snow!

Well, last week I was thinking that the weather was finally turning mild, and I could maybe pack away my big fleece and possibly even send it home. Nope! Weather started gtting real cold again on sunday, and when I woke up this mornign there was snow out again!

shopping

Well, I finally got to the Silk Market yesterday. all I can say is "impressive" - I walked around it pretty fast, not really stopping to look at anything, and it still took me the guts of two hours to go through the lot! last time I saw anything like it was hte Golden Arcade in Hong Kong, but while that was 3 (4?) floors of computers stuff, this was 5 floors of clothes! I know one friend of mine (Louise) who would probably nevr leave the place if she went in - the only thing that could get her out of the 3rd floor (the silks floor) would be telling her about the pearls and jewellery on the 4th floor! And once she got to there, you'd need a couple of sticks of dynamite to shift her! :-)

Prices were, well, I'd say you could get a whole new wardrobe in there for what you'd pay for a pair of jeans back home! Of course it's all haggling as well - they start off ridiculously high, you start off ridiculously low (maybe one 10th of what they say)and meet somewhere in the middle! I'm going to have to book an entire weekend for that near the end, for shopping, although my problem then will be how to get everything home.........

This is a quick pic I snapped, you couldn't stop long to take pics tho, as the second you stopped moving the stall vendors were all over you like price-quoting piranha!

The Best Laid Plans.....

Well, my weekend didn't exactly go quite the way I was planning it earlier in the week. I know Shane is going to be disappointed in me (again), but I still haven't managed to hit any of the local nightspots here in Beijing and mix with the locals. I was planning to, but then matters were taken out of my control.

The original plan was that myself and a crowd from work were going to head off skiing on sat (organized by the guy who'd slept in last weekned and missed my other ski trip), and then I'd meet up with a few of the irish guys and head down to Sanlitun sat night. Sunday then I was planning on going on a cycle tour to the Ming Tombs (assuming I was able to be up early enough to get to the meeting place at Jinshuan park by 8am!). It started off ok, met up with the work crowd and headed out to the ski resort. Turns out it was the same place I was in last week!

Seeing as only 3 others out of the 14 ppl had been skiing before, I ended up spending the morning teaching a few of them how to ski. Me, the guy who has been skiing a total of 2 times before this, teaching other ppl how to ski!! It sort of started off me showing one of the girls how to get up the slope without falling on her ass, and sort of grew from there. I'm not saying now that the fact that the girl I started helping was really fit had anything to do with me deciding to "coach" her, but I'm not saying it didn't have anything to do with it either! :-P

So far so good anyway, skiing went OK, even managed to get a few runs on the "big" slopes in between coaching sessions (they'd stopped the lifts to the top slope tho, as it was melted too much to ski on, so I only had the blue run). After the skiing tho is where things started to not go to plan. There'd been mention of us going to a spa earlier in the week, but I thought it was just for a few hours then we'd be heading back into town. When we got there tho, suddenly we're checking into this hotelont eh outskirts of the city! It seems the guy who'd told me about it had neglected to mention to me that we were staying the night. So, not only was I not going out in town like I'd wanted to, I was also left with no change of clothes, and wearing the gear I'd been skiing in!

We went out for dinner anyway, then back to the spa, where we went into the hot springs. My god! When they say hot, they mean hot! Now I know what food must feel like when you throw it in the cooking pot! Some of the pools were OK, but others were just barely on the cool side of unbearable. The air temp was maybe only 3-4 degrees (all the pools were outside), but I still had to get out to cool down every now and then. Thing is tho, you were so hot after the water you didn't even notice the cold air! Was an interesting place tho, lots of hot springs with difernet kinds of minerals in some of the pools (supposed to be good for you and all). I couldn't take any pics tho as you weren't allowed, something to do with everyone being half nekkid I guess. Anyway, we were tehre til about 11ish, and afterwards we went bac to one of the hotel rooms where they tried to teach me how to play Mahjongg (complicated) and a few chinese card games. The card games thing wasn't so successful anyway, mainly 'cos the people who were trying to explain it to me could nevr find the right words in english, and spent so much time arguing over hte rules that half the time it dind't seem like they knew them either! That went on til about 2am anyway, then up at 9 for 10am checkout and I got back to my apartment about 11:30 - so much for the 8am cycle tour!

So, a good enough day, but not quite the day I had planned.......

First Chinese Lesson

Well, I finally decided that my mime act whenever we go out wasn't going to get me all that far, so I decided to sign up for some chinese lessons. Bloody hell! I thought getting the pronounciations was going to be hard, but I didn't count on having to deal with the tones! So, for each vowel sound, you have 5 possible tones (high tone, rising tone, "dipping" tone, falling tone, no tone), and each one has a different meaning. Then, to add to the fun, some combinations of the tones aren't used in some characters. And I thought having no vowels in written arabic and using the accents as vowels was bad! Got afew simple phrases for eating out as well (sort of ironic, I found a restaurant last night where the staff speak english, and now I start geting the phrases I need to order!)

eating out

Well, I finally had a craving for western food yesterday. Took longer than I expected, two weeks! I was at the Lama Temple and sort of met up with this American girl, Katie - was the usual thing of "sorry, would you mind take my picture?", and seeing as we were the only english-speakers around, we decided to team up for the day. At least that way we figured, we'd actually be able to get pictures of ourselves in all the touristy places!

