Some funnies

Funny excerpt from an article that Lauren sent me:

Posters are appearing around Beijing guiding locals about how to interact with the foreigners coming for the Summer Games.

The posters instruct residents on the “eight don’t asks” when chatting with foreign guests. Here’s a rough translation, courtesy of the Peaceful Rise blog:

Don’t ask about income or expenses, don’t ask about age, don’t ask about love life or marriage, don’t ask about health, don’t ask about someone’s home or address, don’t ask about personal experience, don’t ask about religious beliefs or political views, don’t ask what someone does.

And one more:

About 350 million of China’s 1.3 billion people are regular smokers, more than the entire population of the United States, and even though
1.2 million people die each year from smoking-related causes, there is a widespread belief that cigarettes hold some health benefits. A cigarette in the morning is energizing, many smokers will declare, and even when confronted with scientific reason, they will cite Deng Xiaoping, an inveterate smoker who lived to 92, and Mao Zedong, who lived to 82.

Health care workers are not exactly the best role models: more than half of all Chinese medical professionals smoke, and a 2004 government survey of 3,600 doctors found that 30 percent did not know that smoking could lead to heart disease and circulation problems. (Unlike cigarettes in much of the world, Chinese brands carry no health warning on labels, although that is scheduled to change in 2011.)

Smoking with one hand and wielding a pair of chopsticks with the other, Li Na, 26, a secretary, was unapologetic as her 2-year-old son sat next to her at a restaurant here enveloped in a bluish haze. “If you overprotect your children, they don’t build their immunity,” she explained. “Breathing a little smoke when they are small makes them stronger.”


The olympics are almost here!!!!

I ate a piece of this fruit yesterday at fruit time:



it was so weird. You pick out these very rubbery little yellow pods and chew on them. It's called a jackfruit.

I'll write more soon.

