It comes out tomorrow: will the customer sign the acceptance note?  I visited the customer today to show that yes, the system could do what we said it could.  It took a day, and I was able to show most things, with even a phase contrast image right under the wire despite awful drift from the system first standing in direct sunlight and then the evening cold coming in the open windows. 

It shouldn’t take this long; I shouldn’t be doing basic calibration checks.  But at least I got a nice lunch out of it: lovely tender Peking duck among other things.  In the morning I mostly worked with a student from Hainan (who seemed a bit surprised when I said I knew Hainan from the incident with the US plane in the early Bush days) who spoke more English than the others and even some French.  In the afternoon another student took over, who knew less English but was equally pleasant to work with.  I liked the students because they were knowledgeable and reasonable in their demands.  The professor who bought it surprised me by shaking hands in the morning and then retreating.  I hope the students give him a good report, because he’s the one who signs in the end… 

Ah, yes: the poison I swallowed yesterday is still doing its job.  I took a third of the recommended daily dose for adults, which is more than I ever have, and it’s practically pulling an imodium on me.  Imagine the full dose – and some people think herbal medicine is gentle stuff!  After flipping through those tox sheets yesterday I for one will be looking at herbal medicine through new eyes. 

I’m not writing about the Scottish band, in case you were wondering, though they do sound good, as far as I can tell.  I’ll get back to creosote later in an attempt to be chronological. 

Wednesday, October 17: I arrived, dazed after being woken by the flight attendant out of the deep sleep that always seems to overcome the discomfort just before we begin to approach our destination.  I’d watched “Fracture” on the plane and learned from this movie that apparently lawyers are an achingly beautiful set.  I also learned that ordering a children’s menu brings extra chocolate with your meal. 

The drive from the airport consisted of the usual gnarly traffic, the manic mergers, honking, and short-term thinking that cripples Beijing transportation.  As long as I don’t drive, I can enjoy the slowed down pace and take in the surroundings.  I still hadn’t gotten my bearings: I find I need a map first.  After two hours of rest at the hotel I was picked up and we walked to the exhibition and set up the booth.  There were at least eight of us on a 3-by-6 meter booth, which meant we got a lot of waiting done.  First we watched as one person hung posters, then one instrument after the other was unpacked and set on the trestle tables, with perhaps two or three guys lifting the instrument.  At one point I just went ahead and set ours up, hooked it up, checked that it worked with my computer (failing to note that I had the wrong calibration file), packed my computer again, and waited, until I was told that the others were only waiting for another piece of equipment to come in and I could leave if I wanted to.  I did, which led to my first dinner alone – which I’ve already chronicled.  So I’ll jump ahead to

Thursday, October 18: Breakfast buffet Chinese style to start off the day.  No bread items, except for their steamed variety, and the only item I really enjoyed was the corn and corn meal in a bowl with hot milk.  The corn is some rolled and fried grain, perhaps corn, who knows, and the corn meal looks like rolled and crushed wheat grain, but I’m not certain.  For my taste buds, breakfast isn’t Asia’s finest hour. 

The show went reasonably well, although my expectation that toilet paper would be provided for the exhibition days was shattered.  Good thing I always carry paper tissues.  We had lunch at the “Fast Food,” which was a Chinese food cafeteria with a long line but fast food once you got there.  We went as a group of four and one of us found a table and reserved it while the others stood in line.  I know we do the same back in Switzerland, but I wonder at the efficiency of blocking four seats while other people are coming out of the line with full platters and nowhere to sit.  In theory, it should be easier to find free seats if everybody just stood in line and looked for seats after getting their food.  In practice, I suppose there would always be a few especially clever people who would exploit such a system and block a table of four while their compadres find food. 

After lunch, the show died down a bit.  I walked around, looking at other booths, and covered the whole exhibition by the end of the day.  I just don’t get kicks out of stirrers and ovens and liquid chromatography systems.  I do have to hand it to the company with the coolest name and to Dragon Med for promising the Ultimate Pipetting Experience.  I’m waiting for the Ultimate Titration Thrill, and then for someone to say that quickly three times in a row. 

