Month: June 2017

Posted on

Day 13 – Lingering Garden and Shantang Street

The rain held off for most of today, but gosh was it humid! I spent about an hour on the treadmill this morning and my shirt weighed three times as much by the time I was done. Eeek!  After a morning of studying Mandarin, SharePoint, and catching up on the latest episode of Rachel Maddow, I spent a good chunk of the afternoon exploring two sections of old town Suzhou: The Lingering Garden (留园) and Shantang Street (山塘街).

The Lingering Garden is one old gardens that help give Suzhou its mystique as a beautiful city. In fact, this garden dates back to 1593 when China was ruled by the Ming dynasty. It is known for its collection of bonsai trees (about 200 of them) and interestingly shaped rocks. In fact, in the bonsai section of the garden, there was this rock collection that reminded me of a combination of a dog and an Egyptian Sphinx!

Lingering Garden Sphinx-16

While the Wikipedia article on Shantang Street is rather … skinny … I’m pleased to report there’s a lot more going on in this area than that article would lead onto, provided I was on the right street! (Directions in China are still confusing to me…) As I walked north along Guangji Road (广济路), from the Lingering Garden, I crossed a stone bridge that went over a canal (pictured below) and on the other side of the bridge was a narrow street (maybe 4-5 meters wide). To the west, the street had a number of shops selling anything from prepared and fresh food, fruits & veg, baked goods, and textile good. To the east, the street was a bit more upscale and housed a number of other shops including a number of jewelery and art shops.

 

Canal near Shantang Street (left) and looking down Shantang Street (right).

If tomorrow remains mostly dry, another garden and perhaps a trip to an expat bookshop, library, bar, restaurant and events space all rolled into one might be had!

Today’s word of the day is 花园 (Huāyuán), meaning garden.

Posted on

Day 12 – Rain, rain go away!

It looks like this week will be a wet one. The forecast for Suzhou is for rain every day, and it looks to be getting heavier as the week progresses, which will either put a damper on plans to explore more of the city, or I’ll just have to suck it up and get wet. Decisions, decisions!

Today was one of those wet days and I decided to spend it mostly indoors. Studying Mandarin, studying for work, a good workout, and a bit of TV helped pass the time.

Kind of a blue Monday I suppose, but those are OK every now and then! Here’s hoping the weather holds for a day or two this week as I want to go and check out a couple of the gardens in the old part of town.

Today’s word of the day is 雨 (Yǔ), meaning rain.

Posted on

Day 11 – The busses along Xinghu Jie

This weekend the weather was lovely and it allowed for some exploring of the city, specifically the Times Square area. This is a really nice, upscale neighborhood with tons of shops, restaurants and apartment buildings. The Suzhou subway (Line 1) has a stop in the area, which makes it convenient and easy to get to, except from where I am staying in Suzhou. There is no North/South subway line on the east side of Jinji and Dushu lakes, so in order to take the subway from Moon Bay where I’m currently staying to Times Square, I need to hop on Line 2 and transfer to Line 1 … all of which takes about 80 minutes. Oy!

A faster alternative is to hop on the 156 or 176 busses that go up and down Xinhu Jie (Star Lake Street) and run every 10-15 minutes. For all of 2元 (or about $0.30 USD) you can travel the 4-5 miles from Moon Bay up to Times Square. Yeah, a little walking is involved, but nothing too bad. Just be sure to have exact change as the bus drivers don’t make change and you don’t want to over pay!

I’m glad I explored Times Square a bit more as I found a number of good restaurants to sample in the Harmony City shopping mall. That place is huge! It even has a rooftop park as you can see below.

IMG_20170617_172614-EFFECTS

I’m not sure if this is the right translation, but today’s word of the day is 总线 (Zǒngxiàn), meaning bus.

Posted on

Day 10 – Recapping the team offsite to Hangzhou

Even though my first day has yet to happen, my team at work allowed me to join them on an offsite event at a nearby city called Hangzhou (杭州). The city of Hangzhou is known as one of the two most beautiful cities in China, with Suzhou being the other one! The city hosted the G-20 Summit in 2016 and is also the home to e-commerce giant Alibaba.

