Tag: China

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.

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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