It's United Nations Day. Did you remember to send your loved ones a strongly worded letter?
A day or so late, but ah well.
Showing posts with label work. Show all posts
Showing posts with label work. Show all posts
Thursday, October 25, 2007
Friday, September 7, 2007
I've never wanted a briefcase before.
I just had my second meeting in as many days. I spent 2 unproductive weeks trying to to line up meetings and make things happen. Now things have finally started falling into place, but maybe a bit faster than I'd like.
09/06
I had a meeting at the Beijing Pharma and Biotech Center, a biotech promotion group funded by Beijing. The meeting was at 2PM, and their office is about 25km from work, so I knew I had to leave at 1 at the latest. I had some preparation work to do, but I also had a morning meeting with a UN coworker to deal with.
The coworker was trying to get me to help rewrite our Country Service Framework, the description of our activities in China. I had helped on an earlier draft, and it turns out I inadvertently changed UN policy by combining our listed 'priority' and 'goal' in our development and aid framework language. It turns out that the priority was China's and the goal was our own, so for about a week our goals matched China's phrasing. They're similar; it's not like I was devoting the UN to a new socialist countryside or anything. Anyway, besides finding out I accidentally set policy, this conversation took forever. We realized after an hour of discussion that the only tasks I'd actually been given so far were 2 copy/paste operations. I wanted to leave, to get ready for my afternoon meeting, but our talk dragged on and on. She realized it, too, but we've got scheduling problems coming up and had to finish outlining the work. She left for a quick talk with our boss, I scrambled to organize my notes for my meeting, then we got back together to talk some more. I ended up with a real assignment, one involving a working brain and plenty of writing, but I spent my whole morning getting it.
I raced downstairs to a cab and across town, writing notes on the ride. I got out somewhere near the address I'd been given and walked across a medical school campus, complete with beautiful bridges and Chinese eaves, stopping to ask a security guard directions. I was a bit confused about where to turn, but I stumbled on the place, a much bigger office than I'd imagined. That part of town is much less vertical than others, and the office had a big parking lot of its own and an open field on the other side. It wasn't what I'd imagined.
So I sat down with 'Alice' from public affairs, who was translating, and Hong from research, and ended up talking to them for 3 hours. I knew the meeting was running long, but I didn't realize to what degree until I'd left. They gave me some decent information, but since it was mostly translated I didn't get much in the way of quotes. The most exciting part for me was 2 books they had, both reports in Chinese on the local industry and full of statistics. I photocopied the cover and title pages of the books so that I could find them later; they may be the only way to get some damn numbers around here. Hong was very interested in biotech elsewhere in the world, a topic on which I'm now fairly knowledgeable, so I gave them some stats I'd gathered and promised to email them a few reports, in addition to my own when it was done, then we took a picture and I left.
I took a bus to meet Scot nearby at Zhongguancun, the computer and electronics district, where he'd been shopping. I wandered around a bit to check out the huge cell phone and MP3 player selection, but only ended up buying some blank DVDs and an iPod wall charger ($3!). At this point I'm seriously considering these external hard drives with card readers that they have around here. I'd just buy the case and put my own laptop drive in it, I think, rather than trust whatever discount drive they're pushing. The kind of cases I like are light, have batteries built in so you can use them on the road without a wall plug, and have a slot to load a CF card. A setup like this, maybe $100 for a hard drive and $25 for the enclosure, would give me almost unrestricted space for digital pictures while I'm traveling. I just ordered a second 2GB compact flash card for Thailand, so the drive isn't urgent, but I'm seriously thinking about it for the future.
Afterward our getting our geek fix we met Matt and Ben, 2 MIT grads from my year who just moved to Beijing to start work. We had a hot pot dinner in Wudaokou, yet another Beijing district I hadn't seen before. Haidian and Wudaokou are where most of the universities are, so they have a young feeling. Microsoft, Google, and a lot of other tech companies are there, too. After dinner we had some beer on the street and chatted for a bit, then I said goodbye to Scot before his visa run back to the States and rushed off to catch the train home. I only made it part way before the system shut down for the night (I couldn't make a connecting train), so I had to take a cab part of the way.
I got home right before midnight, thankfully, or the elevator would have been off and I would have had to climb up to my apartment. I'm getting sick of the damn Cinderella routine.
09/07
I met Alessandro at the office at 8, and his driver took us to our meeting at the National Center for Biotech Development. Alessandro normally pays this Chinese guy to drive his wife around during the day and leave the car back at the office afterwards. It's cheaper than buying another car, a local guy gets a pretty sweet job, and his wife doesn't have to learn to drive, so I guess it's good all around.
