Shared this with the Nuffies the other day on BBM chat. I was on the way to meet our very first blogger yesterday and walked pass this salon. No it wasn’t any normal salon. The name of the salon was the best.

Yep that’s right. A hair salon, an ASS hair salon. I’m sure it was meant to be a short form to represent something, but these chinese people don’t know how to spell. Oh well, maybe when I go in I’ll sit on the chair with my ass facing up, then they’d ask me what am i doign and i’ll just point to the signage. HAHAhahahaha

——————————

Few more random posts, check this hawtie out. I love the sexy secretary glasses look.

Goddamnnn…. So hawwttt..

This is Huiwen btw, my gf. Yes I have one, no you can’t be mine. Oh you mean part time? hmm…can….not lah crazy meh….

—————————

This is my third week here at Beijing already and I’m still staying at the hotel here but I’m not complaining at all. This is my office:

Well it’s really the cafe at my hotel, which I shamelessly use as my office pretty much everyday. Look at the brightness there, the wall of the cafe is all glass which faces outside so its’ nice and bright and has a good view. What’s there to complain about. hahaha.

———————–

Tomorrow’s the last day of work before a 7 day National holiday for the Chinese people. I guess I hope I’d still be meeting bloggers during the holidays. So if you’re a blogger and you wanna know more about Nuffnang, come to Beijing to talk to me!

Yep, so this is what I had tonight. Peking Duck at one of Beijing”s best place to eat it – Da Dong. I was told it was not going to be cheap again and after consulting with Rachel , she said this one was worth the money so I trusted her and casino online went for it. Turns out it wasn”t bad and I enjoyed the food more than the previous day”s crazy expensive Thai Food. We had 2 ducks and lotsa other dishes including white wine and dessert for only RMB155 per person. Yup I say “only” becuase it was way less than yesterday”s RMB257 dinner.

Anyway, it was a good time to hang out with friends and must certainly say that for the next few days/weeks I”d be eating RMB20 and below food for all my meals!

yep, we’re good. Rachel and I spend the whole day today sending 120 emails to bloggers, 1 at a time. We finally got through all of them and at the end of the day realised that about 6-7 did reply us!! We felt like a small sense of achievement! Every email that came back in felt like a boost in morale. Good stuff.

Could see that she was really tired after the long tedious day of doing work.

I went to this place called Face Beijing for dinner after with Vig, Daniel, Wai, Anne Sophie and Wai’s friend ( i can’t remember her name damnit) and had some Thai Food dinner that costed RMB1300+ for the 6 of us?! LIKe DAMMnnnnnn……..I don’t know if it was worth that much, as in my opinion, we get just about as good Thai food anywhere else in the world. However the ambience was very nice, with the lounge-style music playing outdoors. I’d go there to chill after dinner, but maybe not for dinner.

What they’d need is some heaters outside and it’d be perfect.

At least my ride there and back costed RMB 0.80, yep thanks to the ??? (like Malaysia’s Touch n’ Go card) I took the bus for RMB 0.40 each way. Nice.

Today is a working day after a 3 day holiday. Although I was working all 3 days during the holidays it sure does feel like a Monday today since it’s like the first day of work after 3 straight days of “weekend”. Feels weird, it’s like after working 2 days (today and tomorrow), then only it’s Monday.

But work has started right now in terms of getting them bloggers! We really go hope to get some Chinese bloggers to reply to our emails. All we can do is hope.

Hung out with Juin Yi who’s here for only 2 nights from ChengDe and then going back again tomorrow early afternoon. We had some taiwanese dinner, a full body massage, and ????? Breakfast should be western tomorrow. Dinner was on her since everything’s charged to her expense account! She works for Molson Coors, the beer company that produces Coors light and a few other brands. They’re here in China to buy a manufacturing plant so that it’s cheaper to produce their beer here!

More American beer for everyone! hahaha.

It was the 2nd of the 3 day holiday and I defintiely wanted to head out for a big instead of just sitting at the hotel room not doing shit. So Vig and I decided to go to the driving range coz he was bored of the Beijing zoo shopping thing. hahaha. We asked WangTing (Rachel’s roommate) along since she’s not working and Rachel will be out on volunteer work and she wanted to try out golf for the first time as well.

