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!