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Woot, new thread! Great job SB35. The pictures help a lot to break up the  , as Bloodnose suggested.What follows is mostly for non-tourists, though I suppose it could be useful for travelers too, to a degree. At any rate I hope it's useful for someone. Commence   Freshly-minted and prospective China goons take note: this thread, and its predecessors, can be invaluable if you come on over to glorious 中国 (are we keeping characters out of the megathread now? I can't remember). Beyond having done a lot of reading about Chinese history and whatnot, I was a complete and utter China noob when I showed up in Beijing in 2012. Now, a year later, I am admittedly still a noob, but one much more at ease with and able to enjoy the hilarious/bizarre clusterfuck that is living in China, and the goon community did have a lot to do with that. Ask questions if you have them, no matter how silly. Share stories when you get them. As for pictures (except babies making GBS threads; we see that enough every day, thanks),  .You will almost certainly go at least partially insane while you are here. Don't worry, though -- it's temporary.  Culture shock can be serious business to some folks, and it definitely got to me after the initial honeymoon period of three months or so. This is a pretty common reaction to living in a very different culture, of course, and well-documented in sociological research -- and, even better, previous China megathreads. Here's my advice to anyone who is a total noob and is having difficulty adapting, as I did for a while: stick it out. Trust me. It's worth it. If you're here working, know very little or no Chinese, and are having a hard time finding the motivation to fit studying around your professional life, take this advice too: do your damndest to at least learn basic stuff, even if it's arduous. Having simple communication skills is a huge relief here. It's even more true than it is obvious.Life here can be wonderfully eye-opening and enlightening (though not in the sense that you will magically become a Buddhist sage or esoteric Taoist philosopher -- and if you're pursuing some  EAT PRAY LOVE ORIENTAL FANTASY, come anyway, but prepare to have your preconceptions get  ). It has been for me. I would recommend it to anyone who has even a modicum of adventurousness.As many of my students have told me (sometimes after knowing me for months, which is, sadly, less puzzling now than it was a year ago), WELCOME TO CHINA.
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Jun 20, 2013 03:35
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GuestBob posted:How long before new-thread-shock wears off and we can stop being helpful and start being cynical. It may not be a happy everyday, but at least the first page of the thread can be, right?  And yeah, I should have clarified what I meant by culture shock. Mostly it has to do with your professional life. I can only speak about Chinese universities and high schools, of course, but they tend to treat teachers and curriculum very, very differently than we do in, say, the U.S., and by "differently" I mean "holy poo poo this is terrible." Ultimately, though, a teacher's job is to teach students, and if you can do that -- and are interested in doing that -- I think many of the, uh, differences melt away. Not all, but many. We do have some corporate folks in this thread. From past posts, I'm assuming that the non-education fields in China are similar in their frustrations. True or not?
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Jun 20, 2013 04:11
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Magna Kaser posted:Let's be honest this is the typical thing at most gyms anywhere. Yeah, you're probably right--probably also had more to do with the fact that it was Wudaokou, so student central. Also, because I didn't make this clear, the lifting offenders were both locals and foreigners. Just depended on what time you got there: foreigners during the day; locals at night; girls only seemed to roll in around class time. New gym in Yuyao is full of crazily strong ladies, though.
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Sep 8, 2013 04:48
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Baddog posted:I'm heading to Changsha for a month in a few days, trying to get setup with a vpn... I know its a bit of a lottery with what vpn provider is getting blocked on a particular day and hasn't found a workaround, but any recent recommendations on a good/stable/working service? Someone had recommended vitavpn a ways back (free 150 mb trial), but I'm a bit dubious about using a proprietary client from a chinese company. Is this poo poo going to give me computer aids? I'm thinking just take the binary as a backup and install it if I'm desperate. StrongVPN works perfectly for me, weird. The US servers are pretty slow, but I just bounce through Singapore or HK instead. I've heard Vypr is good, though.
