I’ve updated my mobile phone number and now have an office phone so here it is for those who keep track of such things. I’ve also changed the address format for my home address to one which I think is more correct.

我的住址
中国上海市宛平南路255弄31号702室
邮政编码: 200032

My Home Address
Room 702, Block 31, Lane 255 Wanpin Road (S).
Shanghai 200032
P.R. China

公寓电话号码 / Home Phone
+86 21 64260625
移动电话数字 / Mobile Phone
+86 136 81989831
办公室电话 / Office Phone
+86 21 34244720 x5143

Every month Microsoft issues to us a “Sodexho” card, which is a fixed value smart card that can be used at various food retailers across the city. Our building, Metro Tower is connected to a shopping mall called Metro City in which the ground floor is a mega food court. It’s call both Da Shi Da (I think?) or Megabyte, which houses about 20 or 30 different food vendors, mostly Chinese and I think some Japanese as well. Throughout the place, no cash is accepted, only these stored value cards. For folks who don’t have one, there’s a cashier from which you can buy a card and then redeem it for the unused value. The card can also be used at Starbucks (at least the one in Metro City), KFC, McDonalds, Ajisen Ramen, and a bunch of other places. Apparently, you can also use it at the Warner movie theater in Grand Gateway but I haven’t tried that one yet.

http://english.people.com.cn/english/200105/28/eng20010528_71211.html has more info.

I went today to Pudong to finish the final step of my paperwork to live and work in China, my residence permit. To get to this point, I’ve had to get my Temporary Residence Certificate from the police office, a health examination (which included an ultrasound, x-rays, and blood tests), and my work permit (which allows me to work in China). The “Entry-Exit Bureau of Shanghai” is in Pudong, about 40 minutes by taxi from my office. After the very long taxi ride, we went to the third floor, filled out a bunch of paperwork then waited another hour until our number was called. The delta in the numbers that were being called when we arrived and the one that was handed to us was about 150. The strangest part was when I actually made it to the front, the process took all of two minutes. Now I wait 5 business days until I get my residence permit.

On the Contacts tab in Windows Live Mail (Kahuna), you can select people in your address book by either clicking, using Select and click or Control and click (depending if you want to select one, a continuous set or a random selection). You can then click on the “E-mail contact” button to send the email. However, if you don’t feel like clicking anymore, you can use a little drag and drop trick and drag your selection to the mail tab, which will start a new mail for you with your recipients.

I’d blogged earlier about the way to board trains here and I’ve finally uploaded my pictures from the trip, so I thought I’d share some here to put it in context.

After buying a ticket, you’re sent to another door, where the queuing area and platform indicators are:

Once you find the platform you then sit in the waiting area which is above the platform. Over to the right (not pictured) is a bathroom and drinking water area. There were tons of people inside filling up instant noodle cups with the hot water.

The platform:

Once the boarding starts (which is when the train has arrived), there’s a massive surge of humanity towards the staircase and people quickly make their way in to the train:

It’s very unlike any train boarding procedures I’ve done elsewhere, but it’s probably necessary since you have so many millions of people using the trains on a regular basis.

The picture gallery from Suzhou is online now, if you want to see the city as well.

As my fury of blog posts in the last two days might indicate, RedYawning is back online and I’m back to posting. I’d been keeping track of some interesting anecodtes while it was offline and I dequeued them when the server came back to life.

Things have been going well these last three weeks. Ami came and visited for the first week, before I’d started work and I showed her the sights of Shanghai and we took a day trip to Suzhou. Taking a train ride here is quite an adventure. The trains are quite nice (not super cheap but not expensive either) but the crowds they pack on are unbelievable. All the trains are scheduled and while waiting, you sit in a massive waiting room for your track. Unlike any other train system I’ve been on, you don’t line up on the platform itself, but once the train has arrived you walk down from the holding pen over to the platform and board as quickly as possible (which usually means a lot of pushing and shoving).

I started work last week, on the 16th floor of Metro Tower in Xu Jia Hui and celebrated New Years Eve in style at the Nightcat Club on Tian Yao Qiao Lu (the same street the office is on). It’s a new club (so I hear, they’re all new to me) about 15 minutes from the Xu Jia Hui metro station. On the work side, I’ve got a little cube with about a whole lot of people all around me but I’m sporting three computers right now. My old tablet, a new Dell Precision 380 and a Dell X1. The coolest part of all the new hardware has got to be the 19″ flat panel display.

The apartment is coming along and it’s starting to feel more like home. I went to the Grand Gateway mall and bought a super thick comforter and a space heater to supplement the built in heater/AC unit and it’s getting more comfortable in the evenings. I think partly my body is adjusting to the cold. I’ve also got my DSL running along with my WAP so I’m fully wired up there as well.

That’s it for now. Since I’m online again I’ll be able to give more of a stream of data rather than this massive dump.

Many of you known already, but Anon, our turtle, has been sick. He’s been looking a bit pink on his skin for a few months and in December it started to look bad and the area around his shell started to look puffy. We started to get worried and took him to the vet where we found out that he had twin bacterial infections.

He’s been on antibiotics ever since and has a couple days left on his current perscription. Ami took him in to the vet again yesterday and his condition has improved (the swelling is down but he’s still pink-ish). The vet is did another culture; I have yet to see it done, but it sounds horrible: they have to hold open his mouth and swab it with a qtip). Once the culture comes back we’ll be able to see if needs to continue on antibiotics or if he’s healthy enough to come off of them.

His infections is waterborn, which means that he hasn’t been able to swim in his tank since he was diagnosed and has to be kept in what’s called “dry dock”. Basically, he’s kept in a dry tank every day except for half an hour where he’s allowed to soak and feed. Wish him luck!

While every major fast food brand is available here (McDonalds, Pizza Hut, Burger King, Starbucks), KFC is colonizing China. Almost ever 500 feet I stumble across a KFC here. They’re omnipresent and packed. Literally every single once I come across is full of people at nearly every time of the day and the register almost always has a line at it. This article describes the phenomenon in detail:

http://www.time.com/time/asia/magazine/article/0,13673,501031124-543845,00.html

With the help of my team members, I was able to pay my bills yesterday. To pay bills, I’d been told that you just take your stack to a convenience store (there are a billion of them here) and hand over the cash. Almost, but not quite. I walked in to the Lawson’s after lunch at the bottom of Metro Mall with my gas and telephone bills. Upon handing the telephone bill over the women at the counter looked over at me, shook her finger and pushed it back at me. Okay, no dice. The gas bill was met with a lot of very fast Chinese to which I took the bill back, turned around and walked out, totally confused.

After conferencing with my coworkers, it turns out that every bill except the telephone bill is payable at a convienece store, while the telephone bill can be paid at the post office. I left work, went to the post office that’s on my walk home and handed over a couple of RMB and the bill and presto magic the bill was paid. The lady at the desk took it without a word, processed it and sent me on my way. Next stop was Lawson’s on the walk home, only this time I had the cash ready and counted, so I walked up to the counter and the bill and the cash on the desk and nodded my head until the bill came back to me stamped and done.