when in beijing, eat what beijingers eat

Today, I had a late lunch with my friend from Berkeley.

fried chicken with tomato sauce, bacon wraps with pumpkin soup, fried potato balls, steamed seaweed wrap, etc.

After lunch, we tried sneaking in this residential highrise, gated community, because it was

designed by Steven Holl and apparently celebrities live there.  But of course, we failed after pretending to be a couple of interns doing on site inspection.

these buildings are textbook examples of hybrid buildings as you can go to the theater, gym, supermarket, and other amenities through the bridges. the place also uses water to control the temperature, which is both sustainable and pricey. final verdict: strong concept, okay appearance, bad construction.

Her mom and her also invited me to have dinner with some CEO that’s their family friend. Reluctant at first, I never turn down a free meal. Dinner was awkward to say the least. Set in an abalone restaurant where only people with money to blow would eat, I regretted listening to my stomach. Especially not knowing the proper drinking etiquette, I stood up nervously every time someone would want to drink red wine with me. Apparently, it’s Chinese custom to jing jiu (offer to have a drink together), because it is a sign of respect and gratitude.

Later I found out that a tiny bowl of soup made from a rare type of grass that looks like some sort of bug in the summer costs 600 rmb per bowl, about 90 dollars PER A DAMN BOWL (there were 8 of us, and that’s not the main course). The things rich people do/eat….

Because I didn’t want to say, I listened most of the time. It was interesting hearing adults talk about their kids, their jobs, and their plans for what’s left of their lives. I guess you don’t stop having problems when you have everything money can buy and I also learned that the most important thing to succeed as a businessman is honesty.

When I got home, I munched on some snacks and finally felt satisfied.

purple and gold

GAME DAY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I woke up early to find a good website that would broadcast the NBA final with English commentary. During half time, I quickly walked to the office afraid I was going to miss any minute of the game. Instead of streaming the game while working, the game was way too close for me to take my eyes off of it. In the end, west coast prevailed and I waited anxiously to rub the result in my coworker’s face (he’s from the east coast).  The day started out EXCELLENT.

However, after more than 10 hours of working, my second day of work ended disastrously. One moment I was slaving away on the cutting mat, the next second, the blade sliced through my index finger and my boss was calling people to get me a band-aid. Shit, I was trying so hard to make a good impression. Now, I will be known as the only intern that has cut his/her finger on the first day. On the upside, because of my injury, my boss told me I didn’t have to come in over the weekend, he was probably afraid that I would find other ways to hurt myself. But man, I didn’t even cut myself this badly when I pulled all-nighters at school.

In the end, the US football tied Slovenia from losing 0-2. And even though the ref made a bad call, I was still pretty happy that despite of everyone at work shittalking about US “soccer”, we were doing pretty good.

working hard, hardly working

Today was my first day of work. I was instructed to go in at 11:30 and at 11:00 I was still having brunch with my aunt. at 11:30, I could not find where the office is located within the compound. at 11:40, I stepped inside standard architecture timidly, with every possible part of my  body sweating. It was a rough start. Luckily, this is one of the most relaxed and chill firm I have ever witnessed, so my lateness went unpunished.

in the middle of the office is this divider that is actually a model of a museum project they did.

Because it was after a long weekend, a lot of people were still on vacation. I was told that about 1/3 of the firm was not there. The firm had a fair number of foreigners and I unintentionally decided to speak English. Consequently, I had lunch with the English-speaking people for lunch. There was a Swedish dude called simon (pronounced like Simone), a French-Italian girl called Clare, a Puerto Rico guy named Kurt (or Krew? i have no idea), a New Yorker called Reed, and a fellow newbie from Spain called Hector. For once, I wish I had some sort of accent while speaking English. Half the time, I was just observing the how these people carried themselves, and how their culture is clearly reflected in their demeanor. For example, when I say something sarcastically, only the American gave me some sort of response, others just stared at me blankly.

Hector and I waited around for the bosses to arrive and talked amongst ourselves while other people minded their own business. He told me that he had been in China with his wife for 8 months and that he’s only going to be a part-timer because he is still taking language courses. We talked about buildings and architects we like, and he told me he would tell me about Barcelona later on.

At 4:30, one of the boss arrived and gave us a brief orientation. He told us that people generally come around 10 or 11, and leave after they work about 8 or 9 hours. Everything is pretty flexible, this was not a 9 to 5 office. Everything about this firm seemed to be idealistic and unreal, and the first day I’ve been dreading over panned out very unexpectedly.

man vs. shanghai

My cousin left this morning because she only has a limit amount of vacation days, so I explored shanghai on my own.