The goal of the offsite was to allow the team to get to know one another better through a series of games, events, and elaborate meals. Most of the “getting to know you better” time was spent over these meals, so that’s what I took pictures of! OMG was there such delicious food. You can see a lot of the pictures in my Suzhou album on Google Photos. Each meal featured various vegetable, meat, fowl, fish, and crustaceans including items like bullfrog in spicy chili oil, smoked duck tongue, various soups, jellyfish, squash, pumpkin, pork belly “sandwiches”, and this fish that’s seen better days.

The fish has seen better days

Hangzhou has a really nice park & lake area called Westlake. After dinner on Thursday, a number of us from the team went to Westlake to go walk around and have a good time. Westlake was billed as a beautiful area with lots of little shops and a great walking trail; it did not disappoint! The pictures I took at night did not come out all that great as the camera I’m using (an older point-and-shoot Nikon Coolpix) does not have the best settings for nighttime photography nor did I have a tripod with me. Most of the shots came out terrible, sans a few like the one below. (Others are posted in the aforementioned Google Photos album.)

SOX Offsite Hangzhou-6

The Hangzhou event was a big success as many team members got to know one another better, learned how to work together as a team on non-work related tasks, and we got to explore a place not everyone previously visited. With some now friendly faces known at work apart from my immediate team, I’m quite looking forward to my first official day of work in a few weeks.

No new word of the day today, but look for that list to start up again tomorrow!

Posted on

Day 9 – Back in Suzhou

Another short post today as I’m completely exhausted from the trip to Hangzhou! After learning about the Chinese tradition of the toast at dinner last night, I woke up early to go run with the running in from work. Six of us set out at 6:05am … Some faster than others … And some slow like me (since when is a 9 minute mile slow???). Well, turns out the loop we were doing was about 10km, well past my usual 6km limit. That limit was hot and the next 70 minutes were spent walking back to the hotel. THEN it was time for a full day of activities, which included picking vegetables and fishing out lunch out of the wetlands — literally. Don’t worry, tons of food pictures are coming tomorrow 🙂 And yes, it was all amazing once again! The ride back to Suzhou was long as we hit traffic, so yeah … Not much of a blog post today but plenty more coming tomorrow! 再见 // Good bye!

Posted on

Day 8 – Team offsite

Today was a pretty special day. My team at work was having a two-day off-site in a nearby city called Hangzhou and they invited me to take part in it!

Needless to say there’ll be lots of food and nature/landscape pictures coming soon. Hangzhou is a beautiful city, and the food…OMG!

Posted on

Day 7 – You chat, I chat, WeChat

Continuing yesterday’s post about VPNs and YouTube TV, today’s will be a bit more simple. As the Chinese government is rather strict about what information they allow their citizens and residents to access (aka, censorship), certain apps just won’t work without a VPN: Facebook, Facebook Messenger, Instagram, Netflix, anything from Google, Microsoft’s OneDrive …

Even with a VPN, depending on your internet connection speed, trying to make VoIP calls (Voice over Internet Protocol) may be difficult as the audio may be choppy; video calling may be even worse!

Enter WeChat, an app from a Chinese company that works great for messaging and making voice or video calls without a VPN. The app is free for Android and iOS and is pretty easy to use, once you get it installed and configured. It’s been a while since I installed it so I don’t remember all the steps, but do be sure to connect WeChat with your mobile phone number as it’s required. Don’t worry, you can still do everything over WiFi!

wechat1

In China is seems pretty normal to use WeChat for everything communications related. That can be from sendings personal txts, conducting business, or continuing a conversation with someone you just share in a Didi ride. The app, once configured, gives you the ability to show a QR code on your screen that someone can scan using their phone to add you to their contacts list. Pretty simple, huh?

