It's probably no surprise that fireworks are a big part of Chinese New Year (CNY) celebrations (they were invented here in China after all). But, I was (and still am) surprised at the quantity and duration of the fireworks. Every night (and pretty much during the day too) from about a week before CNY people have been letting loose with a vast assortment of pyrotechnics, from sparklers (although they're much bigger here than in the US) to full-on aerial starbursts. I'm told this will go on until fifteen days after CNY with a final hurrah on that last day. There's a constant booming like distant artillery pretty much all the time out here in the suburbs; I'm told in the city it can get so loud that you can't hear the TV. Some evenings we can smell the burnt gunpowder in the air.

Before the CNY holiday, fireworks stands started popping up all over the place, like latte stands in Seattle. The big boxes in front of the tent below contains the big aerial shells you see at public Fourth of July events. They go for about 1000 RMB (about USD$145) -- very pricey, especially for people making Chinese wages. A huge string of firecrackers way bigger than anything I've seen in the US (they look like machine gun ammo belts) goes for 20 RMB (less than USD$3) by comparison.

Our ayi (the woman who helps us around the house with cleaning and such) runs a fireworks stand during this time of year where she says she makes the equivalent of six months of ayi pay in a week. She was kind enough to bring us a bag of what she called "safe for kids" fireworks -- sparklers, Roman candles, fountains, spinners, and a small rocket multi-pack.

We set out to the designated fireworks area in our neighborhood with some friends after dinner. After struggling with crappy lighters (we were rescued by a kind neighbor), we started out with the Roman candles. The kids quickly figured out the Roman candles were like magic wands and started yelling spells from Harry Potter. True to form, Andrew (11) sent stunning and disarming spells while Michael went directly for avada kedavra -- the killing curse. Here's me helping Michael (8).

We then moved to the 2.5 foot long sparklers. Here's Andrew in front of the rest of the family and our friends waving two sparklers around. Notice all the firecracker paper on the ground.

A van pulled up and some serious looking guys came out with some really serious fireworks. They started out with a few long strings of firecrackers. You can see Andrew and Michael below waving their relatively pathetic sparklers as they watch the three strings of firecrackers going off.

Then they brought out the big guns. We were almost literally under these huge shells with paper (and in one case a ball of flame) falling on our heads until we backed off a little. I was probably fifty feet at most from the launch point in the shot below. This went on for a good fifteen minutes. They had clearly spent a fortune and were enjoying themselves. We were happy to enjoy the show too. Our hearing recovered surprisingly quickly.

This scene was repeated in thousands of places around the city. Here's Andrew on a pile of firecracker paper in front of a restaurant where we had breakfast one morning. People clean up the mess the next morning and then start all over again.

I kind of wish we'd been downtown on New Year's Eve to see the mayhem. We plan to get a hotel downtown next CNY to really immerse ourselves in this fun custom of our new home.

Sorry for not posting last week. We finally moved from our temp housing downtown to the suburb of Shunyi. This was really a multi-part process. On Thursday the week before the movers took our things from the apartment; this was the stuff we carried on the plane, our air shipment, and the few things we had bought to date. Then, on Friday, we received our sea shipment with our furniture and the balance of our stuff. We were excited by the prospect of finally having all of our things in one place.

Unfortunately, our new house was not ready to move into. There were still workmen inside patching up a few things, the place was very dusty and dirty (with sand and bugs in our bathtubs for instance), and (as we discovered later) many systems not ready for prime time.

As we started cleaning and unpacking, we had to debug these systems one-by-one: getting the heat turned on in every room, getting hot water to come on in the master shower, turning on the dishwasher, and so on. Pretty much each of these problems involved one or more visits from our neighborhood maintenance staff. Thank goodness for these guys. I can't think of a analogy in an American neighborhood; I suppose it's more like the kind of thing you might have in an apartment. You call the office with a problem and sometime that day, the guys come over and try to fix your problem. They were largely successful despite my weak Chinese explanations; I hope I understood their responses too...

Now, a week later we have most systems working pretty well, and we're liking the house a lot (this was not the case during some parts of the past week). The biggest remaining issue is that the phone and CAT-5 wiring in the house is messed up in many locations. I had beat my head against the wall until two or three in the morning trying to get the network working one night; when the maintenance guys came over, they found a bunch of the jacks were miswired and others were not passing any signal at all. I've got wireless working on the first floor now and have bridged to another wireless adapter on the second floor (although this is a slow/spotty connection). It will take some more doing to get this last part fixed.