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Sep 10, 2013 02:03
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Pro-PRC Laowai posted:Says the boy who still lives with his mom.. Be sure to clean up your room. caberham posted:Boy/goon/neckbeard/creep/random internet guy, I'm Chinese and have a family to live 
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Sep 11, 2013 04:55
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It's nice actually have a family to live with instead of fleeing from the government over student loans.
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caberham posted:After the riots, some of the patients just pretend nothing happened: "Nurse can I have some hot water please?" Fixed that for you.
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Sep 12, 2013 09:40
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caberham posted:You guys really ought to read the OP Pretty sure the airport express is always a flat 25 RMB. I have to admit, I love the airport express and the Beijing subway in general...except for line 13. Line 13 can seriously go gently caress itself.
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Sep 13, 2013 04:47
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MeramJert posted:Shenzhen doesn't "do" address numbers. My last apartment building was on a street that literally didn't have a name until right before I left. Living in a small city like we do now creates similar headaches. There's a million people in this place and it's geographically sizable, but only the main roads have any kind of distinguishing names or numbers. Fearcotton and I had to take a taxi to Yuyao a few weeks ago from the Hangzhou airport, and the poor Hangzhou cabby had to actually chase down a bunch of local Yuyao cabbies in order to get help. (One of these gentlemen casually offered us directions whilst relieving himself smack dab in the middle of the pavement immediately past the highway toll booths. Several of the booth attendants were observing his great stream of piss and its issuing organ with impressed miens.) I'd never come into the city before via that highway and was of no help to the guy until he got closer to our part of town.
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Sep 13, 2013 14:07
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VideoTapir posted:Anyone traveling or touring on the holidays? There's a chance Fearcotton and I might take a jaunt over to Hangzhou. We really liked it there, despite the HAVE YOU SEEN THE WEST LAKE????????? YOU SHOULD SEE THE WEST LAKE!!!!!!!!!!!!! issues. (In fairness, the West Lake is pretty nice.) We'll certainly make it back there again before the year is up, so if anyone with experience of the city can give us some must-sees (excepting the above), it'd be much appreciated. I vaguely recall some goons having lived there before. This will be our last year in China full-time, as we're returning to the States for grad school, so we're going to try to do some more traveling. We had a great student in Beijing who was from Guilin, and if we don't make it down there he'll be super disappointed. Plus the place looks truly beautiful. Part of me wants to check out Henan as well because who doesn't enjoy dumpster diving from time to time? Honestly, though, I want to visit Taiwan again. blinkyzero fucked around with this message at 05:35 on Sep 21, 2013 |
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Sep 21, 2013 05:32
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Rabelais D posted:OK so the new Detective Dee film is coming out this week; Young Detective Dee: Rise of the Sea Dragon 狄仁杰之神都龙王. The first one (Detective Dee and the Mystery of the Phantom Flame 狄仁杰之通天帝国;, 2011), despite a dodgy CGI deer, was surprisingly quite excellent. These are Judge Dee films, right? I've never seen any of the movies, but I've read many of the different takes on him by Eastern and Western authors and really liked most of them.
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Sep 22, 2013 14:45
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Rabelais D posted:Yeah; although I never knew Judge Dee was a thing outside of China. I've read a few Judge Bao stories, and they were pretty cool, but the 2011 movie was my first exposure to Di Renjie. I don't think he is a thing outside China, honestly. I just had a Chinese history professor in college who loved Judge Dee the way some people these days love Sherlock Holmes because of the BBC and the Hollywood movies. Thanks for the good word about the movies. I'll definitely check those out!
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Sep 22, 2013 16:32
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MeramJert posted:I have several coworkers that immediately sent their children away to be raised by the grandparents back in their hometown, with both actual parents only having spent a relatively short time with their infant before going back to work. I think that's crazy. One of my coworkers recently told me she went back to her hometown to see her 11 month old son that's being raised by its grandparents and her son didn't even recognize her for about 2 days. I hear stories like this fairly regularly and it seems ridiculously awful. Yeah, raising children isn't just about turning babies into people. It's also about turning people into parents. This kind of separation seems like a recipe for disaster. A lot of my students are in similar situations even now, as teenagers, and they talk all the time about how they really know nothing about their mothers and fathers, nor do their mothers and fathers know anything at all about them.
