Zhanga: May 18, 2007

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Friday, May 18, 2007 (4 comments)

You know, I hate it when people/companies say "blah blah OVER 50%!!!!" when it's 50.002%, or "blah blah over 25 essential nutrients" when it's actually 5 vitamins and 19 minerals, plus fat and water. Even worse is when you have "blah blah SUPER PACKAGE WORTH OVER $274!!!!!" when it's really a toothbrush that they claim is worth $67, a bottle of super-duper toothpaste "worth" $150, and a roll of toilet paper "worth" $57. (That adds up to $274.) Then if you're lucky (one of the first 3 customers, last name begins with Qzc, ...), you are eligible to receive a FREE!!!! disposable razor, valued at over $12!!! (Thus justifying the over part of the "over $x," since the average "value" is more than $x.)

Anyways, I don't know why I typed all that, because all I'm trying to do here is make fun of poor English. This misuse of "over" here is getting out of hand:

...each of our six executives has over many years of experience in various fields.

Wow, what an anticlimactic half page I just wrote. Sorry to disappoint.

Ok so the next thing I want to say is that it's really hot here. Too bad I can't leave the room to cool myself off (aren't I hilarious?). Yesterday afternoon, I looked at the weather and it was 90 degrees in Shanghai. The Atlanta high was 72. Ahhh!

I ate a lot of food last night. I went around looking for a restaurant, and walked past a lot of places because they looked too expensive. Then I went into a semi-crappy-looking shopping center/mall type place, and walked towards the inside. It's well-known that you can get better prices on items from stores towards the inside of a shopping place because they see less customers and pay less rent, so I figured restaurants would work like this too.

Well, apparently the same doesn't hold for restaurants, because I paid 127 RMB for the meal. I will admit that it was very filling and highly satisfying, though. Besides the price, there is one other thing I'm a little upset about. They asked me what I wanted to drink, and I said I wanted 水, which in the past I had always thought was water. Well, it turns out I was wrong. Apparently, it means corn juice. Yes, corn juice. I'm not sure how much it cost me, but I think it was somewhere around 15 RMB. Could have gotten an entire bowl of noodles + soup on the street for that price. Argh. Needless to say, it didn't taste very good either.

My mom called me later that night and happened to ask me what I ate. She actually sounded pretty happy that I indulged myself and ate there. I guess she's getting tired of her own cheapness showing up in me.

By the way, even though banks will exchange your money at around 7.7 RMB = 1 USD, that's not really how much it's worth. Wikipedia says that the World Bank estimates that in purchasing power parity terms, 1.8 RMB = 1 USD. This basically means that stuff that you can buy for 1 USD in the States will go for 1.8 RMB here (obviously this applies to a basket of goods, not every particular good on the market). Shanghai's PPP value is something like 2.5 RMB = 1 USD, so stuff here is a bit more expensive than most of China. Using those numbers, my opportunity cost for that meal was >$50. Ouch. Not to mention that I have to work over 12 hours to make 127 RMB...

I can't decide if this is amusing to me, but I've been getting a lot of phone calls looking for people who aren't me. This happened a lot when I first got my cell in the States too, but the difference is that when people mistakenly dialed my 678 number, they would say sorry and hang up. That doesn't happen in China...

The second night I had my phone, I got a call from number A. I picked up and I said wei wei wei wei wei a lot and didn't get a response. Then number B called. This was some lady looking for her friend. The first thing she said to me was, "Who are you?" Of course, I replied, "What? Why are you asking me that? Who are YOU?" Obviously, that got nowhere. After a while, she asked me if I knew her friend. Of course not, I told her, I'm American. She told this to some guy in the background, and he got mad and told me that American phone numbers don't have numbers like the one I have (duh). I explained to her that I arrived in Shanghai just a few days ago, and she kept asking me where in Shanghai I was. What a creep. It would have been funny to tell her "im in ur fone, stealing ur numberz" but I'm not sure how to translate that into Chinese and still preserve the effect. (Every sag who reads this is now going, wtf? Try a Google image search on "cats in ur" -- it's an Internet meme thing.)

I couldn't manuver her off the phone, but I guess that eventually God got tired of the insanity and made some sort of electromagnetic disturbance, disconnecting our call.

Then number A called again. I heard some guys talking in the background, but no response to my repeated wei wei wei wei'ing.

Then number B called again. This didn't really get anywhere. She asked me if I had registered my number (it's a process that associates your name/ID with a cell number), and I told her yes, I did. Then she said she'd go check the info on my number and see if it's actually mine or if I was lying to her. Then she said something about "If it's not actually your number..." but I didn't really understand the second half of that sentence because my Chinese sucks. She also told me that her friend has always used this number, so she couldn't possibly have dialed the wrong number and this couldn't possibly be legitimately my number. Whatever, woman.

By the way, those four calls all came within the same 20-minute span. I was actually a bit creeped out.

A week passed, and I only got maybe one or two random calls. Then yesterday, I got a random call while I was at work. Whoever it was hung up less than one second after it rang, before I got to pick up. Later at night, while I was at the hot pot place, the number called again. The following ensued:

Me: 喂？
Guy: 喂 [some useless stuff]
Me: 你是找谁？
Guy: 我找我的女儿。
Me: 我不是你找的人。
Guy: 你是什么时候买这个号码的？
Me: 上个星期。
(Guy hears this as "下个星期"。)
Guy: 少废话！
Me: 上个星期。
Guy: 我一直在用这个号码！
Me: 对不起，你打错号码了。
Guy: 我打错号码你的妈！你--

In English:

Me: Wei？
Guy: Wei [some useless stuff]
Me: You are looking for whom?
Guy: I'm looking for my daughter.
Me: I'm not the person you want.
Guy: When did you buy this cell number?
Me: Last week.
(Guy hears this as "next week.")
Guy: Bullshit/Cut the crap (literally "less useless words")!
Me: Last week.
Guy: I've always been using this number!
Me: I'm sorry, you dialed the wrong number.
Guy: I dialed the wrong number your mom! You--

I hung up at the end. When people hang up on me, my cell doesn't automatically terminate the call, so maybe it's a limitation of the Chinese cell phone system. If his cell has the same problem, then he probably continued to yell into his phone for the next couple of minutes, not realizing I hung up. In any case, it's been a day and he hasn't called back yet.

One last thing. There's a guy in the investment firm whose name somehow sounds like a woman's name. I had just assumed from the name that the person was female, and I was surprised to find out that he isn't. Apparently, this gets other people too. I'm always amused by potential clients who email him and greet him as "小姐" (literally "little older sister," basically a term used to refer to a young woman).

And one more tangentially related thing. I was out eating with this guy whose apartment I'm living in, and he called for a waitress by using the standard waitress call, "小姐." (Does the period go inside the quotes, as in English, or outside, as in Chinese? I'm confused.) Anyways, the targeted waitress as well as a nearby waiter turned around. The guy with me pointed at the waitress and said in a kind of embarrassed, unsure way, "Uhhhh, I meant you..."

Ok, that last one probably wasn't funny or interesting. Oh well. At least this was a long post, so maybe I'll take a break for a while.

12:12PM

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