Human pin cushion

These are my knees one hour ago undergoing some kind of accupuncture/moxibustion/e-stim procedure.  This is my first experience with accupuncture of any kind.  When the doctor was putting in the needles I had a tingling surge in my lower abdomen, which might have just been adrenaline because someone was putting needles in my leg.

New apartment

My first apartment for me and me alone.  It's about 500 sf, has marble and hardwood floors and is on the 6th floor of an 8 floor walk up in an older established neighborhood.  Best of all, it's a 5 minute walk to work. I'll post more photos once I'm settled and at a time when I'm not supposed to be working.

Blog by mail test

I'm writing this entry to test the blog by mail function.  If this works I expect to make more frequent submissions because I will be able to leap the Chinese firewall with greater ease.

Per my father's request, this is the view from my office, the room in which I work and the entry gallery space respectively. I'm still getting the hang of the panorama function on my camera phone, but you get the general idea.

New apartment

This is the view from the balcony of from my new apartment taken with the camera on my new phone. In front of the short building with the red trim next to the river there are a bunch of pet chickens, but you can't make them out in this photo. I believe that they're pets as opposed to dinner because they belong to a school, but I could be wrong.

Holy cats!

When I first got to Guangzhou every new or interesting thing that I did or saw I thought of a person back home that I'd love to share the experience with. The longer that I'm here the more this becomes unfathomably difficult and I think that I hit overload this week. I now see that these experiences are for myself and what my poor memory is able to retain over my remaining years. I will try to give a much abbreviated version of my last 3 days, but we'll see how I do.

On Wednesday morning at 7 AM I ended a week long, sleep-deprived charrette by taking a train to Shenzhen to present our designs for the site of a corporate headquarters, a project on which I was made lead designer during my first hour of work. The presentation went well, the clients liked our work and I agreed very much with their comments, so we will be going on to develop this design. Unfortunately, this morning it was clear that the pain in my throat over the last couple of days had become a full blown sinus infection.

Hours after my train returned to Guangzhou. I bought a suitcase and hopped on a plane to Qingdao. During my flight the sinus infection turned into a shivering achy fever. I waited uncomfortably at the airport for the rest of my party to arrive and then got in a car with a driver for a two hour drive to Weifang. By the time we got to our super swanky hotel I took my second to last ibuprofen and settled in for the 4.5 hours that I had available to me for sleep. I then got back in the car and drove out to the site of what it to be a tournament level golf course and housing development. We drove to a makeshift meeting space in what I think were once ramshackle apartments on what I think was once an army base. We started by running through our Powerpoint with a room full of arguing, smoking Chinese men while I tried to look presentable but felt like I wanted to die. I didn't really have any options, though. The golf course designer was arriving from California in a couple of hours, my boss was leaving for another meeting a couple of hours after that and I would be left representing the wishes of our firm and our client for the next two days.

After the presentation we rode in a herd of golf carts to a vastly different space also on our site, a luxury modern restaruant/event/meeting space just down the hill, which you can see in the background of the photo that I found online. We had lunch and I think that there were as many 22 year old, uniformed and beautiful young ladies as there were diners. They brought dish after dish, eventually piling dishes on top of other dishes onto a giant glass lazy susan. The dishes showed an emphasis on fresh vegetables and had many strong and delicious flavors. However, the aspect of the meal that was most apparent to me was the size of the array of meats that were served. I have no idea what I ate, though I do know that at one point I ate donkey. There was a pile of steamed somethings that were somewhere between a large shrimp and the thing that crawled out of the guy's stomach in the Alien movie (a scene that I can still remember watching through my mother's fingers when the film came out and I was four). If you tear this creature apart there is something orange and about the consistency of a roasted chestnut at its core. I think that I dismembered the thing enough that no one could tell that I barely touched it. Meanwhile we were in an super fancy space with a glass wall looking out over rolling hills and golf courses. While the bathroom back at the compound where we work and meet is probably the dirtiest squat toilet situation I've seen in China thus far with a toilet that sprays water at your legs when you flush, the bathrooms at this place are marble and bronze with western toilets and complementary hand lotion.