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Sep 22, 2013 18:51
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Donraj posted:Could you suggest some? I'm about to write a paper on early 20th century Chinese detective literature, but truthfully I don't know much beyond one author and I'm pretty ignorant on more traditional stuff. I don't know much about the subgenre itself, unfortunately, especially at that time, but I do know a fair bit about the Dee stories specifically. You should start with Robert van Gulik's stuff. He was Dutch, but wrote mostly in English and had everything translated to Japanese and Chinese afterwards. (Interestingly, the Japanese were at first far more into Chinese detective fiction than the Chinese were, though of course this probably had a lot to do with when van Gulik was writing -- the turmoil of the 50s and 60s). His first book is actually more or less just a translation of the Judge Dee Cases, a Chinese book by an anonymous 18th century author that van Gulik supposedly found somewhere in Japan. I'm guessing this is the guy you've heard about. Anyway, he's definitely worth reading, and there's a lot of him to read. Fun stories, especially when he freed himself from the original text and started making up his own stuff. Van Gulik himself was a really interesting dude too. Much more recently there's the Tales of Judge Dee by Zhu Xiaodi. Definitely continues where van Gulik left off. I read an interview where Xiaodi said that was his goal, so it makes sense. Pretty sure he hasn't done more yet, but I think Tales came out not that long ago. I read it in 2009 while I was still an undergrad. I think there were some French and Swedish writers working with the Dee character too, but I haven't read them. When I looked in college, none of their stuff had been translated yet into English (or Chinese, not that it would've helped me any then and not much more now). That might have changed since, though. I don't recall their names, but I'm sure it's on Amazon or Wiki somewhere.
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Sep 22, 2013 21:11
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Baddog posted:Everything is so much better today - vpn to amsterdam, gamepass.nfl.com I hear you. I actually sprung for an MLB.TV subscription this year, and it was totally worth the money. Kicking back and watching American sports is a great cure-all for the occasional China ills, for me anyway. Speaking of China ills -- I've been feeling like poo poo for a few hours every day after my classes, and this morning I suspected that it had something to do with the water that I drink while I'm teaching. We have one of those dispensers with the heater thingy and the jugs are delivered to us as needed, sealed (in plastic wrap, no less). On a lark, I went all day without drinking any of it and I feel a lot better than I have been recently by this point in the afternoon. This water's pretty loving suspect to me now. That these jugs are being filled out of a tap somewhere downriver is a disturbing prospect, especially since Yuyao's in the immediate vicinity of the great Shanghai Floating Piggy Parkway. That got me curious about just how bad the water is in this country, so I looked into it. I'd read about the "black ice" factories in Beijing and of course I knew that water's a pretty serious issue in the country at large, but holy poo poo. There are hydrologists out there that seriously think it could be the doom of the entire nation. Hyperbolic, but even the government estimates there are no less than 300 million citizens without any access to clean water, and hundreds of millions more who are scraping by on the bare minimum. blinkyzero fucked around with this message at 10:29 on Sep 24, 2013 |
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Sep 24, 2013 10:17
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Magna Kaser posted:Maybe I'll get the NHL equivalent this year. Unlike basketball and soccer which is all over everywhere, and other sports which have enough Americans to support... there's never any hockey anywhere I was thinking of getting the NHL package too. Baseball season's winding down, and I do love the Penguins. When I got the MLB.TV subscription, I had gone back and forth for like a week on whether it was a responsible use of the $110 or whatever it was. It's not that it would strap our budget; I'm just that much of a miser. It looks like a ridiculous internal debate now when I realize that, in the last seven days, I have only spent 150 RMB...and 110 of that was grocery shopping this evening. Considering all the free stuff and perks teachers (foreigners in general) get for working in this country, it can be really, really easy to save a ton of money without even trying. MeramJert posted:Yeah I think I read that 40% of China's fresh water is considered unsafe for contact with humans. Good Lord, 28% not fit for industrial use? That's pretty awful.
