May 2015 – Page 6 – David and Yanmei

May 16, 2015May 16, 2015

Bonus country: South Korea

Seoul is only a two hour flight from Beijing. Neither of us had been to Korea and we both wanted to go, so we booked a flight. This will be a short but full trip. We arrived Wednesday night and just took a taxi to our hotel and checked in. The hotel is located near Myeongdong which is a good central location in Seoul.

Thursday we had booked a DMZ+JSA tour. The DMZ is the demilitarized zone between North and South Korea and the JSA is the joint security area, which straddles the border and is guarded by both North and South Korean troops.

We went to three sites along the DMZ border. First the Dorasan train station. The station is the last stop on the railroad that links North and South Korea. Unfortunately since 2007 NK no longer accepts rail traffic, so the train only goes south. There is a fairly significant military presence there.

Soldiers on the left, tourists on the right

After the train station we went to the Third Infiltration Tunnel. It is called that because it was the third tunnel discovered being dug underneath the DMZ from NK. It was discovered in 1978. Unfortunately they had a strict no photo policy inside the tunnel. It is 73 meters deep and through solid rock. We had to wear hard hats and it is a good thing because we both hit our heads on the low cieling. We were able to go as far as the first barricade beyond which the tunnel is supposedly mined.

Tunnel down to the 3rd Infiltration tunnel

Bonus picture below.

Not a picture of the tunnel, this is the Thurston Lava tube from Hawaii 🙂

After the tunnel we went to the Dorasan observation post which is on a small mountain had has a good view across the DMZ to NK. Unfortunately it was not a clear day so you couldn't see much detail.

Finally we went to the JSA. We stopped at Camp Bonifas before the DMZ where an armed US soldier from the United Nations JSA Battalion checked our passports (we had to send scans of our passports 3 days ahead to be cleared for entry). After we entered we had to sign a form saying we understood and would follow the rules, such as no pointing, waving or gesturing, no leaving the group, no communicating with NK personnel, etc. Then there was a short presentation on the history of the Korean War and JSA.

Since the JSA is on the border, you actually go through part of the DMZ to get there. We switched buses and drove into the DMZ with our army escort. Again we were not allowed pictures but before the DMZ there is a tank wall, a mine field and electrified razor wire.

The picture above needs some explanation. The blue buildings are UN buildings and the grey buildings are NK buildings. You can see our US army guide just above the shoulder of the guy in the red shirt. The soldiers with the white band on their helmets are South Korean, and they are standing rigidly motionless. Between the two UN buildings in the center you can see some gravel, then a line, then concrete. That line is the border between NK and SK. He's hard to see but there is a NK guard In the door way of the larger NK building in the distance. The middle UN building with the open door is where negotiations are sometimes held.

Yanmei is on the right side of the South Korean soldier, which means she is officially in North Korea. Technically I guess that makes it two bonus countries.

Me in North Korea. The flag and recording devices in the middle of the conference table mark the border.

For me this was one of the most interesting days of the trip so far. Really good tour and there is a lot of stuff I left out too. This is not something we are used to in North America. There is a lot of history and still a lot of tension behind everything that is going on here.

-David

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May 13, 2015May 13, 2015

Living in Beijing, part 2

It's actually pretty interesting living in an apartment instead of a hotel. It gives us a feel of what it is really like to live in Beijing. Of course Yanmei already knows this, but for me it is new. Similar to Taiwan the bed is very hard, like a box spring with no mattress. Even Yanmei doesn't like the hard beds anymore. To make it a bit more comfortable we moved the pillows from the couch to the bed.

Left is kitchen, right is bathroom, 2nd right is bedroom

The apartment is pretty nice, I'd estimate about 500 sqft, maybe a bit more. It even has a clothes washer, although no drier, so we hang our clothes everywhere to dry.

The TV has a lot of channels. There are at least three video game channels and two channels that always show games of Go. I've found I can watch NBA playoff games live in the morning (we're 12 hours ahead) but with Chinese announcers. I discovered one channel that plays Hollywood movies undubbed from 6pm to midnight. Since there is no Internet I watch that channel a lot. Finally saw Rocky V, and a pretty good movie called Doubt, starring Philip Seymour Hoffman and Meryl Streep. Yanmei recently discovered an English news channel.

We live in a pretty dense apartment complex. On the first floor outside there are restaurants, convenience stores, phone shops, etc. Since the weather is nice the restaurants set up tables and chairs outside. It always seems pretty active, even at say 9:30pm on a Tuesday night there will be people out drinking and eating on the patios.

