Blue eyed Chinese

One thing I noticed with a lot of old Chinese people is that their eyes get this greenish blueish color. When I first saw it I thought they were mixed or whatever but later I realized a lot of old people have it. It seems to come with old age. Never saw it anywhere before.

Baby come back to me, in my heart I still believe

It's a shame Al Gore is not running for office this time around. Right now when people are tired of cowboy tactics they only want somebody "president like" who is able to do the job. The reason people voted for GWB instead of him was probably becaused they were spoiled with Bill Clinton. It's the nature of mankind, we want chance and we want to try new things. Bush was the opposite to Clinton so he was chosen. People appreciated his simplicity, his good 'ol folk feeling, and guts. People got what they wanted and more. Al Gore has all the qualities a good president should have and they just don't seem to make them like him anymore; of all the candidates for '08 there seems to be no body who can match his caliber. Then again the next president in office needs to deal with one of the most difficult periods in US history in terms of Iraq. The next administration needs to pay for the mistakes of the current one and might even end up being blamed for them. I can see Al Gore smirking, sitting back in his couch, sipping scotch, looking at his nobel price and thinking: "Lets wait another four years".

I don't mean to disrespect George Bush because I like him too. He seems like he's got a nice heart but he probably got stuck at the wrong place at the wrong time. Maybe he never really wanted to be president, maybe he was just trying to live up to his dad's expectations. Maybe he would have been a lot happier to be a rancher and just deal with his cattle, his land and eat Laura's homemade blue berry pie and BBQ. Because unless the president knows a lot himself, unless he has a strong intellect and can make his own decisions, unless he can choose the best advisors and know their hidden agendas, he is likely to be an easy prey for those around him who want to take advantage of him. Bush has most likely been the victim of advisors who were either not informed themselves about the situation in Iraq or had an hidden pro-war, pro-arms industry, pro-oil industry agenda. No body expected that the current situation would come about. Had they known, keeping Saddam Hussein in power and trying to make friends with him would have been a far better option.

Saddam Hussein was the lid on a pandora's box and when he was gone the shit hit the fan. Iraq is not one country but three countries: Kurdistan, Sunni Iraq and Shia Iraq. These three countries hate each other. The Kurds want independence, the Shias hate the Sunnis for what they did during Saddam's rule and the Sunnis are fighting for their lives. The situation is made further more sensitive by the fact that Iraq is surrounded by neighbours who all have major stakes in Iraq. Iran supports the Shias, the Saudis support the Sunnis and the Turks dread Kurdish independence more than anything else. This means that when Iraq has problems the whole region will be destabilized. Given the natural resources in this region it is also fair to say it has a major impact on the whole world. The Russians and the Chinese also have stakes there and will support whoever they think benifit them the most. If the US withdraws its troops, the building will collapse and the dust that amounts as it implodes will spread a dark cloud around the whole world.

This is what we know now. A lot of us didn't know it at the time of the Iraqi invasion. A lot of us couldn't predict this would happen, then again we were not the people ine power who made the decision. The people who made the decision should carefully have studied the ethnic make-up of Iraq, the internal opposition and the risks of ousting Saddam Hussein from power. Yet somehow the intelligence failed to get through to the top and now we are in the situation we are in today. That is why the president needs to be informed, needs to have strong intellect and analytical thinking. Needs to be able to rely on himself and not on advisors who know a lot more than him.

Finally back!

Blogspot finally works in China again and since it does I might as well drop by a quick update before it stops working again. Well, in June me and my girlfriend moved to Shanghai. We found a really nice flat right in the centre. We have about 20 shopping malls and three starbacks within 10 minutes walking distance (btw, ever since I came to China I learned how to appreciate starbucks).

Once we got here we both applied for jobs. I got a reply pretty quick from a "financial planning company" in Shanghai looking for "marketing executives". Well, that sounds great, I thought and went there. It was a group meeting where all the aspiring marketing executives met with one of the company's directors. It turned out that it was a financial planning company for expatriates in Shanghai helping out with offshore investments and retirement plants. Well, out of the 12 or so people that went there five of us were hired. It turned out that "marketing executive" meant telemarketer, i.e., your job would be to sit at the phone all day and call expats who really didn't want to hear from you and invite them to meet with one of the consultants. I still thought I'd give it a shot, at least it was something. The conditions were pretty bad though, the company would pay NOTHING for the first month and if they decided to hire you they would pay you 4000 RMB per month plus commission. What was even worse though was that everybody in the office had to wear very formal clothes, i.e. a shirt, tie and formal pants everyday despite the fact that we just stayed by the phone and never actually met any clients. This was really bad for me since I had to travel about one hour everyday to get to work and it was getting very hot outside. Everyday when I would get the office my shirt would be soaked in wet, it looked like I had just taken a shower with my clothes on.