\We had about 5 minutes with the center's director, then he left us with a staffer to answer the rest of our questions. The staffer was polite and nice, he just didn't really know what I want to find out or he doesn't want to tell me. Honestly, I think they don't know. One thing I want is a list of biotech companies in China. He thought they had such a thing in each individual department of their center, and it could maybe be compiled. These guys work in a building together, have a focus on biotech, and rely on their contacts to get anything done, but they don't have a master address book. It's not incompetence, I don't think, just this Chinese attitude wherein you don't coordinate between departments.
Then, as I'm writing this, I get an email from the staffer thanking us for the meeting and 'reminding' me that I have to submit my report to him for approval of any reference to their center before publication. I haven't responded yet, but if a guy in the US asked me for editorial approval after the fact I'd probably laugh at him. I doubt it'll be an issue; I don't think I got anything interesting enough to make it into the report.
09/06
I had a meeting at the Beijing Pharma and Biotech Center, a biotech promotion group funded by Beijing. The meeting was at 2PM, and their office is about 25km from work, so I knew I had to leave at 1 at the latest. I had some preparation work to do, but I also had a morning meeting with a UN coworker to deal with.
The coworker was trying to get me to help rewrite our Country Service Framework, the description of our activities in China. I had helped on an earlier draft, and it turns out I inadvertently changed UN policy by combining our listed 'priority' and 'goal' in our development and aid framework language. It turns out that the priority was China's and the goal was our own, so for about a week our goals matched China's phrasing. They're similar; it's not like I was devoting the UN to a new socialist countryside or anything. Anyway, besides finding out I accidentally set policy, this conversation took forever. We realized after an hour of discussion that the only tasks I'd actually been given so far were 2 copy/paste operations. I wanted to leave, to get ready for my afternoon meeting, but our talk dragged on and on. She realized it, too, but we've got scheduling problems coming up and had to finish outlining the work. She left for a quick talk with our boss, I scrambled to organize my notes for my meeting, then we got back together to talk some more. I ended up with a real assignment, one involving a working brain and plenty of writing, but I spent my whole morning getting it.
I raced downstairs to a cab and across town, writing notes on the ride. I got out somewhere near the address I'd been given and walked across a medical school campus, complete with beautiful bridges and Chinese eaves, stopping to ask a security guard directions. I was a bit confused about where to turn, but I stumbled on the place, a much bigger office than I'd imagined. That part of town is much less vertical than others, and the office had a big parking lot of its own and an open field on the other side. It wasn't what I'd imagined.
So I sat down with 'Alice' from public affairs, who was translating, and Hong from research, and ended up talking to them for 3 hours. I knew the meeting was running long, but I didn't realize to what degree until I'd left. They gave me some decent information, but since it was mostly translated I didn't get much in the way of quotes. The most exciting part for me was 2 books they had, both reports in Chinese on the local industry and full of statistics. I photocopied the cover and title pages of the books so that I could find them later; they may be the only way to get some damn numbers around here. Hong was very interested in biotech elsewhere in the world, a topic on which I'm now fairly knowledgeable, so I gave them some stats I'd gathered and promised to email them a few reports, in addition to my own when it was done, then we took a picture and I left.
I took a bus to meet Scot nearby at Zhongguancun, the computer and electronics district, where he'd been shopping. I wandered around a bit to check out the huge cell phone and MP3 player selection, but only ended up buying some blank DVDs and an iPod wall charger ($3!). At this point I'm seriously considering these external hard drives with card readers that they have around here. I'd just buy the case and put my own laptop drive in it, I think, rather than trust whatever discount drive they're pushing. The kind of cases I like are light, have batteries built in so you can use them on the road without a wall plug, and have a slot to load a CF card. A setup like this, maybe $100 for a hard drive and $25 for the enclosure, would give me almost unrestricted space for digital pictures while I'm traveling. I just ordered a second 2GB compact flash card for Thailand, so the drive isn't urgent, but I'm seriously thinking about it for the future.
Afterward our getting our geek fix we met Matt and Ben, 2 MIT grads from my year who just moved to Beijing to start work. We had a hot pot dinner in Wudaokou, yet another Beijing district I hadn't seen before. Haidian and Wudaokou are where most of the universities are, so they have a young feeling. Microsoft, Google, and a lot of other tech companies are there, too. After dinner we had some beer on the street and chatted for a bit, then I said goodbye to Scot before his visa run back to the States and rushed off to catch the train home. I only made it part way before the system shut down for the night (I couldn't make a connecting train), so I had to take a cab part of the way.
I got home right before midnight, thankfully, or the elevator would have been off and I would have had to climb up to my apartment. I'm getting sick of the damn Cinderella routine.
09/07
I met Alessandro at the office at 8, and his driver took us to our meeting at the National Center for Biotech Development. Alessandro normally pays this Chinese guy to drive his wife around during the day and leave the car back at the office afterwards. It's cheaper than buying another car, a local guy gets a pretty sweet job, and his wife doesn't have to learn to drive, so I guess it's good all around.