The common hallways in the building have sound activated lights. I understand it makes sense to have the lights go off when no one is there, but sound sensors don't seem ideal. When we come back late at night we have to make noise to make the lights come on. Usually it takes stomping our feet loudly.

There is a morning market that sets up across the street every day. Originally Yanmei liked this, but then we found their produce wasn't good quality so we stopped going there. About a block away is a WuMart, which is a lot like Walmart, they sell just about everything (except deodorant). We ended up doing most of our grocery shopping at WuMart.

We also bought a rice cooker there. After using it twice it didn't work very well so Yanmei wanted to return it. One of the things Yanmei likes in the US is most companies have a good return policy. In China they generally don't have this, but WuMart had a sign that said you could return within 14 days, so she wanted to return it. We took it back and she ended up in a heated discussion with two people at the customer service desk. BTW, this is a $15 rice cooker, not a big ticket item. Finally she told me they didn't believe it wasn't working and wanted to test it. So they actually got some rice and water and set about cooking a batch of rice! We didn't want to watch rice cook, so Yanmei gave them her phone number, and we left. They called about half an hour later and said it was working fine and said we were using too much water, so they wouldn't accept the return. So we just abandoned it at the store, no refund.

For some reason deodorant isn't common here. I wish Yanmei had told me that, I would have brought extra. She said Chinese don't have that problem, but based on some of the taxi drivers or the crowded subway on a hot afternoon, I have to disagree. 🙂

The nearest subway station is about a mile away. We take the subway almost everywhere we go. Since we don't want to walk a mile we take an unlicensed taxi every time. These are lined up outside the apartments waiting for customers. They are regular cars with a red LED light hanging from the rear view mirror that indicates they are for hire. It costs 10 yuan for a ride to the subway, which is about $1.50, so worth it. Where we are there do not seem to be many licensed taxis. Downtown there are a lot of taxis but they are almost impossible to flag down. They all use smartphone apps like Über. If you don't have the app you are not likely to get a cab. I should also mention all the taxis have seat covers which block the use of seatbelts in the back.

The Beijing subway is very good. It seems less crowded this time, although still busy. Yanmei said the price is more than double what it was 2 years ago, so that may explain it being less crowded. All bags have to be scanned, and some stations have an airport style metal detector with guards with wands. One time we went at rush hour and it was crowded so they just let everyone through without scanning anything, which makes me wonder what the point is. As an aside I feel the same way about airport security. Suddenly at Christmas because it is busy and people are running late we no longer need to remove our shoes, jackets or laptops, and we use the old metal detectors instead of the body scanners. So why do we need all those checks the rest of the year?

Some of the lines have screens in the tunnels that play ads. They must sync the refresh rate of the screen with the movement of the car because the images appear steady while the car is moving.

All the stations are announced in Mandarin and English. Amusingly I can understand the Beijing subway announcements better than I can understand the BART or TTC station announcements, which are usually garbled or at much too low volume.

The city is huge. For example it took us two hours and two transfers to visit one of Yanmei's friends who lives on the other side of town. We live near Huilongguan station on Line 13.

Based on purely anecdotal evidence I feel like there may be a real estate bubble here. There is still a lot of construction going on and many of Yanmei's family and friends already own second apartments. I don't know what the prices are like, but when everyone starts buying investment properties it can be a sign of a bubble. Also I think the stock market is in a bubble too. I heard on the aforementioned English news station that the Shanghai stock index is up over 110% in the last 12 months, despite the Chinese economy having its slowest growth in a decade. They also said over 45% of the listed stocks have P/E ratios greater than 100! That is a recipe for trouble, see the dot com bubble. We'll see, maybe everyone is buying properties because they doubled their money in the stock market.

-David

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May 12, 2015May 13, 2015

Wedding photos

What a dramatic day we had!

Several months ago Yanmei was admiring a wedding photo a friend of hers posted on WeChat. She showed it to me, it was done by a studio in Beijing. Since we didn't have a big wedding, I asked her if she wanted to get some photos like that. She said, “a little bit.” We've been together long enough that I know that means she really wants that.

Now that we're in Beijing I suggested we go to the studio to check it out. They seemed pretty good to me, they were willing to accommodate our tight schedule and have us in for photos the next day. We didn't want lots of hard copies or a big album because we can't fit that in our luggage for the rest of the trip, so we just asked for digital copies of the photos. I wasn't sure if they would agree to that, but they did, at least as far as I got from Yanmei's translations. There was a lot of talk that I couldn't understand. Anyway we paid, and the next day we had to go to their studio in a park, different from where we were, which was just their sales office.

