Tania in China

Wed, Oct 18: To Work and Back Again

Day 11 of bobbing China. Resigned sigh...

I am really, really tired this morning after the interuptions to my sleep last night. I also wonder if has anything to do with the allergy tablet I took last night. I read that Dramamine (the motion sickness medicine) is basically allergy medicine, so I thought it might help with my bobbing problem. No such luck. The breakfast buffet is also very crowded, so I try to eat and get out of there as soon as possible.

I have realized that on my Chinese visa, although I have the visa for a year, it says that the maximum length of any stay I have in China is 30 days! That is not very good since I will be in China for around 70 days, so I take my passport to the office expert, and he says that he will find out whether or not I am going to have to leave China every 30 days, then come back. Although I would like to see some of Asia, I would rather reserve my weekends for traveling in China, so I am hoping this problem can be fixed. The coworker who brought me the hard drive has a visa that lets him stay 90 days - I don't understand it. We both got our visas through the same company within a week of each other, and I specifically stated on my application that I would be in China from Oct 6th through December 15th. Hmm...

At work they finally get a handle on our network problems, and now the connections between the servers is flying. We are actually able to get enough done that I will get to go to Shanghai this weekend! Yea! I have been trying to get a hold of the people who made my original reservations in Nanjing so that I can have another 2 week reservation starting Sunday night, but have had very little luck getting anybody to write me back. Finally at the end of the day the Ford woman says she is too busy to handle it and I should ask my boss in the office to handle it. Well, it will be much easier if I can make these reservations face to face with somebody, so hopefully this is the case and I will follow up tomorrow.

I go to the travel agency in the hotel to purchase train tickets to and from Shanghai. They have an express train, but it only goes at around 12:50pm - it is better if I don't take any time off right now, so I pick the slow train that leaves at around 6pm. I am also returning on a bit faster train Sunday that leaves around 4pm. That should give me enough time to do a nice bit of sight-seeing and shopping. Shanghai is famous for it's shopping. It is also much more foreigner-friendly: there are at least 100,000 Westerners in Shanghai. In Nanjing, a city of 5 million, there are 4000 foreigners, and 1500 of those are either Japanese or Korean. So in Nanjing, unless you are around a Western-style hotel or tourist sight, you are not likely to see a Westerner. I leave a 200 yuan deposit for the train tickets (about $25), and they will send an employee to the train station to buy the tickets in the morning. They just take my room number, not even my name! So different than the US!

I am not able to find out if I could get any kind of discount on the hotel in Shanghai, so I decide just to book on my own. Shanghai is expensive - I would think comparable with New York. I am going to be staying at a Le Meridian in the center of town that just opened - in fact they haven't even held their official opening yet, so it is a bit cheaper than the other hotels. I could save money by staying further from the city center, but I figure it is worth the money since I have so little time to see everything.

Luigi will be going to Beijing for the weekend - I am interested to find out his experiences and how much it costs, since I am planning to go in a couple of weeks.

I really, really planned to go somewhere for lunch, but we were so busy at work that Luigi and I just went to the buffet. It is just so much quicker to eat at a buffet than a sit-down restaurant. I am not brave enough to try the street food - it is supposed to lead to all kinds of strange abdominal symptoms in foreigners! But, I did brave it out and went to the Thai restaurant for dinner. I had Pad Thai, and it tasted exactly like what you would get at a Thai restaurant in the States. I always wonder if the food we eat in the US has been modified for US tastes - it looks as if the Thai food is authentic.

I plan to start packing this evening - it is amazing how fast my stuff has expanded into every corner of my room - but I end up falling asleep watching an episode of The Simpsons on DVD, so I give up and am asleep by 9pm. I have a lot of work to do tomorrow evening, in addition to the phone meeting that has been rescheduled from Tuesday. Arg!

p.s. I have heard the question - "how much time do you spend on this blog thing?" - I have been spending between 1 to 2 hours a day between the photos and the typing. There have been stretches of time at work where we are waiting for a process to complete, or we are waiting for somebody to do something that I have been able to work on it, and I have also been working on it in the evenings. I may end up reaching a point (maybe soon!) that I will have too much to do to type so much, but right now everybody will still know every detail about my life here in China!

posted by Tania @ 5:01 PM