We are slowly settling in. I think that by now, the fact that we have really moved here has fully sunk in, and we are starting to find our way around - we may have even got a flat (made an offer, awaiting final confirmation). EDIT: We got the flat. So, a few more observations and comments:
- Customer service here is amazing. I went to get a phone, and managed to get a plan and a device within half an hour - regardless of the facts that I do not have a Chinese bank account yet and that the lady who had to deal with me did not speak any English... She called a colleague of hers who did, and we managed the whole transaction by passing the phone back and forth. EDIT from a year later: service here is bizarre. At times unbelievably efficient, at times incomprehensibly Kafkaesque. People are very helpful and kind in general, except...
- ... when commuting. I covered driving habits last week - now let me talk a little bit about the underground: firstly, like all modes of transport here, it is very, very cheap (30 pence per trip!). But secondly, it is also very clean, modern, fast, and your phone has signal - in other words, so much better than London (though not as nice as the Athens one, where you see ancient ruins in the stations). Unfortunately, however, people in the underground as not as polite as in the UK. They do not apologise when trying to pass through - they just push each other out of the way (in the rare cases they do speak, they don't say "excuse me"; the direct translation of the phrase they use is something like "move out of the way"). It got me thinking - what's the minimum % of people who need to start saying "excuse me" when shoving people out of their way before everyone adopts the habit?
Also, infuriatingly, there is no escalator etiquette - people stand both on the left and the right. Having picked up something of the English mentality, I'm ill-equipped to deal with that: since I cannot speak Mandarin, and thinking that it would be rude to talk to people in English, I have no way of communicating my desire that they move out of the bloody way - so all I can do is stand behind them helplessly frustrated.
- WeChat is your life. That's the Chinese version of WhatsApp, but so much more powerful. Besides providing a chat service, WeChat also functions as a payments system - in fact, we've been to a few places where they accept WeChat payments, but not cards. You can use it to pay restaurant or utility bills, or to transfer money to one another - it makes splitting the bill much easier. Unfortunately, that service doesn't seem to work on Jessi's and my phone (this sentence is pretty tricky grammatically... "Jessi's and my phone" seems the best option, but surely it should be "phones"? Also, and I'm aware I'm digressing here, how would I refer to something that belongs to Jessi and me - e.g. our flat? "Jessi's and my flat" looks awkward) because we somehow got our WeChat accounts registered outside of mainland China. Besides payments, there is another great functionality (I'm beginning to sound like an ad here): you can add a contact who acts as your valet - e.g. you write to them "I want tickets to watch Star Wars in English", and they will book them for you. How cool is that? Why doesn't have exist in London? (Well, probably because here it's quite cheap to pay hundreds of people to provide such a service)
- The Chinese are like the Honey badger: Chinese don't care; Chinese don't give a ****. Unlike the English, they do not exhibit any kind of self-conciousness in their public behaviour. There is a park between where we live and the Embassy, where you see all kinds of things: people practising Tai Chi in solitude or in groups, people ball room dancing to "the tide is high", people walking backwards (in that park, walking clockwise is supposed to be good for your constitution, and vice versa, so people want to avoid walking directly counter-clockwise), people flying kites or even sword fighting. Which relates to the point below...
- ... a friend expressed mild surprise that I did not mention the public spitting or burping in my previous post. But the thing is, almost everyone had told us about this before heading out - and once you expect it, there's nothing really surprising about it. Whereas even if I tell you that people engage in sword play in parks here, you'll still do a double take when you see it for yourself. I'm curious as to what would happen if a 90 year old guy showed up in Hyde Park brandishing a sword and waving it around...
- Finally, a comment on height: disappointingly, it is not the case that I find myself towering over the masses and that people regard me with awe (although a guard did salute me for some reason, so I've got that going for me which is nice (anyone get the reference?)). Actually, a quick check on Wikipedia, which is inexplicably not banned, shows that while the average male height in China is 167 cm, in Beijing it is 175, which is not only close to the European average of 178, but is also higher than my own 170 cms. Jessi however does make an impression - our estate agent commented "your wife... she's very tall!".
