Phil’s blog

I think there’s a time window after I write each blog post where the activation energy to write the next post is low enough that I’ll actually do it. If I don’t write anything before the window closes, I go into another phase where I won’t write again for a long time. I think it’s because too much has happened for me to want to write about, or I’m dreading explaining why I haven’t written anything for a while to the two or three people who read this blog (hi mom and dad), or both. Then there’s a tipping point at about three months where I finally work up the motivation to write something. This has happened twice before, and tonight it’s three months to the day since my last post. At least I’m predictable. So below are the major things that have happened since November that I’m willing to share with the general internet-viewing public. Actually, I think my flickr sets page is a much better chronicle of my life than this blog ever was.

New Office

Last October we got into an incubator at Tsinghua Science Park. An incubator is basically where a group of investors give you subsidized office space and access to resources either for a share of your company or the opportunity to invest. What it means for us is that we have a pretty nice office for very reasonable rent in a building full of startups in the heart of what’s called “the Silicon Valley of China.” Just down the street are Google, Microsoft, Sun, and a bunch of other tech companies. It’s a hot area because it’s close to the two top schools in China, Tsinghua and PKU. Many students stay on campus during the summer and if you’re just down the street they’ll be more likely to accept internships at your company and eventually take a full time job after graduating. Many students also do internships during the school year, either because they’ve finished and are just waiting to graduate (like one of our engineers), they’re almost done with their grad research and have plenty of time, or they’re machines and can get through 16 hours of study and work every day. Anyway the new office is totally sweet and beats working at the old apartment hands down. It feels more like a real company this way, and the division between work and home is good (as much as I enjoyed the old one-second commute from my bed to my desk). We have 10 nice desks, a few cheap tables currently used for extra computers and junk, a conference room with a white board and projector, and a private office for Clement because he’s always doing meetings and calls. It’s on the 11th floor so there’s a decent view out across Haidian, at least when the air is clear. There’s a cafeteria in the basement where you can get a lot of food a la carte style for cheap (I average about 11 RMB per meal which is $1.50 USD). At first it seemed decent but now I think we don’t have as much tolerance for it; it’s really salty and greasy and there isn’t much meat (though I seem to be the only one who complains about the latter). So we’ve been going out to eat a lot lately, most often to a restaurant across the street where you can feed a group of people for about 10-15 RMB per person and it tastes way better.

More photos of the new office

New Apartment

The new office is in Haidian district which is in the northwest of Beijing, while our old apartment was in Chaoyang which is on the east side. Beijing is a big city so that ends up being an hour and a half commute. Keen and I still had a month left on both our lease in Chaoyang and our memberships at the nearby gym, but the commute was too much so shortly after we started working at the new office we moved to an apartment near it. Living here is awesome. The apartment itself is nothing special; 2 bedrooms (actually mine seems to be an office but no matter), kitchen, living room, tiny refrigerator room, and split bathroom with the shower and toilet in one room and the sink and medicine cabinet outside. It has crappy wall-mounted radiators for heat. Oh yeah, it got really cold here. On the plus side the radiators are nice for drying laundry on because they never get that hot so there’s no fear of burning anything. Side node, after I do laundry I hang it on every corner, handle, door, or other feature in my room that will support a piece of clothing. It’s kind of funny to walk in and see 10 pairs of boxers on various pieces of furniture throughout my room. Anyway the great thing about living here is that it’s a 10 minute walk to work, 5 minutes to my gym and the supermarket, 2 minutes from our language school, 5 minutes to Wudaokou subway station, and 2-5 minutes from a large number of restaurants. There’s a McDonalds 2 minutes away that I’ve been to more times than I’m happy about. During the work week we have everything we need in a very small area so we get by just walking. Going out for fun is less convenient because fun is generally more central or on the east side of the city. We used to ride the subway more but have gotten lazy and now often just shell out for a taxi; about 60 RMB ($8 and change) is enough to go most places.

More photos of the new apartment

Learning Mandarin

After moving to Haidian, Keen and I finally started Mandarin lessons. We have class Monday-Friday from 8-9:30am. It’s just the two of us and our teacher whose name is Fei Lu. Her English is pretty good. She teaches from workbooks and adds some extra material, pretty standard. Actually the workbook exercises are lame. I think what helps me the most is just having improvised conversations with her. We recently started learning how to write characters and it’s starting to come back to me from my one Chinese class at UVA. Fei Lu is on vacation now visiting her hometown of Harbin, but we’ll start class again next week. I think I’ve passed a critical point where now if I have a dictionary I can express a lot of things. I can probably continue to learn just by speaking, reading, and writing Chinese (which I now do every day anyway), but I’ll at least continue with the class until we’ve gone through all the hours we’ve paid for.