So, we "did" the Lama Temple, then walked down to the Drum Tower and the Bell tower, then up to Coal Hill in Jingshuan Park to get the view of the city. Unfortunately, you couldn't get to the top of the hill 'cos they're renovating the building at the top, os we had to make do with pics taken from maybe 3/4 up through the trees. after that, we walked back down to Wanfujing, and at that stage we were ravenous 'cos we'd done maybe a 5-6k walk! So, I txted a few lads to find out where we could get some burgers and stuff (Katie was having food pangs as well - after only a week!), so they told us about this place called Outback down by the Worker's Stadium.

Before we went there, we were passing the food market up on (I think) Wusi Daije, and I decided seeing as I was going to have a nice steak like back home, first I was going to brave the local "delicacies"! So, I got some deep-fried scorpion!



The pic was taken just after I took my first bite, while I was still trying to figure out what the taste was :-) Sort of was just crunchy and deep-fried, no real taste. if had to say something, it'd be like the crunchy skin you sometimes get on chicken wings.

After that, we headed for Outback and pigged out on american-style food portions and chinese beer! Fully satiatd, we headed back to the Night Market for a look, then seeing as i had to get my train back to Wudaokou, we went our separate ways. Nice girl, too bad she's heading home tomorrow......

Hitting the red slopes in China

Well, this is what skiing looks like in china!


Got a call from one of the lads I was out with last weekend saying that Peter (the Austrian guy, the one wearing shades in this pic) and some friends of his were going skiing today, and did I want to tag along. So, I did! I had to get up at 6:30am to get across to the other side of town to meet up with them. This was a bit unfortunate as I'd been out fri night with Liam and his friend in an (in)famous Beijing bar called Maggie's in the embassy district!

Anyway, I got in the taxi about 7:30, and on the way rang my "liason officr" from work who said that he'd wanted to go too. Well, turns out he wasn't going 'cos when I rang him to find out where he was, 15mins before we were supposed to meet the others, I woke him up! Met the others in this huge hotel (the Kerpinsky hotel, if you're ever in town), and we headed up to the resort, which was about an hour and a half's drive north of beijing. On the way up, I got my first view of the Great Wall, from the window of the car!

We finally got there anyway, after a bit of confusion with directions, and I'm not sure what I was expecting but this wasn't it. Maybe my experience in Soll had spoiled me a bit, but I was expecting a bit more snow! There was only one real run, then there was the baby slopes for the beginners. Once we got there, we had over an hour of total chaos to get all our gear and get sorted - it's the first time I've understood the term "chinese fire drill"! All we had to do was to get our boots and skis, and two of us had to get suits, but it involved arguing with everyone involved - we were just lucky that one of the guy's girlfriends was chinese and could argue properly! Even then, at one stage one of us had to hop over the counter and go off searching for the gear which we could see on the far side of the counter but which the guy behind the counter insisted he didn't have. Even after that, I ended up with odd skis and two poles that were differnt sizes.

FInally, about 11am, we got skiing! We started off by going up to the very top of the slope, which looked OK from the ground but when you got up there, wsan't quite as appealing looking to someone with as little skiing experience as me! I managed it though, and so that began the pattern for the day. Afterwards, talking to one of the guys, he reckoned the slope we were doing would be about a red back in Austria, so I did fairly well for myself for the day! I only started falling on it later on in the evening when my legs started getting tired (and my hangover from the night before kicked on - no nice high austrian altitiudes and clear air to blow away the cobwebs!). The guys were actually surprised when I told them that I'd only done a week's skiing before, said I handled it pretty well under the circumstances.

We managed to get a fair bit of skiing in anyway, and left the place around maybe 4:30-5pm. By then the muscles I'd forgotten I had form last time skiing were definitely making themselves felt. Now I'm just waiting for the post-ski stiffness to set in! Anyway, here's me in my lovely lavender ski suit, and my "ski partner" for the day (Alex, who also got odd skis, but we couldn't swap 'cos the sizes were different)

food - beijing style

Well, I know that eating over here is pretty different to back home, but last night was definitely a new one for me. Eating over here is generally a communal thing anyway, instead of everyone getting their own thing and just eating that you get a load of dishes, put them in the center of the table ane everyone helps themselvs. If you have a big party (5 or 6 ppl), you get a round table with a glass turntable which all the dishes go on, and you just twirl it around (slowly of cours) til the dish you want is in front of you. I've done it before in dublin when I was out with Vicky & the lads in "real" chinese restaurants (as in, you don't order by a number :-P), and of course when I was in Hong Kong 18 months ago, but it's been so long that it was still a bit of a novelty when I got here.

At least one thing about that tho was that at least the food came out to you cooked! Last night though, we went out for a more "traditional" Beijing dish: hotpot. Here, ther's a little gas cooker on the table and you get a big-ass dish of "soup" boiling away on it. Then, you get a few big platters of little rolls of thinly sliced meat (lamb, chicken, beef) and few plates of veg, which you dip in the pot until it's cooked. Takes a bit of getting used to!



