A few pics

I promised these. My current apartment has 2 bedrooms, living room with dining area, kitchen and two bathrooms. The outside view is from my balcony and the pool picture is from the neighbourhood.

I'll post more later if requested.

OP out.

The eco news headlines are all bad, but is it really?

I'll comment on my new apartment with photos later. Markvs asked for some pics and I've taken a few, but haven't uploaded any. They are coming, though.

Here's a bit of ecological news I picked up. Don't drink water from the Yellow River:

"The Yellow River, the second-longest in China, has seen its water quality deteriorate rapidly in the last few years, as discharge from factories increases and water levels drop because of diversion for booming cities.

The river supplies a region chronically short of water but rich in industry.

The Yellow River Conservancy Committee said 33.8 percent of the river's water sampled registered worse than level 5, meaning it's unfit for drinking, aquaculture, industrial use and even agriculture, according to criteria used by the United Nations Environmental Program.

Only 16.1 percent of the river samples reached level 1 or 2 — water considered safe for household use.

Industry and manufacturing made up 70 percent of the discharge into the river, the notice said, with 23 percent coming from households and 6.4 percent from other sources. The notice did not identify specific pollutants."

The numbers above are not relevant, but what is, is the fact that the pollution is being acknowledeged. The real hope anyone can have at this point is that no other agency comes up with a competing study saying the water is safe (with percentages of their own.) Remember, there is no need to worry for the environment per se - you need to worry for the people living in the environment.

The news post lists a few other previous events related to water quality. Note this one: "In February pollution turned part of a major river system in central China red and foamy, forcing authorities to cut water supplies to as many as 200,000 people."

That is a case where nothing was done until the water was visibly unusable. Red and foamy. The problem is that the factories near the rivers are important to the local citizens. Working in a factory can offer a steady, safe and comfortable conditions compared to farming. And I'm not joking. Amid all the crap you hear about labour laws in China the factories are important sources for employment in many areas. You can't close them and say "go environment." But at least in this case, we are noting the water pollution before the river is red and foamy. There's hope that it doesn't become as bad.

Perhaps it will be easier to control pollution growth next year. The forecast is lower, coming to a 7.5% economic growth. That's the lowest rate since 1990. Keep it in mind when you evaluate environmental news in the coming year. The challenges are huge and control mechanisms often need to be built from the ground up. Small factories and shops have none existent or next to none environmental control.

But remember, China is trying. You might have heard Hong Kong has natual gas taxis running around, but did you know so does Guangzhou? Actually, Guangzhou has natural gas taxis and electric buses. I've even taken a trip in a domestically produced gas taxi in Guangzhou, very few cities let alone countries have similar setups. On a related note, Shell just agreed to sell two million tonnes of liquified naural gas to Petrochina under a 20 year contract.

The full newsposts are available at:
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20081125/ap_on_re_as/as_china_polluted_river
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20081125/ap_on_bi_ge/as_china_economy
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20081125/ap_on_bi_ge/as_china_shell_lng

OP out.

More about driving

Driving really shows the true nature of people.

When I drive inside to my apartment's car park, I have to cross an opposing traffic lane. There is a bumb just before my car park's entrance on the opposing lane, so that the car's wouldn't drive so fast and let people move in and out from the condominium.

However, again today, there was an idiot who thought that HE should go before me, so he decide to speed up while approaching the access point to my condo (and the bumb). BAM! His brand new Mercedes' bottom hit the bumb, and hopefully there's at least a minor oil leak now. It was truly hilarious, and serves him/her right.

And this leads me to;

Maybe it's a bit hard to explain or prove in a blog entry, but people really are "me first" "I'm here" "me me me" etc etc. all the fucking time. One proof, however, could be that every brand or product name with letter "i" or letters "my" in the front sell ridiculously well.

People are mass-individuals. These kind of blogs are one way to trick ordinary people believe that they matter.

Coincidences

I'm moving. This Saturday I plan to move the main load and hand over the old keys on Sunday. I have paid the first 6 months' rent, deposit and I've got the keys. But I'll tell you how the moving went after the fact.