When the exhibition closed at five, Mrs. Li and I boarded a bus that at 5:24 took us to the Shangri-La hotel for the reception dinner.  While we were wondering if the buses would leave at five-thirty as the driver apparently told Mrs. Li, I looked at the back of the ticket and saw it said that the reception was to begin at seven.  Mrs. Li didn’t seem bothered by it when I showed her.  We arrived at the hotel and entered a nearly empty grand ballroom, where we sat and sipped red wine and coke until – yes, you guessed it – seven o’clock.  I nodded off repeatedly – I’d already had apneoid spells at the booth and the wine wasn’t helping.  A traditional Chinese orchestra played traditional Chinese tunes like Red River Valley and Edelweiss (and some that I think were probably genuine), pausing in between songs to allow airtime to some pop radio.  At seven an elderly man with a comb-over got on the podium and introduced another man, beefier, with fuller hair, who gave a booming speech and turned out to be the Something Minister for the Department of Science and Something Else.  The emcee then called the president of the JAIMA, who congratulated the BCEIA, and the organizer of Analytica China, who also congratulated the BCEIA and opined that with the communist party pledging to make environmental standards and protection a priority, manufacturers of analytical instruments should have halcyon days ahead.  Then there was food, western style, with plenty of sweet desserts.  At 8:30 I was so tired I suggested we leave this place of glamour, where not even Richard would be able to touch the top of the toilet stall doors (and where the toilets actually provided paper in the stalls), and Mrs. Li agreed.  From what I understand she had another hour before she got home, so I think we both silently deplored the reception as mostly a waste of time.  I got back to my hotel and for the first time read the welcome signs to some Scottish high school’s tour of China (which explained the pimpled bearer of shorts and loud manners at the breakfast table) and two seminars.  The first was the Seminar of Ugandan Economic Management Officials (I think the keynote speech was by G. W. Bush of the National Institute for Applied Thrift).  The second was the “seminaire de la gestion et de l’exploitation du tourisme pour les officiels africains,” or in English, the “seminar on how to snag Olympic games, buff your capital city to a sheen, and attract foreign officials to spend tourist dollars in your country.”  Needless to say, after repeatedly falling asleep that day, I wasn’t going to write blog entries, but headed straight to bed, which brings us to

Friday, October 19: I added an unidentified fruit to my corn and corn meal porridge, that looked like a cross between a lychee and a blackberry but tasted and had a pit like a cherry.  Not bad.  The show was more of the same.  We had a few interested visitors, but mostly I kept myself busy measuring ten-cent coins.  One of the tech support guys came by and asked me how long it would take to finish the installation at a Beijing customer site.  This installation was plagued by mysterious problems that baffled our own support guy mainly by the dearth of information that accompanied the questions.  We’d get vague problem descriptions without measurement data and measurement data that seemed not to fit the problem description.  I answered that I had no idea how long it would take.  “Longer than one day?” he asked.  “I have no idea,” I again replied – simply because nowhere else do we have these issues nor customers demanding this sort of installation/certification/discharge routine, particularly not with similarly odd requests, such as imaging on a silicon sample in a measurement mode that makes most sense on samples with at least two commingled materials.  I can’t say I’m looking forward to Monday, but it should be interesting, or at least revealing.  We’ve also reserved Tuesday in case it does take longer than a day.  I hope to finish on Monday and see the Great Wall or go to the silk market on Tuesday, but I’ll take my Chinese medicine as it comes.  After the exhibition Mrs. Li accompanied me to my hotel and I took her laptop to store there instead of her having to carry it back home.  I was a bit surprised that I wasn’t invited out for dinner, but I don’t blame Mrs. Li for wanting to get back to her husband after already one late night.  I’m amazed at how chipper she is considering the long commute and her having to look after me, too. 

