Phil’s blog

I arrived in Beijing almost 3 weeks ago on June 19th, so this update is long overdue! For context, I moved out here to work on a startup with my friend Clement from UVA. For the first week, my friend and soon to be coworker Keen (also from UVA) was also visiting, so we spent most of the time taking care of things like apartment, insurance, cell phone, and generally scoping out the area with Clement and his girlfriend XinXin as our hosts. Keen only spent a week here but will move here for real around the middle of July. For my second week, we started working at an office we shared with Clement’s friend Felix’s company, and my evenings were spent settling into my new apartment and visiting the internet cafe. My third week has been more routine; we moved our office into my apartment to avoid the hour long commute, have been working out roughly every other day at a gym that’s about a 2 minute walk door to door, and go out for dinner a few times a week. I spend most of the evenings chatting with Justine and catching up on emails and blogs and everything I neglected while I didn’t have consistent internet access. There’s a lot to cover about my experience here thus far, so I’ll just put down my general and miscellaneous thoughts here and write about major things in other posts for easier reading.

The first thing I noticed walking out of the airport was the amount of smog. Some days it’s better than others, but even on the best days, visibility is worse than in any place I’ve ever been. I heard that the government will try to reduce pollution in time for the “green” olympics, but that’ll be pretty tough because apparently a lot of it blows in from outside the city.

The second thing I noticed riding to Clement’s place from the airport was that drivers are very aggressive by US standards, especially taxi drivers. The rule seems to be that if 1) there’s space in front of you wide enough for your car and 2) any cars about to fully or partially occupy that space have enough time to stop or slow down, go for it. It seems really dangerous but I’m told there are relatively few traffic deaths here, at least in the city, because you can never drive that fast since there are so many cars. Even the bicyclists are bold; nobody wears a helmet and people don’t hesitate to ride alongside cars and across intersections when they don’t have the signal to go.

There’s construction everywhere, mostly offices and apartment buildings. This means a lot of migrant workers are in the city, sleeping in ramshackle huts and even under bridges. I felt bad for them initially but a friend told me that people jump at the opportunity to do these construction jobs because they get paid far more than in the villages they come from. When they return home where the cost of living is even lower, they can live pretty well. They may not have amenities like internet and flush toilets, but I can see how a simple life could be pretty good too.

People like to sit around outside and chat or play card games and the like - in parks, on sidewalks and bridges, in front of stores, and especially in front of residences in the poor areas. Clement suspects it’s because their homes are so small, the outside is like their living room. It’s neat that these people probably see each other every day and are perhaps like extended families.

The quality of things ranging from mass produced goods to buildings is generally lower here than in the US. We’ve all heard about the toxic toothpaste and pet food, and probably numerous other cases like excessive levels of cancer-causing preservatives. The drive to produce things cheaply leads to cutting corners, substituting cheaper materials, and a lack of quality control. I saw this first hand in Clement’s building, where some of the wall surfaces are stripped away to reveal large cracks in the concrete. In one place there’s a hole about the size of a large loaf of bread that looks like it was filled in with some kind of Styrofoam spray.

People pay for almost everything in cash because there’s no credit system here, and no checks either. I felt like a gangster or something when I went to the bank to withdraw money to pay 6 months’ rent; I left with 50,000 RMB - more currency than I’ve ever handled in my life. Clement said he once saw a guy use two giant sackfuls of cash to pay off his condo, which a group of property management staff then spent hours counting.

Unlike in Japan, very few people speak English here. I get by through a combination of scattered Chinese words, gestures, drawings, pre-written addresses for taxi drivers, and when all else fails, a call to Clement so he can translate for me.

Possibly my favorite thing about China is that the food is incredibly cheap, both at restaurants and in grocery stores. I’ll write more about this later, but to give you an idea, I now consider $5 US to be pricey for a meal :]

That’s all I have the energy to write for now, but I hope to soon post about friends, living arrangements, food, shows, and maybe even work. Hope everyone is well back home!