After almost 7 months in the Jinger, we arrived back home in the bay area today. The first thing i noticed was that I no longer have to use squat toilets in public places. I don't mind them too much but it's a luxury to not have to use them anymore.
The last month or two went by especially fast, Charlie traveled a few times outside the country for work and I was kept busy with end of program activities and a conference at UNFPA.
We managed to escape the cold weather and pollution by taking a weeklong trip to nothern Yunnan, the southwestern most province in China, right before we headed back to the States.
The traveling is not over yet though, we're about to hop in a car and head out to Santa Fe via Vegas to visit the nephews and then hopefully some skiing in the rockies on our way back.
Here is an illustrated trip to work in Beijing by Karen. She was on the back of motorcycle taxi, 'Mo Di' in Mandarin. If you listen you can hear Karen speaking Mandarin in some of them. Here is the series in order, each is about 3 megs AVI file: Kind_of_Dangerous,GasBike,turnedaround, Im_in_a_modi_right_now, beijing_bike_lane.
Here is a morning shot of our apartment complex, the Moma, or 'Wan Guo Cheng'. You can see the pond, and one of the 4 new buildings being constructed.
p.s. Some Mongolia pics are up, look for link over to the right under Photos.
If China takes over the world, it could easily be for this reason: 6:30 PM, any Sunday afternoon, and the roads headed back to Beijing are clogged with construction workers, looking like they are just getting going. It never stops. Construction, 24 hours a day, buildings fly up, so much that clouds of dust rise over Beijing. Good old fashioned hard work.
Karen and I don't subscribe to that philosophy though, we're headed to Mongolia tomorrow for our monthly vacation.
Well, Karen's 20 - 10 today. I'm taking her to green tea house. We had an eventful weekend, went out to for dinner and drinks on Friday, and to a Chinese French Vinyard tour where we were the only people in the entire place on saturday. Unlike a Napa Valley we could walk through the vinyard and pick grapes. Yesterday we checked out some modern Beijing art, the Wall, which was quite interesting.
Well, you don't really need a reason to party in Beijing. But the excuse this past Friday night was to celebrate our friend Wendy (a Chinese national) getting a visa to visit her boyfriend's family in Germany. We were told that it's a big deal so it's a reason to celebrate. It took her two tries and a letter from her boyfriend's father to the Chamber of Commerce to get it approved - and she's just going for a 2-week visit!
Other activities this weekend included checking out an art gallery that's inside the well-preserved south-eastern corner tower (Dong-bian men watchtower) of the former Imperial city wall (bits and pieces of the wall still exist). We would have thought that it's a tourist spot but we were the ONLY people there! It was quite nice, so was the art. We tried to imagine what the view from this tower was like - probably clear views of the Forbidden city, Temple of Heaven and no tall buildings.
It's hard to believe that we've already been in BJ for 2 months and that we'll be leaving in a months' time. July was a busy month. The first weekend we took at trip to the grasslands in Inner Mongolia for some horseback riding and fresh air, check out the photos!
The following weekend my brother, Eugene, his girlfriend Carmen, and our cousin Jackie all came up to visit and we finally got an excuse to do some sightseeing. Then I went on a work trip to Qing Dao (More commonly known as TsingDao - yes, where the beer is brewed) and turned around and headed off to Espana for our dear friend Pablito and Maria's wedding! Then a weekend of dealing with jetlag and this past weekend we took a weekend trip to Hong Kong for my mother's birthday. And then boom, it's August. Time flies.
I am interning at the UN Population Fund China office this summer (UNFPA). I believe it was called the UN Family Planning Assistance at one point, but they obviously didn't change the acronym when they got the new name. There are many acronyms in the UN, I am usually quite confused when sitting in internal meetings that would go something like this: In CP6, we will be switching from using PAD to BBS, because CTS at HQ wants us to.... Go figure.
I wanted to dedicate a posting to the agency I'm working for because it is one of the lesser known ones because they are relatively small. The US has denied funding to UNFPA for the last few years and have again done so this year. So due to my humble office here in Beijing, the US is once again making itself popular by denying funding to every UNFPA program in the world. They stand alone in this matter in the world community, as usual.
The reason given by the Bush administration is that UNFPA China office supports the coercive family practices in China - which we don't really. Although many of the practices in the provinces are quite horrible, we cannot tell the provincial government what to do - that is not the job of the UN. What this office has done, however, is advocate for, promote, and provide assistance for more human-centered population services. Good news is, country programs get renewed every 5 years, and despite opposition from the US, the China program has full support from other member States and will be renewed for the next 5 years. One of my projects involve evaluating and planning for a couple of potential programs for the next 5 years which is quite interesting.