Among the five of us who were hired at the same time there was me, an English girl, a French girl who spoke great English (probably the first and last one I met), a French guy who told me he did a lot of mushrooms and weed back home in France which is why he had to get away from all of that shit and a guy from a really small African country I and just about everyone had never heard of before (a small island between Madagascar and the mainland). In the team of marketing executives consisting of about 15 people in total, about half of them were French, there were a lot of guys from S-E Asia as well, a Turkish guy and the consultants were mainly American including the manager.

The first week we mainly had training consisting of us calling to different people in the office and pretending to make a pitch. It was a way to learn about how to deal with objections, how to make the sale etc. Everybody did pretty find apart from Mohammed, the African guy. His English was really bad and it was hard for him to understand what people were saying. He didn't really understand the company either or what it was about. He was also really nervous on the phone. The first time he made the practice pitch to another guy in the office he was like: "Hello, my name is Mohammed". The French guy on the phone replied, "Good morning". Mohammed said: "What?". The French guy said: "I said: good morning". Mohammed laughed nervously and asked us how to continue. In general I tried to help him a lot, especially because his assigned "coach" basically ignored him the whole time. I tried to show him how the computer system worked, how to make the pitch, what the company was about etc. and I felt he was improving. I seemed to be the only one who cared.

Anyway, during the week I was there I realized how difficult telemarketing was. A lot of people would just say: "No, I don't want to talk to you. NEVER CALL ME AGAIN" etc. It was especially bad as I was calling cold leads, i.e. people who were essentially never going to meet with us for sure and had already told us a hundred times. I still managed to get through to some people and got two meetings the first week which everybody thought was really special. Some people had been there for weeks and still had nothing. It was clear the climate was very rough at the work place and not like I was use to back home. During the first week two or three marketing executives quit. The next week I realized Mohammed was missing at the weekly Monday meeting. I asked where he was and they said he had been fired. At the same time the Turkish guy who had been there for four months was fired as well. About a third of the staff had left in a matter of a week. I realized they had probably only hired Mohammed to set an example for us, i.e. they're not afraid to fire us if we do bad. I felt really sorry for him and given the overall situation in the company I was thinking about quitting. At the same time I was offered to join a training program in the company I was writing a thesis about as well for seven weeks during the summer to which I accepted and quit my career in "finance".

More to come.

A stop at the food market

One of the main interests for me in China is the food. It is pretty much the opposite to the food I'm used to back home. A visit to the food market will sort of illustrate this difference.



One this video you'll see a whole hen, a duck, duck feet and some other gastronomic highlights.

It's very popular with living crabs. Don't put your fingers too close or they might catch you.

My girlfriend swears these are not turtles but to me they sure look like that...they've got shells and small little heads sticking out...I felt like buying all of them and setting them free.

Anybody fancy a fish head? I hear they're full of E-vitamin.

The missing link? These fellas looked like something half between lizards and fish.

Different parts of a jelly fish. Is typically eaten raw dipped in soy sauce.

I like shell fish but this is a bit over the top.

How to decorate your new Chinese apartment

There are a few things I noticed all modern Chinese apartments have in common. Keep this in mind when you're decorating your new apartment.

You need a glass table

You need a bunch of expensive alcohol bottles you will never drink (Remy Martin is a sure winner)

If you want to be really modern, you should put in some blue colored lights mixed with the ordinary ones

You need a big couch in the living room


An absolute must unless you want to lose face: a big screen TV

To be on the sure side you better throw in another glass table

Wedding

When you're in China, don't be surprised to be woken up suddenly in the morning by large bombs and the sounds of car-alarms going off. No, it's not the Taiwanese attacking; you might just have the bad luck to live next to a restaurant which charters weddings. In China, fireworks is a natural part in wedding cermonies. Unfortunately for Rochelle's uncle, his 16:th floor apartment is just on level with the fireworks at their explosion level outside a popular marriage cermony restaurant. The video shows the view from the uncle's balcony and the bride's car with its following of black mercedes coming in after her to the hotel. Unfortunately for Rochelle's uncle the restaurant has about 5 weddings per day.

Driving

In China the there's only rule in traffic....get wherever you want to go as quick as possible without getting killed. In the situation below there was a long line of cars ahead of us on the right line so the drived decided to go on the left lane instead to skip ahead. Luckily there was not so much traffic coming towards us. FYI: This guy is a driving instructor.

Instrument

Went to a visit another family which is friends with Rochelle's family. They have two twins, one of which plays the Chinese old-fashioned instrument of "guzheng". She's only 9 years old so you have to give her credit for how much she knows. She had to use fake nails to play it.