The one we had had two parts to it, on side was the "hot and spicy" side and one was the milder side. I'll let you guess from the pic which was which :-)

Officially an "irish abroad"

Well, the other day I was told that I should really register with the Irish Embassy here in Beijing, so they could keep track of me just in case anything should happen (plus you get invited to the official Paddy's day bash). I sent off the registration form the other day, and got confirmation this morning. So, now I'm officially an "Irish abroad".

Oh, something else struck me as well. the email had the usual boiler-plate "this email is confidential blah blah blah", but it had it in irish as well as english. I never knew the irish word for email before - r-phost"!

cold!

Well, after me saying in my last entry that the weather was starting to get warmer, it must have hard me and decided to play tricks on me. It's bloody freezing today! At least last week it was cold but there was no wind, today's wind chill factor is like about -5 degrees, which is putting the temp back below zero. And there was me thinking about going out doing touristy stuff this evening! Think I'll just go playing pool with the lads instead.

Impressions after 10 days

Well, I've been here for 10 days now, might as well give some impressions of the country as I've seen it so far. I've been stuck at work during the week from 9am til maybe 6:30-7:30, so I haven't had much of a chance to do all that much touristy stuff, and I'm living a fair bit out from the city center as well so I'm not in the heart of things, but shur I'll just give a few impressions anyway, in no particular order.

• Cold! When we were coming in on the plane, the pilot announced that it was -7 degrees outside. I nearly died when I stepped out of the airport! It snowed on my second day here, then it got even colder. I think it got down to maybe -12 or -13 on tues night! It's been a bit warmer since then, but the last of the snow we got on last monday only really melted away on sunday, and all of the rivres around are still frozen over. Reckon it may be hovering around zero or slightly above most days now, but by now I'm used to it. Supposed to get warmer next week, hopefully!


• Good Food. Well, I haven't had all that much to eat that I've actually recognized while I've been here, but then again, pretty much everything that I've had has been damn nice. I've been going out to restaurants a lot (see my next point), but even the canteen in work is maybe about as good as most of the chinese restaurants I've been to in dublin. I'm getting pretty handy with the auld chopsticks as well, I wouldn't be up to doing brain surgery with them or anything, but I'm at the stage where for most things I don't really have to think about what I'm doing with them any more. If I'm stuck, there are some western places around me where I work as well, Pizza Hut, McDonalds, KFC, but I'm avoiding them unless I get serious cravings. It's funny though, Pizza Hut back home would be considered a middle-of-the-road cheap-enough food joint, but here it's a classy joint where all the fashionable young people go to hang out and be seen. Apparently there was a 2hr wait to get in there last night, on Valentines night!


• Cheap! I still can't get over how cheap things are! We went out for lunch at work on my first day, 10 people, we all stuffed ourselves, and the bill came to ¥330 - or about €35 - for 10 people! Your average meal might set you back maybe ¥20 0r ¥30 (€3 maybe), a beer in some places is ¥5 (50c), or a really good imported beer might be ¥30. The metro is ¥3 (30c) a ticket, and a taxi from here to the city center might be ¥50 (€5) for a 45min trip. Amazing!


• Language. Well, there's no way in hell I'm going to be anywhere near fluent by the end of the 2 months. If I get enough to be able to go out for a meal and actually order rather than just pointing at the menu I'll be doing OK. So far I can mostly say "ni hau" (hello), "zhe zhe" (thank you), "wo ting budong" (I don't understand) and "dai buche" (I'm sorry). Oh, and "piju" (beer) of course! :-) It's a bit of a hassle though going around and not being able to communicate with maybe 9 out of 10 people you see. No-one appears to speak english in any of the shops around here (which was fun when I went to get my local SIM card), but I can just about get by with the old mime artist bit. The scariest language bit so far has to have been the taxi the other night - I was getting into a car with a stranger who I knew I wouldn't be able to talk to, and was supposed to get him to take me to one particular spot in a city of 5 million people! I'm in two minds as to whether I'm going to go seriously mad on learning the language or not, as I'm only here for 2 months. Reckon I'd just about be making some headway when I have to head home. I'll see.


• No TV! This is related to the last part there about the language, but is serious enough to warrant a paragraph on its own. My TV has 58 channels, but only one is in english! And the one english channel I have is a weak-ass soft propaganda mouthpiece for the govt! "today the central government announced this wonderful new plan". Hell, even CNN would be better than this! My TV is currently plugged out and my laptop is plugged in instead of it, with bittorrent running nearly the whole time pulling down TV shows and films from home (have the first 4 episodes of that new C4 show, "The IT crowd" here)


• Transport. As I mentioned already, everything is damn cheap. The metro isn't as expansive as maybe I'd be used to from Dublin Europe, but I have a station on the light rail just 5mins walk from the house and that gets me into Tian'anmen square or thereabouts in 45min (have to change lines twice). It apparently gets really packed at rush hour, but it's been OK when I'v been on it. Apparently the best two ways of getting around town are by bike (still) and by taxi. Taxis are dirt cheap, and nearly every 2nd or 3rd vehicle on the road is a taxi! You have to be a bit careful, they will try to rip you off (altho even at the rip-off prices they're nothing compared to dublin - at least you still have the shirt on your back when you get out of a taxi over here). as I said though, communication with the drivers is a bit on the minimal side, you're best off to have your destination written down for you by some friendly chinese-speaker. The roads are really wide as well - the ones outside my place are 2 lanes each direction, and wouldn't be as busy as back home. It seems that pedestrians have the right of way nearly the whole time on crossing, although you still have to watch yourself as they have the same "right turn on red" thing here that they have in the US. Still though, I know I'm going to have to be sooo careful when I get home, as the bad habits I'm picking up here for crossing the road will kill me in a day on Dublin streets!


