{"id":105,"date":"2007-10-21T14:01:28","date_gmt":"2007-10-21T13:01:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.morbidcornflakes.ch\/thduggies_blog\/?p=105"},"modified":"2007-10-21T14:01:29","modified_gmt":"2007-10-21T13:01:29","slug":"king-creosote","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.thduggie.com\/thduggies_blog\/2007\/king-creosote","title":{"rendered":"King Creosote"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’m not writing about the Scottish band<\/a>, in case you were wondering, though they do sound good, as far as I can tell.\u00c2\u00a0 I’ll get back to creosote later in an attempt to be chronological.\u00c2\u00a0<\/p>\n

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.\u00c2\u00a0 I’d watched “Fracture” on the plane and learned from this movie that apparently lawyers are an achingly beautiful set.\u00c2\u00a0 I also learned that ordering a children’s menu brings extra chocolate with your meal.\u00c2\u00a0<\/p>\n

The drive from the airport consisted of the usual gnarly traffic, the manic mergers, honking, and short-term thinking that cripples Beijing transportation.\u00c2\u00a0 As long as I don’t drive, I can enjoy the slowed down pace and take in the surroundings.\u00c2\u00a0 I still hadn’t gotten my bearings: I find I need a map first.\u00c2\u00a0 After two hours of rest at the hotel I was picked up and we walked to the exhibition and set up the booth.\u00c2\u00a0 There were at least eight of us on a 3-by-6 meter booth, which meant we got a lot of waiting done.\u00c2\u00a0 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.\u00c2\u00a0 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.\u00c2\u00a0 I did, which led to my first dinner alone – which I’ve already chronicled.\u00c2\u00a0 So I’ll jump ahead to<\/p>\n

Thursday, October 18: Breakfast buffet Chinese style to start off the day.\u00c2\u00a0 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.\u00c2\u00a0 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.\u00c2\u00a0 For my taste buds, breakfast isn’t Asia’s finest hour.\u00c2\u00a0<\/p>\n

The show went reasonably well, although my expectation that toilet paper would be provided for the exhibition days was shattered.\u00c2\u00a0 Good thing I always carry paper tissues.\u00c2\u00a0 We had lunch at the “Fast Food,” which was a Chinese food cafeteria with a long line but fast food once you got there.\u00c2\u00a0 We went as a group of four and one of us found a table and reserved it while the others stood in line.\u00c2\u00a0 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.\u00c2\u00a0 In theory, it should be easier to find free seats if everybody just stood in line and looked for seats after getting their food.\u00c2\u00a0 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.\u00c2\u00a0<\/p>\n

After lunch, the show died down a bit.\u00c2\u00a0 I walked around, looking at other booths, and covered the whole exhibition by the end of the day.\u00c2\u00a0 I just don’t get kicks out of stirrers and ovens and liquid chromatography systems.\u00c2\u00a0 I do have to hand it to the company with the coolest name<\/a> and to Dragon Med for promising the Ultimate Pipetting Experience<\/a>.\u00c2\u00a0 I’m waiting for the Ultimate Titration Thrill, and then for someone to say that quickly three times in a row.\u00c2\u00a0<\/p>\n

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.\u00c2\u00a0 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.\u00c2\u00a0 Mrs. Li didn’t seem bothered by it when I showed her.\u00c2\u00a0 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.\u00c2\u00a0 I nodded off repeatedly – I’d already had apneoid spells at the booth and the wine wasn’t helping.\u00c2\u00a0 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.\u00c2\u00a0 At seven an elderly\u00c2\u00a0man 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.\u00c2\u00a0 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.\u00c2\u00a0 Then there was food, western style, with plenty of sweet desserts.\u00c2\u00a0 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.\u00c2\u00a0 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.\u00c2\u00a0 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.\u00c2\u00a0 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).\u00c2\u00a0 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.”\u00c2\u00a0 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<\/p>\n