I'm just here to share with you that I got a nice deal, partly through luck.

The housing area is said to be the best in Taizhou. It certainly looks the part - all of the 20+ buildings are less than 5 years old, near the city center but off the main road enough to be quiet and peaceful. There's a lush green hill on the other side. I've been there once before, asking about prices. The cheapest was 3300 RMB/month.

This time we decided I wouldn't take part in the apartment hunt at all and that I would only come look at an apartment once my wife had been trough the price negotiation.

So she did. She waded through several agencies, until the she found a nice deal. Trough the surprising Chinese social network. Guangxi. The real estate agent knew a friend of a landlord, whom my wife met when looking through agents. The friend was involved in the price negotiation and agreed to the terms.

2500 /month, 6 months up front, 3000 as a deposit. The average, we found out, is 3300-4000 /month, 12 (!) months up front, 5000 as a deposit. And since the friend had agreed to this, the landlord actually agreed too. When she arrived to the realtor she wasn't too happy. Actually, she had specified a higher rent for the apartment. But my wife had had the presence of mind to make sure and doubly sure that the price was the agreed one. After the landlord saw me, she remarked she should've push for a better price since I was foreign. On the other hand, she was relieved that she wouldn't really need to worry about her getting the rent money.

So, the air conditioners were bought in today while the TV cable was installed. The utilites all work and we'll be the first tenants in the apartment. The Internet will be set up tomorrow. I'll grab a few pictures once I get all my stuff sorted away. It's a short move from one part of the city to another, about 30 minutes in a car, so I expect things to go reasonably well.

OP Out.

Efficiency

Efficiency is when you march in to an office with papers in tow and the official makes your certificate while you wait. But I'm getting a little ahead of the story here.

About a month ago I contacted the Finnish maistrate asking how to apply for a paper declaring myself free to wed in a foreign country. It turned out they had a simple application available online, which they required signed as well as a second form they needed but didn't have online. The official in Finland was nice and responsive on the phone and emailed me the missing application to me the same night.

These maistrate applications were easy to get, but required additional work. The two steps were the Finnish Ministry of Foreign Affairs who legalized the certificate by stamping and signing it. You see, Finland and China are not part of a mutual agreement where official documents of both nations would be directly usable in both. Instead, the stamped and signed official documents needs a second set of official identifiers from the government. This I got done by using a relative in Finland. They charged about 20e.

The second step was the Chinese embassy in Finland. For a document of this nature to be accepted in China, they need to authorize the legalization with a further stamp (it comes with a cool hologram sticker too.) They charged a little under 60e but were fast as well. The mail-in service is cheaper but takes longer (one day for 60e versus a week for 20e.) With this, the certificate is ready and has about five stamps and four signatures. Plus your own signature.

Get the paper to China. 100e for the courier covered my cost, but it was quick. I strongly recommend against cheaper options for important documents.

In China the local notary will need to translate the document. This is the step where all the stamps are needed, as the translation will be official too. The Zhejiang notary did the translation in a reasonable timeframe, for less than 200 RMB. They then stamp the Chinese translation together with the original document, so that now your certificate has five and a half stamps plus four plus two signatures. You are ready for the final hurdle, the local bureau in charge of the wedding registry.

You would expect it to be horrible by now, right? We walked in at about 10am with the documents in tow. The official took them asked for a copy of a couple of them (Household registry for my significant other, identifications) and gave a pair of documents to fill. Name, Date of Birth and such, nothing you couldn't answer off the top of your head unless you forgot where you were born. There was even a service available to have the paper filled for you if you couldn't read/write. (Not catering to the foreigners, but they would help a laowai too, I assume.)

The official checked the documents, printed a confirmation out and asked for one more signature plus 9 RMB. Official documents followed immediately.

The last step of the journey took 30 minutes, three A4 papers and no hassle at all. I walked out with a Chinese marriage certificate bound in a small red booklet with golden letters on top. Fancier than what would be provided in Finland.