There’s another way to add people to your contacts list if you’re not physically located next to them: Find them via their username. Your username acts similarly as your email address or phone number in this case. And, if you’re truly a friend of mine, shoot me a message through email, txt, or FB messenger and I’ll send you over my WeChat username so you can add me and we can chat! (I’m not going to post such personal information that can easily be spammed on such a public forum…)

So, friends, go ahead already and install WeChat, add my username to your contacts list, and let’s txt/talk/video chat away!

Today’s word of the day: 手机 (手机), meaning cellphone.

Posted on

Day 6 – Technology + Golden State Warriors = Awesomesauce!

Another rainy morning which didn’t yield until late afternoon which, once again, hampered plans to explore more of Suzhou. So what’s a guy supposed to do? Figure out how to stream the Golden State Warriors game, of course!

First up, I needed to subscribe to a new VPN as the one I was previously using (TunnelBear) was just not reliable enough here in China, nor would it allow me to stream Netflix on my laptop — I could on my cell phone, sometimes — and I could not get it to work on my five year old iPad. After a bit of research I settled on trying ExpressVPN and, let me tell you, that was a great choice! Not only can I now stream Netflix on my laptop, it works on my iPad *and* you can choose from multiple servers within the United States — meaning you can set your location where you’re supposedly physically located(“spoof”); more on that later as to why you’d want to do that.

Shameless plug: If you’re looking for a VPN solution, use this link to sign up for ExpressVPN so this shameless blogged can get some bones thrown his way! And if you’re trying to understand why you might want to use a VPN when living in a non-censored country, watch this 90 second video.

Before leaving San Francisco, I knew there were a few options for streaming TV over the internet. The obvious provider is Hulu, but for some reason I just don’t like Hulu. There’s no rhyme or reason to that choice, it’s just me being me. SlingTV is the new kid on the block so I figured I’d give them a try. After connecting to my ExpressVPN account, I went through the sign-up process for SlingTV. Well, I *almost* went through the process. Step 3 (of 3) asked for a credit card number to finalize the setup. No problem! I entered my card number and it was rejected. What??? Ok, so let me try that again. Same result.  And a third time with a different card produced the same result. Not sure what the issue was, but right then and there SlingTV lost my business. Time for Plan B, and I don’t mean RU-486.

Since I wanted to stream ESPN for the Warriors game, I had to find a provider that has that channel and preferably one that has ESPN2, ESPNU, and ESPN3 as well so I can watch college football this fall. It didn’t take too long to figure out that YouTube TV has those channels plus MSNBC (Hello, Rachel Maddow!). To make things even better, YouTube TV throws in a free DVR type service (SlingTV charges extra for that) *and* they accepted my credit card. Things were up and running with only a few minutes of the game being missed.

Now why was it a good thing that ExpressVPN allows you to choose certain locations in the USA to spoof your physical location? Well, as it turns out, with YouTube TV you can watch “local” channels — ABC, CBS, NBC — provided you’re “physically” in that market. With ExpressVPN I can set my location to LA, SF, Seattle, NYC …  meaning there’s a good chance I can watch some SF Giants games or Seattle Sounders matches if they’re on one of those channels! Yee haw! SPORTS!

It should be no surprise that today’s word of the day is 技术 (Jìshù), meaning technology.

Posted on

Day 5 – The medical exam

It rained again this morning which, in itself wasn’t the issue, but the rain caused many people to take taxis (出租车) to work and made it nearly impossible to hail one to take me 27km clear across Suzhou to get to the medical facility in time for my 9am appointment. You see, even though my physician in the US gave me a physical (which needed to include a chest x-ray and an EKG readout), China requires one done in country in order to obtain a work/residency permit. So yeah. Anyway. The taxi arrived at 8:50am, then got stuck in traffic, then dropped me off at the wrong location (about half a mile away) … The one good thing in all this is that there was no actual appointment that was missed; the facility seems to be a “drop in” type location.