\We had about 5 minutes with the center's director, then he left us with a staffer to answer the rest of our questions. The staffer was polite and nice, he just didn't really know what I want to find out or he doesn't want to tell me. Honestly, I think they don't know. One thing I want is a list of biotech companies in China. He thought they had such a thing in each individual department of their center, and it could maybe be compiled. These guys work in a building together, have a focus on biotech, and rely on their contacts to get anything done, but they don't have a master address book. It's not incompetence, I don't think, just this Chinese attitude wherein you don't coordinate between departments.
Then, as I'm writing this, I get an email from the staffer thanking us for the meeting and 'reminding' me that I have to submit my report to him for approval of any reference to their center before publication. I haven't responded yet, but if a guy in the US asked me for editorial approval after the fact I'd probably laugh at him. I doubt it'll be an issue; I don't think I got anything interesting enough to make it into the report.
Monday, September 3, 2007
Shared experiences.
8/31
On Friday the UNIDO director general came through the office. Our Chinese office manager decided that this was an important event, and came by my office to make sure I'd stay until 6:30 to join the staff meeting and photo op. I agreed with them that that was a good idea, and wondered why they'd waited until a few hours beforehand to give me a heads up. Whatever, the only thing I would have done differently is wear a tie. The director seemed to be a nice guy, definitely a politician, but I hope my colleagues will excuse me if I wasn't too impressed by his rank. I looked up his CV out of curiosity, and what immediately struck me is how he went from assistant professor at U. Michigan Dearborn to Minister of Finance in Sierra Leone. That's some kind of a promotion.
I went home around 8 and relaxed for a bit, but I didn't have long before I was supposed to meet Linda and her boyfriend at a bar. They're leaving China soon, and I just wanted an excuse to go out. I didn't get around to eating dinner, usually a bad idea before hitting bars, but drinking coffee all day had messed with my appetite. I changed clothes, decided against the bike lights because I didn't want to carry them all evening, and set off, showing up at the Rickshaw a while before they did. While I was sitting alone in a lawn chair in the courtyard, drinking my expensive Tsingtao, I was invited to join a couple of girls and a guy at a table nearby.
Have I mentioned how much I love this phenomenon? In my experience, friends either have shared interests or shared experiences. These are the bonds that hold people together, and the best friends have plenty of both. In a place like China, expats all have a common shared experience before they even meet. If nothing else, you're guaranteed to be able to talk about China, and that makes starting conversations relatively easy. Of course talking about China with everyone gets old after a while, but the potential is there. Think about it- people in a NYC subway would never talk with strangers, but the instant there's a power outage, boom, there's a shared experience and people emerge from their bubbles. In line at the airport? I bet you're silent unless the line's brutally long or your flight's delayed, when the shared suffering gives you something in common. There are exceptions, but the rule works fairly well. It's one of the reasons I was such a fan of drinking shots of liquor in college (Hi, mom!) If you drink a beer nearby someone you don't know then it's a just couple of people having a beer, but inviting them to gather in a circle, coming up with a toast, grimacing about the burn of the liquor all produces a weird camaraderie that lingers beyond the act of drinking. And no, it's not just the additional intoxication brought on by the booze.
Anyway, so I join these 3 at their table. One's a heavily-tattooed, 30-something American guy living for years in Indonesia on his savings, claiming to spend $8 a month on rent. Another's a Canadian girl working for a security publication in Beijing with aspirations of holding public office back home in Toronto. The third's a Greek/Italian girl whose line of work I missed. Linda and her boyfriend come, other people join the original 3, and after a hanging out for a while we go our separate ways. I got the Greek girl's cellphone number, and I'll likely see her again, by coincidence if not on purpose. Such is the small world of the Beijing expat ghetto. This happened all evening- meeting and chatting with new people, being asked directions by strangers (and me accidently telling them the wrong street), being offered pot disguised as Marlboros by the Libyans who don't speak English, Chinese, or Spanish but welcome me at the open seat at their table. No thanks, I don't like the idea of Chinese jail, but it was nice of them to ask.
09/01-02
It was a quiet weekend. I didn't get in until 5AM after seeing Linda and her boyfriend off on Friday, and I didn't get up until 2:30 on Saturday. I watched a lot of movies, read some books, and did some research on freelance writing for science publications. The article below is one of my reject ideas, something I wanted to write about that didn't really fit into the science category. It feels strange not citing sources, but I guess I should try to get used to that. I'm also not very good at this style of writing, I don't think, so I'll try to get some more practice in before I start sending things off for real.
On Friday the UNIDO director general came through the office. Our Chinese office manager decided that this was an important event, and came by my office to make sure I'd stay until 6:30 to join the staff meeting and photo op. I agreed with them that that was a good idea, and wondered why they'd waited until a few hours beforehand to give me a heads up. Whatever, the only thing I would have done differently is wear a tie. The director seemed to be a nice guy, definitely a politician, but I hope my colleagues will excuse me if I wasn't too impressed by his rank. I looked up his CV out of curiosity, and what immediately struck me is how he went from assistant professor at U. Michigan Dearborn to Minister of Finance in Sierra Leone. That's some kind of a promotion.
