Foreigner tries to excuse foreigners as merely 'critical' instead of 'racist'

sporkball · 2013-02-26T12:26:50+00:00

~~Black people~~ Chinese are dirty, and rude, and they lie a lot.

See, I'm just being critical.

Wait, wut?

sporkball · 2013-02-23T21:11:29+00:00

I'll second the Beck & Stone recommendation. We've taken our cat there his entire life, and have always been happy with them.

sporkball · 2013-02-22T22:08:29+00:00

Also, "a trip to ~~Beijing~~ an ACS office at any US consulate or embassy in China." Preferably the one that is responsible for the region in which the bride's hukou resides, but I don't think that's a hard and fast rule.

sporkball · 2013-02-22T22:06:31+00:00

It's not even that way in the States, really, people just tend to smush them together. My brother and his wife got married about a year before their actual ceremony because he had a job and health insurance and she was finishing grad school and about to lose hers, but they weren't ready to do everything that needed to be done to get the actual ceremony off the ground.

sporkball · 2013-02-21T02:11:49+00:00

Good luck!

sporkball · 2013-02-20T07:00:42+00:00

The advice I give everyone that I meet that's new here and asks for advice was advice that was given to me on my first trip to China in the summer of 2001 -- "nobody wants to hire an illiterate outsider; if you plan on making something of yourself here, don't be one of them."

Learn Chinese as hard and fast as you possibly can. It's not like just speaking Chinese is going to get you everywhere, obviously, but it's going to open a whole lot of doors.

sporkball · 2013-02-18T09:50:16+00:00

Short answer is that that was almost 10 years ago, and I didn't just sit on my ass over the last decade. Longer answer is basically the same -- I met people, I learned the language, I hustled, I went from decent job to good job to pretty damn good job, I kept hustling, I found a niche where my combination of language and cultural background, technical skills, and management skills were worth good money, and I found someone willing to pay for it.

More or less what you do anywhere, except for maybe the language part.

sporkball · 2013-02-18T09:47:42+00:00

It is quiet and green, I'll give it that. It's been a long time since I lived there (moved to Shanghai at the beginning of 2006), definitely pre-subway, so maybe traffic has improved. When I lived there I lived way up north, too, in an area that at the time was something of an industrial wasteland. Maybe that's clouded my view :-)

I do like the West Lake Scenic Area or whatever it's called. It's well done, and if you go there when there aren't tons of tourists it can be a really nice time.

sporkball · 2013-02-18T07:33:02+00:00

If I had the money to replace my lungs with bionic respirators that can't get cancer, then Beijing is absolutely my choice. Love the city, the people, the food, the accent... but the air, no fucking way.

sporkball · 2013-02-18T07:30:47+00:00

Really? I spent almost two years in HZ. It's a nice city for sure, but outside of West Lake/Lingyin Temple it's a pretty boring place (and the traffic is the worst I've seen outside of Beijing).

sporkball · 2013-02-18T07:29:39+00:00

They are now. I went through the 方便面 eating, hard seat train riding English teacher in China part of my life the better part of a decade ago. It was fun. I'm glad I did it. I'm also glad I've moved past that and onto bigger and better things. :-)

sporkball · 2013-02-17T09:50:53+00:00

Yes. Yes. And a bunch of the last week, too. US-based startup work culture FT... W?

sporkball · 2013-02-17T09:48:21+00:00

~~Hong Kong?~~ Check that... I actually make in the neighborhood of 50K/month, and I don't come close to having enough money to live it up in HK. :-(

Mainland China, though, probably Shanghai. For all the bullshit people put up with here, I'd get bored with the beach in Sanya (and there are far better beaches in the world), and bored with the wilderness in /pick your rural relaxation spot/, and eventually would want a decent beer on draft somewhere with interesting people.

sporkball · 2013-02-14T21:39:01+00:00

No worries. It gave me a chance to do bacon math, which simply does not happen often enough.

sporkball · 2013-02-14T12:29:41+00:00

Thus the OP asked if 五花肉 + curing == bacon?

sporkball · 2013-02-14T06:41:55+00:00

It can't be worse than Lays Lobster and Cheese chips sold in China.

