1) ISP sends ships the modem to us in the mail.

2) Tech guy comes over to the house to flip a switch and plug the modem in to make sure it works.

3) The day after the tech guy visited, someone over at the ISP headquarters or phone company or something flips a switch to route the DSL river toward our house, thus actually activating our internet connection.

In America, the entire process would be done by machines, but it would take less than a week. In China, it would require a dozen people and ten hours, but would be completed within a day. Yet here on the continent that created a special fork just for fish, it takes an entire month. It’s like the entire country is on an eternal coffee break.

Regardless, we have internet now, and I have two and a half months worth of Austrian adventures to post, so hopefully as I get a few free minutes here and there this week, I’ll get a bunch of new stuff up.

Before I’d finished finalizing the details of my flight, August 1st, the dreaded packing date had arrived. The movers were horrifyingly on time, Christian and I were both unfortunately hung over, and the apartment was already a complete wreck. Having never partaken of nor witnessed an assisted move before, neither Christian nor I really had much idea of what the whole thing entailed. We walked threw the house, army of uniformed movers in-tow, and pointed at what we wanted shipped. Then before the command had even made it through the translating chain, poof, it was wrapped, taped, and hidden away in a box that was then assigned a number, a label, and the owner, “Mr. Christian.”

Soon enough, the movers were on auto-pilot like some kind of blue-jump-suited, multi-armed Rube Goldberg Machine, leaving Christian and I with a surprising amount of leisure time and far too little coffee–thanks to the packing of our espresso machine–to properly enjoy it. We took turns walking the dog, playing on the internet, and blaming each other for items that mistakenly were or weren’t packed while the moving machine toiled away. What we didn’t do, however, was kill each other. The movers, whether their blessed swift indiscrimination took the thinking and the arguments out of our hands. No longer was moving a matter of forethought and planning and trying to get rid of one another’s possessions. Moving, rather, had been reduced to its purest essence: pointing and taking naps.

In the end, a few things got packed that shouldn’t have, virtually Nico’s entire wardrobe for one, one of the landlord’s couch cushions for another. A few things didn’t get packed than should have–Nico’s winter coat–but for the most part, everything magically ended up where it ought, and by 2 pm Monday all of our possessions (all 103 boxes) had been loaded into our container in preparation for their two month voyage to our new home, leaving us with an apartment filled with echoes and a marriage still intact.

I learned my lesson about being too optimistic, though, when I received a “desperate” call, asking me to MC the whole thing. By the time they finished stroking my ego, I found myself committed to far more than I wanted to be. Christian wasn’t exactly thrilled either when he found out our nice little family evening (we’d been planning on bailing early, when Nico got tired) had turned into me spending the evening working for no reimbursement yet again.

Things only went downhill from there when the party got overbooked and turned from a family affair into two separate parties: one for adults and one for children with the children only paraded briefly around the adult party like peacocks. As things grew further, the speeches from sponsors and magazine-related peeps grew and grew until the program started to resemble a press conference more than an actual party.

Christian and Nico still came with me, but after the dress I was forced to wear freaked Nico out to the point that he wanted nothing to do with me, they both headed home to a take out dinner and some movies, leaving me behind with the ruins of my own doing. I sucked it up and played it out.

Dinner was actually served early for once and I managed to get the entire thing wrapped up forty minutes before planned, which I felt was a pretty awesome feat (on paper, the party was intended to be FOUR hours long, which is a really long time, especially if the majority of the people you’re throwing the party for bail directly after dinner, which they, of course, did).

Yet when it was all done, I wasn’t exhilarated nor even relieved. I was just tired. Too tired to relay the events of the evening in a suitably scintillating manner, or so it seemed, as Christian’s attention couldn’t be kept for more than ten minutes before he started complaining about wanting to go to sleep.

Such was Saturday night.

When I was finally paid, they tried to cut my salary down by a quarter. And that was the tv station’s version of being nice. I was able to argue my way into full pay, whereas both the cameraman and the English translator, tired of being professionally abused, decided to quit. They were the last original remnants of this show.

Then the tv station, knowing full well that I’m on a spousal visa and not a working permit (and thus technically not allowed to work for money) sent me down to the headquarters of the Exit-Entry Bureau (the guys in charge of visas and who gets to stay and who has to go) to interview some vey important and very friendly PSB officer who was all too happy to point out that what I’m doing is illegal and needs to be remedied, leading to the admittedly minor possibility that I could get kicked out of China. Then he cheerfully rewrote our entire news story just to add insult to injury and suck out what little life it had left.

That was a bad month.