I went home around 8 and relaxed for a bit, but I didn't have long before I was supposed to meet Linda and her boyfriend at a bar. They're leaving China soon, and I just wanted an excuse to go out. I didn't get around to eating dinner, usually a bad idea before hitting bars, but drinking coffee all day had messed with my appetite. I changed clothes, decided against the bike lights because I didn't want to carry them all evening, and set off, showing up at the Rickshaw a while before they did. While I was sitting alone in a lawn chair in the courtyard, drinking my expensive Tsingtao, I was invited to join a couple of girls and a guy at a table nearby.
Have I mentioned how much I love this phenomenon? In my experience, friends either have shared interests or shared experiences. These are the bonds that hold people together, and the best friends have plenty of both. In a place like China, expats all have a common shared experience before they even meet. If nothing else, you're guaranteed to be able to talk about China, and that makes starting conversations relatively easy. Of course talking about China with everyone gets old after a while, but the potential is there. Think about it- people in a NYC subway would never talk with strangers, but the instant there's a power outage, boom, there's a shared experience and people emerge from their bubbles. In line at the airport? I bet you're silent unless the line's brutally long or your flight's delayed, when the shared suffering gives you something in common. There are exceptions, but the rule works fairly well. It's one of the reasons I was such a fan of drinking shots of liquor in college (Hi, mom!) If you drink a beer nearby someone you don't know then it's a just couple of people having a beer, but inviting them to gather in a circle, coming up with a toast, grimacing about the burn of the liquor all produces a weird camaraderie that lingers beyond the act of drinking. And no, it's not just the additional intoxication brought on by the booze.
Anyway, so I join these 3 at their table. One's a heavily-tattooed, 30-something American guy living for years in Indonesia on his savings, claiming to spend $8 a month on rent. Another's a Canadian girl working for a security publication in Beijing with aspirations of holding public office back home in Toronto. The third's a Greek/Italian girl whose line of work I missed. Linda and her boyfriend come, other people join the original 3, and after a hanging out for a while we go our separate ways. I got the Greek girl's cellphone number, and I'll likely see her again, by coincidence if not on purpose. Such is the small world of the Beijing expat ghetto. This happened all evening- meeting and chatting with new people, being asked directions by strangers (and me accidently telling them the wrong street), being offered pot disguised as Marlboros by the Libyans who don't speak English, Chinese, or Spanish but welcome me at the open seat at their table. No thanks, I don't like the idea of Chinese jail, but it was nice of them to ask.
09/01-02
It was a quiet weekend. I didn't get in until 5AM after seeing Linda and her boyfriend off on Friday, and I didn't get up until 2:30 on Saturday. I watched a lot of movies, read some books, and did some research on freelance writing for science publications. The article below is one of my reject ideas, something I wanted to write about that didn't really fit into the science category. It feels strange not citing sources, but I guess I should try to get used to that. I'm also not very good at this style of writing, I don't think, so I'll try to get some more practice in before I start sending things off for real.
Wednesday, August 29, 2007
If my posts had fewer subjects it'd be easier to come up with clever titles.
8/24
Night out at 5:19
I decided that I should go out to a bar. I was sick of sitting around watching TV and eager to try to meet people, and I'd seen on the thatsbeijing forum that a member was performing at a place nearby called 5:19, so I decided to check it out.
5:19 was quiet. There was the forum member playing guitar and singing rather competently, plus maybe 10 other people on the first floor. There were others upstairs on the roof, but I didn't know that yet. So I ordered a drink, much to my regret turning down the Bombay Sapphire in favor of the dramatically cheaper Gordon's Dry in my gin and tonic. I chatted with a few of the guys sitting around on some couches. They turned out to be Americans working in construction on the new US embassy, and were all pretty drunk. The conversation was much as you'd expect a chat with drunk construction workers to be, revolving around booze, women, and sports. I politely declined their invitation to go next door to dance with the Filipina girls, explaining with a straight face that I was waiting for a friend.
I chatted with the bartender and owner, Dave from Canada, who was running the business in his retirement. I asked him why he'd stayed in China after his decade-long contract with the mining company was up and after his wife divorced him, and he answered that he couldn't imagine readjusting to civilization.
I met the musician, who I'd previously chatted with in the online forum, and we went upstairs to the roof to hang out with some others. There he introduced me to an older guy from Montana working on the communications infrastructure for the Olympics.
