Challenging China

Perhaps you’ve noticed a bit of a gap in my blogging. Perhaps you fear I have abandoned you. Perhaps you are wailing, “Erich, we need our fix of your nonsense and pictures of interesting things. How could you neglect your eager readers?”

I assure you, eager readers, I have been writing blog posts. There is no lack there. The delay is in posting said content. And why is that? China.

Look, the motorcycles here wear coats.

We are enjoying our stay in China in many ways. This is our fourth day here, and we’ve done some very cool things (as you will see in some of my blog posts when I am able to catch up.) But there are a few things about China that make it more difficult and more frustrating.

Some of them just wear mittens.

The Great Firewall of China

The biggest of these is the other great wall, the Great Firewall of China. Holy blockage, Batman! China is very restrictive about the internet. In theory, we have internet in our hotel, though I can’t get it to work on my computer at all. Alrica can from time to time.

Our cell phones do better when using our eSIMs (though they don’t do any better using wifi.) And still there are restrictions. Some websites you just can’t access. Some you can, but they are slowed to such a degree that they are unusable. Most Google apps, for example, are either blocked or they may as well be. You can use Google Maps, but it isn’t very good here. It won’t give great directions. You have to use AMap, a Chinese product. Google Translate barely works. (It works to some degree if you have downloaded the language.)

We purposely picked a week between semesters for me. And thank goodness we did! I couldn’t possibly do any work with the amount of internet that is trickling forth. Alrica does have some work to do this week, and she is eating up the data on her eSIM.

I never bought these, but I should have. I am just so curious!

Transit Visa

The visa situation is also a bit different here. US citizens cannot visit China without a visa, but sort of you can. You can do what we’re doing. We are on what is called a Transit Visa. We didn’t have to pay any visa fees. But there are a few rules:

1. You must be using China as a transit. That means you must fly (or train or boat) in from some country (call it country A) which is not China. (Interestingly, you can fly in from either Taiwan or Hong Kong, and those count as a country which is not China.) And when you leave, you must fly (or boat or train) out to a country which is not China and also not country A. You can’t go back to the same country you came from. (Again, it could be Taiwan or Hong Kong, so long as that isn’t where you came from.) For us, this is fine. We arrived on a flight from South Korea. We are departing on a flight to Uzbekistan.
2. You can only stay in one division. Think of a division like a state. We landed in Beijing, which is in the Beijing division. We cannot go to any other division. We must fly out from an airport in the Beijing division.
3. You can only be here for 240 hours. You must already have a flight out before you arrive. Before arrival, we also filled out China’s electronic entry. And we gave them the flight numbers of our arriving flight and of our departing flight. Be prepared to show proof of that departing flight at passport control when you arrive.

Honestly, as troubles go, the transit visa was pretty minor. We were worried that there would be some trouble, but it went smoothly. (I say this now while still in Beijing. I will have to update the post if we have any trouble leaving.)

There are warm tips all over the subway stations. Not warm enough to be hot tips, however.

Money (and Associated Apps)

Some countries are all about cash. Others would prefer you don’t use cash, but foreign credit cards are good. But in China, neither of those are the case.

A few businesses will take cash, like the grocery store. But that’s rare. And nobody takes a foreign credit card. You have to have a payment app. And not just any app you choose. You have to have either Alipay or WeChat. (Alipay is the big one that everyone uses in China.)

You set up Alipay to use your foreign credit card. So ultimately, you are using the card. But in reality, you are using the app as a middleman. Or middlebot. It works one of two ways:

Method 1 – Scan: You open Alipay, press scan, and then you scan a QR code presented to you by the business. Alipay then asks you for the amount, which you enter. You use a six-digit payment password that you chose when you set up the app. And then you get a confirmation message that the payment occurred.

Method 2 – Pay: You open Alipay, press Pay/Receive, and then enter your six-digit payment password. Then your phone displays a QR code. The business scans your QR code and they enter the amount. You again get a confirmation message that the payment occurred.

WeChat is very similar in how it works. So using Alipay or WeChat isn’t so bad. But the setup, wow, that was terrible. If you want to use a foreign credit card rather than a Chinese bank account, then you must set the app up before you arrive in China. But the app really wants you to have a Chinese phone number to validate your identity. It says you can use a foreign phone number, but it doesn’t work well. Alrica did finally get it to work. I ended up using an email address instead.

You might think, that’s great Erich. That’s not so hard. Ah, wait.

I wanted to also be able to use Alipay for public transportation in Beijing. That is in a separate section of the app. And when you go to set that up, well, if you didn’t use a phone number to set it up initially, you can’t make it work with public transportation.

I saw this in one of the residential neighborhoods. I have no idea why they lean wood boards up against the tires of the cars.

Passports

You always have to carry your passport with you in China. That’s not entirely unheard of in other countries. But the difference is that here you need it over and over. Every time you enter a site, any place you have to buy tickets to enter, you must show one passport for each ticket you want to buy.

I assume the Chinese have to show their national ID cards. But I don’t know that for sure. I also assume it is part of some heavy duty record keeping about how many people visit sites and from which places.

Pedestrian vs Motorbike

On a scale of East Asia, the walkability of Beijing is between Hanoi (you may or may not have a sidewalk and you are continually dodging motorbikes) and Seoul (you almost always have a nice wide sidewalk without any motorbikes parked on it and you need not dodge motorbikes because they stick to the street.) In Beijing, you almost always have a sidewalk. However, in some sections, the amount of it left for pedestrians after motorbikes (and pedal bikes) are parked can be very narrow. Plus, there is still motorbike dodging. The motorbikes don’t want to wait at red lights, so if they are making a turn anyway, they just ride up on the sidewalk to get around traffic.