In the morning, I went to the tallest building in china at 496 m. I still remember that when I last visited shanghai couple years again, they were just starting on the foundation work. Time really flies.

last time i went to the one on the right, JinMao building, which is only a little shorter.

this is taken from the 94th floor, the corridor you see is at the 100th floor, which i climbed 100 flights of stairs to get to because i didn’t want to wait for the elevator.

this is highest observation deck in the world at the beginning of the year (the burj dubai has the title now). it has a row of glass tiles so people could look down.

the view (that’s the building on the right in the first picture). luckily it was a “clear” day.

In the afternoon, on my way to the shanghai museum I stumbled upon to the museum of contemporary art and decided to go there instead.

the show was called Stay Real Forever featuring three very young artists. I especially like the artist called KEA (the first piece is by him), because he created paintings and sculptures that were bizarre hybrids of animals of young consumer culture.

Afterwards, I went to this street with  a lot of graffiti painting that I had read about on a blog once.

This place was amazing. Tucked in a modern city with high-rises, this wall stretches couple blocks long behind an old factory. Like the subway cars in NYC in the eighties, this wall is full of inspiring pieces of artists making their marks and statements.

I had the pleasure of watching two graffiti artists at work, they didn’t care that people were taking pictures of them because they were so absorbed in their works. I didn’t have the courage to go talk to them so I just admired from afar.

biggest gainer

I think it’s chinese memorial today, so my grandparents wanted to go to yuyuan, I guess it’s some sort of tradition. Besides a sea of people, there were plenty of cuisines such as buns, dumpling, tofu, and etc. I tried the tang bao which is a bun with soup inside that you can drink through a straw.

It looked pretty fun, but in reality the soup was so hot inside that it melted the straw and made it very hard to drink with. Later my uncle told us that the food there is no longer good because it’s mainly catered to tourists. Here are few desserts that I have indulged in. Which reminds me, When I get back to Beijing, I need to start exercising.

mango pancake and red bean tofu pudding

green tea ice cream with brownie, almonds, and green tea marshmallows

coffee and mango donuts (the one on the right is supposed to a lion, mister donut’s mascot)

I’m on a boat

On Sunday my cousin and I first went to shanghai’s shopping district called Nanjing road. Once again, there were people everywhere as If everything was free. One of the stores was selling world cup t-shirts and it was a buy one get one half off deal. My cousin wanted to buy the Argentina shirt cuz she really likes Messi. I wanted to support USA after this morning epic performance from Howard and equally epic failure from England’s butterfingers. However they salesperson told me they only sell countries that have a good chance of winning and did not carry a design for the us. At first i tolerated his reason, however when I saw a south Korean design, my disappointment turned into anger. There’s no way South Korea’s one man show would carry them farther than the US.

In the after noon, my uncle rented a boat for our relatives and booked a river tour. After telling the boat driver than I have a driving license and pestering him for 10 minutes or so, he let me drove his boat. There I was, driving a ten person tour boat on the Suzhou river with people on the riverbanks watching me. The pilot told me he has been driving for over twenty years and he’s driven in the yellow river. He said I did a pretty good job but he would not let me drive it if there were other boats on the river…

arch PORN

Today i went to the shanghai expo and it was like a disneyland for grownups. If you have any doubt of the immense number of people in china, go to the expo. If you think waiting in line for an hour for the Matterhorn is commendable, you havent seen the line outside of the UK pavilion wrapping around the corner (and the next and the next …)  for 4 hours. Luckily, my cousin and I went with our grandparents and we were able to go through the “green access” or fastrack and skip to the front of the line. Here’s a brief snapshot of my day, i will explain/critique/recount my experience in each of them later on.

up in the air

After spending almost 13 hrs in the air, I have finally landed in Beijing. Since my flight arrives in the evening, unlike most transcontinental flights where I took sleeping pills, I tried to stay awake the entire time. This entailed watching three movies (how to train your dragon, when in Rome, and the road), constantly shifting in my seat to get more comfortable, and a whole lot of thinking. I thought about how I will adapt, how hot it’s going to be, how I wish the dude sleeping next to me would close his mouth.

Since I flew Korean air, the flight attendants seemed to assume that anyone remotely Asian looking spoke Korean. Korean people are everywhere, there’s a huge population at Berkeley, they accompanied on my flight, and apparently the district I’m staying at has a large percentage of Korean international students. Great.

During the last two hours, I had a conversation with this old chinese couple sitting next to me over dinner while drinking beer that came with our meals with the husband. I realized I like talking to old people because they are blunt and direct to the point. They tap you on the shoulder when they don’t know what the white thing was on their plate, it was tofu. They almost rudely ask you to tell them your entire life story. They ask how much your iPad or camera costs, and criticizes how imperfect they are… But most importantly, they don’t care if other people can overhear them, and they certainly don’t care if you think they are invasive. They are old, they’ve seen it all, they have nothing left to prove. Being old is not so bad.

new place, new blog

since china has decided to make everything difficult for me this time around, i have to find new ways to fight the power. step one, wordpress. step two, crack facebook. step three, torrent nba finals with english commentary.

one step at a time.