Love, Emily

Just a mess of things

Ahh! Where to begin?? The last few weeks have flown by and been packed full of fun things so I'll try to keep things organized and cover everything.
Two weeks ago, my friend from WashU, John, and his friend Billy from NYU came to visit. They'd been on a world tour to celebrate their graduation and had already been to Figi, Australia, New Zealand, Thailand, and India. In an attempt to help them save some money, I let them stay in our apartment: one on the couch, and one on an air mattress from Walmart (Wa Er Ma). It was great to have them here and have a week long sleep over party, but unfortunately I had to work most of the time and didn't get to show them around. I did, however, write down some key terms in Billy's notebook so that they could show cab drivers. Before they came, I had written John a long email with instructions to get to my apartment, which is a little bit hard to explain since most taxi drivers haven't heard of the building itself or the road that it's on. Usually I tell them to go to a road that's nearby, and then hope that they know where the Walmart is, and if not then a certain subway stop. If I can get them that far, then I have to tell them to make a U turn at a certain intersection and then to go down a smaller street. You can imagine how hard this would be to write down in any language, so I had about a paragraph to send to him so that he could print it out and hopefully find the place alright. Unfortunately, he couldn't find a printer in the Indian internet cafes, so he ended up taking a digital picture of the email on the computer screen and showing that to the poor confused cab driver when he got to Beijing. It all ended up working out okay in the end, but they did have a few frustrating encounters with cab drivers who were afraid to take foreigners because they couldn't communicate. Nick was also very sweet and took them around a few times when he didn't have to be working. I had a lot of fun with them on their visit and hopefully they did too.
Last week my dad was also in town for business so I got to see him a few times. He took me and all my friends out to dinner one night at his hotel which was fun. He came in to have lunch with me at Microsoft one day and chatted up my cube mates, who hadn't realized that I was half Chinese. They got a big kick out of that and now often explain to me why I like certain things based on the area that my dad said our family is from. "Oh you probably like fish because they have a lot of fish up there." "You won't like this because it's spicy and people from that area don't eat a lot of spicy food" Funny that a place that I maybe went once when I was 4 can determine so many things about me.
Last weekend Lauren and I went to Hong Kong. We left on Thursday night and flew into Shenzhen, which is right across the border to Hong Kong. After a very confusing bus ride, where we had to get out multiple times to walk through customs and whatnot, we ended up in a beautiful hotel on the Kowloon side, called the Shangrila hotel. On Friday, we got dim sum at a very nice hotel on Hong Kong island near Central and then did a bit of shopping. After buying some nice flip flops, we made our way up to the peak on the peak tram - a very cool, but rickety tram that goes up to the highest point on Hong Kong island. It's pulled up a very steep slope by a thick cable, which is scary, but you get a beautiful view of the city, the harbor, and the beautiful, green rolling hills around it. On top of the peak is a mall and a bunch of pretty restaurants and stores that overlook this spectacular view. Lauren has a special passion for sour candy, which Hong Kong happens to have a lot of, so we each got a bag and sat up in a nice air conditioned Starbucks to enjoy the scenery. After that we went back to the Kowloon side and caught a showing of the new "Sex and the City" movie, which we had been dying to see but wasn't showing in China. We figured that it could count as our "American" activity for celebrating the 4th of July. When that was over we stopped by a small, very authentic Indian restaurant for dinner. Hong Kong is apparently known for having very good curry, so that had been one of the important things to cover on our list. Later that night we headed over to the most famous bar street and took a look around. It happened to be a much older crowd, so we felt a little out of place and didn't stay long, but I'm glad we saw it at least. On Saturday, we met up with one of Lauren's Rice friends who lives in Hong Kong and she took us shopping at some of the cheaper, local markets. We found a lot of cool little trinkets and also grabbed some dim sum for lunch. Later that day we met up with another one of her Rice friends who lives in Hong Kong and she took us to a nice, newish street of restaurants on the Kowloon side. We got a very good Chinese dinner, and then she took us to a local dessert place that has a large quantity of my favorite type of dessert: Mango. We each got some sort of assortment of Mango pudding, ice cream, and fruit pieces with tapioca and other yummy things and then rode the Star Ferry across the beautiful, city lit harbor. We got back to Beijing around 7 on Sunday evening, saw our first woman Beijing taxi driver, and came back to get ready for work the next morning.
Work has been going well and has gotten a lot busier for me lately. The device library website that I've been working on is only used by the Mobile Technology Center here in Beijing and handles about 40 devices. One of the device library administrators recently went to Redmond and showed someone involved with keeping track of devices there, who then asked my mentor if they could use some version of our website too. They then sent me a database full of information that was organized completely differently and had different types of things in it for about 10,000 devices. It was a little overwhelming at first, but I eventually got everything organized in our database structure, and am working on a version of our site that is fitted more towards their needs. It's a much larger scale project and has been pretty exciting. I also had not really done much work with web development or databases before so I'm learning a lot. My usability testing has been kind of slow to evolve but should pick up this week. I hope.
This weekend, the boys decided it would be fun to do some Karaoke, so we rented a room at "Party City," which looks a lot like a 5 star hotel, but is actually all Karaoke, or "KTV" as the Chinese call it. You can rent a room that has a whole KTV set up in it for your party and then stay there for some number of hours while enjoying their complementary buffet, soda and tea. We had a lot of fun and found that they had a bunch of good American songs in their system. The funny thing is, instead of using the real music videos, for some reason they have other videos that they either made or found that look like they were made in the 80s by the clothes and actions of the people. Also, sometimes they try to make it related to the song but it seems like they didn't quite understand what the song meant - For example, in one of the songs it kept saying "I want my baby back" and there was a video of an infant crawling around on the screen. Nick, Vinod, and Brian got especially into their singing and ended the night with raspy voices, but high spirits none-the-less.
Today we decided to explore an area that Nick had heard about called "Ox Street," or directly translated from Chinese - "Cow Street." It's supposed to have a lot of Muslim stores and restaurants, as well as a mosque. When we found the mosque, which looked a lot like a Chinese style temple and courtyard complex, there was a large sign that said: "No shorts or skirts." Right when we were about to leave because we had all come wearing shorts, a little Muslim Chinese man came out and told us to come back, and quickly showed us that he had loose, blue flower printed long pants, skirts, and shawls for us to wear. We walked around, clad in our new floral outfits, and enjoyed the beautifully and intricately painted buildings and took pictures with a bunch of Chinese, Muslim men who were hanging out outside the worshiping area. On our way out, the man who had lent us the pants and skirts taught the boys how to make "Tai Chi" poses and we got a few pictures with him.
That's about all I've been up to, but I'll talk a little more about what my friends have been doing. First of all, I should introduce our new friend Susan, who I met on her first day on the job as a design intern at Microsoft. She's also from the Seattle area and graduated from Forest Ridge, which is the small, all girls school I went to for 5th-8th grade. She went there from 7th grade through 12th grade, so we were there for one year at the same time but we didn't know each other. Small world. She goes to UCLA and is now working for the Mobile Technology Center on a cinematic approach to user interface design, whatever that means. It's been a lot of fun to have her here hanging out with us for the last couple weeks. Jaimie has been working on a video that the PR department at Microsoft is making for some sort of anniversary, or maybe Bill Gate's retirement.. I forget exactly... but she's been working in different locations around the city, coaching people on their English and filming them talking about how Microsoft is so amazing and is shaping the future and so on. She says the filming process is very tiring, but it sounds cool and she'll probably have some interesting things to show for it in the end. Brian has been working for a travel website called Here is China, finding companies to advertise on the site and interviewing people for a blog that he posts. I'll try to find a link and post it next time. His job sounds very interesting and he gets to go around the city and talk to a lot of people. Vinod has been working for a company that distributes educational tapes around China. His internship started out a bit slow, but he's been getting to do some accounting work for them, which has kept him pretty busy. Brian and Vinod are also going to Shanghai this coming weekend to travel a bit. Lauren had a bit of a rough week, but her job is shaping up to be very interesting. Her mentor, who lived in Houston for a while, has given her a lot of interesting reading material, and has had her help him with some important presentations and translations. She has gotten to meet a lot of the partners and go to interesting lunches and conferences. Yesterday she went to a big dinner with the Rice alumni group here in Beijing because the president of Rice and his wife were in town visiting. Nick has been doing a fair amount of teaching in the last few weeks. Although his schedule isn't very regular, he has a few students with whom he meets pretty frequently. Most of them are studying English in order to prepare to study abroad or to get ready for some sort of English test that they need to pass. He tutors them all over the city, in his apartment, in theirs, in restaurants, etc. A lot of times he gets a good, free meal out of the deal, which is also a plus. His students have been very enthusiastic to learn English and get used to American accents as well as learn more about American culture. Often they just pick a few topics to discuss and he helps them learn to converse more easily and fluidly and also get more confidence in their English. Most Chinese people in Beijing have studied English since they were very young, but only from Chinese teachers, and mostly in the form of drills and essay writing. This makes them fairly insecure about their ability to actually have conversations and he said that sometimes the first few times they meet, it's hard to get them speaking at all. It has been very satisfying for him, though, to see their progress and watch their confidence rise.
Okay, well that's all I can write about for now, I'll write again soon so keep checking and, as always, feel free to comment and ask questions or anything. Hope everything is going well, and I'd love to get emails or updates on what you're up to!

