Further encounters with Chinese accounting...

Or, yet another reason why I hate working for Chinese universities...

I went to pick up a wodge of money today from the Chinese university(-based school) that I have been doing most of my business training for over the past couple of months.

My liaison there was "too busy" to e-mail me the breakdown of payments and tax deductions (expected, as a matter of course; and oft requested by me over the past few days) until this afternoon, after I'd taken delivery of the cash from another member of staff (who I didn't know very well, and hadn't actually been involved in running any of the courses I'd taught).

And - surprise, surprise - I found it riddled with errors and omissions.

The applicable tax rate was not stated. (Although I now know it to be de facto 16%; there is, in theory, a tax-free allowance of 800 rmb per month, but this is rapidly eroded by the swingeing 20% tax rate applied to the first tranche of taxable income. A tax rate that swings up from 0% to 20% and then back down to 16%, and then who-knows-where? [it doesn't bother me, since I never earn enough to get up into the next tax bracket] - that is pretty eccentric, even for China!)

The tax was not calculated separately for each of the different courses (although, in practice, the same tax rate applies throughout).

The total of taxable income was not given.

The "traffic allowance" (i.e., travel expenses) was listed alongside the taxable income, even though it's supposed to be tax-exempt - leading to the entirely predictable screw-up that tax was inappropriately deducted from these sums as well.

Ah yes, and one full day of training I'd done near to the mid-month payment cut-off was erroneously omitted altogether. And one of the Presentations classes I've been running on Sundays was recorded as a half-day only, although it was in fact a full day.

So, the payment breakdown is a confusing mish-mash which does little to help me understand how much they are paying me or why. But when I painstakingly wade through it all for 10 minutes or so, I discover that the bastards have underpaid me by a little over 2,000 rmb.

I am NOT happy. No indeed. Not at all.

But neither am I surprised. Nor do I suspect wilful dishonesty. Just about all the Chinese I've ever worked with have been staggeringly innumerate. Not excluding the accountants. In fact, especially the accountants. I have from time to time participated in the grading of the mass recruitment exams the major international accounting firms regularly run in the "leading" universities here: the basic number-awareness of the candidates - even those coming from a science or engineering background - is invariably dismal, far, far worse than their English skills (which are mostly very limited, too; but at least most of them can knock out some kind of sentence occasionally; whereas none of them seem to be able to analyse statistics or complete simple arithmetic).

These reflections can't help but remind me of this classic Chinglish anecdote about the profession of accounting.

Chinese sports TV just keeps getting WORSE...

I have written on here a few times before about how much I love tennis, and especially the Wimbledon Championships.

I have written even more often of how gob-smackingly terrible the sports coverage is on this country's main national TV sports channel, CCTV5 (in theory, it stands for 'China Central Television'; but Chinese friends joke that it should be 'China CRAP Television').

Well, this year, CCTV5 didn't seem to be showing any coverage of Wimbledon at all. There were far too many China-friendly sports going on like, er, badminton... and volleyball... and cycling... and ping-pong, of course... and, er, basketball.

I suppose there must have been some coverage of Li Na's advance to the Ladies' Quarter-Finals, but I managed to miss it all.

BTV6 - the sports channel of the Beijing television service, which seems to have attained a national eminence equal to or greater than CCTV's - appeared to have been carrying most of the Wimbledon coverage this year; but I didn't find that out until the final weekend. And I'm not sure that they showed much of the earlier rounds.

Still, at least I got to see the Men's Final between Djokovic and Nadal live.

And on Monday morning, enjoying an unexpected bit of free time at home before heading out to an afternoon class, I happened to switch on the TV just after they'd started showing a re-run of the Ladies' Final between Petra Kvitova and Maria Sharapova. I enjoyed a full, uninterrupted two-game sequence, and I was foolishly starting to hope that they were showing the match in full, and as live.

No. At the next rest break they went into a series of advertisements. A long series of advertisements (well, mostly it was the same two- or three-minute sequence endlessly repeated). It dragged on for 5 minutes, 10 minutes, getting on for 15 minutes. It began to seem unlikely that they were ever going to return to the match at all. And I certainly didn't have the patience to wait around to see if they did, while watching the same ludicrous, annoying ads over and over and over again. I went off to potter around on the computer.