I wish to apologize for all my lady readers seeking an eligible bachelor, there's one less fish in the sea.

OP out.

Kefsi

KFC. What a place. I liked it at first, but now I don't. For the food part.

The food there is worse than in McDonalds, and so is the service. I recommend you don't go to KFC. Yesterday I was really vittu kun vituttaa mood, so I went to KFC and ordered takeaway. They gave me next to none plastic bags plus I had to wait 10 minutes, because employees had a good laugh together.

When I finally received my goods, I told the KFC guy that "MARKUS WANT TAKE AWAY" and he said "take away?" ran to the kitchen and never came back. I never received any plastic bags nor shit. So I just yelled loudly some Finnish curse words and left to eat my thingie elsewhere.

Oh no, KFC must now be the most terrible place correct? Yeah well in McD they at least know how to serve, and they understand the concept of FAST food better. So I know now where my coins go in the future.

I have experience of KFC in three different countries (Poland, Hong Kong and Malaysia) so don't come nagging at me how KFC deserves justice. Fuck KFC.

Vittu ku vituttaa

Vituttaa so perkeleesti, that I'm too vitun tired to write any vitun entries for this or last week. I had a topic, but it was too diluted to post. 100 motrocyclists beat-up a car who tried to pass the mob after an accident in center of Kuala Lumpur. Whoopee. There it is anyway.

Albeit that is not what vituttaa me, but other things. Vitun vittu.

Markvs out. Vittu.

spicy eggplant and salted fish with rice.

Back in July Markus wrote a post about food. It's been a long-forgotten topic but I thought I'd approach it from a different angle.

Let me start with a few very simple and really short stories:

1. Today I ate some microwave food because I was too lazy to cook. I had some Spicy Eggplant and Salted Fish with Rice. In days prior I've had foods like Sichuan style beef, curry chicken in coconut milk and Rise, some Japanese style fried noodles with seafood, etc. These are all microwave foods.

2. My girlfriend's sister and her boyfriend were visiting us a few weeks back and I offered to cook. To the surprise of everyone, I made absolutely awesome meatballs together with brown sauce (secret ingredients included) with potatoes and a salad. I thought my cooking was awesome ("just like home!"), my girlfriend (who has some experience from my cooking before) thought it was "good", her sister and sister's boyfriend thought it was weird. Out of politeness they told me it's good, but as I asked my girlfriend later, I found the truth.

3. If I buy snacks, I buy potato chips, coke and sometimes sweets. If my girlfriend buys snacks, she'll get dried seaweed, fried prawn (or other seafood that is fried in similar way as chips), and maybe ice lemon tea for drink.

Of the above stories, number 2 is the most important for this topic. We Finns cringe at too exotic foods like, let's say, oriental seafood. We don't like tentacles in our food. However, as story 2 shows, not everyone agrees that potato is awesome. Or that a simple setting of three articles (=potato, meatballs and sauce) is enough to make a proper meal. I remember at the university some years back, the newly arrived Chinese (and some of the Europeans) exchange students found Finnish food very plain and boring - and again with the potatoes!

So, where am I getting with this? Well, it's what we all knew already before: Food is a matter of culture.

No big discovery there, eh?

It wasn't supposed to be a big discovery. It was to make a point of the fact, no food culture holds a de facto title "the best food in the world". We are often fooled to think that where we come from is better from "somewhere else". Especially if we come from Europe, the supposedly "better place" in the world.

I'll share two other stories.

4. When I was a toddler and up untill I was about 10 years old, I didn't like pizza at all. It didn't matter what was on it. I just didn't like pizza. I hated it. But then the unexpected cultural marvel from the America came to Finland and I found myself forced to accept that pizza is good. Turtles. I became a huge fan of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and like everyone knows, they just love pizza. Being a big fan of them, I could not NOT like pizza. So, I forced myself to like it. Didn't take me too long to like it, love it. And since then I always count pizza as one my favourite foods.

