Inexplicable

There is a young lady who works at the hotel in the front at the bottom 
floor.  i know, you might think, "Blair, that's the lobby, you moron!", 
and in this case you would be absolutely incorrect. The lobby is on the 
33rd floor.  Anyway, her job is to greet you, press the elevator button, 
locate which of the 5 elevators opens first, then press your floor and 
welcome you to the hotel.  If you manage to do any of these things on 
your own, you will see a hurt expression on her face, which i've taken 
to mean is disappointment that you don't think that she's capable of her 
job.

i've mentioned before that the first thing you do upon entering your 
room is to push the "do not disturb button".  there are no people 
wandering around on the floor, but if you don't hit that button, your 
door gets rung every 20 to 30 minutes, regardless of the time, as near i 
can figure.  Housekeeping comes at crazy random times, as does the turn 
down service.  If you decide to opt out of any of these services, accept 
that your voicemail will be full of messages.  I finally realized 
yesterday, that the secret to happiness would be to use these services 
at your convenience. before you leave in the morning or whenever, call 
guest services to get your room cleaned.  if you're going out for 
dinner, call guest services for the turn down service, so that when you 
think you should be sleeping at 11 and you forgot to turn on the privacy 
light, you don't have someone ringing you at midnight for turn down 
service.  i can't really figure out if these people are paid per room or 
per hour....and if it's per hour, if there's a difference between that 
and per room.  it's simply their job, work with them, or you're working 
against them.  i knokw that it has improved the service of my room.  i 
generally drink a couple of the free water bottles in my room per day.  
now i have 6 available, instead of the 2 that i started out with.  they 
also now get replenished by the turn down service.

i've been trying to get things in order of first views since i've been 
here, but, honestly, it's pure sensory overload.  so many different 
things and ways of doing things, and sights and smells (some of which i 
have yet to determine - not altogether sure that i want to clarify them 
to myself.)  i find myself sitting down at the local cafe, the Sugar 
Box, enjoying a terrific pastry and some Pu Err tea (some sort of black 
tea, i think...maybe it's red, hard to determine, you apparently have to 
look at the leaf colour, but they're underneath the filter and it's sort 
of tough to determine the difference between red and black), in the 
mornings, contemplating the sites, and wondering why i feel so very, 
very comfortable in a seriously foreign environment.

i think that one of the big things that sticks out to me is seeing 
mothers with their children here.  i have yet to see a tantrum, at all.  
mothers are seriously doting on their children, and constantly play 
games with them in public, they are obviously proud, and random people 
will also play games with them.  it's always nice to see their faces 
light up when i wave to their staring children and smile or laugh at 
them.  they invariably wave and say "bye bye"  to me, to the distinct 
pleasure of their parent(s).  i absolutely love that.

it's also distinctly odd that you see small children wandering around 
without any parents in site, and nobody freaks out.  i assume that they 
eventually find their way home.  i saw a 5 year old girl wandering 
around the mall the other day, nobody else in sight, and clearly she was 
where she was supposed to be, it was i who was not, based on the dirty 
look she gave me.  hard not to laugh and obtain an even dirtier look.

i think when i first got here i wrote about power adapter problems. the 
only actual problem with power adapters, besides the fact that they 
sometimes provide you with fruit instead of an electronic version, is 
the third prong on your laptop cord.  this is the ground, it's not 
attached to anything, just remove it before you come to china.  every 
single power cord you own will fit into the plug in, just force it in, 
and all things are good.  you'd think that something will blow 
eventually, but, apparently, that's not the case.  don't worry about 
adapters unless you're attached to having that third prong on your 
cord..... i got a 3 to 2 adapter for that purpose.  why can't the rest 
of the world function like that?

the worst speakers of Mandarin are the Koreans.  i keep wondering if 
that's going to hinder me...also, how much korean i'm going to lose 
learning mandarin, and how difficult it is going to be to get korean 
back.  i've also been trying to figure out why their mandarin is so 
bad...i still think it's because of the tones...korean, theoretically, 
doesn't have any tones, but they whine constantly and vary their voice 
based on mood or what they're saying, or just random inclinations...it 
makes learning korean a little frustrating at times, you keep wondering 
if the drawn out speech actually means something...the answer is no, it 
doesn't mean anything, it's just what they do.  i think that they 
translate that to mandarin, and it simply doesn't work.  i'm watching 
korean television in the background, and while the translation is 
interesting, it's not all that good, i think that they actually just 
rewrote the script in English, and are putting words in that aren't 
necessarily said, implied, or whatever...perhaps that's why the chinese 
love the korean tv so much.  for example the last line the guy just 
said, in korean, "what kind of crazy sickness is this???", in english it 
said, "what is going on?", i wonder what it said in mandarin/cantonese 
or whatever they're using down here.  i think that another thing that 
screws up koreans, is that they learn the traditional chinese 
characters, and everything in this country is simplified.  so, the 
meaning sometimes changes based on what it's grouped with, how it's 
drawn, or some random thing that i can't figure out.  everyone tells me 
not to even try to learn chinese characters until i learn how to speak 
the language...i still find this to be backwards, and doesn't help me in 
reading the signs anywhere...but, perhaps i should just assume that 
someone knows what they're doing better than i.  i'm probably still 
coloured by the fact that every other language that is taught is taught 
letters first, except chinese.