The next morning Yanmei woke up late, she didn't have a good sleep. She also had buyers remorse on the photo idea, and felt like the studio was low quality, even though we hadn't been there. She asked why we were wasting money to be uncomfortable all day instead of doing something fun. What a debacle this was turning out to be! How were we going to get any good photos if she was miserable (and therefore I was miserable)? I finally coaxed her out the door about an hour late.

After taking the subway we had to take a small vehicle to the studio in the park. She hadn't mentioned it to me before, but apparently the taxis can't or won't go there so you have to take a scooter or motorcycle. There were a bunch of these waiting outside the subway to take people, I assume they were like unlicensed taxis. We'd probably have to go on separate ones. We didn't like that idea so we settled on a motorized rickshaw.

The rickshaw went into the park, which Yanmei informed me wasn't the one the sales lady promised her yesterday. “This place is terrible.” Looking around at the mounds of garbage I had to agree. We finally got to the studio about an hour late for our 9:30 appointment. They took us upstairs and gave us a locker for our things. I was supposed to bring dress shoes but of course I didn't have any. Yanmei went off to makeup while I waited.

Yanmei came out of makeup a changed woman, both physically and mentally. I told her “You look amazing!”, and she replied “This place is pretty good.” Finally she cracked a smile. 🙂 We picked out our first set of clothes.

As we were taking our first set of photos I could tell she was enjoying herself a lot, posing for the camera. She laughingly complained that the photographer kept asking her to act shy but she didn't know how. She also said she was nervous.

After the first set we had lunch. The second set was outside. They brought me some white dress shoes. Communication was a bit of a problem, because Yanmei was always in a separate area for makeup when I was getting dressed. Eventually someone used a translation app on their phone and it played “do the shoes fit okay?” The length was fine but they were too narrow, but I said they were okay. They were trying to help me and I didn't have my own dress shoes like most customers, and I figured I could live with uncomfortable shoes for a few photos. Mistake.

We took a van to the park, it was the original nice park that Yanmei was promised. Her mood had done a complete 180 and now she was having a lot of fun. The only problem is she would get nervous when posing and put on a fake smile, then after the photographer lowered the camera she would relax and break into a natural grin. I wished I could tell the photographer to take some candid photos when she was smiling naturally, but he didn't speak much English. Meanwhile people in the park were taking pictures of us too. Understandable, the handsome foreigner with his beautiful bride in their fancy clothes. 🙂

Unfortunately for me we walked about a mile into the park to some different venues. Yanmei had high heels to pose in but she brought her regular shoes to walk in. Smart. I just had my uncomfortable dress shoes, which were growing more uncomfortable with each step. Finally we finished and headed back to the studio where I could finally remove the shoes, what a relief!

We did a few more rounds of photos, and had a blast. Yanmei was smiling and laughing so much that by the end of the day her cheeks were sore. It was a long day, by the time we finished up and changed back to our own clothes it was 8:30pm. By this time my toe was bleeding from being in the uncomfortable shoes.

We stopped in a restaurant in a mall to get some dinner, then looked around a bit before taking the subway home. Yanmei started to worry we might miss the last train, but I wasn't worried because it wasn't even 10pm yet and it was a Friday night. As we transferred to line 13 I heard an announcement “The last train to Xizhimen is arriving, all passengers for Xizhimen prepare to board.” That was the train we needed. I looked at my watch, 10:39pm. What the heck? Why is the last train so early? We started running like crazy. I should mention that Beijing subway transfer stations are huge, 5+ minute walks with bridges, tunnels and stairs are not unusual. Ow my poor feet. The rest of the passengers weren't running which made me suspicious, but we ended up catching the train barely. Later we found out there were more trains after that one, but they didn't go all the way to Xizhimen. We didn't need to go all the way either so we didn't need to run.

Finally one last funny thing happened. We got home exhausted, and I went into the bathroom to wash my bloody toe. I closed the lid of the toilet and sat on it to look at my toe. After a few seconds the lid shattered. 🙁 Yanmei thought I might be injured again from plastic shards in my butt, but luckily that was not the case. Only my pride was injured. What a day.

Anyway I'm sure you're waiting for the photos. Unfortunately they are on a DVD and I currently have no way to get them onto my iPad to post. All I have is a handful of pictures taken with my phone.

-David

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