In the US, I doubt the house would have passed the bank inspection, but I understand this level of construction quality is normal in China. It seems like people settle for "good enough" quickly here; even the maintenance guys seemed confused why I wanted more heat in the house, implying that I was expecting too much to be in short sleeves in my house in January. This is somewhat understandable I suppose since the house is so much nicer than how 99.99% of the country lives, but it will still take some getting used to.

I'll post some photos soon...

One of the seemingly attractive things in China is that it's relatively inexpensive to hire people to do service work like cleaning. Given how dusty and polluted the air in Beijing is, you always have to be cleaning here. These two facts seem to match each other well.

However, based on our limited sample size to date, the low price may not actually be much of a value. The quality of the cleaning jobs we've seen in our temporary apartment, the new house we're moving into, and even good hotels like the Grand Hyatt has been pretty uniformly poor. According to Michelle, who has been in the apartment while housekeeping was cleaning up, the housekeeper goes through the motions of cleaning but isn't especially particular about actually getting anything clean. She would move the vacuum cleaner around the floor but not hit each spot on the rug, for instance. After the housekeeper leaves, the place is neat but not clean. She seems to be optimizing on following the process without regard to the results.

As with any population, I'm sure this one has a curve with good, average, and incompetent cleaners. I don't know where these folks were on the curve, but I'm not optimistic. We'll have to be very selective about who we work with going forward, but I suspect that once again, we may get what we pay for.

I snapped this shot last week near Houhai (the old Beijing lakes area behind the Forbidden City.)

 

Captions anyone?

It's Saturday night here in Beijing, and I'm getting ready to go to work tomorrow. Now, for a lot of Microsoft folks (and others in our industry to be fair) working on the weekend isn't unusual (unfortunately). Tomorrow, however, is an official work day in China.

Here's my understanding: The Chinese government realized it was a good thing to give people three day weekends; it's good for the economy since people will travel more. However, when a holiday like New Year's Day falls on a Thursday, what do you do? Easy -- give everyone Thursday and Friday off and then have them work on Sunday! This way, there's a three day weekend and there's no lost day of work!

I give the Chinese government high marks for creative thinking here. Definitely out-of-the-box.

The pollution is Beijing is certainly well-known and well-discussed; the term Greyjing has emerged to describe it (even making the New York Times 2008 Buzzwords list -- worth a read, btw.) You've all probably seen the photos of the horrible air, but here's something that surprised even me. There's so much dust in the air, even indoors, that our printer is covered in dust every day.

Michelle cleaned this printer less than a day ago. You can see how it's covered in dust again. I'm guessing the dry air isn't helping -- lots of static electricity. We're living in a brand new apartment on the 30th floor, so it's not like this is a drafty old building near the dirt.

I can only imagine what it's doing to our lungs. I'm looking forward to receiving our air purifiers in our sea shipment soon.

For Christmas/Michelle's birthday dinner, we went with our friends Nori and Stacy and their son Jarett to the topmost restaurant in Beijing. Literally. The China Grill is on the 66th floor of the newly opened Park Hyatt Beijing. According to their website, this makes them the highest restaurant in Beijing -- a believable claim.

Naturally, the view is stunning: 360 degrees including a view down Changandajie -- the main drag that crosses in between Tiananmen Square and the Forbidden City. We had a pretty good evening as far as air quality goes (better than in the photo from their website above) so the view was nice. Even the heavy traffic looks good 66 floors up. (Unfortunately, the photos from my point-and-shoot weren't as great.)

The food was excellent as well. They serve both Western and Chinese food. We all opted for the Western meals since eating Chinese food here seemed a bit silly in the middle of China, plus we all  wanted steaks. I started out with an excellent martini, and my blue crab cake appetizer was really delicious, perhaps the best crab cakes I've ever had (which is a big deal since crab cakes are plentiful and tasty in Seattle). The ribeye steak was perfectly prepared and the shared sides of creamed spinach, mashed potatoes, and buttered asparagus were equally yummy. The other adults seemed to enjoy their meals as much as I did, and Michael (8) and Jarett ate their sushi with gusto (Andrew (11), as always, ate very little). I normally can pass on dessert, but the ones we tried were all great as well.