Back in the golf carts we head out to view the site. Keep in mind that I was just acquainted with this project a couple of days earlier and I can't understand a word that anyone is saying. At this point the second ibuprofen has gotten rid of the fever, but now I have no voice. We take the golf carts as far as they can go and then climb hills and force our way through brush. I have no good shoes for this, I feel terrible, the site is enormous and I can't get my foggy head around it, the wind is as strong as I've ever felt whipping dust everywhere and blowing me backwards, and I cannot speak (I didn't mention the wind yet, nor the kite festival that was going on down the hill). The site, however, is lovely. I can see a reservoir in the distance, the hills are covered with volcanic rock, the densely packed poplars I can see down the hill are just getting their new leaves and they and the grasses on the hillside are dancing with the gusts of wind.

So, we head back to the base camp, the golf consultant arrives and we begin in earnest to discuss how we will divide this large but soon to be densely packed site. I like the golf guy quite a bit, and not only because I can speak with him in complete sentences. I found his expressions endearing, such as his tendency to say "Holy cats!" when something surprised him, or to call a reveal (when in environmental design you block a view and then allow a line of sight to see something at a distance) a "peek-a-boo". So, for instance, he would say something like " Driving down this road you will have a row of trees and then, all of a sudden, peek-a-boo! Then another peek-a-boo! Holy cats!"

So, then more meeting, discussion, bla bla bla. Then we all go out to dinner at an indoor/outdoor place in a forest that in feeling reminded me of Austin - with vastly different food. I thought Koreans could drink, but the Chinese, or at least these Chinese, were pros. The boss guy (or at least one of the boss guys, I still don't entirely understand what everyone's role was) had the two westerners, me and the golf guy sit at either side of him He had a young charismatic, swagger-y guy sit at the other end of the table and I was told that was his position because he is the most serious drinker and he will be leading a number of toasts. Again, more food, many more new dead animals that even with their heads I could not recognize. Much toasting, more eating. I was assigned to drink the local rice wine, which tasted like Everclear, because it was said to cure sickness. I drank the glass, but then switched to Chinese wine. This wine was said to be very good because it was made from "100% grapes". More food. Many declarations of cultural appreciation and optimism about cross cultural collaboration. I drank to at least 10 "last toasts". When the boss, a former member of government in Weifang and a big proponent of the region, learned that my father has been known to enjoy golf, he made me promise, at least 8 times, to extend to him an offer of his hospitality to come to Weifang after the course is completed to experience the result of our collaboration. So dad, if you're in the area in a couple of years...

It was becoming apparent that the sleep that I finally thought that I was going to have might once again elude me. However, at the golf guy's insistence that I needed to get some sleep a driver took us all to another very fancy hotel for too short a period of time. Thanks to the booze I got my voice back and thanks to some American NyQuil courtesy of the golf guy, I managed to get a reasonable, if not generous, amount of sleep. However, I also got a gall bladder attack. If you know me well you will know that this has happened to me a few times a year since I was 16, but no one can find stones and I'm not willing to remove an internal organ to save myself from the occasional attack if it's not doing me damage. For a couple of days after I get one of these attacks I cannot eat food with any fat content so as to avoid triggering a recurrence. This is difficult enough in the states, but even harder in China, especially when I am a the mercy of the hospitality of others and I don't feel like explaining through an interpreter why I am eating nothing but rice and this fruit that I don't know the name of.

Bla bla bla, meeting, another site visit, meeting. Driven to train station. I would love to spend more time talking about the texture of Weifang and how it is different from Guangzhou, what it is like to ride in a car in China and how beautiful Qingdao is, but I have some other things to do this afternoon. Suffice it to say, that I managed to eventually get to my apartment and get some serious sleep. I woke up this morning all set to do some of the errands that I haven't been able to do for the last couple of weeks but it seems that the monsoon season that I've been hearing so much about is upon us and the sky has cracked wide open. A few days ago I would have been annoyed, today I just find it amusing.

I will say that having another American to talk to did in some way highlight the strangeness of my life here to me. I have been so busy going with the flow and trying to behave as others do that to have another person there to remind me of my life back home changed my perspective a bit. Also, he gave me some good tips for traveling and some things I can to do make my life more comfortable here. He also seemed a bit concerned for me, and has further convinced me that I need to get formal language training so that I am not so dependent on others to take care of my needs. I've been trying to use the Rosetta Stone software, but I always have more important things to do and I'm not finding it very effective. I'll add this to the list.