• Cops. Maybe it's because I'm living in an area filled with mostly foreigners, and beside a big university, but there is a cop or a guy in an army uniform standing on nearly every 2nd street corner! they don't look as if they're armed, but if the gardai back home hd this much visible presence on dublin streets the crime rate would be a fraction of what it is.


• Shopping. I've mentioned already about the main shopping street, wanfujing, being way better than anything we have at home, and in general here it seems like they've gone and embraced the whole capitalist thing with both hands and then some. On Wudaokou, the street that backs on to my apartment complex, nearly every 2nd shop is a mobile phone shop, and my local supermarket is just amazing. As well as your normal food and drink I can get stuff like mobile phones, wide-screen TVs, shoes, bedclothes, DVDs, motor oil, exercise equipment (and I mean like treadmills and step machines), washing machines and bras under the one roof (not that I'd be buying bras of course). This is what tesco is trying its damndest to be back home! Granted the fact that in the food section I'm having a hard time getting anything I recognize 'cos I can't read the labels off anything is a bit of a problem, but if I could I'd be sorted!


• Communism. Well, right after that rampant consumerism bit, I have to mention the whole commie thing. Apart from the soldiers everywhere, about the most obvious sign of it I've seen so far is on the web - some sites like the BBC won't work (though Fox News does, go figure), and don't even bother typing in "tiananmen" in google, links just won't load. Even this blog is blocked (altho it's wierd, I can update it via blogger.com, bt can't see it via blogspot.com). Then again, most of the time I'd never be looking up politically dodgy sits anyway, so ti doens't really make much difference to me (apart from not being able to se how my blog looks). Outside of that, the only time I've really noticed it is in a few over-dinner conversations with ppl at work, who were sort of surprised at some of the casual freedoms we have back home, like not needing a visa or a passport to travel around europe, or having more than one child per family. It's not all that obvious, but there are still some little things.

Anyway, enough for one night!

irish people are a bad influence......

Well, I've met up with a few irish ppl over here anyway. So far I've gone out with crowds of irish 3 times, and on all 3 occasions I've ended up getting to bed around 4-4:30. Last night it was (sort of) a going-away thing for some of the girls I met out on sat night. They're only over here for a week, and they're going on tomorrow to their final destination, Australia (where else?). They were still going strong when I left the bar at 4:30am, but I had to go "early" as I was the only one in the group who had work the next morning (or later on, should I say).

Going out on a monday night is a bad idea in general, but going out until 4:30am on a monday is a reeealy bad idea.... At leasrt now I suppose I know a few bars in the neighbourhood.

Happy valentines day!

heh, looks like the web site is actually down - too much traffic! :-)

My first "touristy" weekend part 2 - the old and the new

On sunday morning, despite not having gotten quite as much sleep as I may have liked (you never do when you only get to bed at 4:30am), I headed back off into town to go to see the big thing everyone has to see in Beijing: the Forbidden City. When they say "city" they mean it - we're not talking a town with pretensions (like kilkenny), this place is HUGE inside! The first three areas you hit are just big huge courtyards, each one maybe twice the size of a football field, with big huge walls and big huge pagoda-style halls at each end (ok, I'll try to stop using the word "huge" now). This is just one of them, the "smaller" inner courtyard! Once you get inside the 3rd great hall (the Hall of Suprme Harmony, where the emporer used to hold court. It looks impressive even now, with only the throne still in thre, but before the furnishings used to be magnificent. After you've been plundered a few times by the mongols, hte british & french, the japanese, and then your own commie leaders (during the cultural revolution), you tend to lose a lot of stuff and the rooms are mostly empty.

After you get past the great hall, things become a bit smaller, but only in a relative sense. It still took me about two hours to wander around maybe half of the inside of it, altho I was going at the pace of the american package tour I was sort of shadowing (grabbing myself a free tour, I'd accidentally just so happen to be close enbough to hear whenever the guide was explaining stuff). If you dind't have a map, chances are you'd get lost and possibly never be heard from again. The Forbidden City had a staff of over 1,500 to look after the emperor and his concubines (altho one emperor apparently had 72 concubines, so I guess they took a lot of looking afer) - all that to look after one man! A fine job if you can get it!

One of the stranges things I saw int here though was aa snall slice of modern life - a Starbucks. Yup, they actually have a Starbucks in the forbidden city, for when you get tired of walking around and just need that esspresso hit to keep you going. Granted it's not a big monstrousity of a place, but it's still fairly jarring to see it, and a lot of chinese are really up in arms about this symbol of yankee capitalism getting a toehold in the heart of chinese history!