For dinner I went to the same Chinese restaurant on the hotel premises again, and again let myself be drawn into ordering way too much for a single person.  I started out with only two dishes, pine nuts with spinach and something I thought would appeal to Samson on a mellow day, hand-ripped donkey meat.  The trainee waitress pointed out that these dishes were both cold, clearly expecting me to order something warm.  I don’t think she suggested something “delicious” like the waitress two nights before, which usually arouses my stubborn independence and leads to me ordering the item two rows down, but waited with her notepad until I chose a pork chop hot-pot.  Then she asked if I wanted rice, and turned to the page with the staples, where (I’m so predictable it’s embarrassing) I chose hand-pulled flapjack.  I think it may even have been two rows down from the rice.  And of course, beer.  I’d already ordered Yangjing beer two nights before and gotten a 350ml can for 5 RMB, so this time I thought I’d order “local beer” for 5 RMB, which turned out to be a 600ml bottle of the same Yangjing beer with a slightly lower alcohol content.  I’m confused, but I still stick with liking Yangjing, as mentioned before.  (“Before” refers to a post on my former VOX blog, which I’m unable to access right now.) 

Hey, I’m writing a lot here.  Humor me and write a comment.  “A comment” – while hardly original – will do.  “A comment – I’m hardly original” will make me chuckle. 

Saturday, October 20: For once, I was on time and didn’t keep Mrs. Li waiting for me in the hotel lobby, but as though she had anticipated that, she brought me a bag with wife cakes and yoghurt as a gift.  “Wife cake,” named for reasons that escape me, is a small pastry with a bean paste or sesame paste filling and butter-fried dough on the outside.  The show once again was slow and I announced I’d leave at 1pm and return on Sunday in the early afternoon.  At twelve o’clock Mrs. Li suggested we go eat, which I declined, saying that if I was going to leave at 1pm already I might as well eat lunch then.  This delayed their departure for lunch until I caught on and realized they would never leave with me there and sure enough, when I returned from the toilet, all but one had left. 

I’d visited a booth that morning of a guy that had shared our reception dinner table and who had returned from a long stay in the US to start his own company in Shanghai.  We talked about technology a bit.  At some point he remarked: “You’re very handsome.”  I still haven’t gotten used to that; I just blinked said thank you.  “You have a nice beard.”  What does one answer to that?  “You have nice hair?”  “You’ve got a fine shave there?”  “I love that refined Asian look you’re cultivating?” 

At one o’clock, I packed and left for the hotel, where I ate wife cake and yoghurt, and then proceeded to dawdle on the internet and otherwise whiffle away time until about 4:30, when I headed to the lobby to ask for a taxi for Wangfujing.  It took long enough for me to be able to spot a kite in the sky, try to ask the portier whether kites could be flown all year, and to finally learn from the reception lady that yes, they could, because there is always wind, for the porter to inform me that “for taxi, go to Kentucky.”  That meant KFC at the end of the block, so I walked there and then walked toward the oncoming traffic until I spotted a free taxi and flagged it down.  I showed the driver my address and he said something and waved his hand.  I pointed at a mall on Wangfujing street and the same hand motions ensued.  I suppose I could have left the taxi, but I didn’t, and he gave in, turned around, and drove east.  Once he left the ring road we were almost immediately stuck in traffic and he got impatient.  I thought perhaps it was the end of his shift and he didn’t want to drive me that far, but impatience seems to be a general characteristic of Beijing driving and after he dropped me off, he picked up someone else.  We passed old men sitting on a construction site, a woman on the back of a tricycle chatting with another lady on a bike, a guy running out of an official building pursued by two uniformed officers, and plenty of buses and old buildings.  When he let me off, he pointed in the direction in which I had to walk and I think the hand motions back in Kentucky were to inform me that Wangfujing was a pedestrian zone and he couldn’t go there.  He brought me close enough, though. 