I took the opportunity to ask how he felt about potential protests, which was apparently a red-button issue. It ended up a 3-hour, heated debate about freedoms, respect, and the 'greatest stage ever set on earth'. I thought for a while he was drunk, but it later turned out he was a recovering alcoholic and he'd been drinking tonic water. Anyway, we had radically different points of view. In the young and naive corner, I supported protest and free speech and the ability and obligation of individuals to change the world. He had a much more jaded attitude about the potential for change, and he also believed that the Olympics shouldn't be interrupted by dissent. His arguments weren't very good, but one that held up for me was that public protest would inevitably disrupt some poor athlete's proudest moment. He also had this weird belief that Olympics were about hope for the Chinese people, and that protesting would somehow betray that hope. I personally think that most Chinese see the Olympics more as an opportunity to make a quick buck by whatever means they can than they do a source of hope or pride. Anyway, he argued on the grounds that protesting against injustices in China during thr Olympics was somehow taking away hope from the Chinese people, which was just weird. By this point the bar had closed, which I didn't think they did in Beijing, and we were standing outside the front door debating. He finally misquoted Ben Franklin at me, saying, "He who sacrifices hope for security gets neither." (What?) When of course it's, "He who sacrifices LIBERTY for security deserves neither." So when I pointed his error out to him, trying hard not to jump up and down in glee that he made my point for me, we agreed to disagree and I went home for the night. I didn't meet anyone my age and I didn't meet any girls, but at least I got out of the house.
8/25
On Saturday I met my language exchange partner for the second time, this time at a Starbucks in Guomao halfway between our places. We haven't been very diligent about studying, to say the least. As much as I loathe Starbucks, it was nice to overpay for a giant coffee; I had no idea how much I'd miss the drink. So we chatted for a few hours, asking questions and taking notes. I managed to drop my pocket PC with my electronic dictionary off of the table and down 2 flights of stairs, but it survived intact, probably thanks to the heavy metal case that I've hated lugging around.
Bike repairs (Or, "No, no. Night time is when I fill the hole with water")
It was getting dark when I got back to the subway station where I'd left my bike. I had already put on my helmet and flashing lights and started riding down the street when I realized that my rear tire was flat. Fortunately, China has bicycle repair 'shops' on just about every corner They're really just 3-wheeled carts with supplies and a grease-covered older guy sitting on a stool, but they work. I remembered that only a moment ago I'd seen one across the street from where my bike was parked. Then, as I got off my bike and turned around, something clicked- those bastards flattened my tire. Furious, but trying to act cool, I walked my bike over to the cart and asked to use his pump, hoping they'd just let the air out. So I pumped up my tube and stood around for a minute poking at the tire. It was leaking, so I asked the guy how much it'd be to change the tube. He wanted 40RMB, but I talked him down to 25RMB ($3.50 for parts and labor), plus I get to keep the dead tube, which I'll throw away to prevent him from pawning it off on someone who doesn't know a new one from a patch job. When he took the tire off I checked it for anything along the inside which could re-puncture the tube. Assuming he's competent, he should have done that himself if he didn't know how the tube was damaged. He had a water bowl, so I pumped the tube up and slowly ran the length of it through the water until I found the leak, an invisible line of holes along the seam. It could have been a slightly split seam or it could have been someone with a needle poking my tire a few times. Who knows, but after he put my wheel back on I waited for a few minutes to make sure all was kosher before I paid him and left. I don't know if he actually did kill my tube, but everyone here I've mentioned the incident to thinks he did.
8/27-28
On Monday and Tuesday I got little done at work, or so it always seems to feel. I'm calling and emailing a bunch of people in the government and research institutions, trying to get information and set up meetings. I finally managed to schedule one with the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Science on Wednesday, but other than that I mostly got passed around from person to person and played phone and email tag.
Alessandro, one of UNIDO's permanent staff, has been really helpful about suggesting names and sending emails out through his account with his name on them, so that's been encouraging. We also have fun chats during the day on everything from his part-time job at the opera during college, where he chatted with Pavarotti and had to carry around large, 'dead' sopranos on stage; to articles in the Economist; to hiking and climbing. He's much older than I am, has a wife and a kid, but it's cool to have someone at work to interact with on a social level.
This week I was also tasked with writing the copy for the new UNIDO China brochure. I don't mind doing some of this kind of work for the people here; it makes me feel like I'm pulling my weight and it keeps them happy.
Exercise, plus what do do with my time
The evenings have been slow and long since my 1 month membership for yoga expired. I would have re-upped it, but I'll leave for Thailand before the full month and it seemed expensive to waste that time. As a result I'm going home earlier and still not doing much when I get there. I've been thinking about getting back into martial arts, so I've been shopping around. I found a well-regarded jiu jitsu school down in SOHO, about 15 minutes from work by bike, which I'll probably check out, but I realized that since I'm in China I should probably take advantage of it by learning something local. I've been asking around about taiji and kung fu teachers, but they're elusive. Most of the best teachers seem to be old guys who teach in parks, just not in the parks near me. They also charge lesson by lesson, payable in cash, and aren't cheap. So I'm looking, but I don't know if it's a practical idea.