- Customer service here is amazing. I went to get a phone, and managed to get a plan and a device within half an hour - regardless of the facts that I do not have a Chinese bank account yet and that the lady who had to deal with me did not speak any English... She called a colleague of hers who did, and we managed the whole transaction by passing the phone back and forth. EDIT from a year later: service here is bizarre. At times unbelievably efficient, at times incomprehensibly Kafkaesque. People are very helpful and kind in general, except...
- ... when commuting. I covered driving habits last week - now let me talk a little bit about the underground: firstly, like all modes of transport here, it is very, very cheap (30 pence per trip!). But secondly, it is also very clean, modern, fast, and your phone has signal - in other words, so much better than London (though not as nice as the Athens one, where you see ancient ruins in the stations). Unfortunately, however, people in the underground as not as polite as in the UK. They do not apologise when trying to pass through - they just push each other out of the way (in the rare cases they do speak, they don't say "excuse me"; the direct translation of the phrase they use is something like "move out of the way"). It got me thinking - what's the minimum % of people who need to start saying "excuse me" when shoving people out of their way before everyone adopts the habit?
Also, infuriatingly, there is no escalator etiquette - people stand both on the left and the right. Having picked up something of the English mentality, I'm ill-equipped to deal with that: since I cannot speak Mandarin, and thinking that it would be rude to talk to people in English, I have no way of communicating my desire that they move out of the bloody way - so all I can do is stand behind them helplessly frustrated.
- WeChat is your life. That's the Chinese version of WhatsApp, but so much more powerful. Besides providing a chat service, WeChat also functions as a payments system - in fact, we've been to a few places where they accept WeChat payments, but not cards. You can use it to pay restaurant or utility bills, or to transfer money to one another - it makes splitting the bill much easier. Unfortunately, that service doesn't seem to work on Jessi's and my phone (this sentence is pretty tricky grammatically... "Jessi's and my phone" seems the best option, but surely it should be "phones"? Also, and I'm aware I'm digressing here, how would I refer to something that belongs to Jessi and me - e.g. our flat? "Jessi's and my flat" looks awkward) because we somehow got our WeChat accounts registered outside of mainland China. Besides payments, there is another great functionality (I'm beginning to sound like an ad here): you can add a contact who acts as your valet - e.g. you write to them "I want tickets to watch Star Wars in English", and they will book them for you. How cool is that? Why doesn't have exist in London? (Well, probably because here it's quite cheap to pay hundreds of people to provide such a service)
- The Chinese are like the Honey badger: Chinese don't care; Chinese don't give a ****. Unlike the English, they do not exhibit any kind of self-conciousness in their public behaviour. There is a park between where we live and the Embassy, where you see all kinds of things: people practising Tai Chi in solitude or in groups, people ball room dancing to "the tide is high", people walking backwards (in that park, walking clockwise is supposed to be good for your constitution, and vice versa, so people want to avoid walking directly counter-clockwise), people flying kites or even sword fighting. Which relates to the point below...
- ... a friend expressed mild surprise that I did not mention the public spitting or burping in my previous post. But the thing is, almost everyone had told us about this before heading out - and once you expect it, there's nothing really surprising about it. Whereas even if I tell you that people engage in sword play in parks here, you'll still do a double take when you see it for yourself. I'm curious as to what would happen if a 90 year old guy showed up in Hyde Park brandishing a sword and waving it around...
- Finally, a comment on height: disappointingly, it is not the case that I find myself towering over the masses and that people regard me with awe (although a guard did salute me for some reason, so I've got that going for me which is nice (anyone get the reference?)). Actually, a quick check on Wikipedia, which is inexplicably not banned, shows that while the average male height in China is 167 cm, in Beijing it is 175, which is not only close to the European average of 178, but is also higher than my own 170 cms. Jessi however does make an impression - our estate agent commented "your wife... she's very tall!".
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