At one point, the discussion had veered toward the topic of dubbing versus subtitles. In much of Continental Europe, movies are generally dubbed into the native language of the country. I frequently give Christian a hard time about this when he makes comments like, “Wow! That’s not what that actor sounds like in German,” though it’s now one of my secret wishes to moonlight as perhaps the English voice of Audrey Tautou if dubbing ever catches on in the English world. Anyway, everyone was pretty much in agreement that they thought having English movies subtitled
rather than dubbed would make learning the language easier, and the Swedish lady made some comment about how she thought subtitles were more common in the countries of Northern Europe compared to middle and southern Europe, when some loud-mouthed man, who had obviously been listening into the conversation, piped up that Finland had the number 1 English educational system and that the Swedes were all conservative racist bastards and that he knew because he had lived in Sweden for two years; not visited, lived.

Before we all realized we should just ignore the guy, someone asked, “Well, where did you live in Sweden?”

His answer: “With my girlfriends.”

One of the Australians whispered what pretty much everyone was thinking at that moment, “Obviously there was a messy break up over there then,” which the guy apparently overheard and sent him off on another tirade, making it even more obvious that, yes, he had been rejected pretty badly (though he insisted to the contrary).

It was quite a shock to the system as it occurred to me that it’s been a really long time since I’ve been in the presence of a true a$$hole. Sure, I regularly meet jerks (although even those have been more rare of late), egoistical maniacs, and racists, but it’s just been forever since I’ve witnessed a loud-mouthed jacka$$ in true form. Part of me felt sorry for the guy. He kept trying to toss out Swedish swear words for his brief tenure in the country, but kept slipping into Mandarin, suggesting this was the first time he’s gotten to use any language other than Chinese in a while (for the record, Mr. Loudmouth was American, stereotypically enough). If I were to hazard a guess, I’d say he works at one of Dalian’s shipyards and this was probably the one free day he’s gotten off in weeks if not months. As such, he was probably desperate for some interaction that didn’t involve screaming obscenities at Chinese coworkers. Shipyard work must be really difficult emotionally. Most of the dockworkers I’ve met around town have come off rather desperate if not a little disturbed (though the vast majority are also very nice people). The hours are long and hard with little if any time off. For all appearances, this guy had been ridden too hard and thought the world was responsible for every mistreatment in his life, which is too bad, because I suspect he’s been to some wonderfully exotic locales which I can only presently dream of.

Some people have all the luck.

We packed together the usual entourage–Christian to drive, me to be obnoxious, an innocent and unsuspecting Chinese friend to translate, and of course Nico to be sick–and high-tailed it down to the premiere children’s hospital in the city, conveniently named Dalian Children’s Hospital. Once there, we performed the usual circus stunts of paying a registration fee before immediately entering utter shock at the number of people in line before us. Then came my persistent attempts to pull the “foreigner card” by goading our poor Chinese friend into harassing the nursing staff for ideas of how we might be able to cut the line. Finally, the nurses suggest we go ahead and show Nico to the doctor so that she could decide if his condition was serious enough to deal with him immediately. Surprisingly enough, the doctor had absolutely spectacular English, was not the least bit judgmental, and was perfectly at home with our foreign eccentricities.

Blood tests and an x-ray were ordered. As is usual in China, we had to cart our sick child over to the cashier to foot the bill before any of these things could be performed. An hour of blood work and x-rays followed after which we were back to the doctor for a diagnosis before our queue number had even been reached. The results: bronchitis caused by a bacterial infection (instead of the usual viral kind). Our options for treatment included three kinds of antibiotics: a shot, an IV, or by mouth. I was all gung-ho for a shot as Nico had been throwing up all morning, and despite the local popularity of IVs, I still have my reservations. Upon returning from a penicillin allergy test, though, Christian uttered the word “IV” instead of “shot,” and suddenly we were signed up for another kind of torture: trying to distract a baby from the needle poking out of his forehead.

Total elapsed time for the whole hospital adventure: 5 hours.

Nico’s now looking much better, though, and we officially have a pediatrician (who’s willing to make appointments with us so we don’t have to go through the entire fiasco again).

This week, the culprit is our apartment complex’s management company. This company is absolutely ridiculously terrible at what they do. In fact, if the complex weren’t so much better than every other complex we’ve seen, Christian and I wouldn’t even entertain the idea of staying here. However, it really is a spectacular complex with beautiful paths to walk, fountains, loads of playgrounds for Mr. Semi-Mobile Nico, strange sculptural copies of Picasso paintings and reasonably unobtrusive neighbors. So we’re willing to put up with a certain amount of stupidity, but we’re almost at the limit.