Having said that, they aren't all that bad at the auld capitalism themselves. After I left the forbidden city I went up Wangfujing street, which is the shopping heart of the city. If that was communism, roll on the revolution! Two big huge shopping centers, bigger than anything we have at home, one at each end of the street, with tons of shops in between! The closest equivalent I could think of was maybe Oxford St in london, except it's not the same 5 shops repeated every hundred yeards like oxford st! The strangst part though was that at one point, if you wander off a side street, you're into the markets, all the trinkety little stalls with the owners shouting "looky looky" when they se a westerner, and all the food stalls selling god-knows what (I recognized the locusts and beetles on skewers, and the baby seahorses and calamari on skewers, anything else was pure guesswork), which I was insufficiently brave enough to try. Bit of a contrast to the jewellers shop and the mobile phone shops that they back onto on the other side of the block!

What did piss me off though was that I got tapped 3 times for the "art/calligraphy student" thing I mentioned in my last blog (where they try to persuade you to see an art "exhibition" and end up trying to sell you a load of paintings). I have a feeling that if this keeps going I'm going to get the same sort of sterotype feelings I got in Hong Kong - there it was any indian guy I see is going to try to sell me a suit, here it'll be any chinese person starts talking to me in english is trying to sell me paintings.

Anyway, after a bit of walking around the shops feeling like a country bumpkin, I decided enough was enough, and headed back "home", to recharge my camera batteries before heading out to the lantern festival. So, a busy day, with big contrasts, old traditional imperial china versus new brash consumer-oriented-commie-in-name-only china!

My first "touristy" weekend part 1 - scam warning

Ok, have a bit of catching up to do here in terms of what I've been doing. I have my first fill working week under me at the moment, and am starting into my second, so time to recount my first bit of time off around Beijing.

Saturday morning I woke up a little bit later than I'd planned, and between that and the usual missing-the-train-by-10-secs at Wodaokou, it was gone 1pm when I got into Tian'anmen square. Getting there was no problems anyway, by this stage I have the metro route sussed. The weather was maybe the warmest we've had yet (still a bit chilly tho), so I wandered around the square a bit getting my first good view of it in daylight. My first thought? "big. damn big". About the best scale I can come up with is if someone took stephen's green in Dublin and paved over it. There were loads of people just walking around the square, and a good few people flying kits as well. Defintwly a bit differnt than your average weekend activity at home, especially at this time of the year! the only rason the place doesn't look absolutley huge is because it's surrounded by these equally huge soviet-era buildings, and then there's Mao's Tomb in the center, not exactly small itself.

After a few mins of idly walking around snapping pics I sort of bumped into this chinese girl who said she was visitng from Tsingtao (I think), and was being shown around by her uncle. We got chatting a bit, and then they asked seeing as he was showing her around, did I want to tag along?

I said yup, why not, so we headed down to "downtown" Beijing, the part to the south of Tina'anmen square. We did a bit of a tour around, then we went to a Tea house which the uncle said he'd wanted to show her. So, we went in and did the tea cermony, which was pretty good. I'm not a big tea drinker, but what we got was pretty good even to my unsophisticated tea-tastebuds. Reckon it's something my father would have appreciated more than me. I would have taken pictures, but apparently you're not allowed for some reason. After the tea house, we went out and had a big meal. A good day, one of those accidental things that crop up every now and then. Or so I thought.

Later on in the evening I went out to meet the irish guys I'd met, they were having an Irish night in some bar, and when I told them about my day, they said "oh yeah, that's a scam". Apparently the "bumping into by accident" thing is all a ploy to get you into the tea house. This is a farily rare version of the ploy tho, the more common one is someone comes up to you, and after a bit of conversation, says that they're an art student, and their college is having an exhibition, do you want to take a look. Then, when you get there, you get stuck to buy some paintings or calligraphy. I actually got that one tried on me maybe 4-5 times walking around yesterday. At least the ones that caught me were way more subtle about it than the "art students". They were so smooth that if I hadn't been told it was a scam I'd prob have believed it. I'm not all that put out by it, I was planning on doing the whole tea ceremony thing at some stage, and I din't get stuck for all that much with it (altho I'm sure there are cheaper tea houses). It would have been nice to have been warned about all that sort of thing beforehand tho.

Oh yeah, the irish night. Well, on my first night out in beijing I dind't exactly get to meet too many locals, but it was a good auld session anyway. Lasted til about 4am! One of the irish guys I met on weds night was playing in this english bar, and so I spoent the night talking mostly to irish and english and a few germans and austrians (who for some reason turned up at the irish gig). Ah well, is all in the name of getting to meet more people!

Happy Lantern Day!

Well, it may not mean all that overmuch at home, but it's Lantern Day here in China. Today is the last day of the Spring Festival, where everyone displays colorful lanterns around ther home and eats some sort of spcial dish (something like a dunpling)

From this website, which knows more about the festival than I do, "According to the Chinese tradition, at the very beginning of a new year, when there is a bright full moon hanging in the sky, there should be thousands of colorful lanterns hung out for people to appreciate. At this time, people will try to solve the puzzles on the lanterns and eat yuanxiao (glutinous rice ball) and get all their families united in the joyful atmosphere.". Well, there we go.

One thing I will say about the lantern festival, not only is it bright and colorful with all the lanterns, but it's also damn loud! For the last week there has been fireworks going off sporadically all over the place, but tonight it's just gone crazy! If you thought that Dublin on Halloween was mad, you hsould hear this. At least at halloween you can get anything from 30secs to 5mins sometimes between explosions. Not here. the noise has been pretty much constant all night since it started getting dark (and even a bit before).