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Sep 24, 2013 11:23
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Baddog posted:I probably wasnt clear enough in my post, gamepass is free if you vpn to the netherlands first (or argentina supposedly, I didnt try that though). Then once you have the stream going, drop the vpn for better framerate. I had high def going most of the game. Well I'll be damned. This is Relevant To My Interests.
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Sep 24, 2013 14:57
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GuestBob posted:"Golf Course" is a public school euphemism for "Brothel" by the way. This explains why my father used to spend so much time at the "driving range."
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Sep 24, 2013 15:31
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MeramJert posted:e: another big contributing cost is that nobody wants to move to Dandong so you have to pay people a lot more money just to consider it. Our university has a similar problem with getting teachers out to Quzhou. Nobody wants to go there, and our boss is like, "I don't understand why we can't get any teachers for Quzhou! The water is so clean that you can drink it!" (And the people there do drink the water, which is enormously troubling.) We try to tell him that Westerners generally want to go where there are Western amenities readily available and perhaps even an expat circle, but he still doesn't get it. "But the water, it's safe! THE SAFE WATER THAT YOU CAN DRINK! IN YOUR MOUTH!"
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Sep 26, 2013 09:19
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BadAstronaut posted:Places in China westerners have heard of: And General Tso, though most people know this august location better by its informal name, D14.
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Sep 26, 2013 12:05
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BadAstronaut posted:Catching up with the thread this morning has been very depressing. Not only seriously Yeah, don't buy into the "Chinese is easy because the grammar is so simple and there's no conjugation!" bullshit. For reference, the US State Department's Foreign Service Institute regularly lists Mandarin as one of the hardest, if not the hardest, language for its trainees to learn (as native English speakers). Japanese and Korean are usually floating just above it.
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Sep 27, 2013 05:07
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about the fact that apparently 6 months from now I'll still barely be speaking Mandarin.
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caberham posted:Yeah but you also majored in linguistics and studied Japanese for 3 years. I also never heard you use Mandarin in higher level conversations ever I think this deserves a  and quite possibly an 
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Sep 27, 2013 05:28
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BadAstronaut posted:Thanks. I will speak to the Mandarin teacher here and see if she can up my lessons to every day. There's more than a few good documentaries you could try this with, like Last Train Home. That's definitely worth watching regardless. While not a documentary, Riding Alone for Thousands of Miles is interesting too, if a bit hokey in places (Chinese cinema for you). There are some goons kicking around here with far more knowledge of Chinese film, like Rabelais D. They could probably point you toward some quality stuff.
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Sep 27, 2013 07:52
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caberham posted:Get your numbers down, it's very useful. 一，二，三，四，五, 六，七，八，九，十。Write each character 20 times into a copy book and have it in your muscle memory. You don't want to be that clueless guy who can't read any numbers. I don't even care if you can't say hello, how are you? in Mandarin. Pretty much the first characters I learned after 中, 国, 美, and 人, heh. Then I discovered that pretty much everywhere you go in China numbers are in Arabic form anyway. 
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Sep 27, 2013 08:52
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Magna Kaser posted:House centipedes are actually cool as poo poo and don't even interact with people as they hate our food, light and anything that isn't eating termites, ants and cockroaches. I, for one, welcome our new hellspawn overlords.
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Sep 28, 2013 04:53
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VideoTapir posted:
Yeah, we have some nasty ones like this in Yuyao. I'm from Maine, so I'm accustomed to doing battle with the infamous black flies (dear tourists: we breed 'em, you feed 'em), but the little fuckers we have here are crafty. They don't do you the favor of announcing their presence before they try to suck half a pint out of you. Not very sporting of them,  ...
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Sep 28, 2013 15:55
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YF19pilot posted:I have an interview with Education First for an English Teaching position in China. What are some things I should know about this company, and some things I should ask? Any goons currently working with them? I've heard that the franchises vary a lot in quality, as you might expect. If at all possible, find out where they'd want to put you and try to get ahold of teachers who have worked there before.
