Things that are hard to do in China: Internet and Multitasking

It's nothing I ever intentionally choose to do, but I am the kind of guy who internet's with twenty thousand tabs open. I probably shouldn't, but at this point it is who I am. I internet multitask, and I do it like a fucking champion. I not only have 20 tabs open in Chrome, I have three different windows of Chrome going, one with info to use, one with articles to read, one with things I use reoccuringly, one for background music, etc.

For instance, right now, I am not just blogging, but I am blogging while booking tickets for a vacation, uploading photos to instagram, reading up on what to do in Macau, downloading a Chrome extension and chatting with a friend, all of this while I have my morning coffee. It's how I do, and it is how many other people my age do as well. We've been tethered to tech like it was an extra umbilical cord since 1995, and we aren't about to change our ways now.
Unless, that is, you live in China. The middle kingdom seems to pride itself on making the doing of normal, day-to-day things as hard as possible. Part of this is just the serendipitous conspiracy of different circumstances coming together to make your life hellish.
To start with, the internet isn't great here. When one decided to boot up their laptop, the first thing they will see is that they aren't connected to the internet. You try to connect, and it fails. So you get up and go check the modem, resetting it just to be on the safe side. It still won't connect, because this is China. Someday a technician may come to fix it, but who has time to wait for that.
So you move into the living room and connect to a neighbors wifi, which works perfectly. Frankly, if the neighbors think that "12345678" is an acceptable password, then they deserve to share their network with all and sundry.
So now you realize you need to check your email, so you boot up your VPN and try to connect to proper, global internet. It connects, but no website loads. You flush your DNS, check your VPN settings and try again. Still nothing. You change protocol, change server, still nothing goes. On the worst of days you find out that China is amping up internet security, and your VPN will be shut down for the next month or so, apologies for the inconveniences.  Well, that's not going to help. Better purchase another VPN.
But normally you just change VPN servers and protocols until something works. After trying for about an hour you finally breakdown and contact your VPN's tech support, whom know you on a first name basis and far from asking you your mother's maiden name for security purposes, ask how Seve is doing these days, and if she bought that mountain bike she was thinking of getting. Your VPN starts working instantly, as if the technician was some kind of messiah your computer had been waiting for.
So now everything is working, right? Sure, but wait a while! Soon enough, your moron flatmate will kill the modem because he is too stupid to properly troubleshoot his computer. Now you have to go through the whole process again!
The modern internet is full of bells and whistles letting you know when something is wrong. Blogger has a nice big pink bar at the top of the screen that lets you know that it is not autosaving anymore. This is your first sign that something is wrong with the connection, and you need to troubleshoot. But this doesn't tell you where the problem is. I usually open up Skype and use it as an internet connection canary. Because skype isn't behind the Great Firewall, if I see that skype isn't connected, I know the problem is with my connection. So I disconnect, check the modem, reconnect, etc. If skype continues to run, but blogger won't connect I know the problem is likely with my VPN, and I play with that till something happens. Reddit is also not behind the Great Firewall, so I use that as an internet canary as well. If my VPN is on and I cant load reddit, then something is wrong with my VPN settings. If my VPN is off and I cannot load reddit, then I probably need to flush my DNS.
Sigh.
Remember how I said that I was chatting with a friend, as I was doing all of this. Well, we are doing so at a rate of about a message every five minutes or so. We have the chatting efficacy of carrier pigeons.
I also mentioned that I was trying to put in a new chrome extension. Well, becasue my VPN is connected to Thailand, Chrome keeps bringing up the TOS for the extension in fucking Thai. And because I am the kind of asshole who reads all TOS, I now have to go through server after server looking for one in an English speaking country that will connect. So a thirty second task is now taking me well over an hour. The prices for that hostel I was looking at are also coming up in Thai. So to get that done, you have to log off your VPN altogether and do it through Chinese internet.
But I am also trying to get some stuff up onto instagram, and that IS behind the firewall. Also, that conversation I am having with my buddy is either on Gchat or facebook....
God, damn, it.
In other words, China requires from you a new kind of multi-tasking. You don't do many things at once in China, but you do one thing while trying to troubleshoot everything else. This is as multitasking as you get.

Busan, Korea [Photo dump]

I found more pictures from Korea on my hard drive.
Here I shall dump them!

English shirts in China

I’ve not been interested in learning mandarin. This isn’t to say that the motivation may not hit me later (when I discover some truly excellent Chinese music), but as of right now I am not compelled to do so. But that being said, there are a handful of things I would really love to learn to say, and at the top of the list is “can I take your picture?” Is this because I have seen so many oriental beauties out in the wilds and I want to immortalize them. Hardly. It is because I have seen so many laughably baffling things written on clothing here, and I would just love to share them with people. I don’t have the stones to just take someone’s picture without asking (yet... This is subject to change, China), and so I am left with the desire to learn this one particular phrase.