The other fitness thing I've recently stumbled on is this yoga retreat outside of the city. It's not cheap, but neither is it too expensive- on the order of $100 for a weekend with food, transportation, accommodation, and classes included. It sounds fun, but the most amazing part is the setting; one location is an old Buddhist temple, another has property around a crumbling stretch of the Great Wall. It seems great, assuming I can handle that big a dose of hippie-ness in a weekend.
8/29
My first work meeting with a 'local expert'
After much debate I ended up wearing my suit to my meeting at the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Science. I seriously wonder what people think when they see me walking around wearing a jacket, tie, and eyebrow piercing. I sort of like the contradiction, and I guess I'll settle for it if I can't dye my hair fun colors. No one in China dresses up; it's like casual Friday meets the Caribbean, with short-sleeve button up shirts all around for the elite businessmen and officials and track pants and polo shirts for the rest. It's sort of a shame that a country with such a cool sartorial tradition has settled on the lowest common denominator of Western dress. Even during the Cultural Revolution, although the clothing was uniform, it was unique and interesting.
I got up at 6:30 to make it to my meeting by 9, biking to work to collect my notes and drop off my computer, then catching a cab to Haidian, some 15km away, during rush hour. I got to read papers and jot notes during the ride through the morning traffic, so I understand the appeal of chauffeurs for people with money and stressful jobs. The taxi driver didn't know exactly where to go, but we managed to navigate there successfully, marking the occasion as the first time the Chinese GPS software on my pocket PC has been useful, and even then it wasn't while hooked up to the GPS. The campus of the institute, along with the rest of China, was gutted by construction, so I hiked in dress shoes over piles of dirt and under tin roofs until I found the right building.
The man I was meeting with, a Prof. Huang, had come downstairs to meet me when I called him to tell him I was nearby. We shook hands and headed up to his office. After the business card swap ritual we got down to business, but as an aside, how are you supposed to take the card you're accepting with 2 hands while simultaneously offer your own the same way? I assume you take turns, but who offers first? The actual trade ended up a weird tangle, but I don't think he cared. He spent a couple of years at Cornell, studying abroad as everyone here seems to do, so was probably lower key about some things than he could have been.
Prof. Huang is the head of biotech research at the institute, a scientist, not a suit. He was wearing a tie, however, so I just took my jacket off and the clothing thing worked out after all. I started by telling him about my research and my goals, and then we dove right into my list of questions. Unfortunately this whole exchange was in English. His wasn't great, but he knew the relevant vocabulary, so it went better than it would have if I'd tried to come up with Chinese for 'cultivars' or 'herbicide'. I ended up with some good notes, a powerpoint presentation with stats, and an introduction to a guy at the Chinese Center for Agricultural Policy whose papers I've read, so all in all it was productive.
When I got back to work I took my taxi receipts to the administrative assistant to figure out how to get reimbursed. She asked me to write my name and the purpose of the taxi trip on the receipt. "Just write, 'meeting'," she said. So I did, she added up the total for the 2 receipts on her calculator, asked if I could break a hundred, and handed me cash on the spot. How cool is that? In a country filled with red tape, in an organization known for bureaucracy, I got my taxi receipts refunded from petty cash out of a drawer in the assistant's desk.
Night out at 5:19
I decided that I should go out to a bar. I was sick of sitting around watching TV and eager to try to meet people, and I'd seen on the thatsbeijing forum that a member was performing at a place nearby called 5:19, so I decided to check it out.
5:19 was quiet. There was the forum member playing guitar and singing rather competently, plus maybe 10 other people on the first floor. There were others upstairs on the roof, but I didn't know that yet. So I ordered a drink, much to my regret turning down the Bombay Sapphire in favor of the dramatically cheaper Gordon's Dry in my gin and tonic. I chatted with a few of the guys sitting around on some couches. They turned out to be Americans working in construction on the new US embassy, and were all pretty drunk. The conversation was much as you'd expect a chat with drunk construction workers to be, revolving around booze, women, and sports. I politely declined their invitation to go next door to dance with the Filipina girls, explaining with a straight face that I was waiting for a friend.
I chatted with the bartender and owner, Dave from Canada, who was running the business in his retirement. I asked him why he'd stayed in China after his decade-long contract with the mining company was up and after his wife divorced him, and he answered that he couldn't imagine readjusting to civilization.
I met the musician, who I'd previously chatted with in the online forum, and we went upstairs to the roof to hang out with some others. There he introduced me to an older guy from Montana working on the communications infrastructure for the Olympics.
