China Blog by Chinaorbit.com

Last week, I visited the Tiananmen Square with a visitor I had from Germany. The result:

1. I have two new best friends, who wanted to learn English and show us the city (refused of course)
2. two Chinese girls, to whom I had to read a few English sentences to train their listening comprehension. They could not reply to any sentence: my comment: “没有通过” (you did not pass).
3. one Chinese who wanted to take a picture of us with our camera
4. a few tour guides who wanted to sell us trips to the Great Wall of China
5. a guy who wanted to sell us his rickshaw (do you want to buy my rickshaw?)
6. a few souvenir sellers
7. at the end I was really a little disappointed but then, they finally came, the arts students who wanted to show us an arts exhibition because it was the last day of the exhibition.

Sometimes, I really doubt, if entries posted by users in our events section really have something to do with China. This time, I decided not to delete the entry of a swimming school in Cologne (Germany) because there is a flood in South China.

I have a phone number in Germany, but when I am in China, all calls are forwarded to my mobile phone in Beijing. Yesterday I received a call from some guy needing some advice how to negotiate with his future employer – in China it was quite late already (9. pm), in Germany 3 p.m. I gave him some advice and also told him, that I am in Beijing at the moment.

About two hours later, another phone call at 11.30 p.m. – great. After giving him another “hint”, that it would be nice not to call me in the middle of the night, I found out, that he wanted to start working in China in two weeks but does not know the time difference between Germany and China. It is a simple thing: but before making phone calls to a foreign country, make sure, you don’t call in the middle of the night.

Guess, he still has a lot of things to prepare – and I should probably switch off the forwarder to my mobile phone.

Today, I had two surprises in a Beijing subway.

First, a young man entered the subway, grabbed his guitar and harmonica and started playing – it was actually really good and really a change compared with the usual music program offered in the subway (often by blind children lead by older women). The Chinese around me were quite surprised, too.

The second surprise was even bigger: At the next stop, this guy just left without asking for money. I think, most of the passengers found this even stranger.

Anyway, I don’t really understand his business model, but maybe he is just doing it for fun.

• I have a client in Beijing
• the client has a graphic designer
• the graphic designer has a new website
• the website of the client suddenly has a link in white colour on white background on the mainpage, which points to the website of the graphic designer.

The graphic designer is a very nice guy, but on the other hand my client is paying me for maintaining his website. I guess, I have to give the graphic designer a few hints.

P.S. Should I post this under Chinese culture or “experiences in China“?