I returned to the TV about 40 minutes later, by which time, even if Sharapova's resistance fell apart - as I gather it rather did - and even if there had been no further bumper ad breaks, I would have expected the match to be still some way short of the climax of the second and final set. BTV6 was now showing a golf tournament (I couldn't work out which one). I can only conclude that they showed only a few brief highlights of the Ladies' Final, three or four of the biggest games. And in a ratio of 40% tennis action to 60% advertisements.

TV sports coverage in this country SUCKS beyond belief!

New Picks of the Month

Looking back into the archives, three years ago this month...

From Froogville, I select A Classical Sunday - some musings on the difficulties of translation, illustrated by my own version of a famous poem of the Roman writer Catullus.

And from The Barstool, I choose A riddle: What do SARS and the Olympics have in common?

'New readers', please let me know what you think of these.

A bon mot for the 4th of July

"It is a marvellous thing to be unself-conscious, and a terrible thing to be unself-aware. The chief usefulness of Americans is that they constantly remind us of the difference."

Froog

List of the Month - oblique introductions

I am very shy about advertising the existence of my silly little blogs to anyone. But if my 'guilty secret' is exposed in conversation, I will occasionally reveal the names of the blogs to someone who really strikes me as likely to be interested in reading them (i.e., someone similarly irreverent and brain-overfull). The trouble is, it is a bit laborious to write out the full URLs for someone; and, if writing materials are not to hand, they can be difficult to remember. My 'boozing blog', in particular, causes difficulties, because it is familiarly known to my friends and me as The Barstool, but its full title is the rather ponderous Round-The-World Barstool Blues, and its URL - thanks to a mysterious lack of 'availability' of the name I'd originally chosen on Blogger - is actually the bar prop. So... I've taken to introducing my blog(s) to people by giving them a memorable phrase that will almost certainly lead them to me via Google. Just the other day, I told a friend to try to find me by searching for Froog+Zelig.

I am such an eccentrically creative fellow that unusual - perhaps occasionally even unique - phrases are fairly numerous in my online writing. Hence, I thought this might be an amusing topic for my new 'List of the Month'.

Google Searches That Will Bring You To My Blog(s)

obscene paperclip sculpture

mojito trough

mumbling Myrmidons (originally a Googlewhack, I believe)

Mescaline Milkshakes (yes, one of long-time commenter Gary's many brilliant band name suggestions)

Zhongnanhai hair tonic orgies

service with a surl

omnibus analogy

Condoleezza Shinork (likewise a Googlewhack - though scarcely legitimate, since it involves two rare personal names improbably combined)

unshaviness suits a writer  (this phrase an invention of my lovely photographer friend Amy)

with impecunity

the foreskin post  (ouch! one of my most notorious flights of fancy)

Y-front rebellion  (another of the band name game highlights)

the sound of minds boggling

panda pornographers

and, of course, Asexualismo and Asexualissimo

and sporadic advance of relevance (which probably describes my blogs rather too well)

but my very favourite of all is...  Jello Biafra cut my hair

[Sadly, though, my invention of the word limelessness is still going unrecognised by Google.]



With some of these, I'm not quite at the top of the returns, but prominent on the first page. And with most of them, there are three - or four, or five - posts listed (three, as we know, is a magic number): you'll have to use your skill and judgement to identify the original source of the key phrase.

And I suppose this post will itself soon become the No. 1 search result for most of these phrases. This doesn't help my Googlewhackiness (surely that can't be another original invention of my own? It seems it is!). But then, that is a problem inherent in the concept: as soon as you say, "Hey, this is a Googlewhack", it no longer is.

The Other 'Party'

Well, in addition to it being Proud-Not-To-Be-American Day for the denizens of The Great White North, today is also the 90th birthday of the Chinese Communist Party.

Yes, 90th. Is that all?? I had kind of assumed that it must be the centenary we were about to endure.

So, it took me rather by surprise that it's only been 90 years. I mean, what were they waiting for? Over 70 years after Marx and Engels first published their Communist Manifesto; nearly a decade after Lenin and Stalin got their act together to found the Russian Party, and getting on for four years after they fomented a successful revolution to take control of their country; more than two years after the creation of the Communist International, and after the landmark efflorescence of radical protest in China that was the May 4th Movement. The Chinese founders were dragging their feet a bit, if you ask me.