Scale

've been really busy over the last week since Cloudy left, but the client likes my design very much so it appears that they will go ahead with it in some form. This is great news. I also have a permanent apartment, or a sort-of permanent apartment. I have a connection to a someone who houses English teachers and has an apartment that someone broke their contract on. They get new teachers every August, so they feel that they can get more money for it then, but for now they're willing to rent it at a reduced rate for short term. My representative/friend is trying to negotiate a longer contract, but I feel ambivalent because after fighting to squeeze onto buses and subways every morning I'm starting to think that it might be best to live near work, even if I like the neighborhood that I'm moving into more.


The apartment itself is really nice and too big for one person. I have two bedrooms, three beds, a balcony that looks out over a little urban river, a big kitchen and a western toilet. It is not in the neighborhood that I fell in love with, Dongshankou, but it is directly adjacent. It's close to transit and is located in a neighborhood which feels in scale like I imagine the downtown areas of mid-sized mid-America towns such as Columbus, Ohio felt 60 years ago before everyone moved out to the suburbs and the apartment buildings were all turned into parking lots.

Scale is an interesting issue here in Guangzhou. The neighborhood in which I work, Tianhe, was largely built in the last 10 years or so and feels massive and cold to me. There are tall buildings, large plazas wide streets, wide sidewalks. Imagine New York if you left the buildings the same size but increased the size of the outdoor space by 300-500%.

On the other hand, the path that I usually walk to work is through these crazy, labyrinthine alleyways that weave through the district in the second picture in what I've been told is referred to as an urban village. I want to write more on these areas later because they're fascinating, but for the moment I should get back to work.

To wrap up, just like Goldilocks I feel that the scale of my new neighborhood is just right.

Wind cold evil

This is from a little white and green box that I bought this morning after having eaten delicious Xinjiang noodles last night:

Relieve exterior-syndrome, disperse dampness, regulate qi and modulate middle jiao. Indicated for cases with affection of exogenous wind cold evil and stagnation of dampness in the interior, manifested as heaviness over the head, headache, chest upset, abdominal pain and distension, vomiting and diarrhea.

Kung Fu

This will be my first use of another's photo to illustrate my blog, which is appropriate given the subject matter. I have eaten at this popular fast food place on 2 occasions at this point. Their logo is pretty fantastic, but would only be possible in a place where no one observes copyright laws. They serve their food on plastic and metal dishes, which makes me happy. The food is fine, if not fantastic, but they have an English menu, which tips the scale in their favor. Dinner will run you about 23 rmb, or $3.50.

Dongshankou

Yesterday I went to look at the neighborhood where I've decided to look for an apartment, Dongshankou. It is central, densely populated with many trees, markets and restaurants, an easy metro ride to work and, unlike much of the Guangzhou that I've seen so far, has retained it's character through the explosion of growth over the last 20 years. The architecture is eclectic with many houses and apartment buildings having a mixture of western European and Cantonese styles. From what I have been told, refugees who fled China during the Japanese occupation of WWII upon returning home brought with them an affinity for the architecture that they had been exposed to while away. When rebuilding their homes and lives back in Guangzhou, they based the designs of their homes on these styles, though they were working with local craftsmen and materials so the houses became these fascinating mash-ups. I will add some photos when I'm able.

Dongshankou has a big fantastic wet market and a little specialty store with foreign delicacies like oatmeal and german chocolate.

A couple of people who I imagine will be reading this would be proud of me for something that I did yesterday. I gnawed chewy bits of something off of the elbow joints of cows and gnawed some other stuff off of some pig bones. It was actually pretty tasty, though it still gave me the willies. The cow stuff that I ate is supposed to be good for joint health and skin. Somehting else I ate for dinner is good for hair. For breakfast the other day I had something good for the breasts, and my Szechuan lunch from last week was good for my reproductive system.

Erin go blech

My first experience with western food in Guangzhou was a bit of a disappointment. The burger was not really great, had a puffy anemic bun, sweet picked stuff, a garlicy flavor emanating from somewhere unidentifiable. Not terrible, but not my cup of tea. When the server asked what I wanted on it I said I wanted everything to which he replied "even pineapple?". I then noticed a burger on the list with all kinds of unusual ingredients on it and in retrospect I think that I should have gone for it, it probably would have gelled better with the overall flavor.

