Feeling bad

We can probably all recall one those mornings when you woken up really early or didn't sleep for more than a few hours. You can't get any food down and feel slightly sick. If you smell something unpleasant or see something gross you feel like throwing up. Well i had that feeling for the past 2 days. I have no idea why, guess some bad food.
When you feel bad or have some problems there is bound to be more problems around you, right? Well today morning was one of those mornings when things just get worse. We were out of water so i had to go downstairs at 6:30 in the morning after to buy some more water.
In Beijing all apartments have 1 card for water and 1 card for electricity, you have to charge the cards at a special ATM or go to the bank. When you are out of water or electricity your apartment it completely dry or dark, i have to say i prefer the bill coming home like in Finland! Anyway, our apartment was completely dry, tired Seba heads for the elevator to go downstairs. It was only after i got into the elevator that i noticed half of the floor was covered in puke and it smelled horrible there! Like i wasn't feeling bad enough already! YÖÖÖHH!!! Well at least i was able to keep everything inside and not contribute to the massive grey pile of something. Good start for a monday morning. I was only able to stay in school for 2 hours because i didn't feel that great.

I'm gonna stay off chinese food for a few days now, just eat fruits and McDonals :D

One of the picture is taken just next to my flat, it's a BBQ stand which is only open in the evening and they make REALLY good chicken CHUARS! It's my favorite and i always pick up 8 of them after work because they only cost 1 yuan a piece (10 cents).
The other picture is some really expensive chinese booze in a awesome bottle. 3000 euros for this beauty :)

City of traffic

The air in Beijing had been pretty bad the last week. Smoggy everywhere, can't see more than a few hundreds or meters ahead Or maybe it's just mist? Who knows,right? :) TIC. This traffic that you see here might be one of the reasons...It's so crowded here that people put their bikes where ever they can find a free space for it...

I had a job interview today and it went really well! I did the interview in English, Chinese and Finnish, felt pretty good about myself after it! Hopefully i will get the position. Will know about that next week! If i get the position there will be some serious partying going on here!! The place where i would be working only has 1 finnish guy and the rest of all hundreds are chinese so it will be good language practice on a daily basis. If i get the job i will reveal the name if the company. I would start working next month or so, but don't worry, they said it's OK for me to fly home to Finland for Christmas! :)

I'm really seeing forward to come home! It's been about a year away now...People always talk about having a cultural shock when moving abroad or having some kind of depression. So far i felt bad for maybe 4 days in total. And that's just because i didn't learn the language as fast as i wished to. Sometimes feeling stupid but never down in a way that this country would treat me bad etc. Quite the opposite, i feel great here! And it keeps getting better all the time, pieces of the puzzle are really falling to their places!
Yesterday i talked with my best mate, thanks for the advice about the job interview btw. You were complaining about "where are my adventures". It got me thinking about all the "adventures" I've had this year. I don't think my life could have been any more interesting than it just has been. I mean I've just been on TV twice in China, travelled to places in China where no foreigner ever been before, done some model working, teaching english in this small Chinese company, learned pretty good chinese and met a BUNCH of really awesome and interesting people. If you want adventures you need to head out and seek them, they will not come to you. It's less likely that there will occur any huge adventure "kotinurkilla".
I just want to say that i miss you all there back home, will see you soon!

What i most miss about home is:
- Moms food
- Family
- Best friends --> Co-op(hen ke ai), Terrorist H. Rainbow+pizza+skruff, anyone feel hit?
- HOT Sauna
- Jogging around Lauttasaari
- Meatballs

Around the neighborhood

I had my oral chinese exam today. It's midterm now, half way done with my second term. The test went fine and i'll pass without a problem. After the test i went to the electronic market just outside my apartment. Zhong Guan Cun has the biggest shopping place for electronics in Beijing. There are several buildings full or electronics and they are massive and over 10 floors! You can find anything from here!
I bought 40 xbox games for around 20 euros, so it's quite affordable.
Because of the large electronic market there are people in the street taking computers here and tv there. Huge piles of it, today i saw hundreds of computer boxes in the street and a man sitting on them, looks hilarious!
Chinese houses often has steel bars in front of the windows to prevent thieves from breaking into the house. They also work well as stopping people from getting out in case of a fire...
I found a CLIO CODDLE on my way home from the shopping, i could swear i've seen this kind of logo somewhere before!! :D

Wedding and me on TV with Da Shan 大山

I must say that this was one of the most interesting weekends i had in my entire life...Let's start from the the beginning of a long story :)

On friday our flight was to leave at 15:35 from Beijing but because of massive traffic we didn't make it in time so we went back home and changed our tickets to the next morning flight, no problem there. BUT some people in Chengdu thought we were not gonna be able to get to the wedding in time if we took the morning flight so they told us to go to the airport and buy a new tickets, we went and got it fixed because heavy fog had delayed a plane and it was 2 hours late so they kindly gave us a seat in the plane without any extra charges. Finally in the plane! Flight was around 2,5 hours long and when we arrived in Chengdu it was way past midnight. The food was AWFUL on the plane and it looked worse than dogfood, check it out, YAH YÖK!

