unit. It appears that people buy these flats as investments and then hang a big red banner in the most visible street-side window stating that the place is for rent. As a measure of how successful this process is, every building has dozens of red banners. My relo person works through an agent who goes out and scours the offerings for units that might be suitable for a picky person like me. This tends to be a bit hit or miss as he usually overl...

Tonight I decided to write my weekend Blog from Starbucks. I simply felt like getting out of the hotel for a change of scenery. I’d spent the last couple of hours working on that annual odium – performance appraisals – and figured some traffic clogged streets, freezing fruit vendors and hot coffee would be good for my weary soul. So now I’m sitting by the window listening to Miles Davis, kindly provided by the company’s music programmers and listening to a couple of small groups of Germans talking about their day in Kai Fa Qu. It’s been an interesting weekend in a boring sort of way. I began by being able to sleep in until 9 AM yesterday, perhaps an indication that I am once again on GMT +8. It felt good to be awakened by the sun as opposed to an alarm. I had set a goal of going to the gym on both of these days having not been there since the holidays what with the New Year’s holiday and my trip to Spain. Saturday was to be the 1st day of the rest of my expat life, one that offered a s...

Sometime in the wee hours of this morning it occurred to me that not all was lost with my phone. It was gone despite the dream I had in which a short Russian with a platinum bleached brush-cut knocked at my door and returned it to me and then went off down the hall refusing to say how he had found me. But while I would not see it again, it became clear to me that I would at least be able to save my phone number and the $40 balance in my account. I would simply head back to the nearest China Mobile store and get them to assign a new SIM to my account. And then go back to using my Chinese Nokia. And that’s just what I did; only I brought along Ben my 2-in-a-box partner on this project figuring that while I could muddle through, it would be far faster to do it with help. And while it was faster, it was still darn slow involving lots of discussion, passports, signatures, PIN’s, a guard who stared straight at me for the entire 30 minutes I was in the store and a long wait for a message to c...

Life ebbs and flows here. Some days you sit back and think it’s a wonderful experience and a challenge. Other days you wonder why you even rolled out of bed. I suppose it’s that way back in the world, but for some reason the challenging days make you re-evaluate your situation far more than you ever would in your normal life. I had a dinner invitation to a friend’s house tonight and decided to walk over after work. It’s about a mile and right on the edge of an easy evening stroll, but as always I was not about to give in to using my driver for such a piddling distance. So I had him drop me off and hung out at my hotel until it was about 20 minutes before I was due there. I gathered my belongings – local cell phone so I could call from the guard house at the entrance to his development, iPhone in case something went wrong in my real life and my flashlight – and I headed out the door. It was a bit chilly and the air felt like it was going to snow but I figured it was a short walk and I c...

Today started out in a less than elegant manner. The last words I spoke to my driver as I stepped out of the car on Saturday afternoon were “Xingqiyi qi dian ban” or “Monday, 7:30 AM. “ So you can imagine my surprise when I went downstairs at 7:45 and he wasn’t there. This made twice in a row, Friday he was late because he stopped to buy gas apparently figuring gas buying time would be taken out of my commute instead of his. At 8:00 I sent him a text message which immediately bounced back – my phone was dead again. So I stood and waited until he showed up at 8:10 upon which my query as to his lateness was met with a “Sorry.” Yea, I bet he was. It’s an interesting thing having a chauffeur, you might think it’s liberating when in fact it’s incredibly restrictive. And I don’t like it a bit. I arrived at work and put one of my local fellows to work figuring out what kind of cell phone plan I had that turned itself off at the start of every month. When I bought this phone back in November, ...

My goal for Saturday was to visit two of the three Carrefour grocery stores in Dalian. Up until Friday night, I was under the mistaken notion that there was only one, the store I was familiar with from many previous visits but my driver enlightened as to the existence of the others. My store is a few blocks up from the Shangri La Hotel and I used to go there once in a while to convince myself that shopping in China was not that different than shopping in France, Carrefour’s homeland. And it might very well be since I’ve never shopped in France. I will say it’s nothing like shopping in the US or in Spain, as I had made a point of visiting their store down the street from our hotel on La Rambla. There was nothing wrong with the original store, it is just not easily reached from my current digs and so I decided to see how the others compared in hopes that their location would make for an easier visit. I collected my companion from his home (at the Shangri La) and we were off intending to ...