June 20

Snafus; or, Learning from my mistakes.

In addition to killing a few goldfish along the way with insufficient oxygenation, water that gets too dirty to support life (have I mentioned how polluted Beijing is?), and possibly other still mysterious causes, we have encountered a few difficulties due to our complete lack of familiarity with the world in which are are now living.

The water bottle situation comes quickly to mind. We noticed early on that pretty much everyone has a water dispenser – the kind of water cooler often found in office buildings in the US where you can dispense hot or cold water from a little spigot, and you get bottled water delivered in a large transparent barrel thing that you up-end on the dispenser. We discovered that at the store it was possible to obtain a very basic such dispenser for about $11.00, and that water bottle delivery is about $1.50 per bottle, including delivery. So we brought one home, and set it up.

In fact, Eric set it up, because I had to go do I don’t remember what, and when I came home he said there was a problem – the machine wasn’t heating or cooling water the way it was supposed to. Upon reading the (all Chinese) directions and looking over the thing, I realized that it said the first time you use the thing, you must first open the hot water spigot, then up-end the water bottle, then plug in and turn on the machine only after the water has begun to flow from the hot water spigot. Figuring we hadn’t done things in the right order, we tried again from the beginning with no success. So we packed it up, took it back to the store, and exchanged it for another.

The exchange was quite easy, although required far more steps than Target demands. The sales woman advised me that it was very important to first open the hot water spigot before starting up, because otherwise it was easy to burn out some vital element inside. Armed now with a new machine and good information, we returned home, and did it right this time. It worked great. The time came to get another water bottle delivered, and one phone call later, a guy arrived rapidly at our door with the replacement to take in trade for our empty barrel. We put it on, and were set to go. Or so we thought. It turns out the game with the unplugging, opening the hot spigot until the water flows, etc. was to be done not only THE first time, but EVERY first time we had a new water bottle. So we burned out our heater thing again, and now have merely a bottled water dispenser that doesn’t heat or cool. But hey, for $11, what do you expect?

The bottle situation was another thing it took us awhile to understand. It turns out water bottle delivery is all over the darn place around here – every little hole in the wall shop seems to run a service. The first place I got a water bottle from required a 50 RMB deposit for the bottle, then 14 RMB for the least expensive type of water. (Divide by 8 for the exchange rate.) Then we discovered a place much closer to home (i.e., 50 steps from the door instead of 150) where they had a type of water for 12 RMB. So the next time around, we got the 12 RMB kind, and they took the barrel from before. But now it turns out that I can’t get the water from the place with my 50 RMB deposit until I get back the original type of barrel. (Exactly the same size and shape, but with a different sticker on it.) Seems obvious in retrospect, but there you go. So I went and talked with the people who took our 14 RMB barrel and left a 12 RMB barrel, and they said sure no problem just bring back ours and we’ll give you the 14 RMB kind (empty, to take back to the first place.)

The washing machine. To operate, our landlord walked us through the steps: open the water valve on the incoming water supply; turn on the power; select your desired wash from among three sets of buttons marked time, size of load, and type of wash. Press go, and you’re set. So day before yesterday we loaded up the machine. Opened the valve, powered up, etc. Pressed go, and nothing happened. Now, it should be said that the time periods from which one can select on the top of the machine are 3 hours, 6 hours, and 9 hours. Given this somewhat shocking fact, we thought maybe it just takes awhile to get going? Shortly though, hearing nothing from the machine, we decided something was wrong, and turned it all off. I talked with the ladies who work in the elevator (there are ladies who ride the elevator up and down all day, pushing the buttons for us. The hallways of the building are dirty and ugly and run-down looking, but someone is employing ladies to sit all day in the elevator pushing buttons…) about whether they had any idea what we might be doing wrong; they did not. One suggested I should call the landlord, because maybe the machine was broken. So I called Mr. Chen, who said he’d be right over after work (around 8pm.)

In the interim, the guy who was supposed to install the internet came over. He brought in a wire from outside, and said we would have to call the building superintendent to come drill a hole in the (very thick plaster) wall over the front door to let the ADSL line in. I said, whoa, wait a minute, would you please explain all this to my landlord and make sure he’s ok about it, and we called Mr. Chen again. The two of them went around about who would call the building superintendent, with Mr Chen winning and Mr. ADSL calling. It must be said that ADSL man was ridiculously busy. While in our apartment a total of perhaps ten minutes, he fielded at least six different phone calls on what looked to be two or three different phones he was carrying, not to mention the call on my phone to my landlord and the follow-up to the super. He sat down at the computer table to plug in the ADSL line that was coming in through the front door, opened it up, then seemed to realize that he had lost track of the paperwork he was supposed to bring to help set up our account (user id and password stuff.) Between phone calls he assured me he would bring it by that afternoon, and off he zoomed.

Shortly thereafter, the Super arrived with a massive drill in his hands. He set up a ladder and began drilling a hole in the wall over the door. Construction here seems to be better suited to insulation and general solidity than most of what we know intimately in the US – windows are doubled and thick, walls the same. We don’t hear each other from one room to the next here as much as one would at home, and the insulation is more what we are familiar with from Europe, meaning it actually retains coolness indoors in the summer without strong need for air-conditioning, (though I'm happy to report that we do have air-conditioning) and presumably does the opposite service during the brutally cold winters of Beijing. So anyway, Drill Man was having some difficulty getting through. In fact, it was only a huge pile of plaster dust scattered across the floor and FIVE hole-attempts later that he managed to cut through to the other side. He plugged in the line through the hole, packed up his ladder and left.