And they've remained significantly behind the historical curve all along. They didn't assume control of the government here until two decades after Stalin had begun to expose the hopeless impracticalities of the Communist ideal; and they're continuing now to pay lip-service to this discredited dogma two decades after the final collapse of the Soviet empire.

If I didn't 'feel the love' about the Founding of the Nation party a couple of years ago, I'm certainly not going to be celebrating the birth of this misguided and oppressive political system. It is my profoundest wish that the CCP will not see its 100th birthday. (I'm sure that wish is going to be disappointed - but let's all keep our fingers crossed, anyway.)

And how will this momentous event be celebrated here? Will there be fireworks and streamers and 'spontaneous jollity' out on the streets? I very much doubt it. There'll be some more-than-usually-DULL political speeches on TV all weekend; and maybe a craptacular or two in the evenings. And then it will all be forgotten. Thank heavens.

Well, except that we ought not to be forgetting. We ought to be reminding ourselves about this every day, and constantly asking ourselves, WHY are these guys still here?

Oh, Canada!

Yes, July 1st is Canada Day.

I confess I have a lot more affection for America, and am much more party-oriented around the imminent 4th July celebrations, but....

Well, I did live in Canada for a year. And I have quite a few Canadian friends here in Beijing.

So, Happy Canada Day, everyone!

(I wonder if it will stop raining long enough for us to venture outside at all today?)

[Further 'celebrations' over on The Barstool...]

Traffic Report - the blog stats for June

I always observe a few days of respectful blog-silence around the Tiananmen '89 anniversary. And my posting was further inhibited by an especially fraught period of work this last month - at least on Froogville, where I came in at under 30 posts for the month for only the third or fourth time ever. Output on The Barstool, somehow or other, remained rather more robust.

There were 29 posts and around 8,500 words on Froogville last month.

There were 35 posts and more than 11,000 words on Round-The-World Barstool Blues.

Nothing very interesting happening in the visitor data. Well, except that I appear to have a new regular - a number of regulars?! - down in Australia (I wonder if that's Cedra checking in??). And I've had a solo visit on Froogville from Finland; I think that might be a first. Even more intriguingly, we've had recent look-ins on The Barstool from Portugal and The Lebanon. I've very nearly collected the UN 'full set' now.

The weekly haiku

Orange air appals

Our lives shorten with each breath

Can't see far ahead

Yes, everything's a metaphor with me - even the Beijing smog. The last two days here have again been utterly appalling. But today's shaping up for thunderstorms - so we might be in for a decent weekend.

A strange dream

A few days ago - Tuesday, was it? - I awoke a tad earlier than I would have liked, and in a rather disordered state, and... a dream fragment stayed with me.

I had been in a Chinese restaurant. Not the kind of Chinese restaurant I usually frequent, but a modestly swanky affair, and one built on an industrial scale: one dining hall (of many) on one floor (of at least three or four, it seemed) was a hundred yards or more long. I seemed to be not actually eating in this place myself, nor even really 'present'; I was somehow floating through the restaurant unseen, like a fly-on-the-wall documentary camera recording scattered glimpses of the behind-the-scenes activity.

During a lull in food service (it seemed to be late afternoon rather than early morning - but the place was suddenly empty of customers) a squad of cleaning ladies appeared - almost as numerous as the wait staff, one to every four or five tables. In this particular room, the tables were - as is usual in China - round, but quite small, seemingly designed for only two, or at most four people. When their tablecloths were removed, they were found to be made of glass. And when the cleaning ladies began to mop and polish them with the damp rags which are the only common cleaning utensil in China, when they began to wipe around the edges of these thick glass discs.... well, the tables began to resonate, to hum with a bright, pure sound, as wine glasses do when you run a wetted fingertip around their rim.

Strange, no?

Although I suppose food and music (and, ahem, drink) are my principal obsessions in life; so, it is perhaps not so unusual that my subconscious would find a way of combining these interests into a single arresting image.

Coming up for air...

Gosh, the first three days of this week have been chock-a-block. And I worked on Sunday, too. And it's been a particularly heavy social/cultural schedule of late as well - music festivals, leaving parties, yadda-yadda. And I've been recovering from a particularly nasty attack of belly rot at the end of last week.

But today... today, I have almost nothing on. Well, apart from having to schlepp up to Wudaokou this afternoon for a three-hour class.