The service was great with good English from the wait staff. It's actually hard to find world-class quality service in Beijing, even at the best hotels (Michelle was practically run over by the staff at the Ritz Carlton brunch for instance) so this was a hugely welcome discovery. We all noted that it felt like we were in Tokyo -- high praise since the service in Japan is typically excellent.

The only real downside was how hard it was to find the hotel and the entrance. It's a brand new hotel that opened after the Olympics so no one, including our awesome driver, knew where it was. There is virtually no exterior signage marking the driveway (just small dark letters on a dark wall) and the entrance is actually under the building. In case you're looking for it, the entrance is on the south side of the Jintai building, facing Jianwai SOHO. You will still miss the entrance on your first drive-by.

The price was expensive by Beijing standards but not out of line with what you'd pay for similar meals in other top world cities. It's definitely a great place for special occasions. I look forward to going back for drinks or for lunch (and the view during the daytime).

China Grill at the Park Hyatt Beijing, floor 66
2 Jianguomenwai Street,
Chaoyang District, Beijing
+86-10-8567-1098

We received our air shipment on Saturday morning, just around a month after arriving. This was an additional set of luggage to arrive ahead of our sea shipment (which contains our big stuff like furniture, my golf clubs, etc.) Unwrapping the boxes was like getting a second Christmas. In addition to a bunch of clothes (very welcome -- I was getting tired of the same things we packed in our suitcases) I got my camera gear (yeah!!) and some gloves (also welcome -- my hands were getting cold!) The boys received their Legos and our xBox 360, so they were delighted as well. Michelle was happy to have some more diversity in her clothes as well in addition to some missing toiletries and such.

Our sea shipment is actually in the country too, but it's still going through Chinese customs. Every so often I get a call asking for detail about something. Some thing are hard to explain. For instance, I had to explain that the Rock Band drum kit wasn't really a set of drums but an input device for a video game. Unfortunately, I don't know how to say video game or input device in Chinese nor do I think the person I was speaking with knew what a video game was. I hope I got my point across. We expect to get our sea shipment in the next few weeks. It'll be nice to have all of our stuff again and to move into our permanent home.

As soon as we got our China Mobile mobile phone accounts we started getting a lot of Chinese text messages. We initially thought they were all spam text messages, but it turns out some are daily news messages from China Mobile. I'm sure if I could read Chinese this would be a nice service, but since I'm illiterate, it's not so useful.

Fortunately, my colleague John sent me the instructions for turning off the news messages. Just send a text message to 10658000 with QXCXP in the message body. You should get two text messages back.

Now, if there were only an easy way to stop the other SMS spam messages. It's really bad here.

Earlier this week, I got my first haircut in China. I'm always a bit scared getting my hair cut in foreign countries since I barely understand what I'm asking for in English, let alone another language. I have all sorts of anxiety about miscommunication or misunderstanding (i.e. what if their clippers are metric?)

I've had exactly three other haircuts in other countries in my life,: Taiwan in 1980, Taiwan in 1986, and Belgium in 1996. While I survived all of these cuts, this wasn't exactly a huge base of experience to work from. Worse, looking at the Chinese guys walking on the street here, it is apparently very easy to get a bad cut. But, since we're going to live here a few years, this was clearly something I had to master.

So, although you can get a cut for a few kuai here (< US$1) I fell back on Michelle's favorite strategy of paying more with the hope and expectation of getting a better result. I went to Bangs Hair Salon, a higher end salon in our complex with Japanese hair stylists that some of our new friends recommended (Michelle had a cut and color there recently with much success as well). After doing my pantomime and English explanation of what I wanted to the very nice Japanese-speaking stylist, I settled back for a very thorough and pleasant hair washing and said a little prayer during my cut.

The result was quite nice, I think. It's a little longer on top than I usually have, but I like it. Perhaps more importantly, Michelle likes it, so I guess it passes the test.

We took Andrew (11) and Michael (8) there for their cuts a few days later. Michael wasn't sure about the whole thing and was especially unsettled by the hair washing. However, within a few minutes he discovered he quite liked to have his hair washed and is now dying to go back again.

We had to talk Andrew out of getting a queue; he had seen it in a kung-fu movie and wanted to whip it around during his wushu classes. Both boys got the best cuts of their lives and are looking especially dashing now.

Anyway, it feels good to have gotten this monkey off my back. Of course, Michael is already asking when he can go back, so I think we'll have no more problems getting his hair cut.