Water Doesn’t Fall From the Sky

I never thought I’d say this, but I miss the rain. I’ve been here 13 days, and it has yet to rain. It rains almost every day back home.

The air is also much drier, and there’s a fair bit of haze in the air — put those two variables together and you have me, standing around coughing my lungs out :( . The temperature is apparently between 21C and 25C, but when the wind picks up it feels more like 16C. I think I understand now why foreigners seem to love Malaysian weather (Till they get sweaty. Then they whinge.)

We’re Walking There? Again? Oh, And Back Too…

I’ve taken a taxi ride three times since getting here and I’ve taken the bus once. The rest of the time, we walk. We walk to work, we walk back. We walk to dinner, we walk to store. We walk to the bakery. I’ve never walked so much in my life. The one good thing about this is that I get to see a lot more of the city on foot than in a car… and it sure is cheaper. Steve would be proud of me.

Cross on Green

In China, green means, It might be safe to cross now. If the taxis don’t run you over as you’re cross the road, the bicycles will when you’re on sidewalk. If they miss, then you’ll be assaulted by very persistent beggars. Walking to work must be the equivalent of an hours jog in terms of cardiovascular workout :o

Something even more shocking is how nonchalant people are about stepping out in front of oncoming traffic — today two people stepped out in front of a bus as it was hurtling towards them … and proceeded to relaxedly cross the road. They walked. Leisurely.

Good thing the buses here have good brakes. One went from ~50 km/h to a full halt the other day. The driver actually managed to lock the wheels — No ABS apparently — which must’ve left some interesting marks on the road.

Fresh Meat

I think I’ve eaten more than my standard quota of pork for the year in these two weeks. This isn’t a bad thing of course, but still, it does feel weird when you have to say, Can we not eat pork today? The food is excellent though, but then again I am not exactly eating cheap either…

Booze

Beer is cheap. Really cheap. It’s 4.5元 (~RM 2.25) for a large bottle of Kingway beer. It doesn’t exactly win any prizes for taste or texture, but it’s not too bad. Well, it doesn’t taste too bad anymore.

There’s also the local rice wine, which smells somewhat like paint stripper — it’s ridiculously raw and strong stuff, sitting at a comfortable 45% vol. Yes, I do realise that a lot of liquor does match, or surpass that figure, but this just burns with the fury of a thousand suns on the way down. If you drop it on your skin, it feels exactly like paint thinner, really.

The Condo

Well, Vivian, moved out of our apartment to a place of her own, and two dudes from Shanghai moved in with us. We are now in permanent bachelor pad mode :-/ People here find it completely acceptable to smoke indoors, in air conditioned rooms. Sigh

Yesterday, I was rather disgusted to discover that the sun rises at 6.25am… I discovered this at precisely 6:35am, after which I was unable to sleep. The weather here is interesting — it’s dry, and cool (25C on average apparently) and it never seems to rain.

Apart from that, no real surprises. It really doesn’t feel all that different, except for the traffic. This still shocks me — people here seem to obey only one traffic rule: drive on the right side of the road. Most of the time.

I expected to see more bicycles here for some reason, but walking seems to be the trend — all my colleagues live within walking distance of the office, and they seem to spend most of their time there. The working hours here are 9am-8pm. 11 hours, and people actually stay and work late. Insanity I tell you. No one goes out for lunch either — they all order in, eat quickly and resume work.

I confirmed today that I do indeed live in the clubbing strip of the city. It’s somewhat hard to tell with all the signs being in Chinese, and there being very normal facades hiding the clubs…

Apart from food (dinner/lunch) I’ve only purchased one thing — a Heineken six-pack . This was at Foong’s suggestion — I said that I needed to get a cereal drink (like Nestum) that I could drink in the mornings, and in reply he proceeded to walk over to the alcohol section of the supermarket we were in. He will pay for this.

On Receipts

There are apparently two kinds of receipts here — official, and unofficial. You have to specifically request these official receipts, which are the only receipts recognised by offices. They come in predetermined values, and have to be acquired from an official source… Most quaint.

Last night I arrived in Shenzhen, China for work. This is as good a reason as any to start up my online journal again… so shrug here goes.

We took the 6:46pm flight out of Malaysia to Hong Kong. After that, it was a car ride across the border to China, and then to Shenzhen.

At every single immigration checkpoint I got stopped and checked… I think this is because I was the only ‘foreign’ looking one in our group — my two colleagues are Chinese.

Finally, after a crazy taxi ride (I counted three almost killed cyclist and pedestrians), we arrived outside our apartment building at about one in the morning. My boss (Loh) then declares that he must now run off and get the key from our office… So I end up standing around with luggage and my colleague, Foong. The upside to that was that it gave me plenty of time to look at the surrounding area . It appears that I live in the area where all the pubs/clubs are:

From Our Condo

Finally, he returned with the key and we went upstairs to the apartment — very strange layout, but I have my own room and hot water, so all is good. At about two in the morning we went out for dinner… and that pretty much sums up my first ‘night’ there.

I’ve just watched the second season of Jack Bauer 24, and all I can say is wow.

The man is tortured, beaten to a pulp, tortured, beaten some more, and yet is able to then run around and take down terrorists who are well rested, well armed and waiting for him to show up.

Oh, there’s also the fact that he can get from anywhere in Los Angeles to anywhere else in LA in a matter of minutes, no matter the time of day, except when someone is bleeding and it really matters. Then they have to wait for a chopper, and it doesn’t arrive in time.

Reality Distortion Field generators are definitely installed all over LA…

All in all though, I still wait for the next episode.

Technorati Tags: tv, 24, suspension of disbelief

During the first year of college, I was assigned a project–CS114, HTML & JavaScript. Now, it was a really simple thing, but the sheer stupidity of the thing made me neglect it, and now, at the end of year two, I have to finish it. In fact, I have to finish it by the 25th of this month.

Starting tonight, I am on a marathon–develop a real estate type website, use liberal amounts of JavaScript, and then document it. Yes, it’s one of those. My classmates enjoyed this task apparently. They must have, as a few of them turned in a binder with a page count in excess of 500.

This of course included a printout of the actual source code for each and every HTML, JS or other file included as part of the website. Still, that means that they managed to write about 200 pages of documentation consisting of mostly debugging/testing… for a basic HTML/JS site.

What this all means is that till the 25th, I have no life.

Today I went bowling for the first time as a result of rain ruining baseball plans. I scored a 69, and a 68. I even got a spare and a strike in the same round :P

I’d resisted all suggestions to go bowling in the past, but I found it really fun, and definitely want to do it again.

My arm hurts though.

It is now 2:38 into the new year. Hmmm…

I’ve decided to listen to every single track in my music collection — about 3000 items right now.

Now, it is as good as written in stone that I am not going to like every song on the album. Would you keep the tracks you’re never going to listen to for the sake of completeness, or not?

Assume you didn’t buy this on the iTMS, but rather ripped them from CDs just in case you’re factoring in money spent.

Blogcritics.org: Why Going to the Movies Sucks So Bad is a nice take on the (sometimes) ordeal of having to go watch a movie…

Quite a long while ago, I really enjoyed The 5th Exotic by Quantic. Today, I rediscovered the album — the phrase “Sometimes a man has to a very long way…” kept repeating itself in my mind, and I couldn’t remember where it was from, or what the ending to that sentence was. A quick Google search and I found it.

Listen to the samples they’ve put up, maybe you’ll like it.

Update: Ahem. Apologies to the planets for the ill-formed link…