Love,
Emily

P.S. I'll put pictures up soon to go along with this, so check back. It will be more fun once they're up!

Welcome to take Beijing taxi

So this blog entry is going to be super random, partly because I'm making it more of a picture diary with explanations, and party because when I add pictures it adds them to the top and it's a pain to drag them down so basically I wrote the whole thing backwards. But, hey, a little chaos is good sometimes right? Sorry it takes me so long to add things. For some reason my computer wouldn't let me upload pictures forever. I'll try to write more often in the future. Please comment!! It gives me something to look forward to when I'm bored at work!





A couple weekends ago, we bought tickets to go to a party on the great wall. This part of the great wall happens to be right on the beach of the North China Sea. We had been under the impression that it would be about a two hour bus ride, but to our surprise it ended up taking a whole five hours to get there. It was definitely worth it though. We met a lot of crazy Europeans, Americans and Chinese people and got a lot of sand in our shoes. My friends and I went out to a cheap Chinese market earlier in the day and bought crazy ugly costumes with bright colored sunglasses and T-shirts with funny english on them. We ended up being the only ones dressed up, but at least we had spirit.





This guy is one of my favorites, and also is one of the most famous Beijing "characters." He's a little old man that wanders around the "San Li Tun" bar area and sells little bugs, frogs, and lanterns made out of grass that he made. He's really friendly and is always up for posing for a picture with you. On this night we bought a random wooden alligator from him and also a little grass lantern that is now hanging in my kitchen. He's got quite the winning smile doesn't he?