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.\u00c2\u00a0 Not bad.\u00c2\u00a0 The show was more of the same.\u00c2\u00a0 We had a few interested visitors, but mostly I kept myself busy measuring ten-cent coins.\u00c2\u00a0 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.\u00c2\u00a0 This installation was plagued by mysterious problems that baffled our own support guy mainly by the dearth of information that accompanied the questions.\u00c2\u00a0 We’d get vague problem descriptions without measurement data and measurement data that seemed not to fit the problem description.\u00c2\u00a0 I answered that I had no idea how long it would take.\u00c2\u00a0 “Longer than one day?” he asked.\u00c2\u00a0 “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.\u00c2\u00a0 I can’t say I’m looking forward to Monday, but it should be interesting, or at least revealing.\u00c2\u00a0 We’ve also reserved Tuesday in case it does take longer than a day.\u00c2\u00a0 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.\u00c2\u00a0 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.\u00c2\u00a0 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.\u00c2\u00a0 I’m amazed at how chipper she is considering the long commute and her having to look after me, too.\u00c2\u00a0<\/p>\n

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.\u00c2\u00a0 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.\u00c2\u00a0 The trainee waitress pointed out that these dishes were both cold, clearly expecting me to order something warm.\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0I 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.\u00c2\u00a0 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<\/a>.\u00c2\u00a0 I think it may even have been two rows down from the rice.\u00c2\u00a0 And of course, beer.\u00c2\u00a0 I’d already ordered\u00c2\u00a0Yangjing\u00c2\u00a0beer 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.\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0I’m confused, but I still stick with liking Yangjing, as mentioned\u00c2\u00a0before.\u00c2\u00a0 (“Before” refers to a post on my former VOX blog<\/a>, which I’m unable to access right now.)\u00c2\u00a0<\/p>\n

Hey, I’m writing a lot here.\u00c2\u00a0 Humor me and write a comment.\u00c2\u00a0 “A comment” – while hardly original – will do.\u00c2\u00a0 “A comment – I’m hardly original” will make me chuckle.\u00c2\u00a0<\/p>\n

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.\u00c2\u00a0 “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.\u00c2\u00a0 The show once again was slow and I announced I’d leave at 1pm and return on Sunday in the early afternoon.\u00c2\u00a0 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.\u00c2\u00a0 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.\u00c2\u00a0<\/p>\n

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.\u00c2\u00a0 We talked about technology a bit.\u00c2\u00a0 At some point he remarked: “You’re very handsome.”\u00c2\u00a0 I still haven’t gotten used to that; I just blinked said thank you.\u00c2\u00a0 “You have a nice beard.”\u00c2\u00a0 What does one answer to that?\u00c2\u00a0 “You have nice hair?”\u00c2\u00a0 “You’ve got a fine shave there?”\u00c2\u00a0 “I love that\u00c2\u00a0refined Asian look you’re cultivating?”\u00c2\u00a0<\/p>\n

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<\/a>.\u00c2\u00a0 It took long enough for me to be able to spot a kite in\u00c2\u00a0the 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.”\u00c2\u00a0 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.\u00c2\u00a0 I showed the driver my address and he said something and waved his hand.\u00c2\u00a0 I pointed at a mall on Wangfujing street and the same hand motions ensued.\u00c2\u00a0 I suppose I could have left the taxi, but I didn’t, and he gave in, turned around, and drove east.\u00c2\u00a0 Once he left the ring road we were almost immediately stuck in traffic and he got impatient.\u00c2\u00a0 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.\u00c2\u00a0 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.\u00c2\u00a0 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.\u00c2\u00a0 He brought me close enough, though.\u00c2\u00a0<\/p>\n

I’d picked Wangfujing because of an article in the September edition of Beijing This Month<\/a> that mentioned the Sheng Xi Fu hat company<\/a> on Wangfujing.\u00c2\u00a0 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.\u00c2\u00a0 Well, no.\u00c2\u00a0 The young man spoke no English, just walked to the door and pointed right.\u00c2\u00a0 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.\u00c2\u00a0 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.\u00c2\u00a0 I was just a tad suspicious, but doing her injustice, as it turned out.\u00c2\u00a0 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.\u00c2\u00a0 I hope she understood my smile and my attempt at “Thank you” in Chinese.\u00c2\u00a0<\/p>\n

