Crazy Chinese Holiday/Work Day Schedule

A few posts ago, I tried an experiment and asked what people would like my next blog post to be about.  Only three people responded, but I actually thought it was a good start.  Two people voted for a post on coworking, which I wrote on Sunday.  One person voted for a post on life in Beijing, so here’s a short example of something that’s different here.

Mid-Autumn Festival is this Thursday so, naturally, people get a day off work.  This is all well and good, except that in China, one single day off work is not sufficient for any holiday, so the government gave everyone Wednesday and Friday off work, too.  However, they don’t want to sacrifice the extra working days, so now everyone has to work the Sunday before and the Saturday after.  In fact, every holiday in China is like this, and every year they come up with a brand new schedule of working days.  Sometimes, they end up with 7 or more working days in a row, just to get the odd Wednesday off.  This confuses everyone and none of my friends ever seems sure until a day or two ahead of time whether they have to go to work.

The full complexity of this fall’s holiday schedule is explained in this WSJ article.

Of course, as a foreigner who is basically working independently here, I’d be tempted to just ignore the declared work days and continue working Monday-Friday.  I do love my weekends.  On the other hand, Judy wants the time off; she has to work on the weekends, and she needs to rest.  So, overall, it’s tough.  I ended up working on Sunday for 3/4 of the day, and today I’m watching TV with Judy at home while working on and off.  It’s not really productive, but I think I’d feel guilty if I completely relaxed.

Automatic networking

Networking and keeping track of my contacts has always been hard for me.  Other than the occasional guilty feeling at forgetting someone’s birthday or sending late Christmas cards, it was never a big deal before February.  However, after I moved to China, I realized that I had no friends here, no one to go talk to about tech, and because I was working at home every day, I wasn’t meeting anyone.  On top of that, when I did meet new people, I was very bad at following up with them – maybe because I felt it would be awkward to offer to hang out with someone I didn’t really know yet.

For a while, I became fairly depressed, but eventually I realized that I was going to have to get over these feelings and go find some friends of my own or else I was going to go crazy.  I knew there must be a way, because every day I could see how easily my girlfriend was able to make new friends and very quickly start a meaningful relationship with them.

One of the big skills my girlfriend has that I lack is that she always knows who to call on any given day.  She instinctively knows how long to wait between contacts for friends vs. business contacts, and she can remember for whom it’s been too long.  I don’t know if my brain is just different from hers, but I find that requires a lot of effort.  If I haven’t seen someone for a long time, I’m probably less likely to think of hanging out with them, not more likely…

Luckily, I’m an analytical programmer, so I can use a computer to do this thinking for me.  I made myself a spreadsheet that keeps track of my contacts and calculates when the next that I should reach out to each of them is.  Every person can have their own period of time that I should wait, so if someone’s a good friend, I can remember them every three weeks, but if someone just needs an update every once in a while, I can send them an email every three months and be ok.  I now check this every week to see who I should get in touch with.  For example, this week, I need to email my friend Jason and see how he’s doing in Boston.

After using this for a while, I feel much more confident about getting more people in my network and not worrying that I’ll lose track of them.  I can safely say that I’ve made more new friends in the last month than in the first five months I was in Beijing.

I actually think this would be a fun web app to build.  Would anyone else be interested in getting an email every Monday that reminds you who you should be in touch with this week?  If there’s a positive response, I’ll take a few days and build an MVP for this and send everyone an invite.

Coming to America

I don't have a crown, and I'm not looking for a wife, but I'm still coming.

Next month is the MIT Pi Reunion in Las Vegas, so I’ve decided to go back to America.  Since I have to leave China for a day on July 10 anyway (because of my visa), I’m just going to fly to Boston on July 10 and stay in the US until the reunion is over on August 2.  In addition to Boston and Las Vegas, I’m also going to visit Ohio and San Francisco.

I already have a number of people I have to see in each city, but I’m not out of time yet.  If you’d like to get together, send me an email or leave a comment here.  I’m really looking forward to this trip and the chance to see all my good friends again.  The last five months have been exciting in China, but I know I must have missed out on a lot back in the States.

Here’s my detailed itinerary:

1. Saturday, July 10 8:30pm – arrive in Boston
2. Tuesday, July 20 noon – arrive in Stow
3. Sunday, July 25 11am – arrive in San Jose
4. Thursday, July 29 8am – arrive in Las Vegas
5. Monday, August 2 10am – depart Las Vegas for China

Finding Deodorant in Beijing

Tonight, Judy and I were standing outside the pharmacy at 10pm when a foreign man walked up and asked if I spoke English.  Of course, I do, so we started talking.  Turns out he wanted to know where to buy deodorant.  (Judy thinks he had a date lined up.)

Luckily for him, I had faced the difficult task of buying deodorant in China myself and knew exactly where to go.  When I moved to China, I didn’t bring any, either.  I figured that it was inexpensive enough that I’d use whatever space it might take up for other more valuable things, and I’d buy some when I got here.  However, I didn’t realize that Chinese men do not use stick deodorant and that it would take me three weeks to find any.

