Today comprised two customer visits, one at the Institute of Physics and the other at Tsinghua University, both renowned institutes, so I was looking forward to visiting.  Mrs. Li again picked me up, and this time I finally got my act together and was ready to roll when the phone rang.  With my timing I’d make a horrible James Bond.  Fortunately, I’m also a middling marksman, a poor runner, a lousy seducer, sensitive to pain, and can’t hold my breath for very long, so nobody will ever want to recruit me. 

We walked to the taxi and Mrs. Li remarked that it was raining, a rare thing in October.  It was barely a drizzle, but it picked up a wee bit that morning until it became a bonafide drizzle, still without any chance of really wetting anything.  Paul got in our taxi at the office and we were off to the Institute of Physics.  He changed the flavor of the ride just by chatting with the driver.  I’d already noticed the driver’s keychain with two kids on it; Paul asked him about it and found out that the girl was his and the boy his nephew. 

During the visit I again ran into both language barriers and personal prejudices.  When the guy asked me to explain the principle of an electronic device, I immediately leapt to the conclusion that what he really wanted to do was copy the thing and find out how it works from us who make and sell it.  I’m still not sure if I was completely unjustified, because there was a stated intent to perhaps try themselves because it would be cheaper, but apparently the question was aiming at how to hook up the device to other devices.  I know too little about this one device anyway to give away too much knowledge, so I shouldn’t have worried.  After all, I don’t even know how to hook it up without a diagram, let alone without a diagram, a device, and an idea of what they want to hook it up to.  The Chinese seem to really like swimming on dry land.  I can understand a good part of their concerns because they wouldn’t likely have the same budget as their European counterparts (though I’ve never met a researcher who was happy with his budget). 

On the ride back to the office we had a female cabbie, the first for me in Beijing.  Paul only had to speak a word or two to this one to get a stream of animated monologue.  At the office I checked e-mails and found out that the government denies access to blogspot.com as well as to wikipedia and vox.com.  According to Joe, though, Chinese blog sites are popular and accessible, and porn is gaining ground: the government seems more interested in safeguarding the political status quo than decency.  Article 15 of the Chinese Internet Regulations includes it all.  Even the hotel internet guide is less than firm, less than clear: “Please don’t browse or download any content from those websites violating relevant regulations of P.R.C.” 

We took the company driver to a hotel in a new area in the northwest of Beijing.  It looked like we’d entered a different city: shiny steel and glass in the freeform style characteristic of the Atopie Indifférente Moderne School.  I could tell the restaurant was fancier because more girls and prettier girls waited at the door.  We rode up the elevator one floor and when it turned out no table was free in the main dining area we got a séparée.  This room had a lounge part with a coffee table and couches, a TV opposite the table, and a washroom adjacent to the dining area.  I found the decor devoid of character, decor for the common denominator, an attempt to make cost-effectiveness look opulent, but I was there to eat, and the food and service well outdid the interior design.  We had fried squirrel fish with a sweet sauce, ox tail, fried lotus root (the Chinese word for lotus root sounds like an over-inflected “oh?!”), mushroom in a spicy sauce, and nibbles that included duck neck and cashews rolled in what tasted like Tang powder – the drink, not the dynasty - surprisingly good. 

The drizzle had stopped before lunch already, and on the way back everything was dry again.  I again noticed the restaurant in the office building of our partners and I am near certain that somebody picked a lowercase “h” instead of a capital “L” for the cursive lettering atop their entrance that ought to spell “Late Autumn.”  It’s similar to the Mistral font that Word for Windows provides. 

We took another taxi to Tsinghua University, this time an angry uncle that vociferated all the way and I think had a misunderstanding about directions with Paul.  I nodded off occasionally, but during one of my waking periods I glimpsed the famous canals and bridges of the old part of Tsinghua University that I remember visiting five years ago on my first visit to Beijing. 

The professor we met spoke German.  I’ll say that again: the professor we met spoke German – a Chinese who’d done research in Germany for a decade.  So the discussion about our instrument ran in three languages, depending on who was talking to whom.  It was interesting that the professor’s first reaction to our system was surprise at its small size and the question whether it was capable of research.  In other words: if all the other systems are so big, what’s missing on yours?  I tried the cell phone analogy, but I don’t know for sure it worked. 

The air had been bad since lunch, but on the drive back it really started to wear on me.  My throat stung and the city smelled like it was smoldering somewhere.  The sun stood large and red in the sky without being close to setting, buildings two blocks away looked blurred, and beyond two kilometers you couldn’t make anything out.  Later, on the taxi ride home, I noticed the moon’s reddish tinge, which came neither from an eclipse or fulfilled prophecy.  I was glad to get inside the hotel. 

For dinner I decided to go to KFC.  I figured I’d get something familiar to both taste buds and stomach.  While I was changing out of my monkey suit into something more comfortable, a slip of paper appeared through the crack above the door handle that requested me to contact the front desk.  I walked down there and was informed that the 3800 RMB deposit wasn’t enough, and would I please make another deposit of 400 RMB with another credit card.  I wasn’t happy about that idea because the whole point of my having a company credit card is to simplify accounting matters for me.  Using my own card would complicate them unnecessarily.  I tried to ask if it wouldn’t just be enough for me to pay the whole deal tomorrow, but apparently that wouldn’t work.  We added it up: I’d spent 3584 RMB so far, and with another night and internet the total would come to 4022 RMB, about 5% more than my deposit.  The idea that I couldn’t be trusted to pay that remainder annoyed me and put me in stubborn mode.  To their suggestion to just charge a night to my credit card now and pay the rest tomorrow I told them I didn’t want to be billed twice on my credit card bill and wanted another solution.  In the end I handed them two 50-franc bills, the equivalent of about 600 RMB, and got a receipt complete with the numbers of the bills.  I’ll get them back tomorrow when I clear the accounts.  I hope I get to keep the receipt as a reminder of my wonderful ability to tie up three employees for five to ten minutes over a pittance. 