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Sep 29, 2013 14:32
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Ceciltron posted:So I'm just about ready to book a flight to Beijing, hoping to take the train from there to Harbin. Getting from the Beijing airport to the train station is easy. Unless you have an obnoxious amount of baggage, take the airport express train -- 25 RMB -- to Dongzhimen. I love this thing and used to take it all the time when I lived in the city and flew in or out for business. It'll put you right on subway line 2, and from there it's just a few stops to the rail station. Those rides together take under an hour, but of course you never know how long immigration, baggage claim, etc. will eat up. Err on the side of caution and give yourself way more time than you need. As for train tickets, try to get that arranged before you get here. Lines at the station can be insanely long and slow, and trains do sell out. I've never taken the Harbin train, but I'm sure goons here have.
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Sep 29, 2013 20:16
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FearCotton posted:On Tsinghua's campus there is a coffee shop run by the art students, which is located around the corner from their theater. The espresso is actually really good and they have cheesecake. But the real winner there is QingQingKuaiDan, referred to by students and faculty as QQ. While I'm not sure anything served in this McD's rip-off was ever actually food, it's worth it to check out ice cream that will never melt. The art student coffee shop is really good. Expensive, but good. Good old QQ. One of those places in China that's just terrible but you have tons of nostalgia for anyway. Also, now that we live in Yuyao, I miss that Korean BBQ place Fearcotton mentioned almost more than anything else, along with Lush (chicken strips and potato wedges!) and Pyro, whose workers knew my goony self far too well by the end.
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Sep 30, 2013 10:44
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YF19pilot posted:Yeah, the recruiter/interviewer used those terms, made it seem like going to a 2nd tier city would be like going to a Jamestown, NoDak, instead of a Minneapolis. That going to a "second tier" city would be getting into the "nitty gritty" and experiencing the "real China". It's all "real China," of course, since it's all part of China. Major cities can just give you a different look at the country and the culture. The biggest differences are the quantity and quality of Western amenities available to you and how many other foreigners are kicking around. Obviously whether you want more or less of these things varies from person to person. My wife and I live in a small city, and there are very few other foreigners here besides us. If we were more social than we are, maybe this would be an issue, but we live quietly so it's actually pretty nice. When we do socialize, it's exclusively with our Chinese coworkers. Even here, there's a good amount of Western stuff available (hell, we had pizza at Papa John's tonight). From what I've seen across the country so far, that's becoming the norm, not the exception. I could be wrong, though -- I haven't traveled much at all in the west or extreme south yet. I can say that we really like our little city a lot more than we did Beijing. People are almost invariably super friendly and often go out of their way to make us feel welcome (except the cashiers at the best of the nearby supermarkets -- those ladies are complete bitches, though I had the same job for a while when I was younger and totally get it). It can be touching. On our way back from pizza tonight, for example, we stumbled across a new hole-in-the-wall rice-and-dumplings restaurant that wasn't around before we went home to the States for the summer. The owner saw us peeking in and ran out to greet us with a huge grin on his face. Turns out it was a guy who used to be a cook at our high school -- he'd saved enough money over the years with his family to ditch that job and open his own place. We always used to talk to him when we got lunch because he was just gregarious as hell and funny to boot. He insisted we come back tomorrow or the next day and eat for free. blinkyzero fucked around with this message at 15:27 on Sep 30, 2013 |
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Sep 30, 2013 15:25
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edit: wrong forum, drat it. In other, more T/T news, anyone taken the train from Hangzhou to Shanghai recently? Fearcotton and I are thinking of trying to get into the city soon-ish and we're curious how accurate the trip duration is. Last time we went from Yuyao to Hangzhou it was only supposed to take 35 minutes and ended up being almost 2 hours, despite no problems of any kind. blinkyzero fucked around with this message at 17:59 on Oct 2, 2013 |
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Oct 2, 2013 17:55
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BadAstronaut posted:Where did you eat? I've managed to avoid that for ten days so far, thankfully Ten days without eating? This is not the real China experience! ...or is it? systran posted:I took it like three months ago. It was pretty drat smooth and took as long as it said. There was the expected shoving within the station but there was way less seat haggling and dipshit behavior than I was used to going from Chongqing to Chengdu. Thanks, that's reassuring. Apparently we just have lovely luck when it comes to trains here. We've had several inexplicable delays on westbound trips here over the last year.