I looked around for a driving range on Baidu and found quite a few. There was one closer to my hotel but it was really with shitty balls and you hit the balls to a wall instead of outwards to an open field just like Malaysia does. So I browsed a bit more and came across this one!

immediatly sold. I looked up how to get there and we met at the subway and made our way there. The people playing there were really not that good, considering China has a shit ton of people, hahaha. However, Vig with the most experience in golf amongst the 3 of us went to start teaching WangTing the super basics, and after the session, she was hooked. Muahahahahahha

she’s super adverturous she now wants to try rock climbing and bungee jumping and all. One at a time girl!

Prices for this place weren’t cheap though. There’s a cover charge per person of RMB20, then RMB30 per 50 balls which we got 200 balls, then RMB100 to rent a full set and another RMB20 to rent a ladies 7 iron for WangTing. Total was RMB300!!! You don’t pay so much for driving range, in Malaysia you go to the course already!!!!

Insane, but what to do? It’s not like China doesn’t have enough land. I think we just dont’ know the luxuries we have in Malaysia at RM10 for 100 balls, no cover charge blabla. If only the Msian government was better, our Ringgit will fly through the roof.

It’s been a while since I posted here coz i couldn’t freaking upload any pictures. But I can now! However, i’m still uploading one picture at a time coz they haven’t done the upload function for multiple pictures yet.

This is our nuffie Rachel. She invited me and a few other friends over to her place for MidAutumn festival dinner which she said it’s a big deal that it’s celebrated here in China. She cooked 8 dishes, said everything had to be in even numbers, so 8 dishes, 4 types of fruits, some red wine, and moon cake of course. 5 of us couldn’t finish all that food for sure, but we sure did pretty damn well. hehehehe

The rest of the post is just goign to be random pictures that I’ve taken the last few days and wanted to share with everyone.

We got Rachel her new Lenovo U460. One of the thinnest notebook in the market, and since we were in China, we buy as the chinese buy, LENOVO! hahahaha. Gosh the story about buying the laptops is the craziest. We went to Zhongguancun, something like the Malaysian Lowyat or the Singaporean SimLim Center. What happens when you have floors and floors of retailers/sales persons and 2 shoppers? You get the best attention! I dont’ know if best is the right way to describe it but everyone was just all over us pulling us from brand to brand. I had a few in my mind, the Lenovo, Dells, Sony or a Toshiba. The previous night I did do a bit of research and found out that this Lenovo U460 was one of the newest from Lenovo and could range from anywhere from RMB4199 – RMB6199 depending on specs. We went in armed wiht that information, and wanted to buy it with the top specs for not more than RMB4500. So we asked almost every shop. All didn’t want to give it to us for that price but then one shop finally said, OK. we’ll do it. The boss came and say fine fine we’ll just do it for that RMB4500 and stop all the back and forth. I was like yay! finally! for RMB4500 I would have to say that’s pretty damn cheap.

Now comes the crazy part. I knew China was shady but not THAT shady. While waiting for the guys to get our unit from the stock room, they pulled Rachel aside from me to cut her a deal, since they knew she was buying it for the company. They said, we’ll give it to you for RMB4500, but if you’d be willing to accept a counterfeit unit, we’d issue the receipt for RMB4500, but only charge you RMB3500 for it, so RMB1000 for you to keep.

Thank god Rachel was honest she totally declined them and notified me after. We asked for a refund and walked out of the shop. I really appreciate the fact that Rachel was totally honest about it. We’re all new to this country and she could have very well took the bribe and I didn’t know about it, but that act says a lot about her.

We then checked wiht her friend who said there’s this website that sells everything for cheap and also all genuine products! So we spent some time there taking a look at value laptops and found ourselves the Lenovo U460 for RMB4200!!! They weren’t the best specs, P6000 instead of the intel i3. But whatever, it was way cheaper so we got Rachel a wireless mouse too for RMB100. This website is 360buy.com. Check it out for cheap and genuine electronic products in China!

These are some of the new friends I’m hanging out here at Beijing. Met them all from Vig (bottom left black shirt), who was introduced to me by Steph Ng back home. Vig used to work at the Camp5 climbing gym at 1Utama and came to Beijing to study chinese. EVERYONE here came here to study chinese! and 4 of them are all Malaysians!!! insane.

Found out that Julie (front row grey top) went to LSE and will be working with PWC London after she’s done with chinese here. Kevin (far right) stays at freaking BU4, ex Sri KL, LSE, and also working at PWC London after this. Suzen (red) went to King’s College, London, and stays at Tropicana. It’s like everyone in your own backyard all the way here in Beijing and we get to meet up. Freaking cool.

