5-star service

A week ago, I arrived at the building by motorcycle taxi, a thrilling thing to do in Bangkok. It wiggles through all the traffic jams. Three men with umbrellas came up and shaded me from the sun and escorted me through the automatic door. The lobby smelled like lavender.

Is this Mandarin Oriental? Nope. It's a hospital. I never thought I would smile going to a hospital. I went for a routine procedure. In New York, I would have to set an appointment 1-2 months ahead of time. Here, I called the day before, and I went in the next day. All the staff were in clean and neat uniforms and smiled at me. I checked in at the front desk, just liking checking into a hotel. When I got to the destination, someone came up and smiled and asked what I was there for.

I have no insurance, and have to pay out of my own pocket. The procedure cost less than $90, and the doctor's fee was $17, less than my co-pay in NY. In NY, they would send a thousands of dollars bill to the insurance company, to cover everything plus the doctor's insurance against lawsuits. And the doctor informed me that I would know the result in one hour (vs. a week in NY), and they have a cafeteria downstairs. I was guided by a nurse's assistant to where I could see the escalator to the cafeteria. There are shops and bookstore along the way. The cafeteria had healthy salad or burgers for the farangs (foreigners), and noodles, curries etc.

My result was questionable, so the doctor had her nurse check the schedule of the specialist. I got an appointment for that day, at 6:15pm.

I never thought I could smile going in and out of the hospital, but I did.

My cousin's wife's parents lived in California. Her father came down with liver cancer and passed away within weeks. She was going to bring him to Bangkok for treatment, (her mother always comes to Bangkok for medical treatment) but he deteriorated so fast that they didn't have a chance. He stayed in Stanford Hospital, and the daily rate was $6K+. If not for medicare, he couldn't even receive morphine in the end of his life.

What about the poor people here? I heard they can go for free care in public hospitals. The wait is a bit long, at least they will be treated. No wonder people take their king so seriously here. He is a respectable man and visits remote places where no other officials would remember. Before any movie or show starts, people stand up to a song that's written for the king.

In China, a continuation of the story of the maid's son - he is in that good province level high school and is working hard. He gets up at 5 am every morning, and when his mother called him one night at 11, he still had an hour to go, and he needed to do his laundry. By hand of course, no washing machine in the dorms. I hope he gets into university...

Picture time - this is sunset at the end of monsoon from our window.

Hello Bangkok!

We left Hong Kong on a very "peaceful" note. We packed and repacked out luggage and weighted and calculated carefully which ones to check in. We were able to fly without paying any penalty! I love Hong Kong every time I go there. Good food, polite people, endless shopping... even though I hate shopping.

We have been staying at my aunt and uncle's house and received numerous generosity from them and cousins. We spent the last four days searching for an apartment. They said we could stay in the house for as long as we want. It is a big house but it is in the outskirt and if you don't know what traffic jam is until you come here. Last night, we saw the biggest monsoon in our lives. It poured and poured and didn't stop till 11 am this morning. Brent went out for a walk (I didn't like walking in dirty flooded streets, I mean really dirty as tons of street dogs roam around), and at one point of the street, it was connecting to the swamp and flooded and fish were swimming on the street river. Anyway come back to the traffic - we had dinner with two friends (will talk about them next) and one offered us a ride home as it was pouring and he lives 10 minutes away. It's usually a 30 minute drive, it took us over 90 minutes to get home.

Back to the apartment search. The house we are staying in is a big old house, and no internet (I'm in an internet cafe in THE MALL) and it has a yard like a tropical jungle. I stood in front of the door talking to my uncle for two minutes, and got a mosquito bite on my toe! I put repellent on mind you. Dangee fever is bad right now and the mosquitoes carry them feed during the day too...

OK, apartment. Since the dollar has devalued to the Baht, the rent here is more expensive than before, to Americans. We looked at so many apartments and our head spinned. Nice ones are expensive, even the ones that are not cheap would have roaches or crumbs on mattress. Ha, shows us that we don't have kids. Or some are in sleazy streets with tons of bar-girls hanging out. We received quite a bit of help from my cousins and their friends, as we don't speak Thai and less people than foreigners think speak English to a level that can understand our needs (such as wired high speed internet, not wireless etc). One friend Sam took us across the river to the building he used to live in. And then my cousin's wife called two days ago and said Sam mentioned a friend Ray in their church has two apartments for rent, though they are far from public transit, he would rent them out to us for cheap. Ray wasn't around till yesterday to show us the apartments. One of them was a penthouse unit with great view. He would rent it to us at less than 1/3 of market price which meets our budget! It's more than what we could have imagined or asked for. God is good!