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Oct 3, 2013 12:51
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xenilk posted:Every time I go to China this happens at least once. But it's usually tolerable and happen at night. It's more annoying than anything else but overall it has never stopped me from eating anything over there food-wise. I just stock our bathroom with long novels that I've been meaning to reread. There were a few places I loved to eat at in Beijing that, beyond having great food, also came with a guarantee of two to three chapters of Les Miserables later in the evening. Last year, during Spring Festival, I knocked out all of Lu Xun as a result of the boss's family's home cooking.
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Oct 3, 2013 21:06
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caberham posted:I may be fluent in English, but sometimes I wish my English is as sharp as my Cantonese. To me, higher level of Chinese culture is to be as underhanded passively aggressive as possible without other people knowing you are being passive aggressive. Just acting all snarky and This really does not make me want to have more to do with the culture than I already do, lol
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Oct 4, 2013 21:22
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all the way when everyone else is oblivious.
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Bloodnose posted:What? I was more interested in how this intersects with buggery.
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Oct 5, 2013 14:13
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Aero737 posted:This was from this past spring, 2 days in the 'Hazardous' range. I've got one looking dirtier than this one just from this past week. This is supposed to be the cleanest season in Beijing, winter is going to kill us all. Wow, that's terribad. And to think Fearcotton and I walked around for a year there without masks. Idiotic, but the pollution seemed quite manageable...until winter. We went to Seoul on business in the middle of January 2012, and when we came back the smog was just unbelievable, especially in comparison with South Korea (where the Beijing pollution had been on the news constantly during our trip, of course). After that, we were glad when work assigned us to a new position down here in Yuyao, which is beautiful year-round. I loved Beijing and will always love visiting, but when the pollution got bad, it did seem like the benefits no longer outweighed the health risks, especially when your wife has asthma.
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Oct 6, 2013 14:17
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Bloodnose posted:It's because you're not wearing a tracksuit. This deserves a 
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Oct 6, 2013 15:40
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Dilber posted:My old school hired a black person accidentally, and then sent her to Henan. Sometimes I think that "sent to Henan" is a lot like the "sent to Siberia" you see all the time in Chekhov stories.
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Oct 7, 2013 08:44
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Facepalm Ranger posted:So I shouldn't go for the Z1 visa? Which Visa should I go for then? To work here legally, you'll need the Z visa. That said, you definitely wouldn't be the first person to work in China on an F business visa. I don't recommend that, though. Do NOT work on a tourist visa (L). That's just begging for trouble. A legitimate employer will be able to get you a Z. If they can't get you a Z, they're not legit and probably not worth your time. Look online for work, yeah. Dave's ESL Cafe always has listings. As has been said, you won't find anything glamorous there (or elsewhere on the net, really; the best jobs don't get really get posted), but if you're just looking for some gainful employment for a while, you'll do okay provided you have a college degree. If you have any kind of official ESL credentials, that's helpful too, like a TESOl or CELTA certificate.
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Oct 19, 2013 19:40
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Facepalm Ranger posted:This is great advice, thanks man. I've got a college and a university degree (not in English though, will that pose a slight problem?). Some employers will want an English or linguistics degree, but most (the vast majority) really don't care. They're just looking for a certain level of education. If you can get a quick-and-dirty TESOL certificate (easy via online courses), that would help you a lot. A true TESOL/CELTA/etc. course would be even better, as that will give you valuable classroom management experience and other stuff bound to make your life here much easier. Teaching English abroad can be a pretty brutal trial by fire if you're totally new to standing in front of a class.
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Oct 19, 2013 20:13
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goldboilermark posted:I don't think anyone has stats on Chinese embezzlement and exploitation lol Sure they do. Just google "china gdp"
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Oct 20, 2013 11:33
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