5. In my late teens when alcohol started playing a part in my life, I began with the "girlie drinks" like cider or vodka with blenders. Stuff like that. Anything that was sweet enough to cover the taste of alcohol would be good. Beer, no way. Beer was like crap. Well, one time me and some friends were on a budget and were forced to combine our monies and buy a case of cheap beer instead of expensive cider or long drink (it's always about the money-to-alcohol ration in that age). Didn't yet like beer after 4 bottles but for the sake of getting drunk, I was willing to accept it. After a few more beers, I was starting to like it. After few even more, it was good! Today, I actually like beer a lot. I really like it. I like it so much I may just buy one bottle for the taste of it and drink it without ever intending to get drunk.

Now, continuing about that discovery of "food is a matter of culture".

Prejudice - in this case culinary prejudice - keeps us from seeking new things we might enjoy after some subjugation. When we're young, our parents tell us to eat the veggies. We don't like them but our parents force us. As time goes by, we grow to accept them. Later we might even like them - enough at least to force our own kids to eat their veggies too. It's the same thing when we grow up. We don't like something and we don't want to eat it but this time there are no parents to force you. So you skip it. You never learn to like it either, though, but you could be missing out something. Great to be an adult.

Now, I'm a big fan of Cantonese food (a foodculture Markus bashed quite badly in July) but I didn't get this way just by picking up the safe foods. It's a lot of trial and error actually. The selection of dishes and whole styles of kitchen is simply so vast that it takes a lot of time to find the foods that are really honestly superb. In the mass of foods, there are some that are actually not that great - some are just misunderstood.

Hong Kong is mostly known, not only by Cantonese cuisine, but also because it has a really vast selection of world kitchens available (as mentioned by Markus as well). Granted, if you come here (or go anywhere) as a tourist, you're most likely given the finest things around. Tried foods, accepted by everyone. The tourist guidebooks will tell you what to eat and where to eat it. These restaurants will charge you extra but for that money you get an english menu and food that is "safe".

Stray from the path of guidebook righteousness and you'll find yourself staring at some very funky local foods. Not tried and tested cliché's but real local food. What is easily forgotten is that a vast majority of restaurants in Hong Kong actually offer food that should be graded "home cooking", not restaurant food. Their function is not to provide tourists fine dining experiences with first class wine, but offer local workers their low-cost lunch or dinner. We don't have ANY comparison points for these restaurants in Finland. None. Period. If you compare a Finnish restaurant to a Hong Kong one, stick to the restaurants in Hong Kong that serve tourists.

Anyway, I think I should start to summarize this post.

Story #1 tells us that despite Hongkongese people buying microwave foods, they don't go for western foods. They still like their own thing. Spaghetti is available, sure, but aside from that, most microwave foods I've found are very localized.

Story #2 emphasizes the above point by showing that even when served to the table, western food (no matter how good) won't make Hongkongese abolish their fondness to Cantonese food and convert to western cuisines.

Story #3 gives us a peek view that local preferences go to all aspects of food culture. The choice of snack sounds trivial but would you (our average Finnish reader) choose dried seaweed over potato chips for a night our at the cinema? Didn't think so.

Stories #4 and #5 finally prove that we all grow to like new things by subjugation. We like some things by nature, some we need to learn.

Did you know western fondness to salt and salty foods is a learned habit? So is the liking of sweet things. If we never tasted salt or sugar in our youth, we would later in life find both yucky. Ever tasted food that was too salty or too sweet? There ya go...

So, next time you don't like a food that other people seem to enjoy, you can think whether the problem is in the other people, the food, or you.

Just as a note to the end, let it be mentioned that I did have a point to all this when I started writing but I forgot it. It had something to do with the actual food culture - not with eating habits. Well, maybe I'll re-do this post at some later time once I remember my actual point again.

From Finland, for a Change

News from Finland Follows.

For our Finnish speaking readers here's the YLE link:
http://www.yle.fi/uutiset/kotimaa/oikea/id107158.html

For everyone else:
In Finland, Imatra, the local vicar (I think the translation vicar, a clergyman, I mean a clergyman) is going to undergo a sex change operation. A Finnish newspaper interviewed the man, soon to be woman, who told the media he had been found transgenered and will begin the corrective treatments early next year.

