I elected to go with a “3 star hotel” instead of 4 or 5 star when signing up. That translates to a very “Chinese” hotel. Turns out that we are in a very central spot of Bejing, just a few blocks from Tiannamen Square. (We are going jogging this morning – we checked with our airport guide who spoke very good English before deciding to venture out, making sure that it was okay for us to “jog” there. The staff knows very little English at all here. Since the facilities are, let’s say, somewhat “limited”, that has meant that I probably have already come down to the lobby 6-7 times the first night, asking questions by doing a combination of English and hand gestures. I can tell that they want to please me but really don’t understand me very well. Unfortunately, that doesn’t work real well when you want answers or helpful directions. They are willing to either give you an answer even if wrong, or maybe ignore you and keep going anyway.
We quickly found out how “difficult” it is to get things done here. You can do it – but it takes so much effort. For example, in order to get tickets to the games, my travel agency was not very helpful – I even found out late last week that my tickets for 2 out of the 3 most interesting events were suddenly no longer available, and I had to find them on my own through US scalpers. Therefore, I had tickets from about 4 different places that I had to arrange to collect yesterday evening. I didn’t mind that too much given that I had directions, email addresses, and 2 phone numbers from each source – and collecting them would give us something interesting to do yesterday evening to get to know Beijing…. That was naïve. J The first place was a pickup for the source of the national lottery system that I participated in a year ago. We got the hotel to help get me a cab with the right directions. They dropped us off in a downtown “SOHO” district and an address – but the best we could do was to get an officer to point us “that way” for directions. We couldn’t figure out the street directions at all. The address was a building 18 – and so we wandered around a long time, looking for building numbers, crossing streets – looking in a sea of faces for anyone that looked halfway Caucasian (English speaking), but saw none. We saw plenty of security/guards but realized they didn’t really know where to direct us. But we finally found the building and the line and were able to get our tickets. Three of our sources were supposed to deliver the tickets by courier. One came without any problems. The other two both said they had been having “courier problems” and had to change the plan. ( I assume that meant that they had given the tickets to couriers who disappeared and they never found them). Our airport guide told us that last week, the last set of remaining tickets went on sale locally in Beijing and that some people camped in line for 2 days to get them. I finally was able to get one of the ticket agents to come to my hotel late last evening at 10:30, and now need to go get the other tickets this morning at a new rendezvous.
Internet and phone connection is another real challenge. I knew this would probably happen, so I had many backups. The hotel is supposed to have internet in the first place. Knowing that this could be shaky, I have my PDA/email service and I have a broadband cable modem card that is supposed to work anywhere. Well, first of all, so far, the internet seems to be broken in my room. I plugged in the cable and there were no blinking lights in the back of my computer connection, indicating a live connection. I went down to the lobby to try to explain this. They sent up a nice girl who proceeded to not understand me, but who spent 15 minutes trying to look at my software setup to see if I was configured incorrectly. Of course, she spoke no English, so after trying to explain 5 times that it was the connection that wasn’t working not my configuration, I realized there was no hope of explaining that in Chinese/English sign language and waited for her to come to that same conclusion. Then she called up another girl who brought up a new internet cable, in case that was the problem (which of course it wasn’t). Finally, they got the idea to try another room – with the same problem. My guess is that it may have been broken for a long time, but no one has asked them about this. They told me “so sorry” and told me that they would have someone fix it in the morning. I have my doubts. I then tried my trusty broadband “anywhere in the world card” – nothing. I tried to see if my wireless could find another connection – nothing. I tried my PDA – and got a connection error. This was going to be challenging. I finally got my PDA to download some emails, so I think I have limited email access. I am going to write my blog in Microsoft word each day and hopefully post this whenever I can get the internet.
We quickly found out how “difficult” it is to get things done here. You can do it – but it takes so much effort. For example, in order to get tickets to the games, my travel agency was not very helpful – I even found out late last week that my tickets for 2 out of the 3 most interesting events were suddenly no longer available, and I had to find them on my own through US scalpers. Therefore, I had tickets from about 4 different places that I had to arrange to collect yesterday evening. I didn’t mind that too much given that I had directions, email addresses, and 2 phone numbers from each source – and collecting them would give us something interesting to do yesterday evening to get to know Beijing…. That was naïve. J The first place was a pickup for the source of the national lottery system that I participated in a year ago. We got the hotel to help get me a cab with the right directions. They dropped us off in a downtown “SOHO” district and an address – but the best we could do was to get an officer to point us “that way” for directions. We couldn’t figure out the street directions at all. The address was a building 18 – and so we wandered around a long time, looking for building numbers, crossing streets – looking in a sea of faces for anyone that looked halfway Caucasian (English speaking), but saw none. We saw plenty of security/guards but realized they didn’t really know where to direct us. But we finally found the building and the line and were able to get our tickets. Three of our sources were supposed to deliver the tickets by courier. One came without any problems. The other two both said they had been having “courier problems” and had to change the plan. ( I assume that meant that they had given the tickets to couriers who disappeared and they never found them). Our airport guide told us that last week, the last set of remaining tickets went on sale locally in Beijing and that some people camped in line for 2 days to get them. I finally was able to get one of the ticket agents to come to my hotel late last evening at 10:30, and now need to go get the other tickets this morning at a new rendezvous.
Internet and phone connection is another real challenge. I knew this would probably happen, so I had many backups. The hotel is supposed to have internet in the first place. Knowing that this could be shaky, I have my PDA/email service and I have a broadband cable modem card that is supposed to work anywhere. Well, first of all, so far, the internet seems to be broken in my room. I plugged in the cable and there were no blinking lights in the back of my computer connection, indicating a live connection. I went down to the lobby to try to explain this. They sent up a nice girl who proceeded to not understand me, but who spent 15 minutes trying to look at my software setup to see if I was configured incorrectly. Of course, she spoke no English, so after trying to explain 5 times that it was the connection that wasn’t working not my configuration, I realized there was no hope of explaining that in Chinese/English sign language and waited for her to come to that same conclusion. Then she called up another girl who brought up a new internet cable, in case that was the problem (which of course it wasn’t). Finally, they got the idea to try another room – with the same problem. My guess is that it may have been broken for a long time, but no one has asked them about this. They told me “so sorry” and told me that they would have someone fix it in the morning. I have my doubts. I then tried my trusty broadband “anywhere in the world card” – nothing. I tried to see if my wireless could find another connection – nothing. I tried my PDA – and got a connection error. This was going to be challenging. I finally got my PDA to download some emails, so I think I have limited email access. I am going to write my blog in Microsoft word each day and hopefully post this whenever I can get the internet.
No comments:
Post a Comment