I took the opportunity to ask how he felt about potential protests, which was apparently a red-button issue. It ended up a 3-hour, heated debate about freedoms, respect, and the 'greatest stage ever set on earth'. I thought for a while he was drunk, but it later turned out he was a recovering alcoholic and he'd been drinking tonic water. Anyway, we had radically different points of view. In the young and naive corner, I supported protest and free speech and the ability and obligation of individuals to change the world. He had a much more jaded attitude about the potential for change, and he also believed that the Olympics shouldn't be interrupted by dissent. His arguments weren't very good, but one that held up for me was that public protest would inevitably disrupt some poor athlete's proudest moment. He also had this weird belief that Olympics were about hope for the Chinese people, and that protesting would somehow betray that hope. I personally think that most Chinese see the Olympics more as an opportunity to make a quick buck by whatever means they can than they do a source of hope or pride. Anyway, he argued on the grounds that protesting against injustices in China during thr Olympics was somehow taking away hope from the Chinese people, which was just weird. By this point the bar had closed, which I didn't think they did in Beijing, and we were standing outside the front door debating. He finally misquoted Ben Franklin at me, saying, "He who sacrifices hope for security gets neither." (What?) When of course it's, "He who sacrifices LIBERTY for security deserves neither." So when I pointed his error out to him, trying hard not to jump up and down in glee that he made my point for me, we agreed to disagree and I went home for the night. I didn't meet anyone my age and I didn't meet any girls, but at least I got out of the house.
8/25
On Saturday I met my language exchange partner for the second time, this time at a Starbucks in Guomao halfway between our places. We haven't been very diligent about studying, to say the least. As much as I loathe Starbucks, it was nice to overpay for a giant coffee; I had no idea how much I'd miss the drink. So we chatted for a few hours, asking questions and taking notes. I managed to drop my pocket PC with my electronic dictionary off of the table and down 2 flights of stairs, but it survived intact, probably thanks to the heavy metal case that I've hated lugging around.
Bike repairs (Or, "No, no. Night time is when I fill the hole with water")
It was getting dark when I got back to the subway station where I'd left my bike. I had already put on my helmet and flashing lights and started riding down the street when I realized that my rear tire was flat. Fortunately, China has bicycle repair 'shops' on just about every corner They're really just 3-wheeled carts with supplies and a grease-covered older guy sitting on a stool, but they work. I remembered that only a moment ago I'd seen one across the street from where my bike was parked. Then, as I got off my bike and turned around, something clicked- those bastards flattened my tire. Furious, but trying to act cool, I walked my bike over to the cart and asked to use his pump, hoping they'd just let the air out. So I pumped up my tube and stood around for a minute poking at the tire. It was leaking, so I asked the guy how much it'd be to change the tube. He wanted 40RMB, but I talked him down to 25RMB ($3.50 for parts and labor), plus I get to keep the dead tube, which I'll throw away to prevent him from pawning it off on someone who doesn't know a new one from a patch job. When he took the tire off I checked it for anything along the inside which could re-puncture the tube. Assuming he's competent, he should have done that himself if he didn't know how the tube was damaged. He had a water bowl, so I pumped the tube up and slowly ran the length of it through the water until I found the leak, an invisible line of holes along the seam. It could have been a slightly split seam or it could have been someone with a needle poking my tire a few times. Who knows, but after he put my wheel back on I waited for a few minutes to make sure all was kosher before I paid him and left. I don't know if he actually did kill my tube, but everyone here I've mentioned the incident to thinks he did.
8/27-28
On Monday and Tuesday I got little done at work, or so it always seems to feel. I'm calling and emailing a bunch of people in the government and research institutions, trying to get information and set up meetings. I finally managed to schedule one with the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Science on Wednesday, but other than that I mostly got passed around from person to person and played phone and email tag.
Alessandro, one of UNIDO's permanent staff, has been really helpful about suggesting names and sending emails out through his account with his name on them, so that's been encouraging. We also have fun chats during the day on everything from his part-time job at the opera during college, where he chatted with Pavarotti and had to carry around large, 'dead' sopranos on stage; to articles in the Economist; to hiking and climbing. He's much older than I am, has a wife and a kid, but it's cool to have someone at work to interact with on a social level.
This week I was also tasked with writing the copy for the new UNIDO China brochure. I don't mind doing some of this kind of work for the people here; it makes me feel like I'm pulling my weight and it keeps them happy.
Exercise, plus what do do with my time
The evenings have been slow and long since my 1 month membership for yoga expired. I would have re-upped it, but I'll leave for Thailand before the full month and it seemed expensive to waste that time. As a result I'm going home earlier and still not doing much when I get there. I've been thinking about getting back into martial arts, so I've been shopping around. I found a well-regarded jiu jitsu school down in SOHO, about 15 minutes from work by bike, which I'll probably check out, but I realized that since I'm in China I should probably take advantage of it by learning something local. I've been asking around about taiji and kung fu teachers, but they're elusive. Most of the best teachers seem to be old guys who teach in parks, just not in the parks near me. They also charge lesson by lesson, payable in cash, and aren't cheap. So I'm looking, but I don't know if it's a practical idea.