The local bishop in the Church has promised to talk with the man in person next week and discuss whether it will be possible for the vicar to continue in his current occupation.

I'm sure the bishop is in a difficult position. The church in Finland cannot really hold on to all of the traditional views and you most certainly cannot fire an employee over a medical procedure. On the other hand, I assume, it will be difficult for the bishop personally to accept this change. And it will most definitely set a precident in Finland. It should be interesting to see the follow up. Remember, the idea of allowing gay people to register their relationship is a relatively new idea - allowing gay people to work for the church is newer still.

I personlly hope he wil be allowed to continue should he so choose and I hope the congregation is open-minded enough to accept him back to his old duties once the treatments are over.

OP out.

New Figures

I've been thinking whether I should post about all the bad news I read from China after all or not. But this one I will share with you.

In Zhuhai, at the town of Baijiao (Guandong province,) a truck driver allegedly had a row with the police over traffic violations and swore revenge. This is not for certain. But what is for certain is that the truck driver ran intentionally in to a group of highschool students leaving school, killing 4 students, a parent and injured 20 others, some severely. Three are still critical or in a coma.

I haven't reported here of the recent landslides, with bigger numbers attached to them. But the volume of bad news isn't going down at all. I'm actually starting to understand the Chinese Government's idea of the freedom of press. If the press, instead of neutrally reporting all news flocks like a pack of vulture to the scene only if there is a carcass involved shouldn't someone push them away? I hope the news actually give the same courtesy as other countries would have. 

When a tragedy occurs in a Western country it is reported and then followed up by articles of the grief work the involved. It's closure and I can imagine it worth a lot for the people reading of their life in the news. But no so much in foreign news about China. Unless it's a total disaster, the news reports a figure and swoops after the next corpse. 

I've in the past critqued the Chinese news about their attitudes. But in a case like this, it's the Chinese news who follow up and bring up angles to the news, other than a casualty figure. 

Me reading news to you is getting old, I believe, but it's partly me trying to form a reasonable view for myself, between the mistruths and slanted opinionated news. 

See for yourself if you think this is reasonable and sufficient coverage of the issue. This is an updated article, but they only bothered to update it since the numbers grew.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20081106/wl_asia_afp/chinaaccidentschool

Bedroom magic

There's two kinds of magic that generally happen in bedrooms. The first one is what you all thought I would preach about, the second is geckos.

Geckos are awesome. In many countries, you'd have to build a big terrarium with funky gadgets for life-support and all that to have a pet gecko - and you'd have to feed them. Here, they are self-sufficient and don't even ask for permission to be your pet. They invite themselves in and make it home. Granted, they run around so fast that you don't get to see them a lot (that's why I don't have a picture taken of one yet). So, as such a pet, they're not as much fun maybe, even less so than a cat.

So, what's so bedroom magical about gecko's?

Well, the 'bedroom' parts comes from the fact that they invite themselves in, and pretty much go wherever they feel like going. Including the bedroom. Killing a gecko is not like killing a mosquito (a lot messier, and quite difficult as well - hence I've skipped that part so far), so they pretty much get their way. Besides, geckos are cool and they are effective insect-killing-machines so why would I want to kill one anyway? I can choose between having a cool gecko around, or a bunch of cockroaches and other insects. Not a difficult pick. Thus, if they want to go to the bedroom, they can, and they will. Luckily that doesn't happen so often, and usually not at a time when humans inhabit the bedroom - they have thing about people around and cool air (aircon).

The 'magic' part comes from the fact that geckos operate 97% on magic. This came as a surprise to me as I was researching into their case.