Dinner with friends

We went to a dinner the other evening with Rochelle's best friend, her husband, another couple and another two old highschool friends. I told everybody I won't drink any wine since I drank about one bottle of wine the day before that at another dinner and was sort of recovering. The problem was that I was really thirsty and the only thing put on the table at the time was a bottle of red wine so I decided to drink a glas with the host. The thing is, in China it's difficult to say no to drink more than one glas once you started drinking, its kind of inpolite. I told them that previous nights I had mostly been drinking with Rochelle's familys' friends, i.e. older people and that it was not so scary to drink with young people so it was ok. I wish I wouldn't have said that because the host took it as a challenge. We kept drinking. Eventually the host, me and another guy had drunk three bottles of red wine together.

The other guy's face was turning into a color of dark shade red, black and dark blue, which I had never seen before. When I cheered with him he just looked at me with empty eyes, the glas and then made a indistinguishable gut sound of disgust and drank it. The host however seemed completely untouched by the drinks. Me, I was beginning to feel a bit tipsy so I began eating all the "exotic" types of food I didn't consider trying before. Seacucumber may not seem very tasty but when you're trying to stay sober it's a good medicine. We opened one more bottle and thanks to the food I managed to make it all the way through...I even began taking the initiative by handing out the cheers. The other guy appeared to be in another place and after we finished the bottle he crashed in the couch.

Me and Rochelle on the left, the drunk guy with the red/black/blue face with glasses, the host in the middle and the guy on the right who had enough after two beers and still has a nice red tone.

The drunk guy's wife was a piano teacher and sort of added a new dimension to the dinner by playing for us. I asked her if she could play Elvis but she never heard of him.

Fishing trip

A couple of days ago Rochelle's uncle rented a fishing boat for the day in a nearby coastal city. Me, Rochelle, her parents, the uncle and his wife and a couple of other people I didn't know went along. We took out early in the morning and the fishermen put their nets into the ocean.

After a couple of hours it was time for brunch. Menu for the day: duck feet, meat jelly, bones with tiny shreds of sweet meat, pig legs also mostly consisting of bones and water melon. I mostly ate of the water melon. As so many times before the hosts felt a bit embarrassed and said they didn't know that "I didn't eat that type of food". Later on Rochelle made me some rice with soy sauce and vinegar (i.e. baby food) and I didn't have to starve for the remaining 10 hours on the boat. If you look to the left at a photo from the brunch you'll see that the lady is holding a big fat juicy duck foot in her hand.

After about two hours they pulled up the fishing net. About 90 % was trash consisting of paper, mugs, logs etc. and huge wads of a jellyfish that broke in parts in the net. As the final part of the net was pulled up there was a sound of excitement from the group and we saw something that resembled living things admits all the junk. It was mostly small fish, crabs, shrimps and a couple of eels. The idea was that the staff on the boat would cook the fish and that we would all eat it together later on...lets just say I was not planning to abandon my rice just yet.

After a couple of hours we arrived at this really cute little island with a small old-fashioned fishing village. When we arrived there was a gate into the village and a sign that said you had to pay roughly 3 euros to enter thus no body wanted to go there. After a while one in the group asked why they charged money to enter to which one of the old village women which just hung out there said that there was no charge, they were just hanging out. Sometimes its even hard for Chinese people to communicate with each other.

The village was really cute. The villages were sitting outside eating lunch among their farm animals and everybody was staring on them. It was kind of like a zoo with the only difference that the items of exhibition stared back at us just as much as we stared back at them.

Fishermen putting in the nets

Brunch at the boat

Catch of the day

Fishing village with gate in background

Ab initio

I'm Mike. I've decided to give moving to China a shot. After all, China is where it's all going down right now and everybody keep talking about it. Plus, perhaps a more important reason my girlfriend (Rochelle) is Chinese and choosing between staying in Europe or China we both prefered China. I've been to China one time before for a couple of months the previous summer.

I have to say my first impression of China was very negative. People were not nearly as friendly or open-minded as the people I had met in other countries. When I've been to other Asian countries people have always shown a natural curiousity towards me being a foreigner but in China people don't seem to care that much, especially in Shanghai being a very international city. Another negative experience was the food. I come from a region where people are crazy about meat, fat sauces and potatoes. It was a total culture shoch eating the Chinese food. I hated almost all the dishes that were served to me. I just couldn't begin to understand how people coud eat beans and ice for desert, the affection for bones or sweet meat. The positive impression was my girlfriend's family who treated me like a member of their family. They lavished me in gifts and free dinners.

This is my second time around in China and this time I'm here to stay. After I finished my vacation in my girlfriend's city we will go to Shanghai in order to write our master thesis for a major Scandinavian company in the beginning of June. That's when the real adventure will start.