My first thoughts during the week were "wow, they're lighting off foreworks like it's going out of style or something". Turns out I was almost right! It seems that this year is the first time in 20 years that the governemt here has allowed people to set of fireworks, and it's only for the duration of the fstival. So, since they won't be allowed do it again from tomorrow on, the locals are getting in as much explosions as they can!

Anyway, despite the pyrotechnics, there are also lantern displays in various parks around town. The biggest of these (or so I was told) was in Chaoyang park, so once it got dark I headed out for a look. It was a big moment 'cos it was also my first time trying to get from point A to point B in a taxi unaided! Manged to get there anyway, and was well worth the trip (altho at RMB36 or €3.75 for a 16.5km run it was cheap enough anyway). We defintely odn't have anything like this at home! There were lanterns of all shapes and designs. There were your "normal" lanterns and fairy lights hanigng on nearly every second tree in the park, and then there were the displays! Everything from animals and birds (and dinosaurs) to Pagodas and gateways to big ornamental sculptures, all lit from within! I'll link a few pics here now, the rest will be up on my flickr site soon.

There were only three slight down sides to the whole evening. The first was that my camera battery died when Iwas only maybe 3/4 of the way aorund the park, and my phone battery didn't last a whole load longer. The second was that it was freezing cold, and the fingers on my camera hand were nearly dropping off me by the time the batery went. The third was that while the trip out in the taxi went no probs, on the way back th egimp taxi driver didn't have a clue where Leisure Gardens were, got lost in Wudoakou and had to ask directions off another taxi driver we mat at some lights! I was OK with the route for most of the way, but then I think he turned left instead of right at one junction and totally lost me. Ended up taking twice as long and costing nealy twice as much as it should have. Ah well. Next time I'll have the chinese for "near Tsinghua University" or "Wodaokou Light Rail station" memorized or written down!

More Irish

Well, I managed to find some other irish people already! The admin here sent out the usual "please welcome Kieran to ERI" mail when I arrived, and nearly straight away I was contacted by another irish guy who works in the office here. Went out with him and his mates last night for a meal and a few drinks (was a going-away thing for another irish guy who's going home today). Got to bed at 4am, so am a tad tired today.....

He told me about some big mad events that are happening for Paddys day, including a black tie affair at the irish embassy. Good job I brought the suit jacket so! They're also planning a movie night, going to show a few episodes of Fr Ted (I suggested the one where he gets branded a racist by the Craggy Island Chinese community) and a film. Could be a laff.

A few pics

Well, I finaly have the broadband working in the apartment. Seems the settings they told me were wrong, all I needed to do was set it up for DHCP. So, now that I have it, I can put up some of the pics I've been taking the last few days!

So, here's my apartment:



here's the view from my window:



Here's my new office:



And here's my first "tourist" pic, of the Gate of Heavenly Peace in Tian'anamen square!



I'll be adding all my pics to a flickr set as I go along anyway.

Oh, I've also been working on cross-cultural relations here too. Myself and my new team members went out for a meal last night (with the bottle of Paddys whiskey I brought over with me :-) ), and the conversation turned to sport, so I was telling them about hurling. So, this morning, I downloaded a few video clips to show them :-) This one especially impressed them, was just a shame about the result of the match...... (Cork vs Waterford Munster final 2004, 50Mb quicktime movie).

First bit of exploring.

I finally went and did a bit of wandering around yesterday evening. Instead of sitting in watching TV I can't understand, I decided to try out the metro and head into Tiananmen Square. It was my first real journey out of the "comfort zone", into an area where I had a pretty good idea that no-one could understand me, or me them. Then again, it doesn't exactly take a cunning linguist to go up to a ticket counter and say "Ahr, Xiexie" (two please). There's no ticket machines here yet, so everything is still done by hand. Not exactly rocket science though!

I had to get two separate tickets, one for the light rail from Wudaokou (my station) to Xizhimen, then another to connect to the metro at Xizhimen. When the ticket lady gave me the tickets, I wasn't sure what to do with tem, as one was a cardboard ticket and the other was paper - two different systems! I took a random guess and put the cardboard ticket into the machine at Wudaokou, and luckily guessed right, 'cos they took the other ticket off me at Xizhiemen!

What can I say, the metro is the metro, pretty much the same in any country. Luckily the signs were all up in Chinese and in Pinyin, so I could at least tell which station was which, and the announcements were in mandarin and english. It was sort of funny though, for most of the stations, the announcements went something like:

Announcer: <something in chinese> Fuchengmen <keeps talking for another 20secs>
then:
Announcer: The next station is Fuchengmen.

Some of the public safety notices on the windows of the carriages were in engrish as well, I'm going to have to try to get a photo!