The medical exam itself was quite interesting. My contact who’s helping direct what needs to be done for obtaining the work/residency permit did not mention I would have to bring 386rmb (~ $57) in cash with me, so … after registration and a visit with the cashier (payments up front, not after), the cashier kindly directed me to where the closest ATM was — a ten minute walk down the street! Now, walking 10 minutes is nothing for me, but where this medical facility was located made the walk quite interesting as it’s in a factory/industrial part of town. Also, the closest ATM was NOT on the same street. Thankfully Google Maps (hello downloaded offline areas!)  was able to point me in the right direction.

With cash in hand, I walked back into the medical facility, paid for my exam, and proceeded up to the second floor to begin the process. There were different rooms that you had to enter and each room had a specialist that was going to poke and prod you in a different manner. Height/Weight/BMI and blood pressure in one room, blood sample & urine analysis in the next, stomach ultrasound in the third, eye exam and EKG in the fourth, and then chest x-ray in the fifth — which happened to be back on the first floor.

The eye exam was rather interesting as unlike in the USA where you read a line of letters back to the medical professional administering the exam, in China you specify which way the character 山 is facing. They also test your color blindness, which apparently they weren’t as thorough in that category because I know that’s one exam that I will fail.

Once all the exams were finished it was time to tender my document showing stamps from each of the rooms. I thought it was time to head home, but no … I needed to get a copy of my passport to turn into the facility and get my photo taken to attach to my medical exam. No idea why that photo was required as they scanned my passport and used that photo to add to the printed document that I carried around to the various rooms.

At this point in the day I was getting hangry as I hadn’t eaten since the night before — fasting was required for the exams — and quite thirsty as I violated one of my rules for living in China: I didn’t have a bottle of water with me and man was I thirsty! Fortunately I was able to hail a cab with no trouble and made my way back to the apartment. Thursday there’ll be similar fun as I need to return to the medical facility to pick up my “certificate”, whatever that means. (Why can’t they just fax it to the hotel? Oh yeah, original copies of things are big here.)

Today’s word of the day: 出租车 (chūzū chē), meaning taxi.

Posted on

Day 4 – Exploring Times Square

Day 4 – Exploring Times Square

The rains stopped and the pollution dropped to the lowest level since moving here…which means it’s a great day for a long urban hike and exploring a new part of Suzhou!

20170611.jpg

The view across Dushu Lake （独墅湖）without pollution, just normal, fluffy clouds!

According to the map, it would be a 4.5mi/7.2km walk from my apartment to Times Square, almost a straight shot up Xinghu Street (星湖街), which is a pretty major thoroughfare but it does have separated sidewalks. So why not!

Along the way there was some nice public art installations, including a tribute to Albert Einstein which proves that math *is* the universal language!

Einstein.jpg

Times Square is a fairly nice, if not bougie, part of the city. Lots of restaurants and cafes of varying prices, an art museum, events center, iMax movie theater, and both an indoor and outdoor mall with tons of shops. I even found a pair of hair clippers in the mall for 460rmb, which was twice the price I’d expect to pay so I passed them by.

This area of Suzhou features what I would call the iconic building of the city. You can see it in the picture after a few more paragraphs below. Apparently it may be called East Door Exhibition Center (东门展览中心, though a few characters are missing from that translation). As it’s across the Jinji Lake (金鸡湖), and it’ll be explored another day.

Overall impressions of Times Square:

  • Seems to attract a lot of tourists, but not nearly as many as the NYC version
  • Plenty of restaurants and shops to keep one busy
  • Being a subway stop is nice
  • Would be a long commute, ~ 1 hour, to get to work each way via bus (a transfer would be involved) or subway (at least one transfer)

I’d love to see this place at night as I have a feeling it will be lit up beautifully! Also, once it’s open, I’d love to visit that new W hotel near the East Door Exhibition Center; I do love me some W hotness! (It’s the smallest of the three “stair step” looking buildings over my right shoulder.)

East Door Convention Center.jpg

Today’s word of the day is what will help me get home from here: 地铁 (dìtiě), meaning subway.