You noticed how geckos can walk on walls like it was no problem? That is because it is not a problem for them. In fact, they're wall-walking-wonders: No suction cups, no stickyness, liquids or surface tension! They stick to walls because (wikipedia):

• ...the patula tipped setae on gecko footpads demonstrate that the attractive forces that hold geckos to surfaces are van der Waals interactions1 between the finely divided setae and the surfaces themselves
• Every square millimeter of a gecko's footpad contains about 14,000 hair-like setae
• Each seta has a diameter of 5 micrometers (human hair varies from 18 to 180 micrometer, so a human hair could hold between 3 to 30 setae)
• Each seta is in turn tipped with between 100 and 1,000 spatulae
• Each spatula is 0.2 micrometres long (200 billionths of a metre), or just below the wavelength of visible light

So, what did I tell ya? Magic. In effect, a gecko merges with the molecular structure of the surface its walking on. Or at least that's my free interpretation of it.

Now get this (wikipedia again):

• Geckos' toes operate well below their full attractive capabilities for most of the time (...because there is a great margin for error depending upon the roughness of the surface [and so they compensate and leave room for error])
• If a typical mature 70 g gecko had every one of its setae in contact with a surface, it would be capable of holding aloft a weight of 133 kg

Try convince me that isn't magic?

Artur C. Clarke said, "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.", and I can definiteky agree with that. With geckos, moreso, it's not even a technology - it's what they do naturally. Super awesome!

Now, I suppose that wraps it for geckos. I know there are tons of animals and creatures around with magical abilities. I just thought I'd share my liking to the powers of the gecko - since they've taken a liking to running around my apartment walls.

On the topic of bedroom magic, I could mention my thinking on the human bedroom magic as well, for what it comes to Asia and also how everything relates to my post earlier about sucky jobs.

Don't worry, this is mostly quite scientifical and proper.

In the 'working nations' of Asia (my freshly inveted word for China, Hong Kong, Japan, Singapore, South Korea and Taiwan) people work as if it was the sole purpose of human life. Or so it seems. In my sucky jobs post I brought the example of factory workers who most likely have to skip large parts of their personal life just to be able to work efficiently (and not lose their jobs). In Hong Kong, many people work 10-12 hours a day and have some overtime on top of that as well - 6 days a week.

In Japan, full-time workers, both male and female, average 55 hours of work per week. One in three men aged 30-40 puts in more than 60 hours a week. Half of them are not even being paid for any of their overtime. There was even a deathcase in July, when a 45-year-old engineer at Toyota died after working more than 80 hours of overtime a month.

In Korea, people rank highest in working hours in OECD country study: with 2390 hours a year (quick calculation: 2390 / 52 = 45.96), that's roughly 46 hours a week. South Korea and Japan are the only countries where death by work or "karoshi" (過労死) is a recognized phenomenon (wikipedia).

Anyway, to put a long story short, is it a wonder that the "working nations" of Asia rank low in sex studies? I just had a look at the Durex2005 Global Sex Survey, and under "Frequency of sex", you'll see that Japan ranks lowest (45 per year), Singapore (73), Hong Kong (78), Taiwan (88), China (96), all well below the global average (103). Finland scored 102 and the 'winner' was Greece with a score of 138. Sweden, for some reason, scored only 92. South Korea was not included.

I'm sure culture plays a very big part in this; the general view on sex and dating, and all that. However, if you spend such a great portion of your day at work, busting your balls (figuratively speaking especially if a girl/woman), you don't have much energy for anything - especially if you get home late and need to wake up early again. You manage to put some time for sex too, of course, but no way as much as the life-loving Europeans or other westeners who have jobs only to pay for the "life" and work as little as possible.

I don't know how Sweden's low (or the relatively low score of Finland) fit to this theory of mine, except that maybe the sampling wasn't really good - or, especially in Finland's case, plans for sex are frequent, but with alcohol and late-nights in the mix too, perhaps people tend to pass out and fall asleep before any action happens. Who knows.

Well anyway, that's all about bedroom magic now. Remember, geckos rock!

Tchau.


1 In, the van der Waals force (or van der Waals interaction), named after Dutch scientist, is the attractive or repulsive force between molecules (or between parts of the same molecule) other than those due to or to the electrostatic interaction of ions with one another or with neutral molecules.