Keen and Able

Haven't posted for ages because it's just suddenly got a little harder to sidestep the Great Firewall of China. I have to do a complicated thing with something called a VPN to get onto some websites, like computer hacking! It takes me ages, making me feel like a massive computer illiterate and a little like James Bond or someone from The Matrix. Anyway, it's working today..

Every day, a number of lawyers from other firms come to the office to chat, and take part in the Chinese business practice of nepotism 'guanxi'. This means that, every day, I perform the ritual of nodding in mock understanding as the newest guest hears a description, in Chinese, of me and what I’m doing at the firm. My guess is that, depending on who’s telling them, they get a very different story to the last man. Explaining to a Chinese colleague my plan of a ‘gap year then joint honours degree then hopefully conversion masters’ isn’t very easy. As a result, stories that are partly wrong get hawked around the office and come back wildly different to the first one. Like a real life version of Chinese whispers! However tempting it is to reply ‘Yes Mr Lei, I do live in Chateauneuf-du-Pape’, I correct people. Trying, of course, not to make them lose face by implying that the real reason I’m not a French postgraduate is because no one understands a bloody word I’m saying!

In the end, the Backstreet Boys played and were amazing. They even did a take on the First Rule of Fight Club! All the interns loved it. Apart, of course, from me and Andrew who weren’t let in. It turns out that some ‘aspects of Britain’s culture’, like paper trails and receipts can be really useful and wouldn’t do much harm here. (‘No no no, it’s just a different way of doing things darling!’) So we went to a local bar to celebrate what was left of St Patrick’s Day with this man until 6.30am:

(girl in photo’s name is not ‘Andrew’)

We went to a local Chinese restaurant the other evening, and it was a disaster. There was no picture menu (very common here! Weird) so we pointed at other customers’ plates. Unfortunately this offended some of them. Each time we tried to order something they just stared with midly insulted confusion, as if I’d stormed into a McDonalds shouting ‘Anastaszia, the best table in the house!’

So next time I’ve vowed to just pick 6 numbers from the menu. I’ll work something out like people who play the lottery do, using relative’s birthdays. I was very careful though, specifying repeatedly that we wanted FIVE dumplings. Predictably, five full plates of dumplings arrived so we took them away in a bag and had them 2 days later. Gross.

We went to the Great Wall of China! It was really beautiful, and it was lovely to see mountains and countryside after over a month in central Beijing. Here is a photo of me on the wall!

We also went to beijing zoo. It was horrendously depressing for obvious reasons. The pandas (national tweasure of china) get their own restricted area. The large cats are kept in prison cells, in a building halfway between a workhouse and guantanamo bay. Photos to come chaps! And pig’s trotters is the latest addition to my list of recently conquered foodstuffs. Had a delicious beef dish today that tasted like a Burger King burger. I know it doesn’t sound nice, but also on my tray was a seafood-flavoured yoghurt and sweet seaweed. It’s all relative!

sad mother's day :(

I have unwittingly spent the last week testing my digestive system. A dinner of Dog meat and a brunch (Chinese people call it 'lunch'. it's not lunch. it's at 11:30) of duck's stomach and that dangly thing under a chicken's chin have all been eaten. All completely finished, in fact (don't offend the host, now), by me with my newly expert chopstick claw. NB however many brownie points asking for the local speciality gets you, it's ALWAYS COMPLETELY RANK.

My not-that-supervising supervisor is away from Beijinjg for a few days, during which i've been trying to pimp myself out to any lawyer inside the firm. My pledges of perfect English, patience and a gentle touch remain untested. So i'm doing this at work again, whilst getting very exciting about seeing the Backstreet Boys next wednesday. That night promises to be the most spectacular two hours of pretending to be disinterested i have ever, or will ever, spend.

new events: backstreet boys tickets were thrown away, along with the remnants of our delivery macdonalds from the night before. one of the hotel 'Early Morning Room Boy' cleaners chucked them. sensible things like purchase insurance and paper trails don't exist in China so we've no hope. we're planning on turning up regardless, and taking the venue staff to our (empty) seats to try to let us in. two non-chinese-speaking young men describing the loss of tickets whilst inadvertently criticising the ridiculous ticket purchase arrangements? what could go wrong...

here you go mum!

and i will not be seeing:

before you criticise someone, you should walk a mile in their robe

the view from my window is typical of Beijing i think. There are high-rise modern apartment blocks, a shiny green glass office tower and a building site that seems to have lay dormant for the last two weeks. but when i woke up this morning and looked out of the window, the ground was covered in snow! so the view was slightly less grey. it was only half an inch thick, but meant that a) all of the taxis were full, b) the subway was absolutely rammed and c) the OAP Slo-Mo Tai Chi Regiment were not on parade. not that they should be barrack-bound for long, no one does organised snow clearing like the chinese. brighton and hove council take note!

hit a bit of a dry patch this morning work-wise, so i'm actually writing this out sitting at my desk in between reading about boring chinese contract law and reading a local litter reduction unfortunately titled 'BRING BACK TRASH!'

it's been a few days since i last wrote and i've seen a bit more of beijing. i went to a networking event at peking university and spent two hours trying to explain my (apparently quite complicated) plans for the future to a hundred different prodigal law students. met a 17-year old girl in her second year of university, reading for TWO degrees at the same time. it was a bit like meeting an oracle or shaman. nevertheless, she was mighty impressed that i'd been in a Student Union (read: infighting events committee) and so i talked it up appropriately. gave out some business cards to try and get some guanxi. got none back.

we did a lot of sightseeing at the weekend, the highlight of which was probably buying a traditional robe and then wearing it to the supermarket. it looked like this:

we also went to Tian. Square but that was a bit of a disappointment. just a square really! went to the forbidden city (not a city, more a decorated wind tunnel) and it looked like this:

also we went to the summer palace which was amazing - a giant park with a huge man-made lake. this sounds normal enough, but in true Beijing seemingly-normal-but-at-the-last-moment-completely-insane style, the next clearing we walked in to was FULL OF DANCING OAPs! there were hundreds of them all bopping around to the sounds of a crooner standing at the front. it was casual enough so we joined in but, in response to some subsonic cue that we must have missed, the OAPs suddenly moved into a line formation and started to dance choreographed dance in unison. a sort of maccarena meets the Cha Cha slide. needless to say, suddenly feeling very sheepish, we floundered in the sea of nimble oldies for a few minutes before breaking ranks and shuffling awkwardly away. we were delayed for a few minutes by this man's advances:

but we made it back to the hotel in the end.