China Blog by Chinaorbit.com

Chinese New Year - Part II.

Beijing really gone crazy – unbelievable

Beijing welcomes the Year of the Rat! Enjoy this video taken in Beijng.

Beijing traffic is ridiculous!! It’s a good thing more subway lines are being built because it would be great to relieve SOME of the traffic jams. Even out of the rush hour time period there’s traffic. Yesterday I was in a taxi and it took him 6 light changes to finally get past the intersection. I’m from New York so I understand there can be traffic, but this is out of hand. New York there are other routes to take but here there isn’t, so you have to wait.

Basically I sat through traffic, moving inches, light after light, before I couldn’t take it anymore. I threw my less-than-what-the-meter said-fare at the cab driver and ran to the closest subway station. Only to be pushed and shoved onto and out of the subway cart. Exhausted and frustrated I arrived very late for my meeting. Good thing everyone else was too.

Crowded subways, McDonald’s, meat sticks, the forbidden city plus the movie “Warrier” - available as DVD one week after its release.

A Taste of Beijing.

Some clips of the China Orbit team in Beijing. Shows you a little bit of daily Beijing life. Enjoy!

I saw the hugely anticipated movie The Warlords on Sunday. It was all in Chinese with only Chinese Subtitles. I couldn’t find any theater in Beijing that showed The Warlords with English subtitles. There is ONE theater for expats that show Chinese movies with English subtitles however I just found out it is closed for renovations until January 2008, great…So I decided to watch the movie anyways, I was with my Chinese friend who could translate any of the necessary conversions to inform me of what the hell is going on. Plus it’s an action/war movie, how hard could it be to understand, one guy is mad at another guy so they’ll fight. Pretty simple.

So the movie was really good even though I only understood 5% of it. Action scenes were intense and well choreographed, and Jet Li, Andy Lau, and Takeshi Kaneshiro were all good actors. I definitely recommend this flick, “a very man movie”, as my Chinese friend says.

There are ro char or meat stick grills all over beijing. You can almost always find one, except near my apartment. But yesterday, when I was really in the mood for some ro char, there was FINALLY one young guy grilling ro char just outside my apartment. F*CKING AMAZING! I love ro char! I told my friend that when I leave, I will probably miss the ro char the most. What is there not to love, meat on a stick grilled up. How much more manly can you get too?

So anyways I ate 5 ro chars then ate a salad at my apartment then drank some beers then went back to the ro char guy and bought 24 ro chars with my friend and watched a movie. It was a good night. The ro char made it a good night. So good. Yeah…..mmmmmm

Acid is falling and I’m not talking about the trippy kind, that kind might actually be better. This morning it was raining, the first time it has rained since I’ve been here in Beijing. No umbrella. And I couldn’t help but wonder if this is acid rain that is falling on me, the infamous acid rain I heard third world countries experience. It looks and feels like normal rain but I’m sure it is eating up my clothes. I wondered if I’d end up making it to work naked. “That damn acid rain!” I’d tell my boss, dripping and disheveled.

But it wasn’t too bad, I made to work. And my clothes….yeah they made it to work as well. I found out that 80% of the rainfall here in Beijing is acid rain. So I could make a mighty fine guess and say, yeah, that was acid rain on me and yeah I’ll tell you if my skin is peeling off tomorrow.

One more thing, I’m now going to invest in an industrial sized umbrella preferably made of steel soon. I think it’s worth it.

I finally went to a gym near me and asked for a trial for the day to see what their fitness center had to offer. Compared to my New York gym or any New York gym for that matter, it was a bit “old-skool”. The tiny gym was filled with outdated fitness machines (some of which were broken), iron weights, rusted bars, broken mirrors, ping pong tables?, and half naked men. As discouraging as this all sounds, the gym wasn’t too bad though. Even though it offered severely outdated equipment that I’m use to, it did have all the equipment and machines I usually use. Two things that an American gym wouldn’t have is a ping pong table and half naked men(well some do). But these two do flow with the Chinese culture. The ping pong I can understand, its China’s biggest sport. While the shirtless men, okay, they aren’t very sanitary, and for me, who drips buckets of sweat while working out, well I can relate.

So after my workout experience I ponder whether to join or not?

On the plus side they offer all the equipment I use and like and its not too crowded. On the negative side, they have outdated equipment, no hot women, no water fountain, and somewhat far from my apartment.

I think the negatives out weigh the positives however I might pay for day passes occasionally. Maybe I can cut a deal with him…. who knows, maybe I could be his personal trainer and get a free membership.

Everyone around me is sick. As I am typing this people are coughing and sneezing inches away from me. I’m just hoping I don’t catch a cold, however hang out with all my friends which are almost all sick, I feel it is almost inevitable. It’s weird to hold the thought of knowing the future. Well I don’t know for sure and I’m hoping I don’t get sick because I hate it (well who likes it?). I must be cautious. (I feel like a ninja). I must wash my hands, I must dress warm, and I must hold my breath when someone sneezes or coughs. You can actually lessen your chance of catching a cold if you do this. So if you’re reading this and you’re not sick yet, these are your rules of defense to avoid catching the sickness.

Last week my friend and I went to O’Brien’s, a big Irish sandwich chain, and asked for fapiao when we received our check. Surprisingly instead of a real O’Brien’s invoice fapiao, we saw our waitress ask a woman on the street for fapiao. When she brought it to us we realized it was fake fapiao. The silver scratch part wasn’t able to scratch off. It was just silver coloring. I couldn’t believe a big chain like O’Brien’s had FAKE FAPIAO!! Good thing we didn’t need the invoice for work or taxes, we just felt lucky that day and thought we’d win some money, i guess our luck never even had a chance.