Purple top girl Wai was born in HK but grew up in UK. Black top girl Klelia is from Greece, the girl behind her tha’ts hidden is AnneSophie from France, and tall white dude standing up is Daniel from Melbourne, Australia.

Went to summer palace, something like a huge Taman Jaya, the last trip I was here in Beijing. Took this picture, coz I thought the situation was hilarious! This is how it goes down in China – guy sits and relaxes eating his shit, and the girl does the work rowing the boat. I like.

They have Gen2′s in Beijing!!!

And lastly, one for the advertisers – Adidas Action 3 body wash at Watson stores here in beijing!!! Woohoooo!!!

So since most people in China can’t view blogspot.com anymore, I have started blogging at ECPod.com. However, I can’t put no pictures up yet coz the system doesn’t support uploading pictures from c:/. Waiting for the day they do. So if you all wanna know what’s going on in my life,

davidwong.ecpod.com

I think I might update here once in a while. But I need to turn on my proxy to get here, and new friends in China won’t be able to see. So….

davidwong.ecpod.com guys. woohooo

So I found out yesterday, that today is a freaking working day in China! Yes, SUNDAY! Don’t ask me why, coz apparently even the Chinese people here don’t understand why it’s so stupid. But it’s in conjuction with all the holidays around this time. So I’d give you a graphic calender if I could upload pictures here but since I can’t let me tell you in text form:

Sept 19 – 21 : Work (Yep Sept 19 is a Sunday)

Sept 22-24 : Mid-Autumn Festival holiday

Sept 25-30: Work (Yep 25 and 26 are saturday and sundays)

Oct 1-7 : National Day holiday (1 freaking week! that’s awesome! If Merdeka day in Malaysia had 7 days off that’d be sweet!!)

Oct 8-9 : Work (yep friday and saturday)

Oct 10: Sunday is off , phewwwwww

Oct 11: Back to normal work on Monday.

So yep, it was a Sunday, and I spent the whole day in my hotel room working on a presentation deck, which I suck at that’s why I took the whole freaking day. But I guess even though it wasn’t a working day I’d still be working anyway.

Oh gosh I took some pictures but somehow I don’t know how ot upload it using this ECpod platform. Gotta learn it fast or else I won’t know what to say if bloggers ask me hehehe.

Was in all day today in the hotel room since i didn’t have any meetings so I was wokring on a presentation deck but i told myself i definitely wanna go out at some point today. SMS’ed Vig and said, dude i’m fucking bored i’m going to come see u tell me what time’s best. He said 6 so I went pretty far out (the train ride is only RMB2 to anywhere anyway so tis’ cheap) to meet him and his friends. He got here just a week earlier than me to study chinese at the University of international relatinos. So i thought if you’re in a college, u’d be having a shit ton of college people there that are also international students that hang out together. And I was right! that night i met 4-5 more malaysians, people from australia, turkey, khazakstan, korea, italy, USA, UK, Nigeria, Zambia, Denmark, France, China.  Gosh I’m sure I missed out one or 2.

The craziest thing is that I actually met someone from Rosemead, CA!! that’s where I sold books my last summer in the USA!. And she told me her street name and I totally remembered selling on that street. Muscatel Ave. Gosh if I still have my maps i’d be able to tell which house had kids and what not. hahaha

anyway, it was an awesome night. Beijing’s starting to look good. I really gotta get that deck done and start meeting some bloggers next week. But next week has 3 days holiday! So hopefully we setup the legal stuff soon and I can move into a permanant place!

Art gallery tomorrow. Gosh I don’t know what it’s all about but it’s going out. So I’m game.

So the driver took me for all day meetings today. I had a 10am, 11.30am, 1.30pm, and 4pm. He didn’t take me back to the hotel after the 4pm meeting but left me as soon as he dropped me to go see some other clients, and gave me a RMB50 discount. I wasn’t too fussed about it as it gave me a chance to go try to get home by myself. When I say home I mean the hotel which it looks like I’ma be staying here for a while til we get our legal issues sorted out.

Anyway, it was my first time trying out the subway. DIdn’t even know how to buy the ticket. haha. and you have to scan your bags everytime you go into a subway station, and not all the trains have airconditioning! Anyway it was fairly cheap at RMB2 for a trainride to anywhere.

Then it was also my first time making a phone call to the helpline at China Mobile Blackberry helpdesk to ask some shit about my blackberry. Sure I tried to listen, but I understood half of what the dude was saying. I probably ask my colleague tomorrow what’s up with the person why can’t they speak proper chinese that I can understand hahahaa.

Aite will update on my adventures as it comes along.