distant ruminations

But before I get started, have a look at this piece, found via Danwei. All that American harping on about contaminated imports from China always reeked of hypocrisy, and that article only increases the stench. It’s amazing that such a strongly Christian nation can so blatantly ignore Matthew 7:1. [Update: Wow. My posting a link to that article inspired a couple of childish, petulant comments by some guy who takes issue with my opinion, but doesn’t want to demonstrate why I’m wrong in any way that would be considered rational, and who then goes on to rant about how crap my blog is. Well, if you don’t like my blog, don’t read it. Never would’ve thought that a simple trackback appearing in the comment thread of that article would provoke such ire.]

Anyway, so what was so mercifully quick? My trip to the PSB Entry-Exit Management whatever they call themselves. See, although I work at big, huge BeiGongDa, I work for one very small office within BeiGongDa, and the office is overwhelmed with recruiting new students, so I was given the necessary forms and money and sent off to the PSB to pick up two passports newly residence permitted: mine and some other foreign teacher’s who I have yet to meet. All up the trip took an hour. Taxi from the BeiGongDa main gate up to the Pingleyuan intersection, straight down through Jinsong Qiao and on to the Second Ring Road, northwards up to Xiaojie Qiao. In to the PSB, ask a baoan how I get my passport, he says pay first, then go to desk 24, I say thanks and stand in the cashiers queue. Five minutes later, pay, go to desk 24, which is the one immediately to my left, anyway, pick up these two passports, take the receipts, and out into a new taxi, and back the exact same way I came. Then straight over to the office to drop off the receipts and this other guy’s passport. One hour, and I must have been in and out of the PSB in maybe 15 minutes. Like I said, mercifully quick, and painless. Amazing.

So now I’m legal again, at least until June 29 next year.

And Beijing is still enveloped in this thick soup of murk. Twice this week a cool breeze has blown up in the afternoon and cleared the air, only for the murk to return the next morning. This, I tell you, is cruel and unusual punishment.

For some reason lzh got a craving for hotpot yesterday afternoon, so she bought the all the stuff necessary on her way home from work. She bought the “lamb” from the market, and when she got home, asked if it smelled alright. Well, I don’t know what exactly was in that plastic bag, but there was no way in hell I was going to eat “lamb” or any meat that reeked that badly. Fortunately she’d also bought chicken which looked and smelled like chicken, so she cooked curry chicken instead. It was good, but trying to eat curry anything (or hotpot, for that matter) in this weather is a recipe for spontaneous human combustion. Fortunately we managed to avoid bursting into flames, though.

I still feel like I’m melting, though. See, the trouble is my electric fan is at a friend’s place because she rented a room that had no aircon. She’s supposed to be moving soon, so hopefully that means I get my fan back. I hate aircon, and most of the time a fan is more than adequate for keeping me cool. And besides, the only aircon in this apartment is in the bedroom and it isn’t quite strong enough to cool the whole place. But even if it was, all I’d do is open the windows and turn the fan on. Fresh air, even if it is fresh Beijing summer humidity and pollution murk, is a million times better than that poisonous gaseous shite that comes out of air conditioners.

Note to self: Don’t go listening to the radio, watching videos, tv or films online, or downloading said videos, tv or films. BeiGongDa charges per bit or byte or whatever, well, charges by the volume of data, not by time, meaning all those things are going to eat up my internet money superfast. I spent eight hours yesterday listening to Kiwi FM, and funnily enough, that ate up 20 kuai. And I’d just put 100 kuai on my account yesterday morning. Oops.

So I thought I should just stop being paranoid and use the broadband. It’s weird, though, getting used to this desktop’s keyboard, especially considering how this desk is set up, with the keyboard in a draw instead of the regular sliding tray or sitting on top of the desk.

So I’ve now got the broadband in our apartment working, but I’m kinda reluctant to use it to check my email or blog. I have to sign in to the BeiGongDa network to use it, see, and although that’s probably only for billing purposes, I’m still kinda wondering about it….

…and so today I’m being paranoid and using the dial-up to check my email and write this.

Which is a bit silly, really. I should turn this off and use the broadband.

In other news, the weather only gets muggier. In other words, there is no news. Right, I’m going to stop being silly and get on to the broadband.

Well, the university provides a nice, big Lenovo desktop in the foreign teachers’ apartments, and so I’m using that as a backup for photos and files and everything. Also, as soon as I got the broadband working I did what I do with any new computer and immediately started downloading stuff- all the things needed to run a computer properly with as little interference from Microsoft as possible. The only problem was that I couldn’t download AVG anti-virus for some reason. AVG anti-spyware was no problem, but for some reason I just couldn’t get the anti-virus. I remember somebody recommending another anti-virus a while ago, but I can’t remember it, and I suspect it was one of the bookmarks China Uselesscom so kindly decided to remove in the midst of one of its semi-regular spasms. But I got Firefox and Picasa and what…. I can’t remember. I also decided to give Safari a go. So far I’m not too impressed and I’m sticking with Firefox for my main browser, but I’ll keep playing around with Safari.