Anyway, between having to change lines twice and all, it took a good hour to get into Tiananmen square, and when I got off the train I was the only one at that stop. When I got out of the station I soon figured out why - it was about minus 10 degrees with a wind chill of easily another -2! I was pretty glad that I brought my ski gloves and neckwarmer, altho I was wishing I'd brought my ski hat too. My first impressions were: "big", "impressive", and "cold!". I sort of felt sorry for the guards who were guarding Mao's tomb, I was freezing my ass off just standing there for 5 mins! The square itself was closed off , so I just stuck around long enough to take a few pics, and headed back again. So, as excursions go it wasn't exactly up there with the Lewis & Clark expedition, but it was a start!

first impressions of Beijing

Well, I've been here over 24hrs now, and so I guess it's time to give my first impressions of Beijing. I have to admit that my first thoughts on the place were along the lines of "what the hell have I gotten myself into?". Having said that I wasn't really in great form (travelling for nearly 20hrs will do that to you), and the local temperature was -7 when I arrived with a bit of a frost fog around. All I've really seen of the city so far is the few blocks around where my apartment is, so it's not really fair to judge the place on that either. Im a good 45mins out fromt eh center of town apprantly, it's at the end of one of the metro lines and I'll have to change lines twice to get into the center. At least there's a lot of shops and stuff around my area - there's even a Starbucks, a McDonalds, a KFC and a Pizza Hut. I'm going to try to stay away from them as much as I can though, I can get them back home after all. The local supermarket is mad - you can get anything there from TVs and the latest Nokia phones to stationary and shoes and bras (not that I'd be buying bras or anything...). I'm maybe going to try to take the metro into town this evening to take a look around, but I'm still fairly tired after the trip so that might have to wait another day.

The place is looking a bit nicer out there now tho - it started snowing this morning just as I was getting up, and hasn't really stopped yet as far as I can see. It's a good job I brought my neck warmer, cap & gloves from the ski trip with me.

The language thing is going to be a killer though, where I'm staying. Most of the shops have no english at all, not even pinyin (which wouldn't be all that much use to me but would be better than nothing). I'm going to try to do my best to pick up some mandarin but until then it's sign language. At least I've found one good restaurant anyway. We went out for lunch today, to celebrate my arrival, and it seems the place they brought me gives emplyee discount to Sun employees, due to it being so close to the office. We brought along the bottle of Irish whisky I brought over as a present, so it was a nice relaxed lunch all round :-) Cheap too - 330 Yuan for 10 people! That's like €30 - you'd pay that for one person at home!

Nearly quitting time here now, wonder whether I'll have much energy to go into take my first look at Tianamen Square..... I'm not sure at what point I'll be able to put pictures up, as the internet connection in the apartment isn't working with my laptop at the moment.As soon as it is, and as soon as I actually take some, I'll put them up!

I've arrived.......

Well, I'm finally here. Sitting in my new office in Beijing (I get an office rather than a cubicle! yay!), trying to get my head around my new environment.

The trip was long, waaay long! Up at 7am sat morning, left the house at 8 to check in for my 10:30 flight, got to heathrow at 11:40 to realise that I was there until 16:40. A 5hr stopover! Luckily I'd checked my bag straight though and gotten my LHR-PEK boarding pass in dublin, otherwise I'd have had to lug my bag around for 5hrs. And it was a heavy bag too! Thank god for the new automated check-in in dublin airport, they never really weighed my bag - reckon I was maybe 10Kg overweight! I was thinking I'd have enough time to go into London to have lunch with my cousin, but then I remembered that he was in India, so that knocked that idea on the head. Instead, I managed to find a bar that was showing the Ireland V Italy rugby match and settled in there for the duration.

I noticed a few rather strange things about Heathrow airport. First off, it seems to defy the law of physics that states that "the shortest distance between two points is a straight line". There is no shortest distance between anywhere in heathrow! Second is the rather strange security measure they have around laptops. When I was going through security in dublin, they made me take the laptop out of its case and put it through the x-ray separately. In heathrow, I had to take the laptop out of its case, put it into a clear plastic bag and put it through the x-ray. The purpose of the plastic bag escapes me, if anyone has a clue, please mail me with the answer. The third strange thing I noticed was that in Terminal 4, the international terminal, the only plug adaptors you can get are UK to European plugs. This is despite the fact that Terminal 4 is the terminal where you go to fly pretty much everywhere else but europe!

Anyway, I made it onto the plane (no thanks to being still in the bar watching England V Wales when the boarding all was announced), and thankfully everything went smoothly after that. Landed in Beijing, got picked up by the taxi, and dropped at the flat. My place here is about the same size as my place back in ireland! I have a few small problems with it though: the TV has 50 channels but only one in english, the controls for the heating system are all in chinese so I'm going by trial and error, and I have a key to the apartment but no key for the front door of the building yet, so so far I'm getting in by waiting for someone else and tagging in behind them!

One more thing that is going to be tricky is food. I went to the supermarket yesterday when I got in, and realised that the first few times I go shopping I'm going to need help, 'cos I can't read the labels on anything! Am going to have to go by the pictures on the box, which don't help since a lot of them are cartoon characters. As for cooking instructions, I'm going to have to make it up as I go along....

Nearly there.....

Well, they say that a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. I'm going a tad further than that (like about 8,000 miles), but I guess the principle is the same. I guess you could say I've started off now anyway, with the train journey from Waterford to Dublin. I've done this part a couple thousand times, and the next part (dublin to heathrow) a few times, but after that I'm into unknown territory. I'm starting to get a bit of the jiters now anyway, feeling a tad bit nervous and a tad bit excited - not sure which I'm feeling more, is a close-run thing. For some wierd reason I have the one song going through my head, and it's not the usual one either. Normally when I'm heading off I have "Leaving On A Jet Plane" (the one from the "Armageddon" soundtrack, not the original) going round and round in my skull. This time tho I have the "sleep song" from Nick Jr going, the thing they play at 8pm to try to get kids to go to sleep!! I blame Brendan & Lou, damn thing must have stuck in my head when I was down in Galway and they had it on to try to get Adam to go to bed.