The website of an organization called 34 Million Friends (and donate a dollar while you're there) has great information and was started to help raise awareness of the work at UNFPA and provide more in depth information on the US's decision to cut funding:
34 Million Friends of the UNFPA emerged as a spontaneous reaction to President Bush's initial decision in July, 2002 when two women, Jane Roberts and Lois Abraham, decided to write letters and send emails to everyone they knew, urging them to send in $1 to help make up for the lost funds. Their point was less to let the U.S. government off the hook as it was to put them on it. By generating thousands of $1 bills, they hoped to send a message to Washington and the world about UNFPA's important role in saving the lives of women and their children.
Here are a couple recent news articles with two different points of view:
This article gives some brief but good background information. Another article by the pro-life news source obviously has a completely different point of view, and I have to say it makes me a little upset.
This China office is quite unique, mostly because we're working with the Chinese government and our work here is a bit different from other UNFPA offices in other developing countries. It's small, has a great staff and is relatively efficient, especially for an UN agency office. It's been quite interesting so far, learning about the UN system and getting a crash course on Chinese politics.
Here is a NYTimes article courtesy of Michael Oppenheimer about Beijing. I recognized many of the places mentioned - the 798 or Dashanzi art district is particularly cool. We went there on Sunday, huge post-industrial spaces that were designed by East Germans with steam spewing into the street. No taxis are allowed, which makes it pleasant for walking without being honked at constantly. The galleries are top notch, with Beijing making a splash on the international art scene. The day we were there we bumped in to a fashion show - ridiculously modern clothes - I saw an old woman stop and watch, she was pulling a three wheeled vehicle carrying debris, knee high rubber boots, smile and watch the show. Probably not the strangest thing she's seen over the years I thought.
We also stayed in an apartment behind the demolished Sanlitun bar area when we first got to town. All the bars were still in the 2005 guidebooks - but blocks worth of buildings were reduced to ruble, thats how fast Beijing works.
Finally, a great blog I found by some veteran expats: TalkTalkChina. Check it out.
I found this website today while searching for English names of a few of the Chinese ministries. Some of the ones I found particularly interesting are:
CPC, Central Committee, Central Party School, Propaganda and Theoretical Personnel Training Course
CPC, Central Committee, Committee for Compilation and Publishing Works of Mao Zedong
CPC, Central Committee, Offices Under Central Committee, Office of Spiritual Civilization Steering Committee (not sure what this one is all about??)
Karen and I took a motorcycle taxi to work today. Usually we've been walking, about 20 minutes to her work from our building, which is also close to my Monday Chinese lesson. Today we were running late, and were going to take a taxi, but there were too many people waiting. So we flagged down a motorcycle taxi - for 5 quai or about $.70 we got a ride. They put a shell over the back of a 3 wheel motorcycle, just enough room for two of us, and off we zipped to work, around the traffic, in the bike lanes.
Pakenheimer.com is back up again! We are hoping to actually update the site from now on, hopefully start posting photos and perhaps a separate blog for our time in Beijing.
Beijing is treating us well. After a frustrating apartment search, we found a place and moved in last week. It's a small studio that looks like an Ikea showroom in a pretty new complex called MOMA (this is a good one, you should all the other names of building here, it's quite hilarious). Beijing is definitely getting into the one-stop shopping. They have some Walmart-like supermarkets, Ikea, big fancy American-style malls, etc.
We haven't seen much of the tourist sites other than the Temple of Heaven - which is under renovations so it wasn't all that nice but we enjoyed strolling in the enormous, lush garden surrounding the temple. We also did a 3-hour walk on the JinShanLing to SiMaTai section of the Great Wall. It was quite nice to be out in the mountains and to see that the wall is still relatively un-touched.
Work was a little slow for both of us but its just picking up steam now! Speaking of which, I need to get back to work! Lots more to tell about BJ but will have to wait for another time!
After a couple weeks of sun and surf in Mexico and Maui, Charlie and I arrived safely in Beijing last night (We had a pretty good flight on Air China). What we've observed so far in the last 12 hours:
- First things we saw as we exited Customs at the airport: Starbucks and KFC
- Bad traffic. People drive their cars like they ride their bikes. Vehicles on the road consist of a mix of autos, bicycles and horse-drawn carts.
- A very nice hotel room at the Rennaisance courtesy of my hotel points from the Oracle days.
- At least 12 construction cranes in sight from our 7th floor window.
- It was 91 degrees out at 6pm and it's only June...but at least it's not humid.
Today we'll move to my friend Aaron's flat for a few nights' stay before we secure our own place. And it's June 4th - the 16th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square ordeal. We'll probably go check out the square to see if there is any kind of memorial activity going on.
note added 7/1/05: Duh, of course there were no memorial activities. We didn't make it to the square but have heard that there is extra security on June 4th and I read that they try to get all potential 'trouble makers' out of town around this time of the year. There is not a mention of the event whatsoever anywhere. And, as a colleague of mine has learned, it's not always a good subject to bring up, even at a workplace like mine.