I don’t know which is worse. Some of them ride up and you don’t even know they are there until they are immediately behind you. Others honk honk honk, they keep honking the entire time. This lets you know they are coming, which is good. But it’s also chutzpah! “Hey get out of my way even though you are the one using the sidewalk for its intended purpose and I am not.”

Aggression

The Chinese are aggressive. I don’t mean belligerent. That’s not the right word at all. I really mean aggressive in the defiance of patience, and I will give you an example to demonstrate.

We were at the grocery store buying some bottled drinks. The line at the cashier was long. Then another employee came over to open the check out aisle beside ours. The employee spoke to the women who was next in line to say she would take her on the other lane.

That woman headed to the next aisle, but another woman with a full shopping cart ran forward and jammed into the aisle before her. Then the two women struggled with one another. The one who had been in line only had a couple items, so no cart. The one with the cart was using it to block the aisle. The woman who had been in line reached over the cart and handed her items to the cashier. And in that way she won the battle.

It was wild to me that I was seeing a wrestling match at the cashier aisle. Alrica and I just stayed in the line we had been in and waited our turn.

That’s the kind of aggression I mean. They will take any opportunity to make things more convenient for them whether or not it is considerate of anyone else. If you are in the crosswalk and a turning vehicle thinks he can make it, he goes. Having just come from South Korea which has a strong courtesy culture, this is a stark difference. No vehicle crosses a crosswalk in Seoul if there is a person anywhere in it.

Don’t misunderstand me. When we go to a restaurant, the servers there are exceptionally nice to us. They help us when it is clear we don’t know what we’re doing. They break out their own translator apps to help us. I’m not saying the people are unfriendly, just ready to take advantage of opportunities to the exclusion of others.

In some ways it reminds me of India, where if I didn’t stand in line close enough to the person in front of me, someone would cut in line. It’s that sort of thing. But I guess both of those countries have a billion people. If there are so many of you, you have to do what you can to get ahead.

Pollution

We have had wonderful weather the entire time we’ve been here. Sunny days, no clouds. And yet, I’ve never seen a blue sky. The sky, during the days, is always a hazy white. Some days are better than others, but there is never not a blanket of particles in the air.

As for litter, there is some. Compared to Seoul, which is so clean it can shock you, the litter is noticeable. But, on the whole, Beijing doesn’t have too much litter. It’s better in that regard than Reno. (I use Reno as an example because it is where I last lived in the USA.)

Random Oddities

Things happen, right? I mean, weird things that are just part of the unique experience of one person and will probably not happen again for someone else in similar situations. Like, in Vlore, Albania, there was a huge rainstorm that overwhelmed the streets with water. The power and water were out for a day. But that’s a rare occurrence.

We had a similar just happened to be here at the right time kind of thing. We got a call from the front desk of our hotel. They explained that the next day, we may not be in our hotel room from 9 AM to noon. The government won’t allow it. You see, the American President is coming to Beijing, and as part of the security, no one is allowed on high floors in hotels. So for those three hours, we must be somewhere else. We can leave our belongings. We just can’t be in the room.

No problem, because we already had a plan for the morning. We were going to visit the Temple of Heaven. Guess what. That’s where President Xi took President Trump. So we couldn’t go there either.

It’s bizarre, right? Just a matter of timing, and I guess it’s the way the government manages security here. Honestly, it’s not a big inconvenience either. We had already planned to leave before nine and we went to Qianmen Square instead. In some ways, it is amusing that we just happened to be here with exactly the right timing to experience it.

A Few Good Things in the Balance

I don’t want to give the impression that we dislike China. We find it hard, and the internet thing is frustrating. But there are some very cool aspects to Beijing too.

They have amazing bottled drinks. When we go to the convenience store or the grocery store, we find all kinds of wonderful drinks. They have some classics we are used to like Coca-Cola. But they have all kinds of beverages we don’t. Some have pomegranate juice in them, others are flavors of cherries or peaches or limes. I bought one drink that came in a bottle with a purple label and it is delicious. The flavor is familiar, but I can’t place what it is. (Even though it’s purple, it’s not grape. But it is great.)

I bet you can, like I did, guess what those bottles are.

Beijing loves roses. You see them planted on the sides of the roads or along the sides of buildings. And these are big, tall roses with wide full petals. They come in all kinds of colors, including the peach color that Alrica likes best.

No shortage of roses, at least not in May

There is widespread use of the Latin Alphabet on road signs and in the subway. Everything is written in two scripts. And on the subway, a voice announces the next stop in Chinese and then in English.

There are bikes everywhere. You know rental bikes like Lime Bike or Bird Bike, they have similar things here. I think, if I could get Alipay to work with transportation, I could use that to rent them. But since I haven’t gotten Alipay to work that way, I haven’t tried. These bikes are everywhere, near many subway stations, bus stations, and popular areas. What’s more, the bike companies redistribute bikes throughout the day. Imagine a pickup truck and a tricycle had a baby. We’ve seen those kinds of vehicles painted in the same colors as the bikes. The vehicles drive around and pick up bikes when there are too many in a location or drop off bikes when there aren’t enough. In the early morning, we saw one of them placing lots of bikes right outside the subway in our neighborhood.

The yellow vehicle only moves the yellow bikes

There is a lot to enjoy about China, and I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend it. But I would tell people to go into it with their eyes open.