And tomorrow... I have nothing on at all: my first completely free day in about 4 or 5 weeks (apart from Saturdays; and I've mostly had 'stuff' to do even on Saturdays lately).

Heavens, this feels gooood.

The secret to a long life

I am not usually prone to stress. And when it does threaten, I think I deal with it pretty well.

But the lousy weather that blights much of the Beijing summer (clammy humidity, toxic supersmogs, flash floods) has been making life especially difficult just recently. Furthermore, I have had an insanely busy workload for most of the past two months (and having to use Beijing's public transport system too often, especially in the rush hour, surely has a hugely negative effect on anyone's composure, serenity, philanthropy...). I've been stuck in China, in Beijing, too long without a decent break, and I'm worn out: everything is bugging the crap out of me almost every day.

I have been getting dangerously close to a catastrophic implosion.

But now I have new role model, a new mantra: from now on, I'm just going to let it all slide right by.... like water off a duck's back.

[Thanks (yet again) to the inestimable JES for indirectly introducing me to this. Last week's instalment of his 'Midweek Music Break' series was a delightful B.B. King novelty song, One Shoe Blues. Immediately bowled over by the song's composer, the utterly wonderful Sandra Boynton, I went looking for more of her work on the Net, and soon found Be Like A Duck. As with the video of the B.B. King song, it's directed by Boynton herself. It features her four children - the lead vocalist is her eldest son, Keith Boynton.

There's lots more fun stuff to meander around on Boynton's website.]

A return to indolence?

Devoted followers of the blog may have noticed that I have been a bit snowed under with work over the past two months. Indeed, things reached a climax of intensity over the last fortnight, where I thought I might not be able to cope... and was actually deferring or declining additional jobs that were offered to me.

But then, all of a sudden... well, the day-long Presentation Skills course I've been doing for an SOE has had its final seminar moved forward a couple of days this week; and a repeat session, which was to have occupied the whole of July, has been abruptly cancelled (I think due to problems with student availability rather than any dissatisfaction with my delivery). The weekend class that's been so depleting my quality of life this month ended yesterday. I'm already at the half-way point in a 6-week series of Legal Writing classes I'm running for the first time (I had been stressing about this a little, as there is a chance of a lot of repeat work with this law firm; but I'd taken some time out to do quite a lot of the preparation in advance, and it's been going about as smoothly as I could ever have wished). And I'm into the home stretch with the long-term series of classes I've been giving up in the far north of Beijing for the past two months; I've got used to the unsocial hours (Tuesday mornings early, and Thursday evenings - preceding an early, early start on Fridays!); and we're now coasting towards the finish line, with the last three weeks being devoted mostly to preparation for a group presentation exercise to be used as a final assessment. A major new writing/editing position, which would have eaten up a good 8 or 10 hours of every week, has (unfortunately!) gone foop! as well... when it had seemed to be in the bag, a done deal, a sure thing just a few weeks ago.

But [Fanfare], most significantly of all for my psychological well-being, I've managed to wriggle out of my twice-weekly date-with-misery out in the desolate newtown hellhole of Wangjing.

So, at least 150 hours of work (and travel and admin and hanging around waiting for stuff to happen) that I had anticipated having to do in July has disappeared. And most of the 40 hours or so I have remaining is really pretty easy stuff, and should all be concluded within three weeks. I have scaled back from the 25-30 hours of training I was doing each week for the past few weeks to an eminently more manageable 8 hours per week. And after the middle of July I should be completely FREE.

It is quite a shock to the system - but a very welcome one.

But oh, wait, what's that ominous train whistle in the distance? Oh yes.... NO MONEY. Ah well - I don't care too much for money; money can't buy me love.

Bon mot for the week

"We are all geniuses when we dream. The butcher is the poet's equal there."

Emil Cioran  (1911-1995)

Film List - Great chat-up lines

Another little cinematic quiz for you, to end up the month.

This time, some of my most fondly remembered pick-up lines from the movies. I'll put the sources in a comment in a few days' time.

Well, OK, some of these are more flirtation between established couples than cold pick-ups. And one or two of the attempted pick-ups were spectacularly unsuccessful.

Quite a short list this month. Sorry - a bit braindead after recent ill health and poor sleeping. Will try to do better next time. At least I got it up to a nice round number - a Chinese 'lucky 8'.

Favourite Chat-up Lines from the Movies

"You like poetry? Come upstairs - I've got a poem for you."