In the shop I browsed through the silly, the cute, and the cool, and finally settled on a warm woolen hat for 98 RMB.\u00c2\u00a0 The same hat would likely have cost 98 francs in Switzerland, so I was\u00c2\u00a0rather 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.\u00c2\u00a0 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.\u00c2\u00a0 After the tea shop I walked to the big apm shopping mall for the food court.\u00c2\u00a0 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\u00c2\u00a0[sic], wild oats, and a hot barley tea.\u00c2\u00a0 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.\u00c2\u00a0 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.\u00c2\u00a0 I walked on out and down to the main road that leads to Tian’anmen square, in hopes of walking off the tautness.\u00c2\u00a0 At Tian’anmen a couple from Qingdao accosted me and struck up a conversation that mostly centered around German cars and Qingdao beer.\u00c2\u00a0 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.\u00c2\u00a0 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.\u00c2\u00a0 And then the inevitable: “You have a very interesting moustache.”\u00c2\u00a0 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.\u00c2\u00a0 I didn’t want to tell them that right now, keeping my drawers clean was a primary concern, and beer wouldn’t help.\u00c2\u00a0 I took the subway home and with the tautness not subsiding realized I had indeed contracted a case of Mao’s bowels.\u00c2\u00a0 At the hotel I slaked my thirst with tap water, which may or may not have helped.\u00c2\u00a0 At any rate, on<\/p>\n

Sunday, October 21, Mao’s bowels were still with me, although it was a bearable experience.\u00c2\u00a0 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.\u00c2\u00a0 Their church is in Expatria to the northeast of the city, home also to several international schools.\u00c2\u00a0 We talked about finding churches and expatriate life and common friends (Dimitri and Cathy used to attend Basel Christian Fellowship<\/a>) and before long it was time to go to the service.\u00c2\u00a0 The speaker used texts from Nehemiah as a springboard to explore the characteristics of a true revival.\u00c2\u00a0 I took notes, as usual, but without a lot of gusto.\u00c2\u00a0 After the service they invited me to an Italian restaurant, where the sign advertised the chef being from Italy.\u00c2\u00a0 Whether that was true or not, I enjoyed my Gnocchi and the complementary tiramisu.\u00c2\u00a0 They brought me back to the hotel by about 2:30 pm.\u00c2\u00a0 It was a brief time together, but good to catch up and enjoy each other’s company.\u00c2\u00a0<\/p>\n

I changed and walked to the exhibition site, only to find that all the booths were in the process of packing up.\u00c2\u00a0 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.\u00c2\u00a0 That was a gratifyingly short work day.\u00c2\u00a0<\/p>\n

I decided to take my seirogan, the Japanese herbal medicine against an upset stomach, and remembered someone saying it contained creosote<\/a> – hence the title of this blog.\u00c2\u00a0 As a result of deciding on the title I went and looked up creosote<\/a>.\u00c2\u00a0 Uh-oh.\u00c2\u00a0 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, \u00e3\u201a\u00af\u00e3\u0192\u00ac\u00e3\u201a\u00aa\u00e3\u201a\u00bd\u00e3\u0192\u00bc\u00e3\u0192\u02c6<\/a>, turned up a highly critical site citing articles to a medical weekly that ran in 1998 and 1999.\u00c2\u00a0<\/p>\n

But I’m not sure I care.\u00c2\u00a0 I’ve been clean since.\u00c2\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u00c2\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’m not writing about the Scottish band, in case you were wondering, though they do sound good, as far as I can tell.\u00c2\u00a0 I’ll get back to creosote later in an attempt to be chronological.\u00c2\u00a0 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.\u00c2\u00a0 I’d watched “Fracture” on the plane and learned from this movie that apparently lawyers are an achingly beautiful set.\u00c2\u00a0 I also learned that ordering a children’s menu brings extra chocolate with your meal.\u00c2\u00a0 The drive from the airport consisted of the usual […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,16,3],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thduggie.com\/thduggies_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/105"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thduggie.com\/thduggies_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thduggie.com\/thduggies_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thduggie.com\/thduggies_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thduggie.com\/thduggies_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=105"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.thduggie.com\/thduggies_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/105\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.thduggie.com\/thduggies_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=105"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thduggie.com\/thduggies_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=105"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.thduggie.com\/thduggies_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=105"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}