Wednesday, September 07, 2005

 

Last Night in Wuhan


Well, we put the Wu! In Wuhan while we were here but its time to go tomorrow morning. Everyone in the newly expanded family is doing great. Nothing new to report. I am trying a local beer tonight called Blue Ribbon Group. I figure its Chinese Pabst Blue Ribbon. It has a weird taste to it but its still beer. In the absence of new information on the baby, I have more random thoughts on China:

Energy: The hotels make you use your keycard to turn on the power to your room and the air conditioning is set to only go to a certain point. They also turn the whole air conditioning system off during certain times of day to save on power. The cities use electric busses for part of their public transportation which is good. The bad side effects of this energy conservation are that you can’t cool your room off enough during the hot summer days and the showers aren’t very hot.

Personal Liability Lawsuits: There must not ever be any. The sidewalks are uneven and broken here in Wuhan and the construction sites aren’t cordoned off at all. The marble and tile steps everywhere are slippery. As I mentioned before; they drive horribly. We witnessed our cab driver hitting a pedestrian with his side view mirror, a scooter hit by a garbage truck, and an old woman who was narrowly missed by a speeding car.

Bicycles: They love ‘em. It looks like a Schwinn convention in China. They have scooters and motorcycles too. It’s not a stereotype.

Mao: They love him. We went to a Mao shop. There were Mao cigarette lighters. I bought a Mau watch in Tiananmen Square with waving arm action. Tiana bought a video chronicling Mao’s famous swim across the Yangtze River. Somewhere in China there must be Mao lunchboxes and boxer shorts.

Uniforms: I can’t tell the difference between the military, the police, and security officers. They all have similar uniforms. The odd thing is that they aren’t issued uniform footwear. I’ve seen a group of soldiers and some have tennis shoes while others wear dress shoes.

Helmet Laws: They don’t appear to have any. I’ve seen some old looking military helmets used by motorcyclists and an assortment of other odd headwear including construction hard-hats.

Money: The exchange rate is 8 Yuan to one dollar. Prices here are good and the dollar is strong. Mau is on every bill so it doesn’t help to tell them apart. They have 100, 50, 20, 10, 5, and 1 Yuan bills as well as 2 Yuan, ½ Yuan, and 1/10 Yuan bills. The latter are worth 1/8 of a U.S. cent and are hard to get rid of once you get them unless you can put 5 together to make a ½ Yuan.

Language: Some people know a little English and want to use it on you; others don’t know any English and don’t care. They're usually nice about it if you're having trouble communicating. Some respond when I use my Chinese and others ignore me completely. It has helped a lot to know some Chinese and I wish I would have known more. One interesting thing to note is that Chinese people engaged in business transactions seem to yell at each other and scowl a lot. The cashier at KFC was a sweet 5 foot 4 woman with a pleasant smile who helped us to order since she spoke a fair amount of English. When Jesse ordered mashed potatoes without gravy, she turned to the cooking staff, scowled, tripled the volume of her voice, and spit out a venomous stream of orders to the cooks. It was scary enough to make us both jump. She then politely turned back to us and returned to her sweet little elf-like self. She must have been doing something right because I noticed from the sign on the wall that she was the employee of the month.

Split Pants: Yes, some children do wear split pants, and yes, they just squat and let her rip right on the street. We saw kids doing number ones and number twos in Beijing and Wuhan. We also saw children playing happily and walking with their parents while their privates enjoyed the afternoon breeze.

Staring: We have been stared at because we are Americans, because we have a Chinese baby, and because we’re loud Americans with Chinese babies. We are as friendly and respectful as we can be but its starting to get a little annoying to be stared at and talked about wherever we go here in the province. There will be hundreds of us walking around with our new kids in Ghoungzhou so it should be better there. It’s starting to creep us all out here in Wuhan, quite frankly. If I went to the mall back home and stared at all the Asian people there like we’re getting stared at here I’m sure they’d get pretty pissed off and call the ACLU.

Television: Reidar and I watched Robot Wars overdubbed in Chinese one night. They have an interesting game show called Lucky Ball and another one like Nickelodeon where they have teams competing against one antoher and the person who loses has a gorilla pour water on his head. There are tons of cartoons in Chinese that Reidar seems to like. The rest of the shows are movies and soap opera types of shows. They also have other American programs with Chinese overdubs and subtitles. Here in Wuhan at least we have satellite TV so there is a whole block of English language channels including CNN so we have been able to see how the whole country is falling apart while we are gone and also see some HBO movies.

The Internet: They have slow shared DSL connections with limited or spotty wireless at both of our hotels so far. We paid $15 per day at the Beijing Hotel but it was free here in Wuhan although very slow. I can’t VPN work or see certain web pages here so it’s really a challenge.

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