Chinese people have this crazy/awesome habit of "exercising" in public places. If you go to the parks in the morning or on the weekends, you can see groups of women and men singing, ribbon dancing, and fan dancing to very random music playing from scratchy cassette tapes. In this particular square, every night a bunch of people come out and waltz. They're very, very serious about it and often have fairly elaborate and obviously well practiced routines to do. If someone comes without a partner, they will dance with the air, or look for a foreigner like Brian ( to the left) to teach. Brian has since become a very good waltzer.



Hou Hai is one of three huge man made lakes that were built for the Emperors. It's a gorgeous place that has since turned into a classier sort of bar area. A few weekends ago, we found a perfect sunny Saturday and went to Hou Hai to paddle boat. You can also swim in the lake, but we decided by the color of the water that it's probably better for your health not to touch it. We went for about two hours, and all were very pleasantly cool under the paddle boat's roof, except for Nick and Ben who got a long workout paddling us around. We did manage to get in trouble by jumping out on this pretty little island to chat up some Chinese men in speedos and swim caps, and again later by daring Ben to jump into the lake . The second picture is of a poor little man who fell out of his kayak and, rather than getting any help, became the source of entertainment for a large group of people walking past on the shore. After his wife quickly paddled away in her Kayak, we decided to go over and help him by letting him climb onto our boat and then get back in is. He was a little too flustered, weighed down by his wet jeans and sneakers, and angry about his "loss of face" to be very thankful, but hopefully he'll have a fond place in his heart for Americans from now on.




This is the Microsoft building where I work. It's pretty nice and modern, but definitely not so much like the Microsoft buildings in Redmond. Instead of everyone getting their own office, it's mostly composed of large cubes. My cube has four other people in it. At the office, there is a nice selection of green tea drinks and coke products, but the highlight of the day for most of the Chinese employees is the "3:00 fruit time." At about 2:50 pm every day, the guy next to me turns around and whispers "WATERMELON TIME!!" and there is a mad dash for the kitchen , where at least a dozen melons are consumed in about 3 minutes. Also, at the same time, they fill up bins by the reception desks on each floor full of Chinese snacky things. Every now and then I can find Chineseified oreos and other good things, but one time I had the misfortune of picking up a large pack of seaweed crackers. Stay away from the seaweed crackers.

Here's a picture of my apartment building. I live on the third floor. In the bottom we recently discovered a massage place where you can get a two hour massage for 58 kuai (~8 dollars). There's also a place where you can get your hair washed and get a head, back, and shoulder massage for about 45 minutes which costs 15 kuai (~$2.50). Definitely a nice way to relax.

One of the funny things about China is everywhere you go they have things that say "Welcome to *verb*". You see it so frequently that after a while it almost sounds right. Someone, at some point, must have been like "Yes. this is definitely correct" and then the Chinese government promptly invested millions of dollars in signs and loud speaker voices that say things like "Welcome to ride subway!" Even the tredmill at my gym says "Welcome to use tredmill!"
It really makes me wonder if they are just really confident about their English and don't bother asking anyone else, or if, for example, the guy printing the signs that appear all over the new terminal of the airport reminding people to "Watch out for children and oldsters" just really didn't care as long as he got the message across. Even when I visited the Terracotta warriors in Xi'an there was a huge sign near the entrances that said "WARRIOS!" Anyhow, since so many people liked the jew's ear, I got another couple pictures from the menu in my office's cafeteria:














So I figure someone was given the job of translating this menu, and they got Sana wish at least remotely sounding like sandwich, and then itdienne is a little bit like italian, but then they just had no clue what to put for the third one so they just ended up bashing their head against the keyboard and getting "Dfjsdkf".

Bad English - aka "Chinglish" is all over China. If you're ever bored and want a good laugh go to http://www.engrish.com/.

Well that's all for now folks. I'll write more often from now on I swear. Comment!!!!

Love, Emily

And the Journey Begins..

This blog begins a little bit late in my adventure. This is my fourth week here in Beijing, China, but that just means I have more exciting things to talk about, so it's okay.