One particularly vexing example is the young lady I found behind me in line at a grocery store with a hat that read “Breakbeat dumbass”. Having once been a kid with a fascination with the written word, I immediately began attempting to extrapolate meaning from this and recalled that I too am a breakbeat dumbass, as I actually only have a passing idea as to what a breakbeat is. This hat isn’t too troublesome, as one can imagine some Chinese guy somewhere with a list of ‘cool’ English words, and putting two together haphazardly. You could almost forgive this one as the person who made it maybe didn’t speak English, or knew his audience wouldn’t, or simply didn’t care.

Or you may find yourself walking around when suddenly you see someone wearing a shirt that says “Please don’t disturb”. You feel uncomfortable about it, so you take another look and realize the shirt actually says “Please don’t dLsturb”[1]. This one is far my troubling in that I cannot imagine how it came to be. I have no idea exactly how people make t-shirts, but if I have learned anything from those mall kiosks it’s that the process is mostly automated; there is a computer terminal where you input the text and then another machines puts it onto a shirt by processes unknown. One would think that the shirt maker knew enough English to distinguish an I from an L. Or if they didn’t, how did they manage to get the rest of it right, not reducing the “please don’t” part to sheer unintelligible nonsense? Most importantly, why the hell didn’t they just copy and paste is from a bank of words somewhere on their computer or the internet. The irritation from this one stems from the fact that I could be a T-short printer making shirts for a language I didn’t understand and with a little bit of effort I could see myself not fucking it up.

And then there are those shirts that are truly haunting. The winner among these was a simple black shirt, the front of which listed colors; ie ‘black, white , red, blue etc’. The only problem with this shirt is that somewhere between beige and grey is the word strve. When I first encountered this my first reaction was of course to blame myself; that day I skipped in kindergarten was finally coming back to haunt me, as I was now the only person in the world unfamiliar with the color ‘strve’. Then it hit me that it was probably nonsense. As with the last point, how the hell did this even happen? Where two guys at the shirt designing office one day, the first diligently working on a shirt that listed colors when the second chimmed in with “Hey, don’t forget about that strve color”.

“Huh? Never heard of it.”

“Oh yea it’s a thing”

At which point the first guy never bothers to look it up. If the person knew the colors well enough to get all the rest of them correct, then where in the world does ‘strve’ even come from? I am hoping, praying even , that this shirt is just a troll, in which case Bravo China, Bravo   .

And there are of course hundreds of stupid examples in between. Notably, I have seen a large number of people where shirts that say “aeroplane of idiots”. The shirt features a rather crude drawing of and airplane. I’ve been led to believe that it is a band shirt. Still, it looks stupid.

---

[1] Formatting is important for this anecdote, and frankly I do not recall if the shirt read “PLEASE DON’T DLSTURB” or “Please don’t dLsturb”. I think it was the latter, as the capital ‘L’ struck me as being very prominent. 

Videos from Korea

In an effort to rid my hard drive of junk, i but some videos I found to youtube.

https://youtu.be/r8-Jn4pOBMU

https://youtu.be/mBaprVM5STc

https://youtu.be/Yj7T95mKMDw

enjoy!

The courtyard (or quad, as a colleague called it)
of the apartment complex I was living in. One
of the few nice things about the place. 

At the beginning of March 2016 I moved into a new apartment Frankly, I didn’t really care for the old place, and I wasn’t too happy there. The place felt cramped, and I didn’t have much room to do a lot of cooking. What was worse, the neighborhood was very boring, and far from anything of note (save one bar that I really liked. I did however get a few worthy pictures from the place. 

A second shot of the quad. This one much clearer.

For any future doxing I may encounter, here is a
where I once lived. The red circle is my            
apartment. #955

Hangzhou has some lovely canals, though.

A ghetto near my old place. It was populated, and in the process
 of being torn down to build a road.

Context as classroom killer

Our memories from grade school are wrong, particularly is we are ESL teachers. The truth is that silence is the specter haunting most classroom. When the room is morgue quiet the teacher assumes the students have not understood, and in turn that they (the teacher) have done something wrong. It’s why so much effort is put into creating lesson context; so that the students are engaged and want to participate in class.

In theory.

The problem is that no one ever consults students on what they think about this context, and therefore it constantly has flaws. The worst of these flaws is when the the context seems a bit inflated (John McWhorter has an interesting quote about that[i]). A problem I never though I would encounter was students taking the context too seriously. They sometimes give the impression that anyone actually cares about validity of whether or not the blue lamp is indeed on the brown table. And in their defense, this means that the students you have are actually interested in doing a good job.

