China · Dominik Mayer · Products, Asia, Productivity

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.

At first I thought this would be a mixture of a razor with an mp3 player though it looks more like a vacuum cleaner on this picture:

A Chinese friend told me it definitely is a razor but I still don’t get it.

Unfortunately we didn’t eat there. But thanks to my Chinese friend I finally got something without meat, fish, …:

They seem to like uniforms here. For me, they all look the same, a bit unreal, like carnival and it’s hard to say if the person in the uniform is a policeman, a parking lot attendant or the member of a private security company. Yesterday we tried to register at the local police station which was very hard to find because it looks like that:

On my way home from school I went through the old Chinese streets when a ranting man walked towards me. One minute later I think I saw the reason for his anger: A truck and a digger that seemed to tear down one of the old houses or clear away the debris. There was so much police around. Twenty persons or more. And a crowd of Chinese people watching. One of them made some signs with his hands as if he wanted me to take a picture. The others looked at me as if I was very welcome and they were eager to find out what I’d do. I thought why not, stepped back a bit and took this picture before a policeman made me leave:

Here’s a text from a German exam in China. It explains why Germans like women with darker skin while Chinese prefere those with a lighter tone.

But my favorite is still this dialog from a textbook:

A: Hello, Mr. Muller. B: Hello, Mrs. Krug. A: How are you? B: Good, thank you. A: Really? B: Yes, everything’s ok. A: Really? B: Yes, I am very well. A: Aha. B: Wonderful. A: Aaah. B: Yes, life is so beautiful.