The problem was the price. I've been told that western food was more expensive and it was no joke. The burger and fries, one of the cheaper things on the menu, was 60 rmb, or about $9.25, the pint of Guinness was the same price. This doesn't seem like much in New York, though I'd say that the pint was a bit overpriced, however if you take into consideration that most of my meals are absolutely delicious and in the 10 - 25 rmb range, and I can buy a 22oz Tsingtao at the corner for 4 rmb, and you start to see why I might balk at the price.

However, I'll probably venture back into the expat ghetto of Taojin Lu and do it again. After two weeks here it was a nice change of pace to:

• be able to speak with relative ease with anyone in the place
• read the menu
• guess roughly what the food will taste like before I put it in my mouth
• eat with my hands
• not have to bring my own napkins
• feel like an insider with a group of other outsiders
• use a western toilet
  

Sláinte

Remind me not to jinx myself again by talking too effusively about how great things are going. Today Cloudy resigned, which is a huge bummer because I liked her quite a bit and she was great at her job. Now that she's gone I've been left trying to manage the interns and without a common language, which has been difficult - especially since I don't know what their capabilities are. This bad news was combined with my Photoshop crashing and losing an important file, frequent interruptions from my collaborators resulting in long and clumsy discussions as well as the pressing needs of the other project that I'm working on. Not to mention that I'm working on Saturday.

I think that I'm going to go investigate what an Irish bar looks like in Guangzhou. This weekend is a Chinese holiday in which they travel to pay respect to their ancestors and I can think of no better way to celebrate my ancestors than with a pint of Guinness and some pub food.

Dim sum

My morning walk to work is about 45 minutes during which I try to go a new route every day, usually snaking my way through the markets that run through the little, convoluted alleys between most of the blocks in the older neighborhoods. As I walk I pick up a dumpling here, a bun there, an omelet-ish thing a little later on and by the time I'm at work I've spent about 75 cents American and I've had my fill.
I'm told that dim sum originated in Guangzhou and it is literally everywhere in the mornings - every restaurant and convenience shop has a steam table out front, and there are assorted carts and bicycles parked between those. Like many things I have eaten since I have arrived in China, I have no idea what is in the stuff that I order or what it will taste like until I've put it in my mouth. Luckily, everything dim sum has been excellent, and of my dinners most everything has been great, with the exception of one dish that I won't go into.
I've been trying to learn a phrase in Mandarin every day and today's phrase is "lai yige ba", or "I'll have that", so that I can stop pointing at dumplings and smiling.

My new gig

I've settled into my new job here and my coworkers are all really sweet with varying degrees of competency in English. Luckily, I have years of experience with wild gesturing and drawing diagrams to make up for my own difficulties with English, so I've been able to get by just fine. The day after I arrived on the plane I was made the lead designer on a project to create the landscape for the corporate headquarters of a large financial concern and I've been churning out drawings and photoshopping renderings as fast as I can to keep up. I was a bit concerned at first, as landscape design is not technically my field, but I've managed to handle everything so far and even designed some things that I'm proud of. At the moment the setup couldn't be better for me, the principal is focused on winning projects and occasionally reviews my work, my new friend Cloudy is the project manager and handles the scheduling and manages the details, I have access to two interns who do really nice work and I design, solve issues, try to come up with ideas and make drawings. I have a feeling that this honeymoon period has an expiration date, but for now I'm enjoying myself.

Their work here is playful and modern with an emphasis on clean, attractive design and strong graphics. The office is less than a year old, so there is not a large body of work to see, but everyone here seems talented, eager and happy to collaborate and several have a substantial amount of experience.

The office is large and brand new with minimal furniture and windows on three sides that are always open. Two-thirds of the office space is a flexible gallery/lecture space where my boss intends to host talks and exhibitions. I'm on the 17th floor with a great view of the Tianhe District and the Tianhe sports park where basketball is king, soccer is popular and the American football field is used for soccer, marching bands, running, etc. I'll post a photo when I can.

In case you thought that e-mail was impersonal...

I'm starting this blog so that those who are interested can check up on me and those who aren't don't have to hassle with deleting my e-mails. Also, it's good to have a project. A few disclamers:

• For several annoying reasons, this blog will be imageless until I get either a camera or a phone with a camera.
  
• Entries might be sporadic until I get a steady internet connection. As it is, I am only able to get online at work.
• I imagine that my posts will taper off as I settle in/get a life/lose interest.

Otherwise, enjoy...