"Girls who glide need men who make them thump."

"If I win, I get to take you home. If you win, you can come home with me."

"I'm just adjusting your breasts. They got all out of whack."

"Take me to bed or lose me forever."

"You know how to whistle, don't you? You just put your lips together and blow."

"I'm kind of a big deal around here. People know me."

"Come with me if you want to live."

Recently, on The Barstool...

Gosh, it's been 7 weeks since I last did one of these roundups. There must have been lots going on over on the dark side in that time. Let me go and have a rummage through the archive...

Well, the first half of May was largely preoccupied with the looming round of polls in the expat magazines to determine Beijing's supposedly 'best' bars and restaurants. The Beijinger magazine's Bar Awards particularly vex me - I made suggestions for improving them, predicted the winners (with somewhat mixed accuracy!), and listed my own picks for nominations and winners in the main categories.

There was a brief spasm of excitement on May 24th, when long-time follower 'Gary' claimed the accolade of becoming The Barstool's 50,000th officially recorded visitor.

Then, in one of my trademark 'curmudges', I itemised the reasons why I have become so disenchanted over the past 18 months or so with music bar Dos Kolegas (previously one of my favourite hangouts in this city) - although I still wished them well for their 6th anniversary party at the end of the month.

June started most unhappily.... with me being forced to miss one of my favourite bands - Canada's finest, the Cowboy Junkies - performing in Beijing because I was almost dying of dehydration. That was the worst organised music festival I've ever been to (and I've been to some bad ones, especially in China).

I have discoursed further on the subject of hangovers (don't believe in 'em!). And we have seen the return of THE COIN.

On the music front, we've had a little blast of '80s nostalgia with Billy Idol, and just a couple of days ago I posted a ravishing demonstration of musical technique from the outrageously talented (and very beautiful) pipa player, Lan Weiwei.

Quite a lot to ponder on there. I particularly recommend the Lan Weiwei post - breathtaking.

A little heavy-handed on the 'Rainmaker'!

Ooops!

Beijing is basically a desert. We go for months at a time with little or no rain at all. But when it does rain, especially during the summer months - oh boy, it comes down hard sometimes!

From about 4pm yesterday it rained here for around 12 hours, pretty much continuously, and often very heavily. The first hour or so was torrential, a full-on tropical downpour.

Beijing floods very easily, because there's no storm drain system to speak of (and what there is gets clogged with the ubiquitous builder's sand and bits of tree within a few minutes - really, minutes - of a heavy rain beginning). The city was brought to a standstill yesterday, just at the beginning of the evening rush hour: many of the downtown subway stations were inundated and had to be closed down for a while. Blogger BeijingDaze collated some of the alarming photos of the situation that were being posted to Chinese 'microblog' site Weibo.

A large part of the problem, I fear, is that the city authorities here are so desperate for rainfall that they never just allow nature to take its course. Whenever a cloud ventures anywhere near the capital, artillery units are dispatched to shoot it full of silver iodide (or whatever the cloud-seeding chemical of choice is these days; the Chinese have probably found something cheaper and more carcinogenic). Even when it's a cloud the size of Belgium, and so dense that it plunges us into pitch darkness in the middle of the afternoon.

If they'd just let this storm front pass over unmolested, I imagine it might have rained fitfully for a day and a half, with much of the rain falling around the periphery of Beijing, or further downwind in places like Tianjin. But the cloud-seeders shot the shit out of it, and it dumped all of its considerable contents on Beijing in the space of half a day - perhaps a third of it, I would guess, in the first hour. And look what happened.

The boys in charge of the Weather Machine got their knuckles severely rapped 18 months or so back, when they initiated a massive snowfall early in the season, without thinking to notify any of the other city authorities first. I suspect there will be similar chidings and recriminations this time.

What larks.

Haiku for the week

Calendar glowers;
This date drags like an anchor,
Summons the darkness.

I always used to hit my annual depressive peak (er, trough) around late April and early May; but, for the last several years, I've tended to suffer a potent resurgence of this debilitating glumness in June, too. I fear it is almost certainly related to an unfortunate anniversary. Summer heat and heavy workloads don't help my stress levels either; but I'd be willing to bet that I'll be right as rain again by early next week.

This is what if feels like...

Yes - like Roger Daltrey, I'm FREE!!!