Just as we had finished negotiating for that fabulous apartment I was recently gushing over, and were waiting for the paperwork to be drawn up, the complex’s management company decided it was time to dig up three quarters of the available parking lots inside the complex and start enforcing a long un-enforced parking rule. It turns out that most of the parking spots around here are for sale for 65,000 RMB a spot. No one who buys an apartment in order to rent it out is going to pay 65,000 RMB for a parking spot though as there are a great many people who don’t have cars, and if you’re a renter, especially a renter from outside of China, you’re not about to pay 65,000 RMB for a few feet of pavement inside China. So basically, the only people who bothered to fork out that money were people who bought an apartment in order to live there and who already had a car. 

In addition, this past weekend, the management company received a complaint about security. You see, we have all these young Chinese guards running around the complex and aside from some of the nicer ones who are occasionally gracious enough to help out lone mothers hauling small children and shopping up to their apartments, for the most part they never really do anything aside from play games and chat on their cell phones. A Canadian woman was accosted in her apartment by a former maid and some very large male friends of said maid, and when the Canadian called security to do something about the unwanted visitors, no one bothered to do anything. This of course begs the question: what is security here for?

It turns out our security force now is for yelling at you if you arrive by taxi or try to drive through the security checkpoints without a “parking card.” No outside cars are allowed in anymore, not even taxis. I fail to see how this solves the lax security issue as the hooligans probably arrived by bus and walked on in (and so far no one appears to be hassling people who arrive by foot), but there you go.

In the face of all these developments, Christian, who is even more inconvenienced than myself as he drives and greatly dislikes having to walk the extra quarter of a kilometer (whatever that is) at the end of a long work day, has gone back and forth, declaring first that we can live here anymore if the property management company isn’t going to let us rent a parking spot (on that subject, there were some parking spots available last month, but you only knew about it if you read the five complex Chinese pieces of paper plastered to some building doors, which of course, is beyond the abilities of most of the local foreigners who make up a considerable percentage of the complex’s residents) to now saying maybe, just maybe we can put up with having to park outside so long as we can still drive inside if we have things to drop off.

And that’s why our new apartment might not be quite the sure thing I had previously surmised, and also why I’ve been in such a bad mood all week.

Forty-eight hours after this picture was taken, Nico would manage to pull that ladder at the top of the room down on his head. There was much crying, though no bleeding nor signs of any swelling at all really. In fact, I can’t be completely sure that ladder and head connected as I was in the kitchen at the time (I know: Bad Mommy!). But Nico did live up to his future as a drama queen by going to sleep an hour later (this was in the middle of the afternoon) and not waking up (well, except to eat every two hours) until 5am the next morning, while I googled such cheery subjects as “symptoms of concussion.”

We have about 44 more hours until Christian returns from his business trip. At the rate we’re going, if we make it that long, it will be a miracle along the lines of… well, something really miraculous.

Generally, I like working for free because people are so happy with whatever you do, so if you go above and beyond, they act like you’re a god. With past positions, I’ve always felt like the folks paying my paycheck thought they owned me, as if with their twelve dollars an hour they have delivered me from a life of poverty and as such I owe them. The situation I’m presently in is unique in that they seem to feel I owe them for just their kind intentions of thinking to pay me at some point down the line.

I finished my marathon of writing, researching, and editing last night in time to watch the Olympic Closing Ceremony. Nico was already sleep, having giving up on me before his bedtime. Christian was on a plane to Europe; in my exhausted state I hadn’t given him a proper farewell. I was tired, bitter, lonely, and irritated that I’d just spent the better part of the past three days working on a school comparison article that will be released a month after school has already begun. This isn’t exactly what I had in mind when I had agreed to do the “stay at home mom” thing.

Actually, for all the work I’m now no longer doing, I’m still awfully stressed out. I spent portions of the ayi’s first two days here ironing sheets because I felt like I should at least look busy (and the weather was pretty gross). I constantly feel bad about my limited ideas for conversations (and my limited Chinese to carry them out). And don’t get me started on how icky salary negotiations were to carry out when the “boss-figure” possesses the vocabulary and verbal finesse of a five-year old. Plus now without the excuse of perpetual cleaning before me, I now have to come up with spectacular ideas for the enrichment of Nico’s life. Lately, we spend a lot of time wandering around the compound, ripping flowers off plants (Nico loves ripping stuff) and having our pictures taken by our neighbors (who shall heretofore be referred to as the Chinese Paparazzi).

All this quality time with Nico (as opposed to working independently in the room in which Nico is ripping leaves off the house plants) is leaving me with some niggling doubts about having a second child at all. I’m counting the days until he can do double backflips, sing the part of Sarastro in Die Zauberflöte, and debate the importance of Goya to the history of modern art, which by my calculations will take another six months. The idea of then having to start all over from scratch after I’ve already ripped thousands of flowers off thousands of plants, fills me with this hideous sense of dread.

In even happier news, on Saturday, Christian, Nico, and I leave for Hong Kong where we will be attending the Olympic Equestrian events. Covet my life!