Getting settled

I moved into my new place about a week ago - since then been very busy facilitating a course at work. It has some weird things, my new place. Its on the 21st floor but the laundry, which leads onto the kitchen, is on the outside of the building, but has a very dodgy window - it is like a glass sliding pane with no much of a seal on it. It's pretty Chinese to close off your kitchen from the rest of the house and not heat or cool it much.

Also, the kitchen doesn't have an oven, instead it has this weird plate steriliser thing, which looks like an oven from the outside, and looks like a dishwasher on the inside. I'm not sure how it works but it was a new invention after SARS which took off like nothing else - I've seen them in heaps of apartments. I have no intention of using it apart from as a cupboard. Its all in Chinese anyway.

Speaking of appliances being in Chinese, my washing machine is in Chinese. I had to take a picture of it and then take the picture to work for translation. I have a vague idea of what cycle I'm on when I do my washing now.

On the weekend I visited IKEA! Yes they have it here too. Its an absolute nightmare, people everywhere walking really slowly. The place is massive though and I bought a few essentials for the apartment.

HK

In Hong Kong now. They have bridges from building to building just above street level so you can get around without having to cross a street, its pretty good. Last night hit the shops (it was too rainy to do any touristy stuff, so boo hoo had to go shopping). Hong Kong at night is pretty cool. I took the ferry to the shopping centre and you get a good panoramic view of the city, can't be captured on photo though. With the mountains in the background, Hong Kong looks like a big movie set.

Taipei airport waffle

Getting to Taipei from Shanghai is not straightforward. In fact its the opposite. I had to fly to Hong Kong in order to then fly to Taipei. You cannot get a direct flight. And if you look at the map, that means flying practically over Taipei on the way to Hong Kong (about half way through the flight) and then flying back again.

Now I'm stuck in Taipei airport for a few hours on my way out again - going to Hong Kong for a few days (where I will hopefully open a HKD bank account) and then back to Shanghai.

Im exploring some other options for hosting my blog site, it sucks not being able to see it and the comments. I actually got to look at it just now since I'm in Taiwan and its not blocked here, but I couldn't leave any comments back to people as this computer is stuffed.

So anyway to be honest I'm not in the best mood as I've been in the airport for nearly three hours and when I tried to check in they told me I didn't have a ticket. So I had to get some taiwanese dollars (NKD) so that I could call my colleague in China and ask her what was going on. I tried to by NKD with RMB (Chinese currency) and of course they wouldn't have a bar of it, were quite offended I think. Luckily I'd had US$20 hanging around in my wallet for the last few months, it turns out its come in handy.

So I rang my colleague, but after a bit of too and fro it turned out the airline lady had got it wrong and my ticket was fine. This is the sucky side of business travel. Hanging around in airports. Taipei airport I would give a 6 / 10. Singapore is still the best in my books. Free internet access is great. For this internet access I had to get a three hour pass to the business centre which cost $29US. The only way to check my work emails today. STayed at the Sheraton last night when we arrived in Taipei but a real waste as we got in at about 1am and left for the client at 8.30am.

Anyway, this is seriously bad waffle so I'll sign off. My plane starts boarding soon as well.

Chinglish

I am hoping that by the end of the year I might obtain a similar standard in Chinese.

Actually the Chinglish here has improved a lot since I was here last.

I started my Chinese lessons on Thursday. Grammatically Chinese is a lot easier than English, its just the tones that get you.

Names

I get called some interesting names over here, I think Bec and Rebecca are kind of hard for people. Sometimes I get called Rec, and sometimes Bebecca. Also, people in China don't have middle names, so they find my two middle names confusing. In fact, someone at work thought it was a completely different person when they saw all my names on a form.

Chinese hospitals

I had my first experience of Chinese hospitals last night. I was meeting a friend, Simon, for dinner last night. We've had the edge of a typhoon here in Shanghai so it was raining hard and pretty gusty. He slipped on the street in a rush to get out of the rain and cut his hand. So it was off to Huashan hospital (see picture), one of the better Chinese hospitals in Shanghai - its a university hospital.

It didn't look like the picture when we got there. They had all the gates closed to the hospital so I'm not sure how the ambulances are supposed to get in. I've been told you're better off in a taxi anyway because people don't make way for ambulances here. And it was dark and rainy and windy.

We went into the general section first. They soon learned Simon was an Aussie so they sent us to another section for foreigners (we had to walk to another building through the rain, so we were soaking wet). A doctor came across with us. They checked out the cut and gave a quote for treatment - 5000 RMB, or about AUS$800. Simon has some Chinese so argued a bit and said he'd rather go back to the other side with the general patients and get treatment there because its much cheaper. So the same doctor came back with us to the other side (through the rain again). We didn't have to wait, maybe because Simon's an Aussie. Anyway, the same doctor was with us the whole time and ended up doing the stitches, etc. He would have been the one to do exactly the same treatment if we got it done in the foreign section too. The price for the treatment in the general section.......220 RMB or AUS$40 (including 8RMB for a special bandaid that is waterproof, which was quite important considering the typhoon outside). Ridiculous. So you seriously need to have good medical insurance if you're a foreigner here - they hit you hard because most foreigners have a lot more money than locals, and a lot of the time their companies pay. I think if you didn't speak Chinese and didn't have a friend translating for you, you'd probably want to go in the foreign section though, even though its more expensive, because otherwise you have no idea what they're doing to you.

Removal of Appendices in China

Don't read this if you're squeamish. I was talking to an Aussie guy last night who had his appendix removed when he was living in Nanjing (literally South City) two years ago. He was getting some severe pains in his lower abdomen so he went to the best hospital in town with his wife. They don't have any western hospitals in Nanjing so it was a Chinese hospital. Luckily he spoke Chinese, although he wasn't familiar with a lot of the medical terms so they couldn't always tell him exactly what they were doing.

So he went to the clinic first. Apparently the way you test for a swollen appendix, or whatever you call it, is you poke the abdomen, which doesn't hurt, and then take your finger away, which kills. So a few doctors did that to him for a while. Then they said to him that he had to have it operated on, and he needed to go across the road to the hospital. He was fairly cripple with pain by this stage, but there was no wheelchair - he had to walk. It took him half an hour or so.

He finally managed to get into a room in the hospital. A male nurse came in and shaved him completely from chest to knees. Then they gave him some iodine to apply to himself, from chest to knees. Then they took him to the operating theatre. The nurses told him to roll onto his side. Then they tried to get an epidural needle into his spine. The first time they put it in it was is in the wrong place. The second time they put it in they hit his spinal nerve, which caused him to kick one of the nurses in the head. They tried again, and still missed. Then the doctor came in and managed to get it into the right spot. They pumped the fluid in which is apparently really painful. Then they sat him up in the bed (once his lower half was numb) and told him they were ready to begin. He was like, what about me? And they were like, don't you want to watch? He was like, no. So they knocked him out and when he woke up it was all done, and he was wrapped in bandages from chest to knees, which made him worry maybe they did the wrong operation on him. But fortunately it was OK, they got the right thing.

Actually he showed us the scar and its pretty small. He says they did a pretty good job, its just that there was a lot of pain.

Special honey

I was at a friend's house and they had this in the cupboard. They had read the Chinese and didn't notice the English. I thought it was kind of funny. I don't know what the Chinese words say!