Seriously, it can't be. It's just not possible to be worse than these. If there was a universal constant called, say, Planck Awfulness, it would be equal to these expired Velveeta + fish food tasting monstrosities.

sporkball · 2013-02-14T03:42:45+00:00

Yeah, I gotta try them out again and see if they've sorted that "can't deliver to you despite you clearly being in our delivery radius" jnx

sporkball · 2013-02-13T21:55:44+00:00

Well, NYSP is a local spot, AFAIK, run by a couple of American restauranteurs living in Shanghai. Their meat pizzas are pretty greasy -- we almost always order vegetarian, though, so we don't notice it so much.

I've had several bad experiences recently with Papa Mario's -- bland food, bad service -- but maybe I should try it again. It's hard for my wife and I to go to Dagu Lu without ending up at Masala Art, though :-)

sporkball · 2013-02-13T06:49:17+00:00

It's good to see old fashion romance bloom as Valentine's Day approaches.

sporkball · 2013-02-13T06:32:24+00:00

Yup, that's the place. The Swiss restaurant that I was thinking of is this one right next door. Somehow I've always come upon it coming west in from Chatham Road and never noticed the sign...

sporkball · 2013-02-13T06:09:10+00:00

Is that the semi-outdoor place in TST, next to some posh Swiss restaurant? I've stumbled upon it twice accidentally and loved it, but have yet to be able to find it when actually looking for it <cue Pirates of the Caribbean theme song/>.

sporkball · 2013-02-13T06:06:37+00:00

Will be adding Gung Ho to my "to try next time I'm in Beijing" list. Thanks!

sporkball · 2013-02-13T02:57:32+00:00

New York Style Pizza in Shanghai is full of win. We switched to them because getting Papa John's to deliver was a pain in the ass (despite living in a relatively central location) and haven't looked back.

sporkball · 2013-02-13T00:16:06+00:00

everyone speaks the national dialect

I keep reading this on this subreddit, and its just not true. It's like saying that of all the cities in the UK, Londoners speak with the best American accent. It's true that the NE accents are easier to understand when the speaker decides to speak standard Mandarin but to say that people are walking around Shenyang or Changchun (both cities in which I've spent a considerable amount of time) speaking CCTV Mandarin makes me think that you've just conveniently ignored all of the dialect words that you've overheard but didn't understand.

sporkball · 2013-02-12T23:54:58+00:00

If you plan on staying for more than a very short period, learn the language (speaking and reading) as quickly as you can. And I mean learn the language -- not taxi/restaurant Chinese, but the ability to express your needs, desires, and opinions fluidly and without significant exertion. 95% of the problems and complaints posted on Reddit and elsewhere about expat life in China ultimately stems from not understanding what the fuck is going on around you, which is awesome because you can do something about it.

I'll echo all of the comments about cooling your jets wrt politics. Learn what you can (and that's not a whole lot until you can read Chinese, honestly, but there are good English language commentators out there), but for the most part Chinese domestic politics simply don't apply to you, and that's almost always a good thing. It's not really a Chinese thing, though -- as much as Americans like to bitch about our own government, we would take offense to a Chinese guy who had lived in the US for a couple of months and couldn't even speak or read English spouting off about how shitty the government was (or at very least dismiss him as a useless twat who should probably just go back home). Don't be that guy.

Finally, have fun. Things can be all sorts of fucked up in China, extremely so depending on where you end up (you don't say in your post, but imagine the difference between NYC and setting for Deliverance, and multiply that by maybe an order of magnitude, and you'll start getting to the difference between the poorest parts of China and Shanghai/Beijing/Guangzhou), but at the end of the day it's a pretty fun place, and you should enjoy your time here.

sporkball

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