Just in case anyone out there is searching the internet for an answer to this question, let me tell you where it is.  The first place I found some was at April Gourmet grocery store.  It’s close to Gongti West Road (工体西路), at the first intersection north of Gonti North Road.  If you’re walking north, take a right on that first intersection and go about 200m.  It will be on your right with a red and green sign.  The deodorant is only available behind the checkout counter, so you have to ask them for it.  They have two kinds – Axe deodorant and Axe antiperspirant.  Here is a page about them with a map on Google.

The other place to go is K.H.Sam’s.  They have more selection, but I can’t remember exactly what brands, since I didn’t buy any there.  To find it, go to the right side of the first floor in the back.  They are also located on Gongti West Road.  To find them, go across the street from Gongti West Gate (near Pavilion bar) and walk south about 400m.  They’ll be on your left just after the G3 club.  I can’t find a map for them on Google.

Good luck to all – Beijing is hot in the summer, so I hope this keeps you smelling fresh.

UPDATE 2010/10/29:

The BHG Market Place in Sanlitun now carries deodorant as well.  It’s at the front of Aisle 4 near the bottom shelf.

Exciting new running site

Those of you who run a lot and those of us that want to go running a lot but don’t have inspiration may be interested in my sister Erin‘s new blog. She’s writing up a lot of Boston running tours with historical information about the places you will run by. She’s also doing the same thing for San Francisco, where she lives now.

Eventually, I believe the idea is to turn them into podcasts that you can listen to as you run at 7-8 minutes per mile.

Anyway, I’m excited for her and thought I’d help her spread the news. Feel free to tell any of your friends in Boston or San Francisco to check out cityruntours.com.

更多中文

今天我要再用中文写日记。

昨天我工作一年了。  很长吗？我听说这是很段的时间工作。  但是这也是我最长的时间只作一个计划。  在大学我的计划都是三个月的。  虽然这是很长的我有时候觉得我不太孳。  我觉得这个感情是因为工作总是有别的问题。  我做完一个问题就开始别的。  很有意思的感情。  我想一个“feeling of completion”。

hmm有别的吗？  有。  今天晚上我看了我的姐姐的履历表。  我体认了我喜欢读履历表。  上大学的时候我做这么多面试所以我也想一想我的履历表。  用LaTeX写。  我觉得我现在知道很多履历表的东西。  要是你想我帮你，当然可以。

今天我也看了我的同事的blog。Lis是一个公司的作家所以她的日记很好。  名字是A Millenial Speaks。  我建议这个。

明天我要写很多中文的电脑工具。  我现在用了很多。

再见！

生活在哪里？

我从中国回来波士顿了。  先我觉得我得生化比较不一样。  每个东西很不一样－我有新的石室友，有的朋友们搬家走了，有的朋友们搬家到了，我知道我非常喜欢中国了。  现在我觉得我点点忘了这个感情。  每天我工作吃饭睡觉。 忙点。  我非常不要忘我的感情。  有一天我一定要住在一个外国可是现在我也觉得住在波士顿在VistaPrint工作对我生活比较好。  有的人可以说我太responsible了（怎么说？我的字典不能帮我。）我希望有好的生活所以现在我需要工作储蓄。感叹。

有一天

小吃

Mmm, dim sum is so good. Yesterday, I tried to get a bunch of friends to agree to go to dim sum this morning. It sort of worked. None of the people from work came (maybe it was the company party yesterday? But seriously, I was up at 8:30 and had to wait so long before going out…), but I still got to see Sally, Jaime, and 영희. We went to China Pearl again, and as usual, I tried to order for us in Chinese. It was tough, because I haven’t been practicing much lately – Chinese class doesn’t start again until February. So, I think I was out of practice listening to people speak.

Actually, the hardest part of going to dim sum with this particular group of friends is that the servers always speak to Sally first, and when she’s on the other side of the table, I probably couldn’t hear what they were saying, even if it was English.

Erin likes eating dim sum with me for two reasons: 1. Apparently hearing me speak Chinese is funny. 2. MIT people have interesting conversations. Today we couldn’t help spilling the tea quite a few times, so we talked about how to improve the conventional teapot. I was initially in favor of a mechanical redesign, but by the end of the meal, Sally had convinced me that new, hydrophobic materials were the answer to our dilemma…

Global Warming Board Game

So this IAP, there’s a session about creating an educational board game about global warming.  I don’t really know what that means, and I probably won’t be able to find out, because the sessions are 2-5 during the day; right when I work.  Nevertheless, I love board games and couldn’t help but start to think about how to turn the game-theory aspects of the global warming problem into a fun board game (because if I’m not in the class, why worry about educational when it could be just fun?).

Dancing for Engineers

Now here’s a topic I’ve been thinking about for a while. I started going to salsa dancing lessons fairly regularly this fall, but am having a hard time remembering the long sequences of complex moves that I learn in the MIT lessons (which are great, by the way). Even when I can remember them, it’s hard to do them on the dance floor with a girl who doesn’t also know what is coming, while staying on the beat, etc. etc. So, at some point this fall, I thought to myself that there must be a better way to learn enough sequences of moves not to bore a good follower to tears.