Of course, I had only JUST finished mopping the floor (have I mentioned the pollution level here? Things get really dirty really fast...) because the Chinese teacher for the girls was to arrive at 4pm. She had to step over the massive pile of plaster dust and keep her shoes on. Having shoveled out the dust and mopped three + times, we’re still dealing with the dregs of the dust two days later.

ADSL man, you remember, was to drop by our paperwork by the end of the work day. As 6pm rolled around, I got nervous that he wasn’t going to remember, so I called my link to the internet people and general all around buffer for the utility world Mr. An (小安） at the Century 21 realty office. Mr. An called the ADSL guy, who promptly phoned to say he would be downstairs in 3 minutes, could I please come meet him. So I did, and armed with my user id and password, I entered them just as he had said I should in my Network setup, and hit “connect.” But nothing happened. No connection – it just says something about not being able to find the PPPoE server? I think we need a DNS server address or something. Fortunately, I thought, Mr. Chen our landlord will be here soon, and surely he can help.

When he arrived, we showed him the five holes over the door, and I gave him the phone number I had obtained from the Super who said (somewhat sheepishly I think) they would take care of it. Then we went to look at the washing machine. Guess what? What we thought was open on the water valve was in fact closed. That was the whole problem. However, I did learn that the really long time periods on the machine were not actually wash times, but set to wash three hours from now, or six hours from now, or whatever. Ah. Well, my Chinese is OK, but apparently not good enough for basic everyday life.

Had we not had this internet problem to deal with, I would have been REALLY embarrassed that it was only the water valve issue that had caused us to bring him over. (I’m happy to report that at the time of writing we have nice clean clothes.) We turned our attention to the internet thing, and I was very grateful that he was here to run interference between me and the tech support people on the phone. His first call went out to Mr. An (realtor) who high-tailed it over to join the fray. The two of them puzzled over my “pingguo” (Apple) system, talked with tech support, and even had directions in English emailed to us (we checked and printed the email at Mr. An’s office in a neighboring building). In the end, it was agreed that the ISP would have to send someone over to check out the connection, which they were supposed to do yesterday. They didn’t come. We hope they will today. Goes to show, ISPs are the same the world over.

On a more personal note, I did my placement testing yesterday. I was feeling pretty optimistic at the beginning of the Listening/Reading test yesterday morning, though I barely finished the test and there were plenty of things I didn’t know. By the end of the Oral interview in the afternoon I had distinctly mixed feelings however. On the one hand, I am generally able to express myself pretty well, and if I don’t know vocabulary for a particular interaction I can find it out and master it fairly quickly. People tell my I pronounce things very clearly and accurately, and that I use forms of expression that most foreigners don’t use – that is I don’t fall into some of the classic Anglicisms they are accustomed to hearing from foreigners. On the other hand, during the oral interview they showed me a list of vocabulary words to read aloud, and asked me to use them in sentences to gauge how many characters I know and what my reading level might be. I’m afraid I didn’t do very well, as they told me that the level I had demonstrated was the level of a textbook that I studied already during my time in Taiwan. Before we got to that part of our interview, the teachers (there were three of them, and a video camera!) had suggested that given my somewhat unusual situation – my family is here with me; I am a high school teacher primarily interested in mastering everyday, oral language rather than specialized business or academic vocabulary – perhaps I would prefer to have two daily one-on-one classes instead of three 3 student classes and one individual class. In fact, I would truly prefer that individualized option, which I told them, but they indicated to me that it would depend on the results of my written test. So in retrospect, I’m feeling anxious about my performance on that test, hoping it will have been strong enough to allow me to do this more individual kind of study, and fearing that my reading vocabulary and character recognition is just not very strong and thus they will feel honor bound to put me through my paces.


Yesterday evening Eric was already feeling happier after a brief moment of stay-at-home Dad blues, as we walked over to Beijing Language University (right next to Qing Hua, my university) and tried out a “Muslim Restaurant” on their campus. University campuses all seem to be small cities in themselves, complete with department and grocery stores, florists, many restaurants and cafes, bookstores, residences, and the usual university stuff. Beijing Language University struck us as an exceptionally interesting place. In asking for directions, we encountered a Chinese guy, a Japanese guy, and an Indonesian guy. All could speak Chinese and Japanese quite fluently. When we found the restaurant, actually a Uighur restaurant in the style of the Muslim minority population of Xinjiang Autonomous Region in the northwest of China, we were seated between a table of young French students and a table of Africans speaking a language we didn’t recognize. The restaurant was charming, and the food was delicious, right down to the cold Yanjing beer we enjoyed with our food. We will certainly return more than once.

Sunny, optimistic, sponge-like Amanda has been struggling a bit with the Chinese lessons. She gets hung up on the fact that she doesn’t understand the teacher unless someone translates for her, and is frustrated that she can’t remember vocabulary. I think her anxiety is slowing her down, and represents a stage of development different from where she was when she was absorbing Finnish like a sponge from Saskia.