I managed to squirm out of that dratted, awful, horrible class in Wangjing. Giving up 4,000 rmb has never felt SO GOOD.

[This is the best recording of The Who's classic hit I'm Free on YouTube at the moment, I think - from the 1970 Live at Leeds album, with a cool montage of photos of the band in their heyday. However, you can also check out their Woodstock and Isle of Wight performances of the song, and the sequence from Ken Russell's film version of Tommy.]

Turning up the temperature in HELL

So, I have a non-event of a class with a trio of especially irritating students in far-away Wangjing...

How much worse can it get??

Well... last Wednesday, a torrential downpour began half-way through the class.

The streets flooded. Taxis withdrew themselves from service. Buses became appallingly overcrowded with damp, sweaty, irritable people (such as myself).

But, you know, at least I'd managed to get on a bus within a few minutes of finishing the class. Not so bad, right?

Well.... the bus driver decided not to halt at the bus stop but 50 yards up the road - I assume, purely for the sadistic pleasure of seeing a dozen drenched office workers being forced to leave the comfort of the bus shelter and run as fast as they could - through a particularly deep puddle! - to reach him before he decided to close his doors again and pull away.

And my dipshit students had misinformed me about which bus stop to use, so I had unwittingly got on a bus going in the wrong direction. I had been alert to this possibility, but it took me a while to verify which direction I was going - because I'm not familiar with this part of town; because the bus stops in this part of town do not (as they do just about everywhere else) have their names written on them; and because the notification of the stops onboard, by both digital sign and bilingual pre-recorded announcements, had been disabled by the driver. I realised after one stop, by asking a fellow passenger; but was then stuck on the bus for one more stop....

And the bus stopped moving... Now, traffic over on the east side of Beijing gets pretty horrible in the rush hour at the best of times. And heavy rain makes things even worse (as everyone, for once, starts driving over-cautiously). But our problem seemed to be almost entirely down to an absurd piece of traffic management by the Beijing authorities: at the major junction we were approaching, the red light was against us for 5 or 6 minutes or more at a time, and then turning green for barely 30 seconds! I kid you not. Utterly f***ing CRAZY! It took us over 25 minutes to cover a distance of about 200 yards to the next stop.

And the driver - helpful, cheery, philanthropic soul that he was - obstinately refused requests from myself and several other passengers to open the doors and let us out. There was no safety issue: we were near the side of the road, and no other traffic anywhere around us was moving for minutes at a time. But the driver insisted on keeping us trapped inside the bus. It was a nightmarish experience; it had begun to seem that the ordeal might drag on for hours, forever. Had I really died and gone to hell this time?

When I did finally get out into the open air again, it was such a blessed relief that I was not too concerned about being LOST (very few street signs in Wangjing; and those there are, too small to read in such poor visibility), in the pitch dark (very few streetlights in Beijing; and those there are, heavily shaded by the ubiquitous goddarned trees), ripe for ambush by lurking potholes and ankle-deep sewage-tainted puddles. So, it's 8.15 at night, and it's pouring with rain, and I haven't eaten yet, and I'm 10 or 12 miles from home - but it's not that bad, right? I mean, it's not like I'm going to have to walk all the way home?? Er.... 

There were a lot of taxis around, parked near this junction, or sailing past - but they didn't want to take any fares. Not from a laowai, at least. Everyone, it seemed, either wanted to take a break while traffic conditions were so "dangerous", or was only interested in heading out to Shunyi (although the eastbound traffic was logjammed, while the westbound route into the city was remarkably empty). 

Eventually I found one enterprising shifu who was willing to consider taking me back to civilization 'off the meter'. Ordinarily, it would be a 35 or 40 rmb metered fare. 50 rmb would be a not unreasonable hei che rate. In these extreme circumstances, I was willing to consider offering him 100 rmb. But he asked for 200 rmb - and that, I thought, was taking the piss a little bit too much.

So, I gave up on that vain exercise. I got my bearings and started to walk. I was soon back in modestly familiar territory, and managed to duck into a bar for an hour to get some food, and shelter from the worst of the storm. Once the rain starting slackening off again, it actually started to feel quite pleasant to be the only person out on the streets, and to be making progress towards home - although it was now becoming soupily humid, and I didn't have a very good pair of walking shoes on, and there was still a long, long way to go...