Anyway, my bags are (mostly) packed, my passport, visa, money etc are all on the bedside locker waiting to go, and my pr0n collection on the laptop's hard drive is tucked away where any Ministry of State Security ppl are unlikely to find it! Just have to go through my holiday checklist now, little tips & tricks I've learned from experience on various holidays:

• If you're doing a stopover somewhere, always give yourself at least two hours to play with, 'cos chances are you'll be taking off late from Dublin airport


• Split your credit cards, keep one with your passport and one with your wallet. That way, if you lose your wallet, you're not strapped for cash


• Keep some high-denominaiton bill of the local currency in with your passport as well, same reason as above (but not in the picture or visa page where it may be misintrpreted as a bribe)


• Keep some sterling with you when you're travelling, 'cos you never know when you're going to be stranded in some english airport for a while (even if you're not technically supposed to be even going through england, your airline may have other ideas)


• Always keep a spare change of clothes in your carry-on luggage, enough to keep you going for a day when you arrive, in case Aer Ling..., er, someone loses your bags along the way


• Keep the international emergency number for your credit cards, bank cards etc in your phone, plus the address/phone number of where you'll be staying. Also keep a copy where you can get to it if you lose your phone (I email it to my gmail account)


• Keep a spare copy of your flight/hotel details (booking numbers etc), plus a photocopy of your passport in your check-through bag.


• Buy chewing gum for when your ears are popping on the plane before you go to the airport, 'cos normally they don't sell it there.

And last but not least, never forget that airport seurity have absolutely no sense of humour whatsoever......

Laptop reinstalled!

Well, I got the laptop reinstalled anyway. Was a bit touch-and-go for a while, as my WinXP Pro disk was a lot more scratched then I thought it was, and it kept throwing up errors like "Unable to read <file>: it appears to be corrupted". So, there was a lot of taking the CD out of the machine, trying to clean off the surface as best I could, and putting it back in again. Got it eventually tho!

I love the way windows tends to bloat out. Here's the space it started taking up on my HD:

• "Clean" WinXP pro install: 2.61Gb


• WinXP + Service Pack 2: 4.16Gb


• All my applications installed: 5.62Gb


• Adding in device drivers: 5.77gb

I still have to do Windows Upgrade, reckon that'll probably push me above the 8gb mark, what with all the backup points it'll want to set. I remember on time reading that some guy managed to get a Windows install down to 450Mb(ish) by getting rid of all the crap that never really gets used. Must try to find out how.......

Then again, before I did the reinstall I was down to 5Gb free on a 20Gb partition. The old saying is true: "crap accumulates". it doesn't seem to have gotten rid of all of my problems tho - the machine still seems to be running hot, shut down twice while I was installing stuff, and the 'e' key is still sticking (tho not as much as it was?). It could be the dodgy power supply, which hopefully I'll be getting a replacement for tomorrow. Hopefully the gfx driver issue will be gone tho, so I can actually run games without the machine dying on me! Speaking of which, where are them game CDs........

(later)

well, I was slightly wrong about online updates, but they did add anothr 800Mb to the install. Gotta love windows security, aftr I put SP2 on, I still had ot go get 38 more patches, 34 of them being security patches! The wonderful descriptions they put on them too are so inspiring: "A security issue has been identified that could allow an attacker to compromise your Microsoft Windows-based system and gain control over it. ", and that's it, no more detail. They should have a "tell me the truth" checkbox so that ppl who can handle the news about which bit of XP has been hacked now can see a bt more details without scaring off Joe Six-pack.

Last day in work!

Well, am into the final stretch in the Dublin office now. The next time I sit down at a work computer it'll be in China!

I'm starting to tidy up my desk here, and have started to say my goodbyes. First goodbye of the day was the cute Latvian(?) chick in the coffee shop (whose name I finally found out is Asia, pronounced "asha"), who wants me to send her a postcard from Beijing! As usual, have so much crap to tidy up before I head off that technically I could be here until 7pm tonight doing it if I weren't leaving at 4 to take a train home !

Had a bit of a going-away party last night in the pub downstairs (well, we went out for a few pints anyway). Was picking John & Lisa'a brains for some info on Beijing, 'cos they were there back in november. When they were talking sabout the taxi drivers trying to rip you off and the haggling in the market-place it finally hit me "crap! in a week's time I'm going to be dealing with this sort of thing!". Mostly in my own head I'm still not mentally prepared for going, and going by previous holidays it won't hit me that I'm really going until I'm there. At least I'll have a "liason officer" over there to help me get used to the place and stuff.

I just hope I'm packing enough of everything 'cos I'm really not sure what to expct weather-wise over htere. I know when I get there it's going to be damn cold, but it ain't gonna stay that way for 2 months solid is it? Should have bought the ski gear when I went to Soll rather than rented it, would be handy in -9 degrees over there.....