The other fitness thing I've recently stumbled on is this yoga retreat outside of the city. It's not cheap, but neither is it too expensive- on the order of $100 for a weekend with food, transportation, accommodation, and classes included. It sounds fun, but the most amazing part is the setting; one location is an old Buddhist temple, another has property around a crumbling stretch of the Great Wall. It seems great, assuming I can handle that big a dose of hippie-ness in a weekend.
8/29
My first work meeting with a 'local expert'
After much debate I ended up wearing my suit to my meeting at the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Science. I seriously wonder what people think when they see me walking around wearing a jacket, tie, and eyebrow piercing. I sort of like the contradiction, and I guess I'll settle for it if I can't dye my hair fun colors. No one in China dresses up; it's like casual Friday meets the Caribbean, with short-sleeve button up shirts all around for the elite businessmen and officials and track pants and polo shirts for the rest. It's sort of a shame that a country with such a cool sartorial tradition has settled on the lowest common denominator of Western dress. Even during the Cultural Revolution, although the clothing was uniform, it was unique and interesting.
I got up at 6:30 to make it to my meeting by 9, biking to work to collect my notes and drop off my computer, then catching a cab to Haidian, some 15km away, during rush hour. I got to read papers and jot notes during the ride through the morning traffic, so I understand the appeal of chauffeurs for people with money and stressful jobs. The taxi driver didn't know exactly where to go, but we managed to navigate there successfully, marking the occasion as the first time the Chinese GPS software on my pocket PC has been useful, and even then it wasn't while hooked up to the GPS. The campus of the institute, along with the rest of China, was gutted by construction, so I hiked in dress shoes over piles of dirt and under tin roofs until I found the right building.
The man I was meeting with, a Prof. Huang, had come downstairs to meet me when I called him to tell him I was nearby. We shook hands and headed up to his office. After the business card swap ritual we got down to business, but as an aside, how are you supposed to take the card you're accepting with 2 hands while simultaneously offer your own the same way? I assume you take turns, but who offers first? The actual trade ended up a weird tangle, but I don't think he cared. He spent a couple of years at Cornell, studying abroad as everyone here seems to do, so was probably lower key about some things than he could have been.
Prof. Huang is the head of biotech research at the institute, a scientist, not a suit. He was wearing a tie, however, so I just took my jacket off and the clothing thing worked out after all. I started by telling him about my research and my goals, and then we dove right into my list of questions. Unfortunately this whole exchange was in English. His wasn't great, but he knew the relevant vocabulary, so it went better than it would have if I'd tried to come up with Chinese for 'cultivars' or 'herbicide'. I ended up with some good notes, a powerpoint presentation with stats, and an introduction to a guy at the Chinese Center for Agricultural Policy whose papers I've read, so all in all it was productive.
When I got back to work I took my taxi receipts to the administrative assistant to figure out how to get reimbursed. She asked me to write my name and the purpose of the taxi trip on the receipt. "Just write, 'meeting'," she said. So I did, she added up the total for the 2 receipts on her calculator, asked if I could break a hundred, and handed me cash on the spot. How cool is that? In a country filled with red tape, in an organization known for bureaucracy, I got my taxi receipts refunded from petty cash out of a drawer in the assistant's desk.
Thursday, August 16, 2007
I'm productive, I swear.
I don't talk about work much, partly because I feel like I haven't gotten much done. I haven't really, but yesterday I sent out a draft of my global biotech trends paper to my bosses and they seem to be happy with my progress so far. I figured I'd post a couple of the papers I've written here in case anyone is interested.
Global Trends in Biotechnology - This is sort of an outline of what my final report will look like. I have all sorts of data to add to the descriptions here, and I'm probably going to spend much of my remaining time here collecting more.
Memo to UNIDO China staff about how biotech fits into the UNIDO mandate - This might be a more interesting read. I try to explain science to economists and accountants, so maybe you'll learn a thing or two about ethanol or GM crops or something.
Today I formulated a list of questions to send to the Ministry of Science and Technology. The idea is that I'll be able to set up a meeting with an official and get a bunch of statistics and data from them, or at least backing to conduct a survey of Chinese biotech firms.
Global Trends in Biotechnology - This is sort of an outline of what my final report will look like. I have all sorts of data to add to the descriptions here, and I'm probably going to spend much of my remaining time here collecting more.
Memo to UNIDO China staff about how biotech fits into the UNIDO mandate - This might be a more interesting read. I try to explain science to economists and accountants, so maybe you'll learn a thing or two about ethanol or GM crops or something.
Today I formulated a list of questions to send to the Ministry of Science and Technology. The idea is that I'll be able to set up a meeting with an official and get a bunch of statistics and data from them, or at least backing to conduct a survey of Chinese biotech firms.
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