equivocal ramblings

On ShenZhen

After what seems like forever, I’m back on Malaysian soil. It feels good to be back to say the least. A big shout out to Vivian, Michael, Joe, Yuko, Tina, Zhou Wei, Lenky, Cici, Jacky, Li Bao, and Lily. You guys rock. I didn’t feel out of place thanks to your efforts, and I know it must’ve been a challenge figuring out what the ignorant brown man was saying half the time :P Thanks.

To Loh and Foong, or rather to 小罗 and 小风, it was fun and thanks for all the translation work :P

On Malaysia

I love Malaysian weather and food, after visiting China. That is all.

P.S.: Tina, I’m busy compiling a full album to upload. I’ll let you know when it’s done :)

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

It’s been just over a week since we arrived in Shenzhen, and time has really flown past. I just uploaded 255 photos :)

You can view them over at my picasa gallery.

Today we spent the day at a friend’s place. We took a half-hour bus ride out of the city to get to Jenny’s apartment. Jenny and Yuko cooked us an awesome lunch, and then we lazed around munching on snacks the rest of the afternoon. In the evening we went to a restaurant called ‘Little Sheep’ — famous apparently for lamb dishes. We had ourselves a steamboat dinner which was awesome, and then came home completely drained — after all, we haven’t exactly been conserving energy the past few days; badminton, late nights, being ill… It does add up.

I’m going to strive to take better photos this week — I’ve familiarised myself with the various modes and settings the camera I’m using has to offer (thanks for the loan Perry). I’m also less nervous about spending time to frame things right now.

On Brown Skin in China

It’s interesting walking around and being stared at all the time. Now I know how my foreign friends feel when they walk around KL. I find the people very accommodating, even learning bits of English to converse with me. I’ve picked up quite a few mandarin phrases. The first few I learnt were:

1. Pretty girl
2. Official receipt please
3. The food is tasty
4. How are you?

:-P

Today we had dinner at Kentucky Fried Chicken. It was a distressing experience. They had this pitiful replacement for coleslaw that was yellow. Yes, sickly pus yellow. Ugh.

When Morons Design

I spent the whole 11 hours (!) at work wrestling with a Flash applet and the accompanying PHP/database backend. It’s an absolutely drop dead dumb piece of crap.

It basically allows video conferencing. Now, the main problem with it is this:

1. Alice starts up the applet, and she waits for the other party to connect
2. Bob connects and they have a conference session
3. Now, Bob disconnects and goes on his way
4. Until Alice explicitly clicks “End conference” she is considered to be unavailable with her status set to “In a conference”.

Smart eh? Obviously someone was half-asleep when he dreamed this system up. Oh and get this — the database table uses two rows to store Alice and Bobs conference status - this is what leads to Alice being tied up. When Bob disconnects, his row is removed, but no no, not Alice! Nooooo! she has to wait her turn. Idiots.

Before anyone even suggests it, no it’s not a feature. It’s a recognised bug.

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.