Moving!

We have successfully moved to our new apartment!

Moving in China is a breeze. We got a truck and 3 guys for just 200 RMB (20 euros). They arrived half an hour early, at 8:30 in the morning, and at 8:45 they had the truck loaded up. We then lost some time in getting written permission to drive the truck past the security guard (turned out we should have had our landlord there --- oops!).
Once that was done, we drove to the other side, unloaded in less than 15 minutes, and at 9:30 this is what the mess in our new apartment looked like:

We have unpacked one box so far, and already the living room is full...

More pictures to follow once we have made everything look pretty and colorful.

Zhangjiajie - Day 2

On day 2 of my trip to Zhangjiajie, I had a really nice breakfast at a little outdoor cafe.

Here I met Cody and Jane (whose Chinese names I forgot). They invited me to join them with their guide. They seemed nice enough, so I said yes. I regretted it a tiny bit when we started walking, and we took 30 minutes to walk a very short but somewhat muddy path. But then I thought, what-the-heck, I'll just enjoy whatever they enjoy in this park. It turned out they really enjoyed taking (Cody) and posing for (Jane) photos. So, I also enjoyed taking and posing for endless photo shoots:










After lunch, we split up, since they were going to walk along the Golden Whip Stream, which I had hated so much the previous day. In the afternoon, I did my best to find some trails that were not full of people. This turned out to be quite hard, because, although such trails did seem to exist on the map, nobody knew where they were. In the end, I managed to find a little trail without tourists which led through tea plantations. It was nice, but unfortunately a bit short.

In the evening, I took a bus to the city of Zhangjiajie. For the umpteenth time that weekend, I was surprised by the Chinese way of doing things (previous surprises included the strong conviction that mountains and shouting are somehow two sides of the same coin, that bringing a radio to a nature park is OK, that it makes sense to pay a professional photographer to take your photo with just a lot of mist/clouds in the background, to name just a few...)
This time, the surprise was in my hotel room. It was really quite nice looking - big, nice decorations - and I would guess it was not more than 2 years old.

But now look at the bathroom. It is full of mold and disgusting-looking-ness!


(By the way, that is not shit on the floor by the toilet (I think), it seemed to be just some silicon with dirt on it.)

I am going to investigate this matter further. Does it not bother the average Chinese guest to have a moldy bathroom?

After Zhangjiajie, I stayed in Changsha in the conference hotel for a week. Again, it was a very nice looking hotel (nicer than the one in Zhangjiajie), and this time the bathroom was mold-free. But now, even though a huge vacuum cleaner could be seen in the corridor every day, vacuuming the floor seemed to be more of a once-in-a-lifetime thing. I found a large Chinese date (similar to a prune), paper clip, staple, nail (of the kind you use with a hammer, not the human kind fortunately) and piece of a clothing price tag on the floor. And these were just the identifiable things. When I called housekeeping they hung up on me. When I asked at the reception if they could make sure my room was vacuumed, nothing happened. Finally, I succeeded in getting my room vacuumed by asking the maid herself. It was not that much better after that (the price tag piece and nail were still there), but I felt a little better.

Again I wonder. Am I the only one who is bothered by this? Sure, it was the time of the month when I get very picky about cleanliness. But still!

Zhangjiajie - Day 1

Last weekend I went to a huge National Park called Wulingyuan aka Zhangjiajie. I payed a whopping 245 RMB for a 2-day pass, and got finger-printed when entering. Hmmmmm, this did not seem to be your usual national park experience...

Around me, I could occasionally glimpse huge karst mountains, but mostly I saw clouds and heard Celine Dion blaring at incredible volume. I hiked up a mountain, although hiking is a bit of a big word -- it was stair climbing actually. Not many people walked up, because most took the cable car. However, huge numbers of people walked down the stairs. Some people found even this to be too exhausting, and got a sedan chair to be carried down in. Unfortunately some of my pictures did not turn out that well, because their faces when they were being carried down steep chairs were pretty funny.



When I got to the top, I got to walk behind the big crowds to tour the mountain top.

Fortunately, it was lunch time, so it became a bit less crowded. Also, at some points the clouds lifted and I could finally see what all the hype was about. It turned out the national park was known for something other than its mountains of people:



After taking the cable car down the mountain (following the crowds down these long long stairs was not appealing), I hiked along the Golden Whip stream. I hated it, because it was so crowded that I could not walk at my own pace. On the other end, the only way to get to where I wanted to go turned out to be by elevator.

So I bought a ticket and up I went:


From the top, I took a bus to a youth hostel where I spent the night. Not terribly impressed with Zhangjiajie so far -- huge crowds, incredibly loud (they were all in tour groups were the guide had a microphone plus radio for entertainment) and no interesting hiking.

The next day was better though. But you'll have to wait until tomorrow to hear about that. Time for more conference talks for me now!

Quick update from Hunan

It seems from the frequent hits we get that some people are also very excited about our new apartment. Unfortunately, we won't be moving until Monday, and I am in Changsha right now. I am a bit bored here - the conference is in the most uninspiring location I have encountered so far (a new part of town which has no malls, restaurants or anything.) So I go to talks, eat at the restaurant buffet (gross!) and generally just wait for it all to be over again so I can take the train back to Beijing tomorrow.

Last weekend I went to Zhangjiajie. I'll make a post later, but for now, you can see pictures on flickr.

Financial news meets culinary news --- from the interwebz

Read about the latest craze in Croatia: the recession pizza.

Bugs!

Not in our new apartment, thankfully. They were in our food, though.