So in todays’ class I came to find out that my students weren’t entirely comfortable talking about giving lifestyle advice. Specifically, they didn’t have a lot of confidence that they were capable of giving good advice (as if the first person they would encounter in the English speaking world is someone desperately needing a therapist). So you give them the exercise (“look at this smoker! What should we tell him?”) and they blank, convinced that this HTML code’s future lung cancer can be saved by their words. And they hesitate.

After they stare at these images of people needing advice long enough, you tell your students that you really don’t care what answer they give so long as the functional language is correct. Suddenly, answers flow out of them; to the man who’s house if burning down “you should really walk your dog”; to the man recently fired “you had better take a relaxing vacation”; to the person with a drinking problem “you might want to have another drink”.

Good enough, me’thinks.

This isn’t to say that context is pointless. Actually, for all teachers who find themselves teaching functional language it is actually the glue keeping your whole lesson together. But it can be more of a determent than a boon, and you should have a modification at the ready in case you hit this problem.








[i] The hands-on approach to language acquisition is reinforced by the fact that, in most places in the world, there are no materials available for any but a few languages to be taught formally through books and instruction, such that one usually learns other languages “live” through imitation and practice, not through written drills of sentences like My cousin’s friend is wearing a shirt, studiously corrected by a teacher, or through listening to tapes purporting to depict speakers in their “cultural context” (which in practice generally means having four characters attend some indigenous event, mention how nice it is, and then proceed to converse at length about the fact that their cousins’ friends are wearing shirts).

John McWhorter
-The Power of Babel

How China rewards your inner hipster.

I look for just a few simple things in coffee shop; a comfortable place to sit down, a decent internet connection, and the ability to get in and out without too many issues. I could not care less about the quality of the coffee or the baked goods. In this respect, elsewhere in the world I was an extremely passive consumer of coffee shops, going to the closest one to me and not caring a wit about where I landed.

China has unfortunately started to change this for me. Here, like pretty much anywhere else, Starbucks is the default coffee shop of the country, with a location frequency of about at seven every city block. .I can’t however go to Starbucks, grab a coffee, and sit with my laptop for a few hours and get some work done. This is because Starbucks in China is a horrible place. It has some advantages, and I should mention them right away. The staff is for the most part friendly, they generally speak English well, and they have some overpriced food that is nice.

But those niceties aside, Starbucks in China is a terrible place. That I can gather, coffee is not the most popular drink in China, but for some reason every Starbucks I have gone to is packed. I feel that this is because it is foreign. But it isn’t the popularity of Starbucks that makes it a problem. The first problem is one that Starbucks shares with lots of other places; a lack of Fordism. When you go to a Starbucks (or for that matter a KFC, a McDonalds) there isn’t a single person doing a single job, each ensuring that the job as a whole gets done quickly. No, you have one cashier, and three colleagues there for support/discussion. Nor is this just something they do for when the foreigner shows up. It seems to be a regularly reoccurring commonality.

The second problem is the Starbucks bonus card. Actually, it may be a bit mean to blame the card itself as the problem stems from the fact that no one seems to have even the slightest idea how the damn card works. I am not too sure about much of this, as all of the actual communication happens in Chinese, but from what I can gather the clientele thinks that they can pay with the card. I’ll often see the following play out as I am waiting in line; a lady hands the cashier her Starbucks card, which is scanned and then returned. The cashier then says something, while pointing to the register’s display. The customer will argue (their tone changes, and you can tell they are getting irate) while gesturing with towards their card. There will then be a back and forth between the two, until with a bit of anger the customer will finally pay. I haven’t done the math yet, but with a billion and a half people in this country I do not think I will live to see the day when every potential customer is educated into understanding how a rewards card actually works.

Similar to this problem is the one caused by Alipay. When it comes to Alipay, the Chinese are suffer from a pride that borders on the paternalistic. I don’t see what the big deal is. As with my previous point about the Starbucks card, I haven’t worked out all the details but from my observations uses some pretty old technology. I does not use NFC (and this makes me wonder why the Chinese brag about it so. They might as well be bragging about a horse and buggy), but rather generates a bar code which must be scanned by the cashier. This never seems to work on the first try, and sometimes not on the second either. Nor does anyone ever have their barcode ready; you always have to wait t ill they open some app or the other which seems to take a century on its own. It is surely not the super-fast process that ApplePay is.

Now that we have managed to order and pay for a coffee at Starbucks, we return to our original point about one person working while the rest of the staff provides moral support/running commentary, and note that this will mean that it takes an hour for you to get said drink. It does ultimately get made though.

And then, as a final kick in the pants, once everything is done you look around the Starbucks and notice that it is packed to the gills, and there is nowhere for you to sit down and get some damn work done. Apparently, everyone in the damn country is at Starbucks right at the moment when you wanted to go there too. So you look hard and long, find a mom and pop shop, and embrace your inner hipster. I don’t want to be that person, but here it must be done.

This post was begun, but not completed, at a Starbucks.