After checking into the hotel etc etc the time was already 3 in the morning/night so there was a good 4 hour sleep before we had to get up and dressed for the wedding, boy was i tired yesterday morning!

In chinese custom the groom comes to the bride house with his friends. The groom has to put small red packages filled with money under the door and tell the brides friends how wonderful she is before they open the door. The process takes about 1 hour and is really nice. After a lot of sweet talk to the bride he has to carry her out to the car. There are usually around 10-15 nice expencive cars which you drive with around the city and then go to the place where the wedding is held.

The wedding itself was really awesome! It was kept in Shangri-La, the most exclusive hotel in China. If good hotels are rated 5 starts, this was around 7 :) There were around 400 people present and the show was great. They had light effects, songs, shows, old pictures on a huge screen and what not, not to mention all the terrific food!!

After many hours of drinking good wine and eating good food and chatting (in chinese of course) with people it was time to go to the airport again. At this point i was already so tired my head hurt. I wasn't sleep in the plane because it had the smallest seats i ever sat in! I finished a Japanese book called Norwegian Wood which was really good, can recommend to anyone who's around my age. I arrived in Beijing late in the night and came home to sleep a long night....I had no idea what was waiting for me next day...Wedding pictures will be put up later! I will make a whole album of it, there are plenty of them!

Like normal sundays i go to work, like today. I had some classes and games for the kids and after a while my boss ask me to be on TV tonight with the most famous chinese speaking foreigner called DA SHAN 大山. Well of course i wanna do it! Gotta admit that i was kinda nervous before the show...

The program was about western and chinese culture. It started with a old chinese woman who's son moved to America when he was pretty young.

The old lady was talking about how her son now days drinks coffee for breakfast and eat a few pieces of bread (western customs). So the old woman had started to practice making Marmalade herself. I was to taste her marmalade and it was really really good! So there i was on a famous TV channel BTV3 eating an old lady's marmalade and telling her how good it is...Da shan came into the show a little later and talked about his life in china and compared it with his own country which is Canada. The show was a little boring but now i have been on TV with the most famous foreigner in China. The whole show and everything was only in Chinese but i was somehow able to keep up with the things and didn't make an ass of myself....:)

What a weekend, what did you do?

Exam and Wedding

I have mid term exams tomorrow, busy studying today! But tomorrow evening I'm flying to Chengdu (central China) to attend a wedding, will be awesome, more stories coming up on that later...

Still is cold here, a cup of Starbucks new tasty christmas chocolate almond awesome coffee helps to fight the cold!

Happy birthday James!

My roommate James turned 23 this weekend and we had a party in a Brazilian restaurant. For 10 euros you could eat as much steaks and drink as much beer as you wanted. Was a really nice place, i'll take you there when you come Husse & Co.

The place was surrounded with buildings that looked very European, spanish like. Didn't feel like being in China at all.

Found some stupid signs in the subway. All is good here but it's believe it or not COLDER than Finland. And i left Finland to come away from those awful wet winters, instead i got a cold windy winter. I should move to Australia or Thailand one day...

This is it!

I went to see Michael Jacksons - This Is It yesterday. Was a movie about the last show/tour Jackson was making before he died. The movie was awesome, he really got the moves and songs, pure genius guy. Wish i could have seen his gig back in the days. Long live the KING!

They had a lot of snacks at the movie theater and i bought some nachos because they looked so good with all the sauce on the picture. When i got the nachos there was just a small pathetic looking package.

Chinese like to eat all kinds of weird things. One really popular snack here is chicken feet, they sell it in supermarkets and restaurants. It's just a bony and skinny snack and really gross if you ask me! It's pale and looks like a chicken that's been dead for a long time....

They put up this huge huge light in the hall of the apartment. Some chinese guys had been working on putting it together for the last 2 weeks. All hand made!

Last night when i was going home i found a sofa in the street, no idea what it was doing there...

Snow and green leaves

The trees have not dropped there leaves yet and yet there is a LOT of snow! It's been snowing the whole week and mornings are minus degrees. Last year i was in Beijing this time it was stil autumn and i was wearing a thin jacket. Now i'm wearing a huge winter jacket and boots, sucks!