KFC tasted like KFC.  I asked for a receipt there and got two, one an extra special one with the possibility to win some cash reward.  It looks much too cool to rub away the silver stuff.  The fried chicken sandwich and large pepsi cost all of 18 RMB. 

I came across a couple Chinese guys in the hallway dressed in warrior costumes, but I think the rowdy folks I occasionally heard on the corridor were speaking a European language.  They seemed to have quieted down, which gives me hope that I may be able to sleep tonight.  With the ruckus they were making, I wasn’t at all sure. 

Final note: Hyundai is winning the battle for Beijing taxis.  Five years ago, they were almost exclusively VW. 

 

I am in Beijing, in the Exhibition Centre Hotel.  It’s a convenient location, because starting tomorrow I’ll be in the exhibition for four days.  Never mind that those four days include Saturday and Sunday.  And Monday will be a fine day off: a customer visit to do support and training, which will take until the customer’s satisfied or my flight leaves on Thursday, whichever comes first. 

For dinner I had the menu items with the squiggly characters and the lacking or incomprehensible translations.  I know that the meat with coriander and cuminseed was lamb, because that’s a squiggly I recognize, even untranslated, but that the translated salad I got contained walnuts wasn’t clear to me.  It’s a good thing that I’m not allergic to any food, otherwise I couldn’t just order at semi-random.  I did avoid the sea cucumber.  I’ll try it another day. 

There were a lot of people setting up our booth – at least eight plus me.  Half of us stood around without being able to help at all, and nobody seemed to be in control.  I prefer being in charge of a booth myself or following clear instructions. 

It seems like everyone in this hotel is a trainee: the receptionists, the foreign cash exchange guy, the café waitress where I had lunch (cookies, ice cream, and tea), the three waitresses who later served me dinner, the lady cleaning the elevator.  I wonder why.  Is that so that they can be given one step more to climb on the corporate ladder?  I did note that (as far as I can tell) they are all Chinese.  It made me think how even the most manual jobs are usually done by locals, not as in Switzerland by foreigners.  Is that because we’re a richer country?  Or is it because the Chinese have Confucianism ingrained in them?  Granted, there are some people who are naturally inclined to enjoy boring, disrespected, and poorly paid jobs, but they’re a minority.  Everyone else needs some explanation.  “I’m scrubbing floors to give my kids a better future.”  “I’m an indentured servant because that’s my station in life.”  “I’m flipping burgers because I don’t have the language skills for a better job.”  “I’m stacking shelves because that’s where you start with my skin color.”  For Chinese in China, only the first two work, meaning that we’re looking at a country with large inequalities or a stoic metanarrative philosophy or both. 

It does make me think that if we want to rid Switzerland of foreigners, as some do, we would at the same time have to abort any attempts at equality amongst inhabitants.  The feudal system worked pretty well without foreigners. 

I arrived in Beijing weary.  I’d only slept three hours from Monday to Tuesday, when I needed to catch the 4:55 bus to the Basel airport.  In Vienna I took the CAT downtown and did the tourist thing for a few hours, returning a bit early to the airport and catching perhaps 90 minutes of sleep in the lounge.  I asked at least three different people if I’d be able to get in after the last disappointment in Tokyo. 

In Vienna I first walked to the Danube.  The sun was rising in a cloudless sky and beginning to warm the air, and I figured that a former royal city like Vienna would have a riverbank to sit on like Basel, except bigger, better, and more beautiful.  Imagine my disappointment when I saw the Danube.  It wasn’t even half the width of the Rhine in Basel and walled in by concrete.  Yes, I could sit on a bench, but from there, instead of a nice view of the old town, I saw the subway tunnel and the 20th century houses beyond the road on the other side.  I later found out that that was only a canal and that the “old” Danube flows quite a bit away from town. 

The veal schnitzel in Viennese style in the Café Vienne did a lot to cheer me up about Vienna, as did the decor and comfort that made me wonder if Vienna needed Starbucks at all.  I found one later, and promptly heard English spoken there, so apparently the standardized fare and non-smoking atmosphere still justify a chain coffee shop in the city that invented coffee shops.  I walked up the tower of the Stephansdom, leaving the microscope in the clerk’s room, and glad to have done that because even with just a backpack crossing was difficult.  It’s slightly disappointing that one can only climb halfway up that tower, but halfway up there means higher than in Basel by going all the way up.  The roof of the nave was perhaps 15 degrees steeper than the roof in Basel.  Vienna may have lost in terms of waterways, but its cathedral is twice as wide, twice as long, and twice as high as ours, and it has an organ that looks like a group of angels in flight.  This building fit in better with the huge manors and parks I’d seen from the plane flying in – the kind of buildings that befit a city that once was capital to half the continent. 

I sat on the square after that, looking at the cathedral, sipping a latte (it’s Vienna, I’ll make an exception) and eating a Sacher cake, soaking up the sun.  I was tired, but life was good.