Amanda took us to a Tujia restaurant, which had very tasty food.

(This morning I was debugging though, but I'll spare you my Tanya-esque stories.)

Fang Shan

It was time for another fancy dinner with ITCS, this time in Bei Hai park, at Fang Shan restaurant.

Still very excited

We officially got all the keys to our new apartment yesterday. We have not moved yet, and this won't happen until Monday the 25th because Anke is going to Hunan tomorrow.

However, moving just the bare necessities (= towel and French press) was easy, so we did sleep in our new place last night. It did not disappoint. The bed is huge and not hard (we did not even know this was possible in China!) In the basement, there are naked men rather than seas of pee (I guess we did not know that was possible either.)

At some point, we'll post photos, but probably not until we've moved.

金鼎轩 -- or cakes for dinner!

Amanda took us to 金鼎轩 tonight. When she proposed this restaurant, she wondered if we, being the picky westerners we are, would be OK with eating cakes and somewhat sweeter things for dinner. Of course we are!

I believe this is the first restaurant we have been to in Beijing where someone held the door of our taxi open for us.
The inside of the restaurant was remarkable too, as it was spectacularly ugly. It actually looks kind of good in a photo however.
The cakes were delicious, especially the one made with Chinese dates and honey, which somehow tasted like really moist and light chocolate cake.






The only thing we did not like so much were the cold potato slices covered with grapefruit marmelade.


At 7:30 they held a painting auction. We had had plenty of beer by that time, so we bought a new painting for our new house and Amanda bought a painting for her friend.

Even though Frans rode his bike over our painting on the way home it still looks pretty good. Can't wait to hang it in our guest room -- it will look great on the red wall I think.

For Ellen

Two photos of the crudités-explosion at SuShi for Ellen.

Too excited

View Larger Map
Sorry, I seem to be getting a bit too excited about our upcoming move and have wasted the past 10 minutes to get an aerial view of our old and new apartments.
The old one is (B) and the new one is (A). Google seems to think there is a straight line road connecting the two, but unfortunately that is not the case.

Although the 文城杰座 (B) looks more interesting and less communist from up above, we are hoping (fingers crossed) that 逸成东苑 (A) will not have seas of urine (ok, a sea of pee) in the basement. The stench has spread to the elevator (probably using our shoe soles), and although some of the urine has evaporated, nothing has been done by the building management. Apparently we are being weird and uptight thinking this is maybe a tiny bit unacceptable.

Sea of Urine --- the movie

Today we went to pay for our new apartment: 3 months of rent plus 1 month of rent as deposit. This is what (almost) 3 months of rent looks like:

Then we celebrated our new apartment again (as well as the fact that this is the 500th blogpost!), this time with...

... some nice roast duck.

Then finally, we made this little movie walking from our bikes to the elevator. It almost seems like a sweet (but very stinky) memory already...

New and old (and another "oh-my-god!")

Great news for all of us: we found a new apartment today! We had kind of given up on it, and decided today would be our last try at apartment hunting. So far, we had seen many apartments that were either filled with junk and mold, or had lots of missing furniture, missing tiles and wires without lamps sticking out of the walls and which, most importantly, never failed to be disgusting.
And then we saw this beautiful new place that no disgusting people have lived in yet (it has been completely refurbished), which has a bathtub (yay!), open kitchen (yay!) and non-rectangular-box-like overall shape (yay!). The good news for all of you is that it has a reasonably sized guestroom with a separate bathroom. So come visit y'all!

We went into town to celebrate the good news. Our rent is going to increase by 40%, but we nonetheless splurged on cocktails and French food, which Frans thought was so-so and Anke liked quite a bit.



Upon arriving back home, we found that our building had immediately struck back to punish us for being disloyal and moving away.

We always park our bicycles in the basement, and some of you may have heard us complain in the past about the fact that some of the basement-dwellers seem to have a hard time finding the restrooms and choose to use the stairway (right next to the elevator) instead. Yeah, we know, it is horrible that people have to live in our basement, with 4 people to a room without windows or fresh air. But that does not stop us from hating the smell of their urine.

Anyways, today upon arriving home, we found a sea of urine blocking the way to the elevators. Normally, we only smell the urine and don't see it, so this was quite a surpise for us. The smell also easily surpassed anything we had known before. We bravely jumped over the sea of urine, went upstairs and then your intrepid reporter went back down again armed with a face mask and camera -- I would not want you to think we are overreacting or anything. So here it is. Too bad (or lucky for y'all) they have not yet invented cameras to record smells.

Duck!

After waving goodbye to the family, we secretly ate pizza. But today it was back to our normal food regime:

Kao ya!

(Not pictured are three other dishes. Due to the recent visit of the fambly, Anke is a little confused about the appropriate amount of food to order for 2 people. Also, it is so much more fun to have a large variety of dishes to eat!)

Hell

Yesterday we were back to work again, but we met up with Ellen and poppamomma in the evening. As we got into a taxi, Anke commented to Frans how nice it was to get out and about in the city so much during the fambly's visit.

A mere 30 minutes later, she changed her mind.

The trip down to Chaoyangmen went smoothly enough. But then we tried to get off the ring road. It was supposedly just a five minute drive from there, but somehow we spent 35 minutes waiting before the traffic light shown above. In these 35 minutes, it turned green exactly 3 times, and approximately 30-45 seconds each time. What the fuck is wrong with these traffic guys!!! It is only thanks to Frans's peace loving mentality that Anke did not get out and start shouting (or worse) at one of the traffic policemen directing traffic at the roundabout.