However, after making such a good start, I probably should have persevered in my walking - at least until I got to a subway station.

Alas, just shy of the Third Ringroad, I unexpectedly managed to flag down a taxi. And this was really NOT the driver I needed to be meeting at the end of such an unusually stressful evening. 

He was the archetype of every complaint everyone - foreigner and Chinese - makes about the Beijing taxi service, a blackly comic exemplar of every imaginable negative cab driver trait. His registration number was 27****, one of the most recent ones, so my heart began to sink immediately. He STANK to high heaven (I don't usually like to comment on the personal hygiene of these folks, since I think laowai disdain in this matter is patronisingly overplayed; and I do have a lot of sympathy for how hard drivers work and how limited their opportunities to bathe are - but this guy was like a tramp, his body odour was making me gag!). He drove at a crawl, even when there was no other traffic nearby. He was reluctant to go into the city centre, and pretended not to know (or perhaps genuinely didn't know?) where anything was. When he was eventually persuaded to accept directions from me, he insisted on trying to correct my Chinese pronunciation every single time; indeed, he enjoyed this game so much, he started asking for confirmation of which way we should go at every junction, and would then correct my pronunciation of 'straight on' or 'turn left' two or three times with wry mockery - at every single junction, every 15 or 20 seconds. Jeez, that was a LONG ride!!!

I was VERY GOOD. I did not punch him in the face. Nor, indeed, did I punch the next three people who annoyed me unnecessarily that evening in the face. But I did fantasise about it very vividly. And I beat the shit out of my sofa for a couple of minutes when I finally got home.

I am lobbying for this bloody Wangjing class to be cancelled. If I am unsuccessful, and it rains again, expect to be reading reports of a foreigner running amok in north-east Beijing and strangling cabbies or bus drivers.

The special room in HELL just for me

Yes, I have to go to Wangjing twice a week for the next month. In the rush hour. 3 or more hours of travelling for only 2 hours of paid work.

How much worse can it be??!!

Well....

It's an abysmally 'designed' course. (Not 'designed' at all, of course. The school that set it up just plucked a textbook randomly off the shelf.)  It's a really crummy book I'm supposed to be using, and it can be covered in about half the number of hours timetabled.

The class isn't remotely quorate. You need at least 8 to 10 people in a lesson to generate some positive energy, and to allow for a decent variety of different activities. There were only 7 people listed for this class. 2 of them have left the company. 1 is frequently too busy with work to attend. And 1 speaks not a single word of English. You can't have a 'group class' with 3 people - it doesn't work.

No money. I took this on as a favour to a contact who has set me up with a fair bit of interesting work in the past. Alas, for this class, they're paying only a rock bottom rate. And (contrary to what they'd suggested to me before I started - based on frantic, uninformed back-of-an-envelope calculations!) I am being taxed on it not at 10% but at a swingeing 16%. This is supposed to be high-end business training for a prestigious MNC. Kindergarten teachers earn more.

No guanxi. My main interest in taking the gig was to try to establish some contacts with this very big, very famous company. But it turns out the training has been set up independently by one of the small work teams there; it's nothing to do with any of the senior managers, nor even with the HR & Training Dept. Very frustrating. Boo!

My contact there is the most annoying person I have ever met: she has quite good English, but otherwise appears to be a complete moron. She takes the Chinese predisposition towards inappropriate laughter to extraordinary new levels, being apparently incapable of opening her mouth to say anything without giggling. I am probably going to KILL her before this course is through. Or at least put duct tape over her mouth...

But wait, it gets worse....

HELL

Or Wangjing, as it is also known.

I have never liked Wangjing.

I have never liked the idea of Wangjing.

It is one of the first of the hideous 'new towns' to spring up outside the northern periphery of Beijing. And, being on the north-east side, the quadrant where most of the laowai live (conveniently en route to the airport!), it has been seen as an appealing location for the headquarters of a number of major international companies. In the past, I've taught training courses there for the likes of Siemens and ABB.

And I've absolutely hated every second I've spent in the place.

When they bulldoze one of the old neighbourhoods in downtown Beijing, the new constructions usually bear at least some faint vestige of the previous urban layout: a few of the small connecting roads remain, some of the old place names survive. Despite the colossal size of some of the malls and office blocks being put up, we yet manage to retain some sense of human scale - perhaps because these new developments are at least still interwoven with a few older, homelier neighbourhoods.

