Amiram Hayardeny's My China Experience

Saturday November 19, Out of Water...

OK, my turn to eat my hat, figuratively speaking.  I guess that I was not aware of the difficulties facing a vegetarian in China.  Our vegetarian friend, saw the quiches, the salads, the soup, the entire pumpkin with rice and vegetables and was very close to crying.  Seriously, she was so touched that somebody took the time to cook for her.  Having seen that, we packed nice portions of the meal as takeaway.  So, my wife was right, she did not go overboard in preparation.  This time I agree, it was worth it.

Living in China you have to very quickly learn a lot about the system of "Pre-paid" stuff.  Indeed, the concept is not new.  You can buy pre-paid phone cards almost everywhere in the world, US included.  Skype, Jajah (ip based telephony services) are all pre-paid.  However, China my first acquaintance of pre-paid electricity, pre-paid home phone, gas, water (three kinds: recycled for bathroom, hot, and regular for washing dishes and hands).  This is how it works.  When you move in to a new place, you get cards.  Pretty cards with nice drawings and letters in Chinese.  You have to go to the bank to "charge" the card, and then ask a maintenance person to "feed" it into the meter.  Then you go about your life until one morning, when your laptop goes "beep" and you try to figure out why in the world it is turning itself off.  Of course, very quickly you realize: there is no power, a blackout or a brownout - pick one.  Being an engineer, first thing I need to know is whether the neighbors have power.  They do.  I'm on my own.  Five minutes go by until I realized, the meter ran off.  I missed the blinking of it warning me that little power is left on my meter.  6:00 in the morning, and I am on my way to find someone to help me work the machine which gives power.  Long story short - Fiat Lux - "Let There Be Light..."

It is not the end of the world, but it is frustrating at times.  For example, today, my wife yells to me from the bathroom, that there is no water.  So she goes (she is better at this) to the maintenance office and as it turns out, the recycled water meter ran out of water, and we did not pay.  So she dug into her purse and paid a whole 1 Yuan (the equivalent of less than $0.13 (yes, no typo, 13 cents) and got it turned back on.  She offered them Yuan 100 to take care of the next quarter century, but the computer system cannot take it.  Don't get me wrong, it really isn't the end of the world, it's just different.

But now, the interesting business side of it.  What happens, for example, in the US when you don't pay your electric bill?  You get a warning, and then another one.  They don't (as far as I know) cut your power off.  At the end of the year the electric company may have millions of dollars in unpaid debt.  This does not happen here.  You don't recharge your card - no power, no gas, no water.  On the other hand, China is moving quickly towards consumerism, towards consumption.  It seems to me that credit is an important building block for moving that way.  It's a matter of time.  But it will happen, soon.

Unless you speak fluent Chinese (which I don't), the television situation here isn't great.  There are scores of Chinese stations, and very few English speaking stations.  ESPN, HBO, Discovery, CNN, CNBC and CCTV9 (Chinese TV in English).  HBO has mellowed content, to the point that I can safely say that I either saw all movies years ago (we already established the fact that I am 44), or I have no interest in watching them.  So we buy our own content.  We watch series such as CSI (Miami and Las Vegas), House, Sopranos, Six Feet Under and others.  It just occurred to me that many of the TV shows we watch have to do with crime, death or near-death.  I'm thinking we should get some comedy in the house.

Posted at 01:56PM Nov 19, 2006 by Amiram Hayardeny in Personal  |  Comments[1]