Ray is a business man and used to be very superstitious (in his own words). When he heard about any new pretty temple coming up, he would go to pay respect. Then something happened to his family two years ago and he became a Christian. He sees now that all his possessions are gifts from God, and he gives them out generously and doesn't hold back. So we hope our friends come to visit and stay with us, that we can spread this grace around.

Goodbye China, hello and goodbye Hong Kong

It was a whirl wind of two weeks of traveling in China and then HK. Went to the "river south" of China and saw many beautiful things. Also got giant mosquito bites. They had to eat too. I was "glad" to contribute to their reproduction.

Felt good to leave China, only because the girl at the airline counter would give us a break, and we got a luggage overweight penalty that amounted to half of my plane ticket! I kept on telling people, please please don't give me anything, I can't carry it. Everyone said, oh, just a little something, then it added up and they charge by the kilo!

HK is much more organized and civilized. I hate to be singing praises to the Queen but we don't need to worry about being hit by a car any more crossing the street. The cars actually stop for the lights.

Miss China for its prices. HK is much more expensive.

People think it's so "cool" and romantic to travel around for a year. Actually it's a lot more pain then we realized. We thought we carefully picked out what is needed for a year, but since we weren't sure where we'd really be (though Thailand preferred, but there has been visa difficulties to the foreigners), we had to pack up quite a bit. Then there's weight limits. In Asia, you can only check in 20kg! (a little over 40 lbs) It's not easy task, but when I see how Americans pack their cars to the rim to travel, I wonder if they can survive this. There's something to be said about minimumlism (I made up that word).

Leaving very early AM tomorrow for Bangkok. Now Thailand doesn't allow anyone going in without a plane ticket leaving the country, I had to scramble to buy tickets going to Penang, Malaysia in 4 weeks. The joy and challenge of this trip!

Good-bye Qingdao and on the go again

We packed up and left Qingdao on September 20, on a stormy rainy day. The big tropical storm hit Qingdao the night before and many roads were flooded. We asked the hotel staff (the building we stayed in is part hotel and part apartments) to book a taxi the night before for us. After the boys loaded the car with our luggage, they were soaked already. Five minutes into the road, the driver started her business talk - "Let's set a price! Look, the roads are all flooded and it's hard to drive. Give me Y150." I replied, "are you kidding! this is an over the top price!" She came down, "OK, 130." I said "that's still over the top". She said "my car's starting price is 10, not 7, and it's Y1 extra for each km". I didn't say anything, just hoping to get to the airport on time. Good thing we started early. Roads were truly flooded, and she was constantly on the phone talking to other drivers inquiring road condition. The radio was saying not to hit the break in the water, just let the car slide, so it wouldn't halt. Many cars halted in the flood. So, it took an hour to get to the airport instead of half an hour. I gave her 130 and let her know that though it was over the top, it was a difficult drive.

Bargaining is a very big part of most Asian life, and it's fun when you shop, but it is not when you are under the pressure to be somewhere before a certain time!

We stopped in Shanghai for a day and then went to Nanjing to visit my aunt and cousin. My cousin's daughter is in Junior in high school. This part summer vacation, she was in school most of the time studying second year university chemistry, so that she can take part in the high school chemistry competition next year. Many students are studying some college subjects at this point. Some parents send their kids, they are all only-childs in their family by the way, to other countries (like America, Europe and Singapore) for a year of study. It's shocking to me to learn that because most parents I met before hold on to their child so tight and don't want their child to leave their sight, yet these parents are willing to let their child go to a faraway land and they won't see them for a year. When these students return to China, they have to repeat that same year because China's school covers so much more material and subjects that they wouldn't be able to follow. My cousin's daughter didn't want to go because she didn't want to be a year older than her classmates when she returns. Now she's regretting a little after seeing her friends return. But too late now!

the hardworking and the smart

It's hard to get hold of the computer to blog these days as Brent has been hogging it, actually he has been working hard.

The first picture is my college classmate whom I haven't seen since I left China and continuously invited me to visit him in Jinan. Jinan is a city full of springs, and by the Mother River of China - Yellow River. It turned out that he's actually very busy. He works basically seven days a week. He manages large engineering projects and often goes on business trips. However he squeezed time to show us around Jinan. He treated us to dinner the first night, but after he sent us to the hotel, he went on to interview someone whom they wanted to hire, at 11PM at night. It's definitely a different business culture. His colleagues took the engineer candidate to dinner, and they drank beer. When they were half drunk, the candidate signed the contract. As the chief, my friend needed to show up to work out the logistics. Chinese is all about food!