I’d picked Wangfujing because of an article in the September edition of Beijing This Month that mentioned the Sheng Xi Fu hat company on Wangfujing.  Once on Wangfujing, I couldn’t immediately figure out where the store was and decided a Tissot watch store would surely be a good place to find English-speaking personnel to point the way.  Well, no.  The young man spoke no English, just walked to the door and pointed right.  I pointed right for confirmation but somehow the message didn’t get through right – maybe he thought I was asking for more information or not quite getting it.  But before we got to writing things down a young Chinese woman came by, stopped, and, when he explained, took the map I had and motioned me to follow her.  I was just a tad suspicious, but doing her injustice, as it turned out.  It was indeed a straight shot, and she led me down the road for about 200 meters, then pointed to the store and bade be goodbye, handing back my map.  I hope she understood my smile and my attempt at “Thank you” in Chinese. 

In the shop I browsed through the silly, the cute, and the cool, and finally settled on a warm woolen hat for 98 RMB.  The same hat would likely have cost 98 francs in Switzerland, so I was rather stoked, and if someone gets a nice meal for having sold a hat without bargaining about the price, then that’s no problem for me.  I tried on a bunch of other hats on the second floor, from felt hats to fur, before leaving and shopping in a tea shop.  After the tea shop I walked to the big apm shopping mall for the food court.  I passed on Yoshinoya and entered a hot-pot restaurant, where once again I ordered way too much for a single person: mutton slices, tofu, dumplings, extremely yummy mushrooms [sic], wild oats, and a hot barley tea.  Unfortunately, I ate it all, or at least almost all, and when I left the restaurant it was with a taut feeling to my belly and the beginnings of a rumble.  After a longish stop at the men’s room (with toilet paper) I exited thirsty as a racehorse and thought to quench it with an Orange Julius around the corner, but forgot that Orange Julius is mostly sweet.  I walked on out and down to the main road that leads to Tian’anmen square, in hopes of walking off the tautness.  At Tian’anmen a couple from Qingdao accosted me and struck up a conversation that mostly centered around German cars and Qingdao beer.  I get immediately leery when the answer to my being an engineer at an exhibition for scientific equipment elicits “That’s so cool” as a reaction.  Yes, my job is pretty cool; yes, the microscopes we make are seriously cool; but no, unless you’re an incorrigible geek at heart you won’t erupt in little squeals of enthusiasm and jealousy.  And then the inevitable: “You have a very interesting moustache.”  When they invited me for a beer, I declined, citing the need to get up early the next day, and apologizing for having to decline.  I didn’t want to tell them that right now, keeping my drawers clean was a primary concern, and beer wouldn’t help.  I took the subway home and with the tautness not subsiding realized I had indeed contracted a case of Mao’s bowels.  At the hotel I slaked my thirst with tap water, which may or may not have helped.  At any rate, on

Sunday, October 21, Mao’s bowels were still with me, although it was a bearable experience.  Dimitri and Cathy picked me up and took me to their church; we made such good time that we had time to stop for a tea beforehand.  Their church is in Expatria to the northeast of the city, home also to several international schools.  We talked about finding churches and expatriate life and common friends (Dimitri and Cathy used to attend Basel Christian Fellowship) and before long it was time to go to the service.  The speaker used texts from Nehemiah as a springboard to explore the characteristics of a true revival.  I took notes, as usual, but without a lot of gusto.  After the service they invited me to an Italian restaurant, where the sign advertised the chef being from Italy.  Whether that was true or not, I enjoyed my Gnocchi and the complementary tiramisu.  They brought me back to the hotel by about 2:30 pm.  It was a brief time together, but good to catch up and enjoy each other’s company. 

I changed and walked to the exhibition site, only to find that all the booths were in the process of packing up.  Apparently the show had ended at twelve, so after a brief discussion of our plans for tomorrow I took the microscope and other material and carried it back to the hotel.  That was a gratifyingly short work day. 

I decided to take my seirogan, the Japanese herbal medicine against an upset stomach, and remembered someone saying it contained creosote – hence the title of this blog.  As a result of deciding on the title I went and looked up creosote.  Uh-oh.  Based on what I found the fact that the pills had passed their expiration date four years ago seemed irrelevant, and a Google search with the Japanese word for creosote, クレオソート, turned up a highly critical site citing articles to a medical weekly that ran in 1998 and 1999. 

But I’m not sure I care.  I’ve been clean since.