I've been working at Microsoft in the Advanced Technology Center for a group that tests the programs that are written for cell phones that run Windows- basically all those fancy phones that can check your email and browse the internet but that happen to be neither the iPhone nor the Blackberry. My project is to help the teams here start doing usability testing, which is testing that involves bringing in non engineers to play around with the cell phones and make sure the design is actually usable by normal human beings. :) It's definitely been interesting, especially since the Chinese people who work here seem to be set on sticking with automated testing (teaching computers to just run tests on programs without having a real person touch them). Also, the language barrier causes some confusion at times.

They can all speak English fairly well, but I do tend to get a few dazed looks every now and then. Chinese people have a really hard time saying V's, so when it comes to talking about Vista and Vendors, I often have to remind myself what "Wista" and "Wendors" are.

In times when I'm waiting for replies from

people and can't really move forward with my testing project, I've been maintaining a website that handles the "device library." Basically, Microsoft buys all the cool cell phones that are out there and has them in a library for people to 'check out' and use for a while so we know what our product is like and what other products are like. The person who made this website initially was a Chinese intern, who claims he wrote it in five days, and I think I believe him, because almost any button you press pops up a dialog box that says "are you sure to delete?" which catches you off guard when you thought you pressed "Check in." Anyhow, I've been combing through it and correcting the english and little things like that.

I joined a gym in the basement of the Microsoft building called "Zero Handicap."

It's very nice, but I do get a good lecture every day from the lady who cleans the locker room about how I shouldn't wear make up and should dry my hair because girls catch colds more easily.

As for life outside the office, I live with a good friend from my language program that I did in the fall in Beijing. Her name is Lauren and she goes to Rice and is here working in a Law firm, which is unfortunately all the way across the city. She has to ride the subway for over an hour every day, and although it is miserable, she brings back some interesting stories. We live in a very nice apartment that my Dad found, which happens to be about a block away from the Microsoft building. My Mother was kind enough to inform us that the name of the seizure giving color on the walls is "Chartreuse," which is a charming kind of tennis ball color. We each get our own room, and the apartment is fairly new and clean. We have only had one cockroach encounter, which is not too bad and hopefully it will not get worse.

The weather has been kind of cool, which is apparently odd for this time of year. We had a huge rain storm over the weekend where the streets nearly flooded and the cab drivers all went to hide to avoid the traffic. We've heard rumors that the government is shooting down rain clouds over the city to keep it cool for the olympics, but who knows.

There's a Walmart across the street from our apartment that is really interesting. The whole bottom floor is a grocery store with hanging roasted ducks, all varieties of Chinese buns, strange looking fruits, and even turtles, which they will immediately pull out of the water and gut for you if you ask them to. It's funny how Walmart can be so familiar and so different.

Aside from Lauren, my friend Jaimie from high school just came in this last weekend, so I've gotten to see her a lot lately. She's working for Microsoft in PR and lives really close to us. Also, my friend Nick, who I met when we were both studying abroad here in Beijing in the fall is back along with his friend, Ben, from home (Idaho) and my friend Erin's boyfriend, Vinod. It's been really fun to see them, and we try to hang out often even though they live as far as you can possibly get from our apartment.

As far as Beijing goes, it's gotten noticeably more polluted since the last time I was here, BUT they have been much better about lining up! I have seen a minimal amount of public loogie hawking, and nose picking, which is also an improvement. I find it interesting also that, when I came in high school people automatically assumed I was caucasian and even used to say I had "yellow hair", but now I've even had a few people mistake me for a Chinese person. I guess they are getting more used to seeing foreigners around. Through all these changes though, it still is a really cool city with a lot of character. It takes some getting used to, but living here becomes kind of addictive after a while. Everything is just always accessible, there are cool people from all over the world here for completely different and random reasons, and just being able to see how vastly two cultures can differ is kind of shocking and eye opening. It definitely makes you think some of our American expectations are silly, but also makes you appreciate others that you never would have noticed.

Anyway, now that I've blabbed on for a bit too long probably, I'll post a "funny chinglish" picture of the day. This one I found in a menu when trying to order one of my favorite mushroom dishes. Please don't be offended, I'm sure they have no idea what that means. Most likely they just didn't know how to translate it and typed random words.

I'll write more often from now on so keep checking! I'd love to see comments and hear what everyone has been up to this summer!

Love, Emily