Asia | Dominik Mayer – Products, Asia, Productivity

It doesn’t only look like war, we also have the sound. There are fireworks about every other day. And they’re only meters away from the houses. I filmed this one yesterday (and it took ages to upload it). A Chinese girl told me that there’ll be a marriage the next day.

Another attempt to communicate with a classmate. She could tell me that she’s not Japanese but Mongolian. From which city? Yes. Which language do they speak there? Yes. I said okay and gave up.

Yesterday we met a German guy with his nice Chinese girlfriend. She really seemed to like him. He will fly back to his German girlfriend in three or four days and thought if he won’t betray her now he’ll never do. And the poor little Chinese girl’s heart will be broken. That takes the stuffing out of me.

If you want to wash with warm water here you have to fill it in by yourself. About four buckets. The thing starts when it thinks it got enough. I had to repeat the procedure twice…

Because you also pay when someone calls you, you’re unreachable if there’s no more money on the card. So I bought an update right away. It wasn’t that easy to tell the man what I wanted. We had no common language. As most Chinese he spoke neither English nor German and my Chinese is hardly existent. I ended up with this:

And had no idea what to do. I called 13800138000 and switched to English but I still needed a “user pin number” which I don’t have. One hour after I had started – and only due to Chinese help – I finally had 48 Yuan on the card. I’d like to know where the missing 2 Yuan went.

I really like it here. Why don’t we have a campus like that in Munich?

They tasted sweet, hot and not like Italian spaghetti but it was the best food I’ve gotten here so far. And that for only 15 Yuan, about 1,50 Euro. They also have pizza (38 to 48 Yuan) and free delivery. I’m pretty sure this was not the last time I ate there.

Someone said that there would be vegetarian food at the Muslim cafeteria so we tried to find it. Without success. The thing is that you can’t just ask someone because hardly anyone speaks English and our Chinese is horrible. I finally had to take rice with vinegar and pepper things… I’ve never eaten so little since being in China. The day before yesterday I bought a whole bunch of candy but it also doesn’t taste. Ah mei.

When we left the cafeteria we found out that the Muslim one was right next to it:

I’ve never had a cleaner. And now I’m sitting in the living room and she’s running around mopping the floor. Strange. I’m quite uncomfortable.

A friend and I met at the metro station Zhongtan Road, half the way for both of us, and walked through a compound near Suzhou Creek.