The second picture is hard to see clearly. It's supposed to be that way, as the man is setting up an illegal net to catch the sparrows. The net lines are so thin so it's hard to see. And he set it up in front of the trees because he knows the birds would fly to land on the branches. One sparrow was already caught!

The third picture here shows some workers making a road in the Yellow River park. They do everything by hand. This looks like as back breaking as building the Great Wall. (well, Great Wall has much larger stones actually) The dinner we had the night before probably would cost their whole month's salary.

Visa extended

After waiting for another two hours in the visa office, we got our turn. Besides for forms we filled in, the woman gave me a blank piece of paper and told me to write a statement that we wanted to extend our visa. She said the policy is to only extend 1 month, unless you are visiting "direct relatives" - parents, children or spouse. I wonder if I could have lied, but it's really a bad idea, as lies will come back to eat you.

I have posted some selected pictures. They are in random order and I don't want to hurt my hand to organize them. So bare with it!

http://share.shutterfly.com/action/welcome?sid=8CcsWbZsyZsTe

The smart, the dumb, and the expats

- The smart
This picture was taken at No. 1 Bathing Beach in Qingdao. There's no room to put down a towel or swim. Suppose there are only 0.1% people are smart, how many smart people can you pick out from this crowd? And this is only a small fraction of the Chinese population. Therefore I have to agree with a couple of friends' opinion on "Olympic math" which I mentioned in a previous posting. They think this kind of education is only used to allow kids to be a step ahead of others, because there are too many people to compete against. It doesn't really give them more knowledge, nor necessarily help them think better. One friend who is a high school chemistry teacher said that the chemistry the students learn today is much inferior than what we learned in our days. The education system now only emphasize on certain subjects like math just to make their students having higher scores than others. In the old days, only the cream of the crop could go abroad to study. Now, mostly kids who can't get into good universities here go abroad, if their parents have the money to pay.

- The dumb
I walked into a high end furnishing showroom, which has Italian design kitchen, bath and room furnishings. I was particularly intrigued by some toilets, especially the ones that looked like having very small water tanks. I asked the salesman if the volume is an issue. He replied no. He told me that the workers who put these up in their showroom, thought these were real toilets, so they started using them! Of course it's not connected to the sewage. They were ordered to pour the waste out and the contractor company had to buy the used toilets. These workers all come from the countryside, and none of them has a toilet at home or even has used one.

- The expats
I've met a few expats from all over the world who work and live here. I'm fascinated by them. One young man came from Wales, Mr N. He was a physics grad from Manchester, but couldn't find a job. After working as a pub chef for a year, he couldn't take it any more. He got an opportunity teaching English in Chengdu, China, and came happily. He subsequently got a job in the English magazine here, and teaches guitar part time. He loves Qingdao. I called this magazine two weeks ago and asked them if they need a freelance translator, they said sometimes. I went in and met with one of the young American editors and had an interesting chat. To have an English magazine is a huge challenge, which I can't go into details. It's a money loosing business, but the chief editor is a persistent person and wants to make the magazine a success. After being closed down for no reason twice, (he was still paying his Chinese staff salary during the close down), it has the status of the only official English magazine in town.
Another Mr Z from Germany is a character. He doesn't read or speak much Chinese but he's adventurous. He tries all kinds of food - he just points and then we eat. Two Sundays ago we went to a Korean restaurant and he ordered everything on the menu and claimed they were all good. It turned out to be either pig feet or some quite spicy food. I was ok with that, but most people didn't eat much. I heard a story about him from someone else. Once Mr. Z suggested to the group that he knew a good Israeli restaurant and has good Jewish food. A friend Ms. C who is a local here had never heard of it in her life. So they went. Ms. C thought it's strange since it doesn't look like anything Israeli though she has never been to one. She saw the sign of the army and thought it's a government owned restaurant. Mr. Z pointed to a symbol and said it's a Jewish symbol. But Ms. C said it's a symbol for the founding date of the military. The waiter came and gave them the menu. He got impatient and left after waiting for a minute while these foreigners discussing about what to order. After waiting for half an hour, the waiter never came back and some people got impatient so they all left! So now everyone is a little weary when Mr. Z suggests a restaurant:) But he did take us to a fantastic gelato place.
Then there's the lively French girl Madame A, who is selling French wine here. It's a lot of work and the distributor she's working with doesn't have too much experience. They work six days a week and the distributor's two male staff live in the office. The distributor was somehow responsible for her housing and they tried talking her into sharing the same apartment with the guys and live in the office. She of course insisted that she's living elsewhere and her husband was arriving. She speaks excellent Chinese. Her husband who is an English teacher in France just landed last week and got a teaching job that night!