And one reason for my paranoia right now is that as soon as I installed AVG anti-virus I scanned the computer and, of course, a whole lot of badness showed up, including one particular piece of nastiness called CNSMin which I have only seen on school networks- this particular piece of nastiness caused me no end of grief in Tianjin. So that got my paranoia going. There was also a trojan. In fact, there were three high-risk things, which is more high-risk nastiness than I’ve ever had on this laptop.

The other hassle with that desktop is that previous occupants of this apartment very kindly left large amounts of their junk on the computer, meaning a whole lot of the c drive was taken up with stuff that means nothing to either of us. So of hidden some of it away on the d or e drive or somewhere, and a lot of it I’ve just deleted. Now, with all of that extra, irrelevant rubbish and me backing up all our stuff I managed to completely max out the c drive, so I copied all of our stuff to the e or f or whatever drive just to make sure then went about getting rid of as much of this extra rubbish as possible. Now I’m back to a more reasonable amount of space on the c drive.

I want one of those portable hard drives to put all our photos on. That’d allow me to free up a lot of disk space here and on that desktop.

And so I bring the computer over to the office just on the other side of Xidawang Lu and all of a sudden China Uselesscom gives me maximum signal and a halfway decent connection. So I guess I’m going to be spending a lot of my spare time here.

Well, every apartment has its quirks, and although our new apartment is really nice and we like it a lot, its no exception to that rule. One thing I don’t like about it, apart from the like of a China Uselesscom signal, is that the first thing you see when you walk in the door is the bathroom. There’s something just fundamentally odd about that. Still, looking at the overall design of the building, it’s hard to see how our apartment could be set up any better.

The only other gripes I have right now are just as minor and aren’t so much about the apartment as about the area. It’s a nice area, but it seems to have absolutely no xiaomaibu whatsoever. I’ve looked, I can’t find one. There’s normally one or two ground floor apartments whose inhabitants sell stuff out their window, but not in our area. There’s a market very close by to the southwest, but there’s no gate that we can find on that side of our compound, meaning we have to walk all the way around to the east gate and onto Xidawang Lu and around the outside wall of the compound.

See? Minor gripes. Actually, we’ve found everything we need and then some. Not difficult considering I was living in this area when I met lzh. And it’s really good to feel so settled in so quickly. I only wish our compound had a gate on the west side or there was a xiaomaibu inside. I suppose, though, the extra walk to the market is going to be good for us, so there’s no sense complaining.

So we’re all moved in to our new digs down at BeiGongDa. It was a bit of a mission, but we made it. Fortunately Lao Ma, my former student, volunteered his car for the mission. Still needed a taxi for the last few bits and pieces. For a while there, though, lzh was trying to pretend she’d ride her bike here. We talked her out of that, folded her bike up, and put her in a taxi. There honestly wasn’t even a tiny little bit of space left in Lao Ma’s car. We have too much stuff, and the scary thing is that most of our stuff is stored up in the village.

And then on the way there we saw one more reason why it would’ve been a really, really bad idea for her to ride her bike all the way here, as if the distance alone weren’t enough. As we were coming down the east side of the Third Ring Road, about halfway down, the rain suddenly started coming down so heavily you could’ve been forgiven for thinking you’d suddenly been transported somewhere way down south where it floods all summer.

Anyway, we got here. It’s all good. Well, almost. The university’s broadband is broken in this area, judging by a notice we came across on the way back from the supermarket and the complete lack of activity when I plug it in. I can’t get a China Uselesscom signal anywhere in this apartment. I’m going to take the computer over to the office tomorrow and try again from there. So I’m stuck using this not very cheap dial up for the time being, which I guess means I can’t go spending too much time online.

Still, if I get some of these part-time jobs going, I might not be able to spend too much time online. And even if I don’t, this could be motivation to spend less time online. We’ll see.

But I must say: This apartment is really nice. It already feels like home, none of that new apartment oddness. And the university even supplies a nice, big Lenovo desktop computer with a printer, which would be more useful with a functioning internet connection, but will still be very useful for backing up files, storing stuff and thereby freeing up space on this hard drive, and preparing decent lesson materials, should I get that motivated. But otherwise, it’s great, feeling like this is home pretty much as soon as we’ve walked in the door and unpacked our stuff.

And, actually, that’s about all I have to write today. But don’t worry, I’m still here, and things will return to normal once I get something approaching a decent internet connection sorted out. Or at least, once I find a place that has a China Uselesscom signal.