But when they build on a greenfield site, it's just horrendous. Wide roads, with few if any footbridges or underpasses to facilitate pedestrian crossing. Intricate, swirling road junctions that are even harder - all but impossible - to get across on foot. And block after block without any sense of a residential community; mile upon mile of offices, with little more than an occasional Costa Coffee by way of a retail/leisure/food distraction. It is a how not to model of urban planning. Walking through Wangjing, I invariably find myself contemplating the Zombie Apocalypse; indeed, I become convinced that it is already upon us.

Worst of all, it is the least accessible part of Beijing. Insofar as it was 'designed' with any intelligent foresight at all (which I rather doubt), it appears to have been designed for people who live in Shunyi (mostly well-off expats) and who have cars (and, usually, drivers). It's still not on any subway lines. (Part of Line 15 appears to now be open; but there are only two Wangjing stations, at the extreme ends of the development - the line does not penetrate into the heart of the office zone desert. The proposed new Line 14 may be slightly better, but not much, I think; and that's still 3 or 4 years away from opening.) There are precious few bus routes through there (most of them go up the Jingmi Highway towards Shunyi; if you want to get out to Wangjing from anywhere in central Beijing, you usually have to make at least one change). And it is very ill served for taxis (and the ones you find there mostly have out-of-town drivers who only want to do the shuttle to and from Shunyi or the airport, and don't know where anything else in Beijing is). Because so much of it is purely business rather than residential, you don't even find many hei che (the 'black cabs' - unlicensed privateers who, although they can be a pain to haggle with sometimes, are usually a boon in outlying areas starved of regular cabs).

From where I live, it takes about 1hr 20mins to get there by bus and/or subway, or at least 20-30 mins by cab. Getting back (in the evening rush hour!) takes more than 1hr 30 mins by bus/subway and ???? by cab.

Considering these dire logistics, I really should not have accepted a 2-hour teaching gig out there!

Oh, but wait - it gets worse.....

Technical difficulties

Continuing the Why I HATE working for Chinese universities series....

I've been doing a weekend class on Presentation Skills this month. The coursebook I'm supposed to use is largely based around audio clips.

So, it would help if we had a good sound system in the classroom.

But, in Week 1, I found that the amplifier made such a frightful buzzing, shrieking sound as soon as it was switched on (impossible to reduce by juggling the settings, and suggestive, I fear, of imminent meltdown) that the students and I found it intolerable to listen to. I had to abandon the coursebook, and improvise six hours of useful activities of my own instead (I wasn't too heartbroken; it's a terrible book, and I had planned to use a lot of my own material anyway).

In fact, I was pretty grateful, because the sound system in this room was almost impossible to access. There's a narrow daïs at the front of the room, a cement step less than 3ft deep. Nearly two-thirds of this is occupied by the equipment console. And the audio equipment is on the bottom shelf of the cupboard in this console - yes, on the floor. And there is barely room for me to get behind the console anyway. I have to get down on my hands and knees and crawl in sideways, wedged between the console and the wall, in order to reach the on/off switch for powering up the whining amp. An utterly, utterly ridiculous piece of design. And emblematic of the whole Chinese university problem.

And alas, most of the other activities I had hoped to use involved PowerPoint slides. And the PPT projector mysteriously lost power mid-morning and stubbornly declined to be revived. The IT assistant for the building was unavailable, because it was a Sunday. So, no audio facilities and no projector. Sigh. Improvise some more.

I badgered my teaching liaison to try to move us to a different room - with better equipment - for this week. She told me this was impossible, none of the other rooms were "available". More classic Chinese university nonsense! I checked last week, and hardly any of the 100 teaching rooms in this building were in use, but all of them were open. This must be some strange use of the word "available" with which I am not familiar; they look mighty available to me.

My liaison assured me that the equipment had been fixed. I didn't believe her for a moment. And I was right not to. The whining amplifier had in fact got worse. But we were spared any pressure to even try to make do with it by the fact that it was no longer connected to the computer's audio outlet. (At least the projector held out this week. A fuse problem last time, I surmise.)

Only one more week of this fiasco to endure.

Why did I ever agree to it in the first place?

Bon mot for the week

"The aim, if reached or not, makes great the life: 

Try to be Shakespeare; leave the rest to fate!"

Robert Browning  (1812-1889)