Yeserday i saw some chinese burning something in the middle of the street. Could be in memorial for some one dead or someone who had died in the intersection...Looks pretty interesting with people gathered around a fire blocking the traffic...

Also some pictures from morning walks to the school. The have these small breakfast stands all over the city where you can buy this deep fried dough with egg, meat, salad and some sauce. Cost about 3 kuai which is around 30 cents in Euro, taste good and no diahorrea！

Total chilling day

I stayed home today as well because i didn't have any class. The whole school went to a museum but i thought it be better for me to stay home resting. Been so chill to just lie in bed watching movies, i don't remember when i had this much free time.

China has the highest rate in recycling stuff in the whole world, reason for this is that you can make a little money by returning cardboard, bottles, plastic etc etc to a certain place.

There are a lot of people in the street who collect cardboard or other things, you give em your cardboard for some small money, they pile it up and later take bigger amounts to some other place and get paid for it.

It's a great and working chain, the money for it is just too small for anybody in the western country to live on. We are talking about a few euros here....But then again that amount is a lot for some people here, 60% or the population here lives on 1 euro a day, those farmers in rural areas. Think of the good life when you can move into the city and make up to 5 euros a day!!

Went to eat at our local chinese restaurant for dinner, picture of the awesome kitchen and this woman in the street collecting cardboard. She has a scale there where you can weight your cardboard and she might give you a few cents...

There is this chinese guy next door who always takes his little chair with him when he comes out for a smoke. Just looks so funny...

Bed day

Today i have just been home lying in bed applying for jobs online, my voice is so crappy i can't speak. But i'm feeling a lot better, hopefully recover soon!

It's very snowy outside....

Because our kitchen is pretty useless we never eat home, went out with James to have some supper and after that to a cake shop to get dessert. The cake shop was hilarious and i found one of the all time best CHINGLISH signs!

Chocolate Golden Brick!!

Plastic Bags

I just heard the most weirdest radio show today morning. It's a chinese radio show where the hosts talk in english. The show was about plastic bags. Last year the chinese government made it illegal for shopping malls and stores to give free plastic bags to the customers when purchasing plastic bags.

There is a city called Hang Zhou near Shanghai which mostly lives on tourism. The tourist who go to Hang Zhou (Chinese) are angry about this because they think that plastic bags should be free and they feel unwelcome to a city where there are fees for plastic bags. I mean, cmon! the cost of a bag is around 0,001 euros...

Some pics from the apartment!

H1N1

When i woke up today morning i felt like a old stinking kitchen rag. Nose full of yellow snot, head felt like it weighted 1 ton and my throat stung. I thought to myself that i FINALLY got the pigflue...

I went to a hospital specially for foreigners because i don't really trust the chinese hospitals here. There has been a lot of weird things going on in them lately. For example, some internship doctors accidentally killed a woman in one of the best hospitals in China. She had some surgery and the doctors managed to cracked 3 of her ribs and did some serious damage to her heart. 3h after her operation she died. How great is that.

I had a couple of test done on me and after 30 min i was H1N1 negative, wohoo! Still feel a little sick though. The bill for this small thing was about 230 euros, no wonder no chinese come to this hospital and thank god for my insurance!

Went to see my favorite Taiwan artist （陈绮贞 Chen Qi Zhen） with Hyan today, the gig was awesome!! Love her songs, the crowd was also very into it. Almost everyone in the audience had those kind or light sticks, seldom see that back home. Looks cool when it lights up the audience like a sea of light.

Sick

I caught some cold today. Yesterday i was still perfectly fine and went to the gym. When i woke up in the morning my throat was sore and i felt really really tired. Maybe i should have stayed home sleeping...Didn't want to skip school because i did that yesterday. Hopefully it will recover ASAP...

Have had work every day this week except thursday but the pay is good. After taxes actually earn more money here in China than in Finland just by teaching small kids some basic english...

The most incredible thing is getting paid for sleeping at work. I usually come to the office at 16.00 and my students arrive at 17.00. Before that i can just sleep, read a book or do whatever i want. They pay me by the hour, they just want me to be there in case some chinese parent would come by to the company so that they can see that there actually are some foreigners working there. Today my boss, Bill offered my a full time job but i still have school. If i can't find anything else until the school is out i will take the job. Pay is around 5 times higher than an average LEE would make...

Some pictures from around Wudaokou and Zhong Guan Cun where i live, street market where you can get stuff relly cheap. The grey house is just next to my work, they just made a lot of holes in the walls, no idea why...Had some food at a local restaurant, nice sign :D