"Meeting with Ben"

After we got down from The Great Wall, we had dinner with Ben, my contact in Beijing, and his friend David. Ben is a businessman who lives part time in China, part time in California. He is Chinese, and it was very interesting for us all to hear his opinions on China. David is an American, married to a Chinese girl and working in Beijing now. He has studied Chinese for one year, thought English for six months, and spent a total of three years in China. It was also very interesting to hear his stories.

The night before Adam, Viktor, Viktor and me had dinner with just Ben. He took us to a "Hot Pot" place. It was a very Chinese place, probably never had any foreign guests. Ben ordered a lot of food, and we were constantly eating for about two hours, getting so full that we were about to burst. "Hot Pot" is a very normal way to eat in Chinese restaurants. You get a large pot of boiling water placed over a heating source, usually natural gas. Then you order your food and get it served raw. You drop some in, a little at a time, and let it cook for a minute. Then you pick it back out and eat it. We had sliced chicken, sliced pork, shrimp balls, lotus root, different mushrooms and fungus, and many vegetables.

It was all very good, and Ben explained about life in China, answering our questions. Some of the things we talked about were how China only is communist in the name, not the real world (In the next blog post there will be a great example of this). They do have some strict regulations, but with almost 1.4 billion people, they need some regulation that is not necessary in smaller populations, like Norway (4.8 million), Sweden (9 million), or the United States (300 million). Many of these restrictions affect what we in the west would consider as the freedom of speech. Here in China, Facebook, Youtube, Blogspot, and many other sites on the Internet are blocked. If you Google "the massacre at Tian'anmen Square", you will get not get any results here in China. Wikipedia is also restricted, and almost no pages on Wikipedia show the pictures.

China also has a lot of other rules, like traffic regulation. These however, no one follows. This we had of course already noticed. Cars, taxies, police cars, busses, mopeds, electric bicycles, pedestrians, people holding kites, people selling things on the street, and us, were all moving around in their own small bubbles. No wonder Beijing is one of the top ten, if not the city with the most traffic accidents. When driving us to the Hot Pot place, I asked Ben if it was hard to find a parking spot in Beijing, kind of a rhetorical question, I thought. He said: "Yes, but it is not that hard to park the car, because everyone just park where they find a little bit of open space. It does not matter if it is a parking spot or not." Then he turned into a small back alley and parked the car. I asked if he could get a ticket for parking there. He told me he could, but that it almost never happened.

The same story went for Chinese business culture also. Ben did not like businessmen in China, because here they may commit to something, only to stab you in the back later, or do illegal maneuvers that in the US would have been possible to sue for, but not in China. This make me a little worried about the future. China is for sure filling their sails with wind, gaining ground on the rest of the world as I type this. But if the Chinese business culture does not change, this can give them problems when taking even more of the western markets. Especially in more high-tech and advanced fields of business, like energy, research and IT.

After the dinner Ben drove us out to the Olympic park, so we could see the Water Cube and the Birds nest. Sadly, they had turned off the lights in the Water Cube right before we got there. But we did get to see the Birds Nest with lights on, before they turned them off as we drove away.

The dinner with Ben and David was in a normal restaurant, and as we looked down the menu they had everything from pig faces, wild turtles, and fish stew with turtle claws. We had some different food (none of the ones listed above) and it was all good. We ordered a lot of different dishes, and everyone shared everything. This is how almost all meals in China are eaten. And it is very convenient with the chopsticks when eating like this. You can reach far, and lift almost anything.

David told us about life as an English teacher in China. He had been in Qing Dao, a beautiful port city, east of Beijing. It used to be a German settlement, and has many German-style churches and other buildings. David was working 18 hours a week, and made 5000 RMB a month. He stayed at the school, and with the cheap food, he could barely figure out how to spend his money. They are desperate for English teachers in China (and most other countries in Asia). You don't need to speak the local language, and you don't need an education. According to David, you can fly out here, and be employed within a week if you look around for ads in the newspapers. You can get a job at a university, an evening private school, or a high school. You usually have short days, and a lot of time to do other things. During my stay here in Beijing I have met several others doing the same. It seems like a great thing to do! You can of course make a lot more money teaching in Japan, but it is so much more expensive to live there, that China seems to be people's normal choice at the moment.